Ann Banfield - professor in the Department of English at the University of California Berkeley
- is best known for her groundbreaking contributions to narrative theory. Working within the
paradigm of generative linguistics she argued that the language of fiction is characterized by
two «unspeakable sentences» i.e. sentences that do not properly occur in the spoken language:
the sentence of «pure narration» and the sentence of «represented speech and thought» (style
indirect libre or erlebte Rede). More recently Banfield offered a major reconsideration of the
novels of Virginia Woolf and modernism in light of the philosophy of knowledge developed by G.
E. Moore and Bertrand Russell and appropriated by Roger Fry in his critical analyses of
impressionism and post-impressionism. The essays gathered here pay tribute to Banfield by
addressing those disciplines and topics most closely related to her work including: narrative
theory and pragmatics the philosophy of language and knowledge generative syntax meter and
phonology and modernism.
