In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Time and Narrative

What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now revised and expanded in its third edition, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes one new chapter. The glossary and bibliography have been expanded, and new sections explore unnatural narrative, retrograde narrative, reader-resistant narratives, intermedial narrative, narrativity, and multiple interpretation. With its lucid exposition of concepts, and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.

Frank Kermode and the Invented World@@@The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

Narrative forms of communication—including entertainment education, journalism, literature, testimonials, and storytelling—are emerging as important tools for cancer prevention and control. To stimulate critical thinking about the role of narrative in cancer communication and promote a more focused and systematic program of research to understand its effects, we propose a typology of narrative application in cancer control. We assert that narrative has four distinctive capabilities: overcoming resistance, facilitating information processing, providing surrogate social connections, and addressing emotional and existential issues. We further assert that different capabilities are applicable to different outcomes across the cancer control continuum (e.g., prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship). This article describes the empirical evidence and theoretical rationale supporting propositions in the typology, identifies variables likely to moderate narrative effects, raises ethical issues to be addressed when using narrative communication in cancer prevention and control efforts, and discusses potential limitations of using narrative in this way. Future research needs based on these propositions are outlined and encouraged.

/pdf/narrative-communication-in-cancer-prevention-and-control-a-198ql2cc37.pdf

Narrative communication in cancer prevention and control: A framework to guide research and application

This article offers a theoretical framework to explain circumstances under which perceptions of “unrealness” affect engagement in narratives and subsequent perceived realism judgments. A mental models approach to narrative processing forms the foundation of a model that integrates narrative comprehension and phenomenological experiences such as transportation and identification. Three types of unrealness are discussed: fictionality, external realism (match with external reality), and narrative realism (coherence within a story). We gather evidence that fictionality does not affect narrative processing. On the other hand, violations of external and narrative realism are conceived as inconsistencies among the viewer’s mental structures as they construct mental models of meaning to represent and comprehend the narrative. These inconsistencies may result in negative online evaluations of a narrative’s realism, may disrupt engagement, and may negatively influence postexposure (reflective) realism judgments as well as lessen a narrative’s persuasive power.

Resume

« Fictionnalite» et realisme percu des histoires : Un modele de comprehension et d'implication narratives



Cet article propose un cadre theorique visant a expliquer les circonstances dans lesquelles les perceptions d’« irrealite» affectent l’implication dans les narratifs et les jugements subsequents de perception de realisme. Une approche par modeles mentaux du traitement des narratifs forme la base d’un modele qui integre la comprehension narrative et les experiences phenomenologiques telles que le transport et l’identification. Trois types d’irrealite sont commentes : la « fictionnalite», le realisme externe (concordance avec une realite externe) et le realisme narratif (coherence d’une histoire). Nous reunissons ici des preuves a l’effet que la fictionnalite n’affecte pas le traitement narratif. D’autre part, les violations des realismes externe et narratif sont percues comme des incoherences dans les structures mentales des spectateurs, puisque ceux-ci construisent des modeles mentaux de significations afin de representer et comprendre le narratif. Ces incoherences peuvent avoir pour resultats des evaluations negatives du realisme d’un narratif sur le coup. Elles peuvent egalement interrompre l’implication, influencer negativement les jugements de realisme a posteriori (jugements reflexifs) et amoindrir la puissance persuasive d’un narratif.

Abstract

Fiktionalitat und wahrgenommener Realismus beim Erleben von Geschichten: Ein Modell zum narrativen Verstehen und Erleben



Dieser Artikel bietet einen theoretischen Rahmen, um Bedingungen zu erklaren unter denen die Wahrnehmung von Unwirklichkeit die Art und Weise des Erlebens von Geschichten und daraus resultierend Realismusurteile beeinflusst. Unter Ruckgriff auf einen Mentale-Modelle-Ansatz zur Verarbeitung von Narrationen werden narratives Verstehen und phanomenologische Erlebensweisen wie Transportation und Identifikation im Modell integriert. Drei Typen von Unwirklichkeit werden diskutiert: Fiktionalitat, externaler Realismus (Passung mit der externalen Realitat) und narrativer Realismus (Stimmigkeit mit der Geschichte). Unsere Daten zeigen, dass Fiktionalitat die narrative Verarbeitung nicht beeinflusst. Allerdings wird deutlich, dass Verletzungen des externalen und narrativen Realismus als Inkonsistenzen in den mentalen Strukturen der Zuschauer wahrgenommen werden, da Zuschauer mentale Bedeutungsmodelle konstruieren, um die Geschichte abzubilden und zu verstehen. Diese Inkonsistenzen konnten in negativen Ad-Hoc-Bewertungen von narrativem Realismus resultieren, konnten Erleben storen oder postrezeptive (reflektierende) Realismusurteile negativ beeinflussen - und letztendlich die persuasive Kraft der Narration verringern.

