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focalization, as discussed in this thesis, will be handled by Manfred Jahn's “scale of focalization”. 70 The
following diagram 71 illustrates the four significant divisions on Jahn's focalization continuum:
123
At its strictest realization, the right end of the scale, the focalizer (F1) focalizes the focalized (F2)
“under conditions of precise and restricted spatio-temporal coordinates”. 72 The following is an example
of strict focalization, one in which Henry, the focalizer, never deviates from his perspective angle, be it
spatially or temporally, and the focalized itself is never presented from variant spacial coordinates:
“Henry lay in his kitchen corner bed staring hungrily across the predawn floor. Between his
nose and the cupboard under the sink lay the crumb of a piece of toast he had missed during
yesterday's sweep, a lonely last remnant not big enough to cast even a sliver of a shadow.
Famished, Henry inches forward but immediately slinks back under his blanket. It was too early
to traverse the chilled expanse of linoleum”.
The coordinates of ambient focalization, the position on Jahn's scale of greatest applicability to
the following chapters' analyses of Cen Shen's frontier landscapes, signals a focalization which “depicts
a thing summarily, from more than one side, [or] possibly from all sides...[while] considerably relaxing
the condition of specific time-place anchoring, and allowing a mobile [or] summary...point of view”. 73
70 Manfred Jahn, “More Aspects on Focalization: Refinements and Applications”, in Pier, John ed., GRAAT: Revue des
Groupes de Recherches Anglo-Americaines de L'Universite Francois Rabelais de Tours 21: 85-110 (Recent Trends in
Narratological Research: Papers from the Narratology Roundtable, September 1997, Debrecen, Hungary), especially pp.
95-100. The essay can be accessed at www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/jahn99b.htm
71 Ibid., p. 97.
72 Ibid., p. 98.
73 Ibid., p. 98. Ambient focalization can also refer to focalization by more than one focalizer. However, this aspect is not
relevant to the following discussions of Cen Shen's frontier poetry since there is never more than one focalizer in a
poem, though the single focalizer's focalization is still ambient in that his spatial coordinates are not restricted to one