And Then Narration

Gerald L. Bruns. "KAREN MAC CORMACK AMONG THE PAGANS". Drawing on the work of Jean-François Lyotard [The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)], Bruns outlines different regimes:

there are multiple and heterogeneous forms of linkages, some of them syntactical (subject-verb-object), some logical (if-then), some propositional (s is p), some hermeneutical (this as that), and some narrative (this then that), but Lyotard’s point is that there are (indefinitely) more forms of enchainment than those we learn to use in school (reasoning, describing, questioning, narrating). Phrasing is not systematic construction. We inhabit a universe of phrases that are rhizomatically proliferating and tangling like crabgrass.

Of his forms of linkages, I want to focus on the last listed. Then, that. It is of course a temporal relation which Bruns associates with narrating. I want to generalize this from the mere temporal to succession in general. Narration (see the distinction between plot and story) rules these pairings. For there is always this then that and the relation arising.

Found Bruns's essay on the WWW at UPenn's site http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Bruns-Gerald_on-Karen-Mac-Cormack.html (24-Jun-2007 16:35 62K)
See also What are Poets For?: An Anthropology of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
See also Antiphonies: Essays on Women's Experimental Poetries in Canada edited by Nate Dorward.

And so for day 1135
21.01.2010