Resumen

La Ficcion y el Realismo Percibido en la Experiencia de las Historias: Un Modelo de la Comprension y el Compromiso Narrativo



Este articulo ofrece un marco teorico para explicar las circumstancias bajo las cuales las percepciones de “irrealismo” afectan el compromiso de las narrativas y los juicios de las percepciones de realismo subsequente. Un modelo mental de aproximacion de los procesamientos narrativos forma un modelo fundacional que integra la comprension narrativa y las experiencias fenomenologicas como por ejemplo la transportacion y la identificacion. Tres tipos de irrelismo son discutidos: ficcion, realismo externo (correspondencia con la realidad externa), y realismo narrativo (coherencia dentro de una historia). Juntamos evidencia que la ficcionalidad no afecta el procesamiento narrativo. Por otro lado, las violaciones al realismo externo y narrativo son concebidas como inconsistencias entre las estructuras mentales de la audiencia dado que ellos construyen modelos mentales de significacion para representar y comprender la narrativa. Estas inconsistencias pueden resultar en evaluaciones online negativas de una narrativa de realismo, pueden trastornar el compromiso, e influir negativamente sobre los juicios de realismo despues de la exposicion (reflectiva) asi como tambien disminuir el poder persuasivo de la narrativa.

ZhaiYao



Yo yak

Fictionality and Perceived Realism in Experiencing Stories: A Model of Narrative Comprehension and Engagement

“[A]ll knowledge is encoded as stories.” This sweeping assertion by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson seems designed to provoke (2).1 But then here’s Mark Turner affirming much the same position: “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought” (4). And here’s Merlin Donald asserting that “the narrative mode is . . . the basic product of language” (257). Fredric Jameson called narrative “the central function . . . of the human mind” (13), and Lyotard called it “the quintessential form of customary knowledge” (19). Goranson and Cardier called narrative a “driving imperative” (1), and Robert Storey contended that narrative is “an innate way of knowing, essentially as pre-linguistic in its operations as conceptualization has proven to be” (84) and, as such, “the ‘deep grammar’ of literature itself ” (113). Storey was echoing both Algirdas Greimas and Greimas’s sometime critic Paul Ricoeur, who both preferred the term “narrativity” for this deep pre-linguistic informing capability, with Ricoeur extending its operation well beyond fictive literature, as did most emphatically Hayden White, who called narrativity a “panglobal fact of culture” (19). If there is no empirical evidence yet that would put any of these assertions beyond doubt, they nonetheless indicate a shared intuition that narrative is somehow of a different order from the other text types. And this intuition, in turn, can make the job of discriminating text types a lopsided endeavor. In strictly literary discourse, discriminating text types has traditionally been a matter of formal categories rather than cognitive equipment. Generally, as formal categories, they constitute equivalent kinds in a hierarchy of forms. In this scheme, they are usually situated equally together at

Time, Narrative, Life, Death, & Text-Type Distinctions: The Example of Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

Letters to the Self: The Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction

Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation

Abbott, H. Porter. Humanists, Scientists, and the Cultural Surplus. Assessing the limits of evolutionary and cognitive approaches to the study of culture goes to the heart of an issue that tends to divide humanists and scientists. The issue is how far, in dealing with complex cultural texts and the complex transactions we perform as readers, can we advance by scientific reduction? The issue is vexed by the fact that at times the complexity and novelty of humanistic discourse is little more than obfuscation and strained ingenuity. But such failings discredit neither the search for novelty, nor the earned perception of irreducible complexity, nor the immense importance of work that is necessarily, and terminally, speculative.

Humanists, Scientists, and the Cultural Surplus

To borrow an understatement from Charles R. Lyons, " the recited discourses in Beckett's late stage plays overpower the dramatised action." Expecting to see a play, we hear fragments of a story. The inversion of genre expectations is so insistent that part of the experience one undergoes is a genre question: Is this theatre or is it (again to use Lyons's words), "prose fiction enclosed in a theatrical conceit?" One object of this essay is to make the case that this development in Beckett's work for the stage rests on the insight that reading itself is theatrical. But my principal object is to enlarge our understanding of what motivates Beckett's way of making strange — of which the reading/theatre fusion of the late plays is a highly characteristic example — and to suggest terms in which to frame that understanding. I shall focus on Beckett's play about reading, Ohio Impromptu.

H. Porter Abbott

Papers

Time, Narrative, Life, Death, & Text-Type Distinctions: The Example of Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

Letters to the Self: The Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction

Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation

Humanists, Scientists, and the Cultural Surplus

Reading as Theatre: Understanding Defamiliarization in Beckett's Art