What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology?

In recent years, scholars have proposed an approach to narrative which diverges sharply from structuralist narratology. The name that seems to suit this alternative approach best is Contextualist. Though they do not speak of themselves as a group, Mary Louise Pratt (1977), Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1981), Thomas Leitch (1986), and, to a lesser degree, Susan Sniader Lanser (1981) have argued the position.' Since I am more concerned with the broad lines of the position than with the differences among its proponents, I shall refer, generically, to the Contextualist position, leaving to footnotes the documentation of who actually said what. The Contextualists' chief objection to narratology is that it fails to take into account the actual setting in which literature is situated: Far from being autonomous, self-contained, self-motivating, context-free objects which exist independently from the 'pragmatic' concerns of 'everyday' discourse, literary works take place in a context, and like any other utterance they cannot be described apart from that context (Pratt 1977: 115). There is certainly justice in that opinion. The more we learn about the nature of language in its social setting, the harder