Replace [narrator] tag with [point-of-view]?

Question

We currently have a tag narrator that as of today has 21 questions associated with it. The tag wiki excerpt says:

Questions related to the concept of "narrator" in literature, i.e. the "voice" that appears to speak or tell a story. The narrator can usually not simply be equated with the author. There are various types of narrators, e.g. the omniscient narrator and the unreliable narrator.

I would propose replacing this tag with point-of-view. While "narrator" seems narrowly focused on who is telling a particular story, "point of view" is a broader concept, as it covers situations that narrator seem unsuited for:

• The voice or persona of lyric poetry, such as the Duke of Ferrara in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess"
• Narration as an aspect of drama, where there is a point of view but no explicit narrator
• A work that has multiple narrators, such as an epistolary novel
• A work that employs the stream of consciousness technique, which appears to give the reader access to a character's unmediated experience of the phenomenal world.

The last two examples highlights the difference of emphasis between narrator and point-of-view. The former appears to focus on the character telling the story, the latter on the technique of presentation. The term "point of view" refers to the relationship between the narrator and the narrative, or the speaker and the poem. As Burkhard Niederhoff explains in The Living Handbook of Narratology:

Perspective in narrative may be defined as the way the representation of the story is influenced by the position, personality and values of the narrator, the characters and, possibly, other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld. The more common term in Anglo-American criticism, which will be treated as equivalent here, is “point of view.”

Here is a (very rough) draft of the tag wiki excerpt for point-of-view:

Questions related to the narrator(s) or speaker(s) of a literary work. Point of view refers to the relationship between the narrator and the narrative, or the speaker and the poem. In prose fiction, it encompasses terms such as first-person narrator, omniscient narrator, etc. In lyric poetry, the corresponding terms are persona or voice. The narrator or speaker usually should not be equated with the writer.

Of the 21 questions currently tagged narrator, nineteen can be retagged point-of-view without raising any issues. The remaining two do not meet the criteria for narrator to begin with:

• Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Abstraction Analysis is off-topic, as the question asked ("How did the scientific community and the media treat Henrietta and her family as abstractions?") is not a matter of literary analysis.
• What is the earliest book where bad spelling is primarily for humor value? isn't about narrators either. A character other than the narrator could be the target of such humor.

To sum up: I propose that we replace narrator with point-of-view; we retain the former tag as a synonym for the latter; and we create persona, poetic-speaker, and voice as additional synonyms.

Answer 1

There is a potential problem I foresee with the 'Point-of-View' tag.

You are writing here as a person clearly very knowledgeable about literary terminology and versed in the minutia of the different terms (Go you!).

Some of our querents are equally scholarly, many of them are not(self included tbh). It's also very clear that even where tags have lots of information about how to use them, many of those go lamentably unread, people assume they know what things mean without checking.

I think there is a strong risk that 'Point-of-View' is likely to be interpreted as something like 'author opinion' or 'character opinion' and it would get used to tag all sorts of 'What did X author really think about Y topic?'

Perhaps the question is, if most of the existing questions under 'narrator' sit happily under 'point-of-view', are there a whole load of 'point-of-view' questions which don't fit acceptably under 'narrator' and what are they currently getting tagged with? The list you give as seeming unsuited seemed to me to mostly to be edge cases. eg I was only able to read the extract on your link on narration in drama and I wasn't convinced from that that the author was proposing 'a point of view but no explicit narrator'.

I can see that there may be a case for separating something out for Lyric poetry if that is a widely known and understood distinction, but I'm unsure of what the wider benefit of the proposed change is and think there is a possible downside in a potential increase in mis-taggings.

So to be clear, I'm not suggesting that the POV tag would be inappropriate in and of itself, but that it might produce an unintended consequence that makes more work for those dedicated souls who diligently sort out people's tags for them.

Answer 2

An alternative proposal.

The use of "point of view" for poetry is not entirely unknown. Nevertheless, one limitation of point-of-view is that the term is much more commonly applied to prose fiction than to poetry. This is partly because, as Brian McHale says: "Contemporary narrative theory is almost silent about poetry." Partly, however, there is a resistance to applying concepts from narratology to lyric poetry. Jonathan Culler argues that "the model of prose fiction, where narrators and point of view are central ... pushes lyric in the direction of the novel by adopting a mimetic model and focusing on the speaker as character." Applying point-of-view to lyric poetry thus has pitfalls.

If we wanted to avoid this, we could take up this alternative proposal: usepoint-of-view for prose fiction or narrative poetry, and use persona for lyric poetry. Two questions currently tagged narrator would need to be retagged persona:

• How is “Gerontion” affected by being told in the first person?
• Why did Tennyson write “The Brook” from the brook's perspective?

The alternative proposal: retag narrator with point-of-view, keeping the former as a tag synonym; limit point-of-view to narrative works; create persona for lyric poetry; create poetic-speaker and voice as a synonym for the latter.

My personal opinion is that in practical terms, there is little difference between the sorts of discussions that terms such as persona, voice, or speaker make possible, and the discussions that take place under the term point of view. The one clearcut case where "point of view" seems inapplicable to lyric is biographical or confessional poetry, where the speaking voice is identified as the poet's. But in such cases, "persona" or "speaker" are equally inapplicable. So it's a question of whether we want to be true to the prevailing weight of scholarly tradition (in which case we would have persona for lyric, as distinct from point-of-view for narrative), or go with the minority that uses point-of-view for lyric as well.

Answer 3

This is a response to Spagirl's answer. The discussion was too long to fit in comments.

First, I strongly disagree that questions that don't fit under narrator are edge cases! Here are a bunch of questions already on our site that could use a point-of-view tag:

• What effect does the epistolary format have?
• Is there a term for the boundaries of expectation as established by a story's narration?
• Books that are narrated using various points of view of the main characters
• When did the perspective-switching trend begin?
• “Limited third-person point of view”, vs “omniscient third person point of view”
• Does Joyce use interior monologue in Portrait?
• Why is there so much stream of consciousness in Ulysses?
• In Finnegans Wake, surely the dreamer is this character?

... and that's just from a cursory search. Two of these questions wrongly have the narrator tag, but most don't, because the askers realize that their question is about narrative technique, not about a narrator. Some of the questions have the tag style, which is inappropriate, since style has to do with choices on the level of language, not of narrative technique. Some have no tag apart from author and work. So I think these questions show we already have a use case where people are searching for the right tag to apply but, because we don't have a point-of-view tag, are settling on tags that don't quite fit.

As for the possible misunderstanding of point-of-view, I don't think we get too many questions of the nature "What did author X think of topic Y." More to the point, I don't believe "people might misuse the tag" is a good reason to shy away from having accurate tags. We already do have such tags that could be ambiguous, where using them precisely requires some understanding of what the tag refers to:

• identification-request versus quote-source is the most obvious example
• translation doesn't belong on any question simply because it's about a translated work
• history-of-literature vs. historical-context vs. textual-history
• tropes, which is "not for the literary figure," and so on.

So our regular practice already shows that "it might be misunderstood" is not a good reason to keep away from a tag which defines something precisely. Existing questions on the site already show the need for the point-of-view tag. If we're a community of literature enthusiasts, then we should use the appropriate vocabulary.