Description
Book SynopsisThe 35 original essays in
A Companion to Narrative Theory constitute the best available introduction to this vital and contested field of humanistic enquiry.
- Comprises 35 original essays written by leading figures in the field
- Includes contributions from pioneers in the field such as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller and Gerald Prince
- Represents all the major critical approaches to narrative and investigates and debates the relations between them
- Considers narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine
- Features analyses of a variety of media, including film, music, and painting
- Designed to be of interest to specialists, yet accessible to readers with little prior knowledge of the field
Trade Review"Written by major narrative theorists, these essays are original to this volume and are impressively accessible. The editors include ample notes, suggestions for further reading, and a brief glossary. Highly recommended."
ChoiceTable of ContentsNotes on Contributors x
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Narrative Theory 1
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz
Prologue
1 Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments 19
David Herman
2 Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present 36
Monika Fludernik
3 Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating the History of Narrative Theory 60
Brian McHale
PART I New Light on Stubborn Problems 73
4 Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother? 75
Wayne C. Booth
5 Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches 89
Ansgar F. Nünning
6 Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata 108
Tamar Yacobi
7 Henry James and ‘‘Focalization,’’ or Why James Loves Gyp 124
J. Hillis Miller
8 What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other 136
Dan Shen
9 The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality 150
Richard Walsh
PART II Revisions and Innovations 165
10 Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses 167
Brian Richardson
11 They Shoot Tigers, Don’t They?: Path and Counterpoint in The Long Goodbye 181
Peter J. Rabinowitz
12 Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things 192
Susan Stanford Friedman
13 The ‘‘I’’ of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology 206
Susan S. Lanser
14 Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film 220
Robyn R. Warhol
15 Self-consciousness as a Narrative Feature and Force: Tellers vs. Informants in Generic Design 232
Meir Sternberg
16 Effects of Sequence, Embedding, and Ekphrasis in Poe’s ‘‘The Oval Portrait’’ 253
Emma Kafalenos
17 Mrs. Dalloway’s Progeny: The Hours as Second-degree Narrative 269
Seymour Chatman
PART III Narrative Form and its Relationship to History, Politics, and Ethics 283
18 Genre, Repetition, Temporal Order: Some Aspects of Biblical Narratology 285
David H. Richter
19 Why Won’t Our Terms Stay Put? The Narrative Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historicized 299
Harry E. Shaw
20 Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House 312
Alison Case
21 Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan’s Atonement 322
James Phelan
22 The Changing Faces of Mount Rushmore: Collective Portraiture and Participatory National Heritage 337
Alison Booth
23 The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists 356
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
24 On a Postcolonial Narratology 372
Gerald Prince
25 Modernist Soundscapes and the Intelligent Ear: An Approach to Narrative Through Auditory Perception 382
Melba Cuddy-Keane
26 In Two Voices, or: Whose Life/Death/Story Is It, Anyway? 399
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
PART IV Beyond Literary Narrative 413
27 Narrative in and of the Law 415
Peter Brooks
28 Second Nature, Cinematic Narrative, the Historical Subject, and Russian Ark 427
Alan Nadel
29 Narrativizing the End: Death and Opera 441
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
30 Music and/as Cine-Narrative or: Ceci n’est pas un leitmotif 451
Royal S. Brown
31 Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative 466
Fred Everett Maus
32 ‘‘I’m Spartacus!’’ 484
Catherine Gunther Kodat
33 Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth Through a Glass, Darkly 499
Peggy Phelan
Epilogue
34 Narrative and Digitality: Learning to Think With the Medium 515
Marie-Laure Ryan
35 The Future of All Narrative Futures 529
H. Porter Abbott
Glossary 542
Index 552
