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Marie-Laure Ryan

Bio: Marie-Laure Ryan is an academic researcher from University of Colorado Boulder. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Narratology. The author has an hindex of 28, co-authored 81 publications receiving 4963 citations.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper defends the thesis that narrative plots are layered entities made up not only of a linear sequence of factual events, but also of the projections, wishes, plans, and interpretations produced by the characters.
Abstract: This paper defends the thesis that narrative plots are layered entities. made up not orily of a linear sequence of factual events, but also of the projections, wishes, plans, and interpretations produced by the characters äs they reflect upon the worid of which they are members. Insofar äs they link events and states in a causal chain, these mental constructs present and structure a story, and may therefore be called 'embedded narratives. The plans of characters are particularly rieh in embedded representations. It is shown that within plans, embedding is produced by transfers of control, i.e. by projected episodes in which the planner depends on the participation of a sub-agent to achieve his own goal Three types of constructs are shown to be necessary to the understanding of plans: (a) the actual plan of the main agent, i.e. the events he really wants to make happen; (b) the projected plans for the subagents, i.e. the plans by which these sub-agents, in theprojection ofthe main agent, will be seeking to fulfill their own goal; and (c) the virtual plans of the main agent, i.e. what he presents to the sub-agents äs being his intent, in order to secure their participation. Depending on the relations among these constructs, the attitude of the main agent towards the sub-agents is sincere, deceptive, or doubly deceptive. The last section ofthe paper describes an attempt to simulate by Computer the generation o f plans with actual, projected and virtual components.

6 citations

01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: In Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature, Felix MartinezBonati establishes himself as one of a growing number of literary scholars who scrutinize fictive discourse, in the hope of finding there a key to the understanding of literature in general.
Abstract: In Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature, Felix MartinezBonati establishes himself as one of a growing number of literary scholars who scrutinize fictive discourse, in the hope of finding there a key to the understanding of literature in general. (Others include Pratt, Herrnstein-Smith, and Brown and Steinmann.1) Although these scholars are usually aware that not all literature is fiction (Pascal's Pensees), nor all fiction literature (for instance, made-up stories used in advertisements), they hold the fact that the two sets intersect as much more than a mere accident: it is in conjunction with each other that the properties of "literariness" and of "fictionality" reach their purest manifestation. A culture with no fiction but a literature appears as unlikely as a culture with fiction but no literatureno texts consumed for the sake of pleasure. By choosing fiction as an entrance into the house of literature, the critic can benefit from the ground-breaking work of a distinguished line of philosophers who investigated fiction as a logical issue: Frege, Meinong, Russell, Husserl, Austin, and today Searle, Kripke, David Lewis, N. WolstertorfF, J. Woods, T. Parsons, and others. The work of these philosophers centers around three distinct, but interrelated, issues: (1) The logical status of the sentence of and about fiction; (2) The ontological status of fictional characters and of fictional worlds; (3) The illocutionary status of fictional discourse. Though Martinez-Bonati does not explicitly address each of these questions (or rather, does not use the terminology in which I have put them), they provide a convenient way to probe his positions, and to situate his ideas about fiction within the current critical and philosophical scene.

5 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 1987-Poetics
TL;DR: It is argued that in order to improve on this situation, story-generation should not follow a strictly linear, chronological order, but rather proceed from the middle outwards, starting with the episodes which bear the focus of interest.

5 citations


Cited by
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BookDOI
27 Mar 1991
TL;DR: The second edition of The Creative Mind has been updated to include recent developments in artificial intelligence, with a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author as discussed by the authors, which is an essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind.
Abstract: How is it possible to think new thoughts? What is creativity and can science explain it? And just how did Coleridge dream up the creatures of The Ancient Mariner? When The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms was first published, Margaret A. Boden's bold and provocative exploration of creativity broke new ground. Boden uses examples such as jazz improvisation, chess, story writing, physics, and the music of Mozart together with computing models from the field of artificial intelligence to uncover the nature of human creativity in the arts, science and everyday life. The second edition of The Creative Mind has been updated to include recent developments in artificial intelligence, with a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author. It is an essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind.

2,371 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: This article argued that narrative is a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, and fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific.
Abstract: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

1,640 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Dollimore as discussed by the authors argues that critical theorists should strive to understand the contradictions within our lives and our literature and explore the daemonic power of the subjects that offend our sense of tradition.
Abstract: but the threat they bring to artistic culture. From his opening mockery of the literary establishment’s tendency to theorize the world in terms of desire or gender to his disapproval of those who venerate art while denying its validity in the same breath, Jonathan Dollimore has created an easily understood, albeit at times too theoretical, synthesis of the literary and the experiential in Sex, Literature and Censorship. His arguments on critical theory do not necessarily reject the concept of theory; rather, he argues that critical theorists should strive to understand the contradictions within our lives and our literature and explore the daemonic power of the subjects that offend our sense of tradition.

1,318 citations

Book
01 Jan 2002
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present 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.
Abstract: 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.

1,236 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The role of the reader in the reader's role is discussed in this paper, where Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs.
Abstract: Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

978 citations