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

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative: Index of authors and narratives

This paper deals with a number of conceptual and theoretical issues that underlie the proposal to employ narrative explanations in science education: What is narra- tive? What is explanation? and What is narrative explanation? In answering these questions, we develop a framework of narrative elements and characteristics of narrative explanations. Two possible examples of narrative explanation are presented and examined in light of the framework. This examination brings to light various conceptual and empirical questions related to the examples and to the larger issue of the use of examples like them in science instruction. The value of the framework lies partly in its power to point to such questions. The questions can guide a program of theoretical and empirical research into the psycho- logical reality of the narrative form of explanation, the existence of narrative explanations in science, the use of narrative explanations in science teaching, and the nature and extent of the narrative effect upon which proposals for the use of narrative often are justified. C � 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 89:535 - 563, 2005

/pdf/a-theoretical-framework-for-narrative-explanation-in-science-sb6tl8ow4f.pdf

A theoretical framework for narrative explanation in science

Psychonarratology is an approach to the empirical study of literary response and the processing of narrative. It draws on the empirical methodology of cognitive psychology and discourse processing as well as the theoretical insights and conceptual analysis of literary studies, particularly narratology. The present work provides a conceptual and empirical basis for this interdisciplinary approach that is accessible to researchers from either disciplinary background. An integrative review is presented of the classic problems in narratology: the status of the narrator, events and plot, characters and characterization, speech and thought, and focalization. For each area, Bortolussi and Dixon critique the state of the art in narratology and literary studies, discuss relevant work in cognitive psychology, and provide a new analytical framework based on the insight that readers treat the narrator as a conversational participant. Empirical evidence is presented on each problem, much of it previously unpublished.

Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response

This essay is part of a long-term cross-disciplinary research project, entitled “Narrative between the Disciplines,” which looks at the way narrative is used within and between different disciplinary formations. Its goal is to say something about narrative itself as a form of redescription, a mode of knowledge, and how the claims made for it by the various disciplines say something about their own operations, limitations, and presuppositions. By examining the diverse ways narrative is inflected in different institutional settings, we might also discover something about our concern for narrative now and our notions of disciplinarity and the compartmentalization of knowledge. Elsewhere, I have already sketched out some of the basic questions regarding the recent explosion of interest in narrative and in theorizing about narrative across the disciplines: Why narrative? And why narrative now? Why have we decided to trust the tale? This essay develops some of the questions that my earlier work left open; more specifically, it deals with the inherent “bivalency” of narrative—its dependency on the temporalities both of the telling and of the told—and charts the history of the recent “narrativist turn.” It attempts to present a genealogy of the different ways in which disciplines in the human sciences have formulated and employed narrative and narrative theory, particularly in those fields that make truth claims: history or political science, for example. Why have political scientists now decided to “trust the tale”? Is their sense of narrative the same as say, literary theorists’? And what might these things say about their own discipline and the relations between it and other disciplines in the human sciences?

Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences

The fundamental principle upon which contemporary narratology is constructed is that narrative is an essentially divided endeavour, involving the story ('what really happened') and the discourse ('how what happened is presented'). For traditional criticism, the primary task of narrative discourse is essentially to convey the story as transparently as possible. Patrick O'Neill investigates the extent to which narrative discourse also contains the counter-tendency not to tell the story, indeed to subvert the story it tells in foregrounding its own performance. The systemic implications of this perspective for narrative and for narrative theory are examined within the conceptual framework provided by classical French narratology. O'Neill ultimately attempts both to expand and to problematize the structural model of narrative proposed by this centrally important tradition of narrative theory. O'Neill describes narrative as functioning in terms of four interacting levels: story, narrative text, narration, and textuality. Using a range of examples from Homer to modern European fiction, he discusses traditional narrative categories such as voice, focalization, character, and setting, and reinscribes them within the contextual space of author and reader to bring out narrative's potential for ambiguity and unreliability. He also discusses the implications of translation for narrative theory.

Patrick O'Neill

Papers

Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory