琼·道格拉斯·彼得斯的女性主义叙事理论解读

An Interpretation on Joan Douglas Peters's Feminist Narratology

女性主义叙事学起源于兰瑟的叙述声音模式建构,发展于沃霍尔的叙述干预和梅齐的含混话语女性技巧,延拓于佩奇的语言学视角。彼得斯打破了文本的“性别”藩篱,将男性文本加入女性主义叙事的研究范畴,她的女性主义叙事学思想体现在三方面:首先,文本中的女性叙述话语与男性叙述话语构成了一种对话式的性别修辞,两种叙述话语在对话中构建了语篇动力学;其次,她对女性叙述的界定不同于传统上的女性叙述者发出的声音,而是将之界定为挑战常规男性叙述模式的话语系统;再次,彼得斯认为女性叙述并不是后现代文类的创新,而是产生于小说这一文类的诞生之初,并提出了女性主义元小说这一概念来阐释文学发展的各个阶段中女性叙述表征的演变,小说家使用戏仿的手法使得女性叙述从隐性走向显性。综上,彼得斯在理论拓展、方法建构和视角甄选方面均对女性主义叙事学做出了新的批评建树,使女性主义叙事学从性别政治的固定模式步入客观性的批评范式。

Feminist narratology is originated from Lanser's narrative voice mode and enriched with such female techniques of narrative intervention and ambiguous discourse as formulated by Warhol and Mezei respectively. Page's linguistic approach to feminist narratology serves as a conducive theoretical extension. Breaking the sexual confinement of texts, Peters supplements male texts into the research realm of feminist narratology. Her central idea on feminist narratology is embodied in the following three aspects. Firstly, the female narrative discourse forms a discursive gender rhetorics with the male one, which further constructs the textual dynamics in the dialogic opposition. Secondly, unlike the conventional definition of female narrative as the voice produced by female narrator, Peters defines it as the discourse system challenging the phallocentric narrative mode. Thirdly, she originates female narrative from the generic emergence of novel instead of a creation of a postmodernist genre. Based on the concept of feminist metafiction, Peters interprets the evolution of female narrative in various stages of literary development, which demonstrates the process from implicitness to explicitness by means of parodies. In short, Peters has made significant contribution to the development of feminist narratology in terms of theoretical expansion, methodological creation and perspective renewal, which shifts the critical focus from sexual politics to a more objective and comprehensive vision.