ABSTRACT
Hans Kellner has said that narrative, ‘for the post-structuralist, [is] guilty until proven innocent.’ 1 These two books hold different opinions with regard to narrative's guilt. For Roof, narrative is far from innocent, while for Gibson (if a monograph produced in Edinburgh can be forgiven a small Scottishism), the case against narrative is ‘not-proven’. Both of these timely works are a response to the neo-structuralist narratology of the 1980s. After Barthes's call for a thinking about ‘structuration’ rather than structure in S/Z, a second generation of revisionist narratologists (from Peter Brooks and Mieke Bal to Ross Chambers and Seymour Chatman) sought to move beyond the allegiance to formalism which had characterized the study of narrative. This work combined the model of narrative production inherited from structuralism with the insights afforded by the theoretical diaspora of the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps most successfully combining narratology's interest in the construction of subjectivity with the concerns of psychoanalysis and/or feminist theory. One might think here of texts such as Leo Bersani's A Future for Astyanax, Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, Teresa de Lauretis's essay ‘Desire in narrative’, or Mary Ann Doane's The Desire to Desire. Inventive and insightful as this work was, it did little to question the actual model of narrative which came from the texts of the mid-1960s. Post-narratology has made advances but has failed to adequately rewrite a model of narrative which, to quote Barbara Herrnstein Smith's appeal in 1981, is:
[N]ot only empirically questionable and logically frail but also methodologically distracting, preventing us from formulating the problems of narrative theory in ways that would permit us to explore them more fruitfully in connection with whatever else we know about language, behaviour and culture. 2
