Emerging Narrative Situations : A Definition of We-Narratives Proper

Recent years have seen a considerable rise in interest in fiction that challenges existing narratological paradigms. Untypical strategies of narration give rise to new narrative situations. Since the end of the twentieth century there has been an increasing number of second-person texts, of narratives in the plural and other experiments with narrative voice. The Genettian choice between two grammatical forms (first- or third-person) no longer seems to cover the gamut of the contemporary novel. At present, second-person texts have been theorised to a considerable degree, but narration in the plural still remains under-researched. This is especially obvious from bibliographies of we-narratives, in which extremely diverse texts are grouped under a single rubric. Its definition is difficult due to a number of factors. In order to delimit a we-narrative proper from other we-discourses and first-person narratives, I propose to combine the existing structuralist and contextual approaches. Moreover, this definition will demand a re-conceptualisation of the narrator category and, consequently, narrator’s identity, knowledge, scope of focalization and narrative levels. On the one hand, the suggested definition of a we-narrative proper is based on criteria put forward by Franz-Karl Stanzel (1984) and can thus be considered as a diversification of the classical typology of narrative situations. On the other hand, however, when defined as a separate narrative form, we-narratives undermine the very paradigm used to describe them and call for a re-conceptualisation of the defining categories.Peer reviewe