The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett

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: 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

Abstract: This naturalistic study investigated what happened in liter- ature study groups composed of 5th and 6th grade students and led by teachers in training. Children chose the novel they would like to read and met with group leaders to discuss their reading (2 days per week, 30 minutes per day) over a 4-5 week period. Teachers were en- couraged to be fellow participants in the discussion groups rather than monitors of reading comprehension. Data were field notes, transcrip- tions of audiotapes of individual sessions, and teacher journals. An analysis of the data revealed that young children of varying abilities participated in rich discussions of works of literature in which they ap- peared to be capable of 1) articulating their construction of simple meaning, but also changing it as they heard alternate views; 2) sharing personal stories inspired by the reading or discussion, often in poign- ant and revealing ways which triggered identification by other group members; 3) participating as active readers - predicting and hypoth- esizing and confirming or disconfirming their predictions as they read; and 4) valuing and evaluating the text as literature. The title of this piece comes from a remark Jim Higgins made to a group of teachers when he was at Arizona State University as a visiting scholar in the spring of 1985. He was describing how literature is used in American classrooms and he said something like "what you most often get are gentle inquisitions, when what you really want are grand conversations." Bryant Fillion (1981) echoed this theme with his remark that when he listened to tapes of literature classes - his own as well as others - he was struck by how often they sounded like inquisitions rather than real discussions. Almost all of children's experiences with literature in elementary schools today are in this inquisition mode. All popular basal series provide students with readers containing stories (many excerpted from fine liter- ature), and teachers with questions (and accompanying answers) to ask about those stories. Children gather together in groups to discuss the story, but the discussion usually consists of the teacher asking the ques-

Abstract: 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.