Narrative Deviations: The Role of the Unnatural Narrator in James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods (2015) | ||
| مجلة البحث العلمي في الآداب | ||
| Article 3, Volume 24, Issue 3, April 2023, Pages 82-105 PDF (1.25 M) | ||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/jssa.2023.185335.1464 | ||
| Author | ||
| Ashraf Kouta* | ||
| قسم اللغة الانجليزية - کلية الآداب - جامعة دمياط - دمياط - مصر | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Based on the critical concepts of unnatural narrative theory, this paper investigates narrative deviations and their functions in James Hannaham’s novel Delicious Foods (2015). According to unnatural narrative theorists, aspects of unnaturalness in realistic fiction can be traced in four elements: narrators, characters, time, and space. Unnatural scenarios in a narrative can be interpreted through certain reading strategies. More specifically, this paper focuses on investigating the aspects and roles of the unnatural narrator in Hannaham’s narrative which has several third-person and first-person narrators. The most fascinating among those narrators is an unnatural object-narrator, namely cocaine, which narrates almost half of the novel. Although cocaine is an inanimate object, it is both first-person narrator and focalizer in the narrative. Moreover, though a first-person narrator naturally does not have access to other characters’ thoughts and other places, cocaine can easily seep into the minds of characters and move freely among locations. Applying the reading strategies of unnatural narrative theory, the current paper interprets the meaning and function of these narrative deviations, showing how they are eventually conventionalized by blending cognitive frames. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Unnatural narrative theory; unnatural narrator; James Hannaham; Delicious Foods; crack cocaine; human trafficking | ||
| References | ||
|
Aba, Luz María Puente. “Defining Child Trafficking for Labor Exploitation, Forced Child Labor, and Child Labor.” The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking, edited by John Winterdyk and Jackie Jones. Springer International Publishing AG, 2020, pp. 339 – 51.
Alber, Jan. “Impossible Storyworlds—And What to Do with Them.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, vol. 1, no. 1, 2009, pp. 79–96, doi:10.1353/stw.0.0008.
---. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
Alber, Jan, and Brian Richardson. “Introduction.” Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges, edited by Jan Alber and Brian Richardson, Ohio State UP, 2020, pp. 1-13.
Alber, Jan, et al. “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative, vol. 18, no. 2, 2010, pp. 113–36, doi:10.1353/nar.0.0042.
Bernaerts, Lars, et al. “The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators.” Narrative, vol. 22, no. 1, 2014, pp. 68–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24615410.
Bales, Kevin and Ron Soodalter. The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today. University of California Press, 2009.
Barth, John. The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984.
Blasim, Hassan. The Corpus Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, translated by Jonathan Wright. Penguin Books, 2013.
Clark, Jennifer Bryson and Steve J. Shone. “Introduction.” The Sage Handbook of Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery, edited by Jennifer Bryson Clark and Sasha Poucki, SAGE Publications, 2019, pp. xxiii–xxx.
Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” Poetics Today, vol. 11, no. 4, 1990, pp. 775–804. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1773077.
Crimp, Martin. Attempts on Her Life. Faber and Faber, 1997.
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Pantheon Books, 2000.
Diski, Jenny. Like Mother. Bloomsbury, 1988.
Donoghue, Emma. Room. Little, Brown and Company, 2010.
Dunbar, Eve. “Genres of Enslavement: Ruptured Temporalities of Black Unfreedom and the Resurfacing Plantation.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 121, no. 1, 2022, pp. 53–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9561531.
Farber, David. Crack Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Fischer, Tibor. The Collector Collector, Secker and Warburg, 1997.
Gallagher, Anne T. and Marika McAdam. “Abuse of a Position of Vulnerability within the Definition of Trafficking Persons.” Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking, edited by Ryszard Piotrowicz, Conny Rijken and Baerbel Heide Uhl, Routledge, 2018, pp.185–97.
Gay, Roxane. “Wise Crack: James Hannaham Gives a New Voice to Addiction.” Review of Delicious Foods by James Hannaham. Boookforum April/May 2015. https://www.bookforum.com/print/2201/james-hannaham-gives-a-new-voice-to-addiction-14370
Hannaham, James. Delicious Foods. Little, Brown and Company, 2015.
---. Interview: “If Drugs Could Talk: In Delicious Foods They Do,” by NPR Staff. National Public Radio, 13 Mar. 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/03/13/391914914/if-drugs-could-talk-in-delicious-foods-they-do Accessed 12 Sept. 2022.
---. Interview: “A Human Story,” by Audrey Hawkes. Superstition Review, no. 17, April 2015. https://superstitionreview.asu.edu/issue17/interviews/jameshannaham
Ingram, Shelley. “James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods: Folklore, Displacement, and Resistance.” The Southern Quarterly, vol. 57 no. 4, 2020, pp. 22–38. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/837287.
Jahn, Manfred. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology.” Poetics Today, vol. 18, no. 4, Winter, 1997, pp. 441–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773182.
Madden, Thomas F. Upon This Rock: A History of the Papacy from Peter to John Paul II. Recorded Books, LLC, 2006.
Martel, Yann. Beatrice and Virgil. Random House Publishing Group, 2011.
McEwan, Ian Nutshell. Jonathan Cape, 2016.
Miller, Rebecca. Jacob’s Folly. Picador, 2013.
Montgomery, Ben. “Florida Farm Workers Tell How Drugs, Debt Bind Them in Modern Slavery.” Tampa Bay Times, 12 May 2012, www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/florida-farm-workers-tell-how-drugs-debt-bind-them-in-modern-slavery/1229662/.
Nielsen, Henrik Skov. “Fictional Voices? Strange Voices? Unnatural Voices?” Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, edited by Per Krogh Hansen, et al. De Gruyter, 2011, pp. 55–82.
Pamuk, Orhan. My Name Is Red. Faber, 1998.
Perks, Micah. What Becomes Us. Outpost, 2016.
“Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.” United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols Thereto. United Nations, 2004, pp 41–51.
Reeves, Jimmie L. and Richard Campbell. Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy, Duke UP, 1994.
Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. The Ohio State UP, 2006.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Jonathan Cape, 1981.
Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Little, Brown and Company, 2002.
Stuelke, Patricia. “Reparative Reading and the Drug Wars’ Queer Children.” Differences, vol. 33, no. 1, 2022, pp. 60–91. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-9735455.
Winterdyk, John and Jackie Jones. “Preface.” The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking, edited by John Winterdyk and Jackie Jones. Springer International Publishing AG, 2020, pp. v–viii. | ||
|
Statistics Article View: 184 PDF Download: 231 |
||
