Showing papers on "Narrative structure published in 1988"

Analyzing narrative reality

Abstract: PREFACE INTRODUCTION PART I. NARRATIVE REALITY 1. Stories in Society 2. Forms of Analysis 3. Into the Field PART II. NARRATIVE WORK 4. Activation 5. Linkage 6. Composition 7. Performance 8. Collaboration 9. Control PART III. NARRATIVE ENVIRONMENTS 10. Close Relationships 11. Local Culture 12. Status 13. Jobs 14. Organizations 15. Intertextuality PART IV. NARRATIVE ADEQUACY 16. What Is a Good Story? 17. Who Is a Good Storyteller? AFTERWORD REFERENCES

Narrative Explanations: The Case of History

Abstract: Narratives are stories, a telling that something happened. A narrative explanation, presumably, presents an account of the linkages among events as a process leading to the outcome one seeks to explain. Examples of explanations in a storylike format are readily found in history books, certain anthropological accounts, case histories in psychoanalytic writings, and the sort of stories one hears daily from students and colleagues as to why this paper was not done or that committee meeting was not attended. The use of narratives to explain is unquestioned; what is subject to philosophical dispute is whether this habit is to be tolerated or condemned. An important focus of this dispute is not the fact that much is obscure with regard to the notion of narrative. Rather, objections arise because the notion of explanation is deemed by some clear enough to rule out any category of narrative explanation, no matter how "narrative" is to be understood. Indeed, the very idea of a narrative explanation invites two objections. The first I term methodological. It runs as follows. Explanations have a characteristic logical form. And while the precise constituents of narrative form are a subject of much study and debate in literary theory, there exists a prima facie distinction between narratives and the standard form of a proper scientific explanation. Specifically, narratives relate discrete events; they do not invoke laws. The methodological complaint, in other words, is that narrative structure is too far from the form of a scientific explanation to count as an explanation. There cannot be narrative explanations, then, because such a category runs afoul of a received explication of "explanation." This objection is closely associated, of course, with positivism. Although my purpose in this paper is not to review the too familiar debate inspired by positivist models of historical explanation, I sketch reasons for believing that much of the debate both pro and conon the form of historical explanation is misguided. The second objection I call metaphysical. This objection may be formulated in the following way. The academic division of labor is such that while, for example, historians work to construct true accounts of the past, philosophers toil to understand by what marks the truth may be known. Any satisfactory analysis of the notion of explanation, and so of historical explanation, should reveal the conditions which must be satisfied if that explanation is to be counted true. Attention to narrative form, however, slights this critical point. Since analyses of narrative structure underline the parallels between history and fiction, the study of narrative is not going to illuminate the relevant differentia of historical expla-

Narrative As Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment

Abstract: What are the expectations and obligations of story-telling? What are the power relations of narrator and narratees? Focusing on the role of narrative in the work of Baudelaire, Marie Maclean sees narrative not just as act but as interplay and enactment.

Narratives and Narrative Structure in Plea Bargaining

Abstract: Recent interest in oral language and law (Atkinson & Drew, 1979; Danet, 1980; Levi, 1985; O’Barr, 1982; Pomerantz & Atkinson, 1984), repeating a characteristic of earlier research on criminal justice (cf. Newman, 1966:xiv, Rosett & Cressey, 1976), gives disproportionate attention to trials and formal proceedings rather than informal processes such as plea bargaining, even though it is in the give-and-take of the more casual setting that practitioners settle the bulk of cases coming before the courts. To be specific, the “explosion” of ethnographic research on plea bargaining during the last 15 years (Maynard, 1984:1) makes it abundantly clear that attorneys often present “facts” by telling stories about “what happened.” However, although investigators have explored various dimensions of storytelling in the courtroom (Bennett & Feldman, 1981; O’Barr & Conley, 1985), narratives in the negotiational arena are unstudied and unexplicated.

