I think we may be facing off each other with some uncertainty about where each is coming from, perhaps? -- I certainly noticed the articles citations of Cohn but did not see (rightly or wrongly) how its discussion related to the particular point of this thread, and I myself have no problem with certain positions that are bracketed with postmodernism -- though with qualifications. White, for example, did not go nearly so far in his work on novelistic themes in history writing as many postmodern historians have run with his start.DCHindley wrote:Well, all I can say is that your way of describing the positions of some postmodernists as "two dimensional" and somehow blurring the distinction between author and narrator, is that I do not remember ever seeing anything like what you describe Cohen as saying as adopted positions of any critical school described by Alun Munslow in Deconstructing History, 2nd revised edition 2006, 1997). That they somehow intentionally blur the author-narrator distinction may be charged by some, but it does not match adopted positions, IIRC.neilgodfrey wrote:Nothing wrong with details [which DCH feels swamped by]. It is in fact the sorts of arguments of the Schaeffers et al that led to Cohn's book and she uses the details to demolish their two-dimensional readings of the texts. The postmodernist elision of author and narrator, of fiction and nonfiction, is all very two dimensional, often with the very examples they use to prove their points in fact doing the very opposite.
But discussion cannot happen without addressing the details. I mentioned some of them in the original post. They really do go to the heart of the question. If we don't take up the details and fall back on postmodernism then the question you raise is merely rhetorical and the thread deserves to run out before it starts.
Similarly with discussions of history writing. The Whites and co really cannot genuinely blur the distinctions as many say they do -- enough historians have addressed the postmodernist view of history with details (all under the same criteria as Cohn covers -- referentiality, voice and mode, narrator/author.)
Funny thing is, the narratology related web article I previously provided a link to, and which is very much postmodern, cites Cohn several times, approvingly, for Cohn's descriptions of the positions adopted by the various parties involved in the debate.That tells me that if a postmodern-right author (that's just the territory where the narratologists I had heard about in Munslow's book seem to lurk) can cite Cohn approvingly, then I cannot think that her criticisms of the postmodern POV could have been as crushingly painful as you suggest - unless they were directed at specific critics within the postmodern community, which is very wide and ranges from the most secular critics to religious-right types. They are not all the same.Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Fictional vs. Factual Narration in The Living Handbook of Narratology website:
http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/ind ... _Narration
Alun Munslow provides a general introduction to the approaches to history adopted by all sorts of modernists and postmodernists. The title "Deconstructing History" is a nod towards the Deconstructionist school of historians, in the sense that "If you deconstructionists can dish it out when evaluating the work of their peers, how about me deconstruction you as historians?" He is very neutral, I think, towards those he describes, so one's "spider sense" will not go off all the time, making the read a drag. But there is a LOT of technical language, although I believe he provided a dictionary at the end.
Stephen Moore, for his part, described one of the dangers he discovered in the narrative based school. For a time Moore, a Christian of what we usually call the moderate-liberal range of the religious spectrum, found the "new literary criticism" of the New testament (mainly Narrative Criticism coupled with Reader-Response Criticism) to be a way out of the dissonance he felt after his adoption of Historical Criticism some years beforehand. "Soon, however, a sneaking suspicion began to creep up on me ...: What if narrative criticism were actually a retreat from the critical rigor of historical scholarship? What if its not inconsiderable success were due to a widespread weariness with 'the unrest and difficulty for Christian piety' caused by centuries of historical criticism?" (Moore, Post Structuralism and the New Testament, 1994, p.115, and yes, I admit to being old and dusty).
Let me slowly, but somewhat surely, see what I can do to learn more about Cohn's POV about the subject of author-narrator divide. Somehow I think this is getting mixed up with the true vs. real issue in distinguishing historians from authors of fiction ("true" = what actually happened, and "real" = a writer's intuitive perception of something - anything really - in this case committed to writing as fiction). Maybe it's related, I don't know ...
DCH
When I say "two-dimensional" I am thinking of analyses that seem to simply gloss over so many factors that contribute towards how we understand texts. Again, details need to be addressed to clarify.
On my blog someone has protested against my stance on postmodernism by claiming that there are certain works that blur the line between fiction and nonfiction. But in each case we can analyse what is fictional and what is nonfiction in those works, so they are not some third genre or entity, but simply a playful, creative mix of the two -- something authors have always had fun doing. I'm not sure if that point relates to what is on your mind here, though.