Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Focusing on William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru, Samuel Beckett's Company, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, Rimmon-Kenan shows how modes of narration participate in the exploration of the problematics of representation and subjectivity. Her insightful analyses of the narrative strategies of these five novels demonstrate her point that narration itself provides a special access to representation and subjectivity. In addition, these analyses offer a compelling example of what it means to claim that we can treat narrative as theory. A Glance beyond Doubt thus provides an important methodological contribution to narrative studies while offering fresh and sophisticated readings of important modernist and postmodernist novels. Rimmon-Kenan's work is valuable for students of narrative and of twentieth-century literature, and it has important implications for other disciplines now studying narrative, especially philosophy, historiography, psychoanalysis, and jurisprudence.

What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan provides a synthesis of contemporary approaches to narrative fiction, considering in particular Anglo-American New Criticism, Russian Formalism and French Structuralism.