![]() ![]() ![]() In the inaugural edition of the American literary journal The Southern Review in 1935, Ford wrote: Ford Madox Ford pronounced that the novelist has “to render and not to tell” (1930: 122). Lubbock’s analysis of formal choices was soon echoed by other critics and hardened into prescription. Certainly he is ‘telling’ us things, but these are things so immediate, so perceptible that the machinery of his telling by which they reach us, is unnoticed the story appears to tell itself” (1921: 111, 113). Lubbock favors the second choice: “The scene he evokes is contemporaneous, and there it is, we can see it as well as he can. In this study he differentiates between two uses of point of view: “In one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it”. Percy Lubbock, a British author, scholar, and close friend of Henry James, published The Craft of Fiction in 1921. Tempting though it may be to ascribe this change to the birth of the cinema, in actuality the change in narrative technique predates the Lumières in the 1850s Flaubert famously banished the artist’s voice from his creation, and his follower, Guy de Maupassant, who passed away in 1893, epitomizes this scenic style. Modernist authors, by contrast, present their stories without such guidance, more “scenically”, as in the first sentence of Hemingway’s The Big Two-Hearted River: “The train went on up the track out of sight around one of the hills of burnt timber”. Take, for instance, the opening line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. One of the main differences between 19 th century novelists such as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and George Eliot, and early 20 th century writers is that the former would include exposition and commentary. The terms “showing” and “telling” have infiltrated numerous fields, thus, these comments will touch on words and images literary theory and narrative theory contemporary popular advice concerning creative writing both documentary and fiction films and both on-screen dialogue and the main subject at hand-cinematic voice-over narration. ![]() In Invisible Storytellers (1988) I spent a few pages discussing the source of one of the influential prejudices against voice-over narration: the preference by critics for “showing” over “telling.” Since this dogma still circulates widely, I’d like to return to this subject. 36-45 DOWNLOAD ABSTRACT / KEYWORDS / ARTICLE / BIBLIOGRAPHY / ABOUT THE AUTHOR KOZLOFF, SARAH, "Further Remarks on Showing and Telling" in: Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, n. ![]()
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