Genette's Narratological Poetics in Joyee Carol Oates' Museum of Dr. Moses[Latin Thesis]

Mohsen Moqim Hanjani

Joyce Carol Oates is an American play writer, poet, and novelist. She published her first work in 1936 and has published more than 40 novels, plays, and short stories. Museum of Dr. Moses is a short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates which includes darker works from a darker genre. In this collection she explores binding and dividing relations with horrifying flair. Narratology is a set of overall regulations about narrative genres, systems overlooking the narration, and colorless structures. Narratology can be categorized into pre-structuralism (until 1960), structuralism (from 1960 to 1980), and poststructuralisim in historical view. Narratology`s origin goes back to Aristotle`s Boutiqa in which he distinguishes between recalling an object (occurrence) by the narrator and its recalling by the story`s characters which was the first step in Narratology. Myths had a huge influence in narrative theories and showed that those narrative structures of singular myths are related to a universal and comprehensive structure and a role in which lays the foundation for all of them. Vlademir Prop is a Russian Formalist who is another well known person who had a role in the making of Nnarratology. He tries to define all the shared narrative elements in all the Russian folklore with a method similar to Levi-Straus. Agirdas Griemas puts effort in semantic analyses of structure to obtain narrative`s overall principles. Yzweta Todorov,Gereard Genette, Roland Barthes, and Frederic Jameson are other important figures of Narratology. Gerard Genette is a French literary theorist and semiotics. He was born in Paris and was raised in Ecole Normal Superior environment and got his M.A. in classic literature. He was one of the highlighted characters of intellectual movements which has happened in the 60s in literary studies to accommodate and expand structuralism theories of Ferdinand De Saussure in linguistics, and Claude Levi-Straus in anthropology. His fame and influence comes from his structuralism study of narration which provides us with one of the most comprehensive frameworks for the analysis of narrative texts. A realistic story is a genre which includes events that have happened to people and animals in a believable environment. Stories are v similar to real life and fictional characters of stories react similar to real people. Stories which fit into Realistic stories are designed to highlight social and personal issues such as love, marriage, employment, divorce, alcoholism, etc. They envision our society. A simple way in classifying stories or novels as realistic is identifying features such as story happening in present or close past, characters coping with plausible issues, living in places similar to real locations, characters close affinity to real people without supernatural elements, and raising questions about real life. In this thesis we attempt to put these two schools together and apply them on a contemporary work to finally figures out through Genette`s Narratological concepts how writer has created a believable albeit frightening environment and atmosphere from events seemingly rare but real. Furthermore, we will see that decisions and narrative methods chosen by the writer highlight each characteristic of a realistic story for the reader.