Dialogue and the Limits of Narrative Discourse: Gérard Genette, Gertrude Stein
Dialogue and the Limits of Narrative Discourse: Gérard Genette, Gertrude Stein

Summary/Abstract: Prose narrative is filled with scenes of character-character dialogue, and yet dialogue has been largely overlooked by narrative theory. Character speech occupies at best a marginal position in classical models of narrative discourse. This article argues that dialogue’s minor status presents an opportunity to rethink the ambitions of classical narratology and, therefore, that this ‘marginal’ discourse belongs to the centre of postclassical thinking. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s remarks on direct speech, I argue that dialogue’s unique position at the limits of narrative discourse invests the form with anarchic potential. Feminist scholarship on Gertrude Stein has made a similar case for Steinian dialogue as a form of discourse resistive to the demands of patriarchal language. We might therefore find new approaches to Stein and new avenues for narratology by bringing these fields more directly into conversation.

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