Monika Fludernik

This is supposedly a seminal text in the field, and certainly was presented as core in our reported speech course, along with Bakhtin and Voloshinov. And there are a couple of things I appreciate, like the syntactic comparison of RS across languages, or the idea that the reporting speaker only ever depicts one consciousness: that of their former self, the listener. And actually, you know, Fludernik is pretty great shakes as a taxonomist; here she is categorizing free indirect speech into several categoriesthat foreground its intrinsic dialogization and irony:

• the rendering of speech events or of a character’s inner consciousness, which becomes dialogic when mediated by the narrator. Fludernik considers this the oldest usage;

• internal focalization in first-person narratives, in which the present character-focalizer presents the thoughts of a past self;

• to report action in the historical present tense;

• in non-literary texts, for example Hansard, in which FIS comes very close to closing the circle and becoming direct speech, but maintains a summary quality by remaining FIS.

But she stresses the importance of function over form in RS, which lets you appreciate her Germanic ordering compulsion. Fludernik may not be as foundational as Bakhtin or as psychedelic as Voloshinov, but she's allll right.… (más)