abstract:Many contemporary novels feature multiple narrators who tell distinct, sometimes incommensurate, stories. While this narrative strategy is often viewed as a relic of the short story cycle tradition, I argue that this technique actually constitutes a new subtype of the novel that I call the braided narrative. In braided narratives, novelists plait together different narrative threads, distinct in terms of both narrator and story, to grapple with both the poignant fissure that fractures the most intimate attachments between individuals and the chasm that historical violences carve between social groups. Here, I focus on Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves (2008) to detail the way the braided narrative’s formal features facilitate ethical work that requires the recognition of different, often opposing, experiences. By pairing narrative theory with cognitive approaches to literature, especially the psychoanalytic concept of intersubjectivity, I highlight the ethical possibilities of this new genre. Recognizing the nuances of the braided narrative not only allows us, as critics, to see similarities between novels usually read separately, such as Erdrich’s and Krauss’s, but also draws our attention to the way this narrative technique can train us, as readers, in a particular form of ethics—one that requires us to hold different, sometimes conflicting, perspectives in our minds simultaneously.

中文翻译：

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编织的叙事

摘要：许多当代小说都有多个叙述者，他们讲述不同的、有时是不相称的故事。虽然这种叙事策略通常被视为短篇故事循环传统的遗物，但我认为这种技术实际上构成了我称之为编织叙事的小说的一种新子类型。在编织叙事中，小说家将不同的叙事线索编织在一起，在叙述者和故事方面都截然不同，以应对打破个人之间最亲密依恋的尖锐裂缝和历史暴力在社会群体之间形成的鸿沟。在这里，我专注于妮可·克劳斯的《爱的历史》（2005 年）和路易丝·厄德里奇的《鸽子瘟疫》（2008 年），以详细说明编织叙事的形式特征如何促进需要承认不同的道德工作，经常对立，经历。通过将叙事理论与文学认知方法相结合，尤其是主体间性的精神分析概念，我强调了这种新类型的伦理可能性。认识到编织叙事的细微差别，不仅让我们作为评论家看到通常单独阅读的小说之间的相似之处，例如 Erdrich 和 Krauss 的，而且还让我们注意到这种叙事技巧可以训练我们作为读者的方式一种特殊的伦理形式——一种要求我们同时在头脑中持有不同的、有时是相互冲突的观点。