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Dennis L. Seager, Stories Within Stories: An Ecosystemic Theory of Metadiegetic Narrative (Frankfurt and New York: Lang, 1991). pp. xiii + 154. $32.95.
Two of the five chapters in this book will interest Scriblerian readers, the opening theoretical chapter and the chapter on Tristram Shandy.
Mr. Seager brings together Genette, Todorov, and Bakhtin to establish a theoretical position centered around Skhlovsky's theory of defamiliarization. He emphasizes the aestheticism of the theory, the concept that art heightens our perceptions and destroys "automatism." He finds similar ideas in Genette, etc., and suggests that embedded narratives are the key, because they force us to question our habitual acceptance of narrative continuity or wholeness.
This useful summary is then paralleled to Gregory Bateson's idea of framed discourse and his distinction between digital and analog thought....