ABSTRACT
The attention given to framing in recent years can be explained in large part because studies of literary works have shifted their focus from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’, from what the work signifies to its strategies, formal and rhetorical. A narrative frame, unlike the material frame surrounding a picture, does not simply enable readers to concentrate their gaze, but is encoded within the narrative convention. It can ‘frame’ readers by implicating them in perspectives that they might otherwise evade, closing the escape routes from complicities and perplexities. The frame generates experiences that present dilemmas typical of the speaker’s world and permits the elaboration of each situation in a new fiction. The whole is then not only a demonstration of the recovery of truth from the labyrinths of falsehood, but attains semiotic status as a model for the transmission of culture.
