Towards a Secular Narratology

ABSTRACT: The recent emergence of a postcolonial narratology raises the question of just how narratologists deploy the "postcolonial" as a concept. While paradigmatic works in postcolonial narratology by Monika Fludernik and Gerald Prince treat the postcolonial either as a marker of a fixed literary corpus ("postcolonial literature") or as an established set of theoretical abstractions to be incorporated by narratology, other scholars who operate under the disciplinary sign of postcolonial studies treat the "postcolonial" as a contingent and generative concept that continually enables new ways of thinking about culture and colonialism. Since postcolonial narratology—and narrative theory more generally—relies on paradigms of narrative in which narrative form and history are necessarily separate and autonomous categories, narratologists often theorize and interpret narratives outside their immediate geographical, linguistic, and cultural contexts of publication and reception. Given these critical predispositions, such narratological work tends to overlook a vital space of postcolonial critique: geopolitical and institutional power. I examine how one influential contemporary approach to narrative theory, the Chicago School rhetorical approach, might incorporate the theoretical insights of Edward Said's stance of secular criticism, which is attuned to those forms of power. Through a short analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent," I demonstrate how we might synthesize the interpretive goals of rhetorical narrative theory with a secular criticism that treats the postcolonial as a generative category rather than a theoretical given that can support narratological projects unproblematically.