Week 8 · Narrative Viewpoint and Speech Presentation 叙事视角与引语方式

Nov 2, 2026 · ← Course home

Planned session. Fiction week, with the microscope on narrative. Leech & Short’s scales of speech and thought presentation — direct, indirect, free direct, free indirect — and what each does to the reader’s distance from a character’s mind. Focalisation: who sees, who tells, and what happens when they are not the same. Then the frontier: 申丹’s argument that narratology (macro: plot, time, narration) and stylistics (micro: lexis, grammar, transitivity) must be combined, and her signature concept of covert progression — a hidden narrative movement alongside the plot that can rewrite the whole story.

This is the week to find a BA-thesis topic if fiction is your direction.

Key concepts: speech/thought presentation; free indirect discourse; focalisation; narratology vs. stylistics; covert progression.

Reading: Leech & Short, Style in Fiction (selections); Shen, Discourse and Style (focalisation and speech presentation chapters).

Slides and materials will be posted here after class.