In this ground breaking work of synthesis, Monika Fludernik combines insights from literary theory and linguistics to provide a challenging new theory of narrative. This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of narrative, represents the epitome of a centuries long developmental process.

Towards a 'natural' narratology

Towards a 'Natural' Narratology

List of Illustrations. The Elements. Preface . The Scope and Aims of This Book. Storytelling Media and Modes of Narration. Acknowledgments . 1. Getting Started: A Thumbnail Sketch of the Approach Developed in This Book. Toward a Working Definition of Narrative. Profiles of Narrative. Narrative: Basic Elements. 2. Background and Context: Framing the Approach. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Narrative Theory. Major Trends in Recent Scholarship on Narrative. 3. Back to the Elements: Narrative Occasions . Situating Stories. Sociolinguistic Approaches. Positioning Theory. The Narrative Communication Model. Conclusion. 4. Temporality, Particularity, and Narrative: An Excursion into the Theory of Text Types. From Contexts of Narration to Narrative as a Type of Text. Text Types and Categorization Processes. Narrative as a Text-Type Category: Descriptions vs. Stories vs. Explanations. Summing up: Text Types, Communicative Competence, and the Role of Stories in Science. 5. The Third Element: Or, How to Build a Storyworld . Narratives as Blueprints for Worldmaking. Narrative Ways of Worldmaking. Narrative Worlds: A Survey of Approaches. Configuring Narrative Worlds: The WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN Dimensions of Storyworlds. Worlds Disrupted: Narrativity and Noncanonical Events. 6. The Nexus of Narrative and Mind . The Consciousness Factor. Consciousness Across Narrative Genres. Experiencing Minds: What It's Like, Qualia, Raw Feels. Storied Minds: Narrative Foundations of Consciousness?. Appendix . Reproduction of Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927). Transcript of a Story Told during Face-to-Face Interaction: UFO or the Devil. Pages from Daniel's Clowes's Graphic Novel Ghost World (1997). Screenshots from Terry Zwigoff's Film Version of Ghost World (2001). Glossary . References. Index

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Basic elements of narrative

An Introduction to Narratology is an accessible, practical guide to narratological theory and terminology and its application to literature. 
In this book, Monika Fludernik outlines: 



the key concepts of style, metaphor and metonymy, and the history of narrative forms 
narratological approaches to interpretation and the linguistic aspects of texts, including new cognitive developments in the field
how students can use narratological theory to work with texts, incorporating detailed practical examples
a glossary of useful narrative terms, and suggestions for further reading.
This textbook offers a comprehensive overview of the key aspects of narratology by a leading practitioner in the field. It demystifies the subject in a way that is accessible to beginners, but also reflects recent theoretical developments and narratology’s increasing popularity as a critical tool.

An Introduction to Narratology

We are living in a time when the activation of mirror neurons in the brains of onlookers can be recorded as they witness another’s actions and emotional reactions. 1 Contemporary neuroscience has brought us much closer to an understanding of the neural basis for human mind reading and emotion sharing abilities—the mechanisms underlying empathy. The activation of onlookers’ mirror neurons by a coach’s demonstration of technique or an internal visualization of proper form and by representations in television, film, visual art, and pornography has already been recorded. 2 Simply hearing a description of an absent other’s actions lights up mirror neuron areas during fMRI imaging of the human brain. 3 The possibility that novel reading stimulates mirror neurons’ activation can now, as never before, undergo neuroscientific investigation. Neuroscientists have already declared that people scoring high on empathy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems in their brains. 4 Fiction writers are likely to be among these high empathy individuals. For the first time we might investigate whether human differences in mirror neuron activity can be altered by exposure to art, to teaching, to literature. This newly enabled capacity to study empathy at the cellular level encourages speculation about human empathy’s positive consequences. These speculations are not new, as any student of eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism will affirm, but they dovetail with efforts on the part of contemporary virtue ethicists, political philosophers, educators, theologians, librarians, and interested parties such as authors and publishers to connect the experience of empathy, including its literary

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A Theory of Narrative Empathy

The purpose of this book is to provide a clear and systematic account of the complexities of fictional narration which result from the shifting relationship in all storytelling between the story itself and the way it is told.

A theory of narrative

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Theorie des Erzahlens

The theory of narrative which I have presented in Theorie des Erziihlens' and from which the following is an extract (mainly of chapter six) concentrates on the process of narrative transmission. It is based on the assumption that mediacy (Mittelbarkeit) is the generic characteristic that distinguishes narrative from drama, poetry and, as a rule, also from film. Being a complex generic phenomenon, mediacy has to be analyzed on the basis of its chief constitutive elements. These are presented in the form of the following oppositions of distinctive features: identity and non-identity of the realism of the fictional characters and of the narrator (first-/third-person narration); internal and external perspective (limited point of view/omniscience); teller-character and reflector-character as agents of transmission (telling/showing). The structural significance of these basic oppositions emerges from the observation that a transformation of a narrative text determined by one pole of one of these oppositions into a text dominated by its opposite elements usually alters the meaning of the narrative. In this way the central chapters of the Theorie attempt a verification of the structural significance of these oppositions. Illustrations are drawn mainly from English, American and German novels, ranging from DeFoe, Sterne, and Goethe, to Thomas Mann, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, M. Frisch, and Vonnegut. In the teller/reflector opposition we perceive two contrary manifestations of mediacy of presentation, the generic characteristic of all narrative: on the one hand overt mediacy, when the process of narrative transmission becomes part of the thematic texture of the story; and on the other hand covert or dissimulated mediacy, which produces in the reader the illusion of immediacy of presentation. Almost all narrative texts, a few shorter stories excepted, oscillate

F. K. Stanzel

Papers

A theory of narrative

Theorie des Erzahlens

Teller-Characters and Reflector-Characters in Narrative Theory

Narrative situations in the novel

Typische Formen des Romans