AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.
The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.
AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2022 No 2 (2022), 107–116
Stories We Tell About Ourselves And Others: Identity And Narration in Julian Barnes’s Oeuvre
Ladislav Nagy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2022.41
published online: 16. 03. 2023
abstract
Julian Barnes’s second to last book to date, The Man in the Red Coat (2019), is a work of non-fiction, devoted to the life of the renowned Parisian surgeon Samuel Jean de Pozzi. It is, however, a special kind of nonfiction – in fact, the book illuminates in many ways the narrative practices in Barnes’s work in general. At the same time, it touches on a theme that permeates all of Barnes’s fictional work, namely the construction of identity through the stories we tell about ourselves and that others tell about us. Storytelling thus emerges as a fundamental human trait: it is our responsibility to narrate, for it is only in telling stories that we can grasp the world around us.
keywords: fiction; contemporary British literature; narration
references (8)
1. Barnes, Julian. "Double Bind". London Review of Books, 4.10 (3 June 1982).
2. Barnes, Julian, The Sense of an Ending. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.
3. Barnes, Julian. Levels of Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013.
4. Barnes, Julian. The Man in the Red Coat. London: Penguin Books, 2019.
5. Carr, David, "Review Essay: Temps et Récit. Tome I. By Paul Ricoeur". History and Theory, 23 (1984): 368-69. CrossRef
6. Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. CrossRef
7. Mayer, Robert. History and the Early English Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
8. Ricoeur, Paul. Histoire et vérité. Paris: Seuil, 1955.
Stories We Tell About Ourselves And Others: Identity And Narration in Julian Barnes’s Oeuvre is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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ISSN: 0567-8269
E-ISSN: 2464-6830
