Mark Currie

Abstract: This book is an accessible and stimulating summary of the often over-complex theories that have transformed the study of narrative in recent decades. It establishes direct links between the workings of fictional narratives and those of the non-fictional world, arguing that it is their inseparability which characterises postmodern fiction, criticism and culture.

Abstract: Series Editor's Preface Acknowledgements Introduction About About Time Chapter One: The Present Chapter Two: Prolepsis Chapter Three: Temporality and Self-Distance Chapter Four: Inner and Outer Time Chapter Five: Backwards Time Chapter Six: Fictional Knowledge Chapter Seven: Tense Times Bibliography Index.

Abstract: This is a critical and philosophical investigation into the unforeseeable and the surprising in narrative and life. This new study asks how stories affect the way we think about time and, in particular, how they condition thinking about the future. Focusing on surprise and the unforeseeable, the book argues that stories are mechanisms that reconcile what is taking place with what will have been. This relation between the present and the future perfect offers a grammatical formula quite different from our default notions of narrative as recollection or recapitulation. It promises new understandings of the reading process within the strange logic of a future that is already complete. It also points beyond that to some of the key temporal concepts of our epoch: prediction and unpredictability, uncertainty, the event, the untimely and the messianic. The argument is worked out in new readings of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. It is an original discussion of the relation of time and narrative. It is an important intervention in narratology. It is a striking general argument about the workings of the mind. It provides an overview of the question of surprise in philosophy and literature.

Abstract: Peter Brooks is one of several theorists and critics who have understood the “strange logic” of reading a narrative to be bound up with the “anticipation of retrospection”: “[i]f the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic” (23). He reaches this suggestion by combining two apparently separate traditions in narrative criticism, one that characterizes the tradition of telling as one in which “everything is transformed by the structuring presence of the end to come” and the other for whom the action of a novel takes place before the eyes as a “kind of present” (ibid.). A fictional narrative, he seems to be saying, can do both of these things at the same time: it can ask us to decode events narrated in the past tense as a kind of present, and ask us to view those events as structured in relation to a future which is already there and waiting for us to reach it. It is clear that, for Brooks, the reason that a narrative can do both of these things, that is to experience the events of a novel as a kind of present and as a kind of past, lies in the fact that the future already exists, and the inference is that the anticipation of retrospection cannot operate as the master trope in the strange logic of what we might call, for want of a better word, life. In life, the future is open, unwritten, and susceptible to our intentions, desires and efforts in a way that cannot be said of narrative.

Abstract: 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.

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.

Abstract: Given the rapid expansion of narrative approaches in management and organization theory in recent years, this paper investigates the contribution of this literature to the understanding of organizations and processes of organizing. The paper tells the story of the development of narrative approaches in organizational theory. Narrative's contribution to substantive areas of organization theory is evaluated. These developments are then reviewed in relation to an ongoing tension between story and science. We conclude by contemplating some of the criticisms, and the future, of narrative research.

Abstract: From a narrative perspective, organizations' identities are discursive (linguistic) constructs constituted by the multiple identity-relevant narratives that their participants author about them, and which feature, for example, in documents, conversations and electronic media. By defining collective identities as the totality of such narratives I draw attention to their complex, and often fragmented and heterogeneous nature. My approach contrasts with much of the theorizing in this field which has tended to homogenize collective identities by emphasizing what is common or shared, failed to capture the interplay between different communities within organizations, and produced bland, undifferentiated empirical research. In particular, the theoretical framework that I outline focuses attention on the importance of reflexivity, voice, plurivocity, temporality, and fictionality to an understanding of collective identities as locales for competing hegemonic claims. In combination, these notions form a unique conceptual model for theorizing and researching collective identities. This said, a narrative approach also has its limitations, and is proposed as an additional, not exclusive, interpretive lens.