ABSTRACT
Narrative has been understood in its capacity of representation. It is increasingly analysed as a speech act too: narrative has an effect, it performs acts. For this reason the new narratives created by women writers and artists should not just be analysed as alternative forms of representation, but rather in terms of affection, intervention, and address. Feminist uses of narrative challenge the cultural categories that are also, and eminently, operative in narrative, such as time and space. Narratology examines 'narrative texts', which inform, manipulate, please, indoctrinate, arouse or repulse. They are both cultural artifacts and cultural agents. The intertwining of codes produced by prior discourses relates Barthes's approach to M. Bakhtin's. Barthes's starts from the receiver. Bakhtin's heteroglossia, the cacophony of incongruous strands of cultural discourses, starts from the side of the sender or writer, or the maker of the image.
