Mark Anthony Signorelli

Son of Rage Mark Anthony Signorelli

There can be no doubt that the art of literary storytelling has reached a dead end. Anxieties about "the death of the novel," which have preoccupied authors and critics in recent years, reflect a widely shared recognition that narrative literature no longer speaks to the public in any meaningful way. The sources of this marginalization are commonly located in the broad technological and social transformations of modernity, with the result that causes internal to literary history are ignored. Signorelli examines the stylistic and theoretical history which has slowly sapped narrative art of its coherence. At the center of this history has been the increasing dominance of the representational theory, which posits an imitative relationship between narrative structure and human experience. An overview of the major trends in the last two centuries of fiction reveal these to be the consequences of the steady application of the representational theory, leading to a state of affairs in which authors of fiction have no other model of plot construction than one which compels them to replicate modernity's disorder in their own works. As an alternative to this constricting theory, this study propose a renewed account of the mimetic theory, one which can repair the breach between narrative and poetic art, by acknowledging the ritual elements intrinsic to both. Signorelli proposes a theory of narrative which locates it among the practices of acculturation; a means of inculcating a unified vision capable of ordering the fragmentation of quotidian experience. He argues that a proper understanding of narrative art compels us to conclude that the multiplied disorder of modernity amplifies the need for a style of ritualistic demarcation, capable of preserving a vision of unity in the face of that disorder. He argues further that only by recovering some such mode of stylistic presentation can narrative art reclaim its former status and authority at the heart of our culture.