Narrative Emotions: Beckett's Genealogy of Love

Abstract: philosophical attempts at self-understanding with concrete narrative fictions, which are argued by the proponents of the project to contain more of what is relevant to our attempts to imagine and assess possibilities for ourselves, to ask how we might choose to live. Since this is a project that I believe to be both valuable and viablenot only for professional philosophers but for people who are, in their lives, pursuing questions about life-and since Beckett's voices have been for some time audible to me in the background of this work, speaking their subversive claims, audible even as Henry James praises the moral role of the novelist or as Proust argues for the epistemological value of narrative form, I want to let them speak and to see how much of this work they really do call into question, how their insights about the narrative forms of human desire and emotion would cause us to revise it-or perhaps, even, to end it. In short (using already their words), I want to judge this work with the judgment of Molloy when he writes, "It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence" (p. 25). (And perhaps that, and this, act ofjudgment is itself inside the stories and, therefore, doomed to affirm the stories even as it calls them into question.) The assessment must begin with a description of the project-just as Moran's search begins with the story of its "quarry" (p. 1 10). Next we need to describe in more detail the view about emotions that we have This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:34:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 228 Ethics January 1988 heard in Beckett's voices. We shall find that it is not a view peculiar to the voices but one that has a long philosophical-literary history, and one that is recently reemerging as the dominant view of emotion in philosophy and in social anthropology. This means that we cannot evade its challenge by saying to ourselves that Beckett and his voices have a rather peculiar view of life-which, I think, is the way that Beckett is read and refused, more often than not. Then we shall turn again to the Molloy trilogy, looking closely at Beckett's particular stories of narrative emotion; not in the trilogy as a whole, which would be too vast a task, but in its first section, Molloy, and especially at that novel's stories of love, guilt, and their relatives hope and fear, and the source of all these in a socially taught religious view of life. Moran writes a story whose aim is, increasingly, the frustration of the reader's emotion, the dismantling of narrative structures that both represent emotions and evoke them. We will consider next this project of ending, asking about its relationship to its own critique. And we can then compare this genealogical critique of stories with two other related philosophical enterprises (those of Lucretius and of Nietzsche) and judge its relevance for our own.

A Cognitive-Developmental Account of Storytelling in Child Psychotherapy

Abstract: Narratives provide the means by which people organize and relate the important experiences in their lives. Consequently, narratives naturally occur in therapeutic as well as everyday contexts. In addition to these naturally occurring narratives, techniques have been devised to generate narratives for the express purpose of facilitating therapeutic change, especially in children. Progress in the application of these narrative techniques will depend on an understanding of narratives and narrative representation as they develop in diverse empirical and theoretical literatures. We explicate the main features of several of these literatures before we adapt and adopt them in our proposal of a cognitive-developmental account of narrative techniques in child psychotherapy.

Oral Narrative and Literary Text: Afro-American Folklore in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract: When Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published in 1937, two earlier books had already proved Zora Neale Hurston's particular interest in black oral culture: Mules and Men (1935) and Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). Hurston had collected the material for Mules and Men, a compilation of folk tales, folk songs, folk speech, conjure formulas, root prescriptions, and various hoodoo rituals, during a two-year stay in Florida under the supervision of Franz Boas, then one of the leading anthropologists in the United States. This book, dealing for the first time with Afro-American folklore from the perspective of the black rural community, is notable because it ties together the numerous stories in an overall narrative structure and thus gives the reader a sense of the original context that produced them. But although this leads to a certain fictionalization of the text, Mules and Men still retains an anthropological approach. It was not until Jonah's Gourd Vine that Zora Neale Hurston tried to embed her experience of black oral culture in an elaborate literary form, the modern novel.' Both Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God are set in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston's birthplace, which, in the words of Robert Hemenway, was "a proud, self-governing, all-black village that felt no need of integration and, in fact, resisted it, so that an Afro-American culture could thrive without interference. Furthermore, both texts are in some ways related to incidents and persons in Hurston's life. Although this autobiographical impulse is less perceptible in Their Eyes, she tells us in Dust Tracks on a Road that after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship and leaving for Jamaica, she took the opportunity to come to grips with a muddled love-affair and wrote a new novel: "So I sailed off to Jamaica and pitched into work hard on my research to smother my feelings. But the thing would not down. The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God."3 The result, however is no ordinary love-story. Janie not only struggles against the anxieties and expectations of a slave-born grandmother who raised her, but also tries to resist the violent attempts of her later husbands to break her will to self-determination and to restrict her behavior to traditional female roles. Only with Tea Cake, her third husband, is Janie able to arrive at something like romance. But even this relationship, far from being harmonious all the time, is not free from oppression and violence. Finally, after shooting Tea Cake in self-defense, Janie returns to Eatonville where she sits down on the veranda to tell her story to Pheoby, an old friend. At first glance, it looks as if Their Eyes is the story of a woman's resistance to male

The constructive uses of deconstruction in the ethnographic study of notable american families

Abstract: This article discusses the shift in analyticperspective that occurred in my treatment ofa particular American business dynasty. The family tells its own story in a narrative structure comparable to that used by the ethnographer, among others who are concerned with the family's history, including lawyers, therapists, and journalists. Seeking an ethnographic vantage point independent of thefamily's internal and authoritative one, yet encompassing theperspectives ofthe others who narrate and thus socially construct thefamily, I discuss an alternative polyphonous perspective in the second part of the paper that departs from the conventional telling ofnotable (and other)family stories limited to the confines ofa kinship grid defined by ties of blood and marriage. [elites, American culture family, narrative deconstruction]

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City: Ideology, Coherence, and Possibility

Abstract: Shortly before she leaves the Communist Party, the protagonist of The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf, insists to her quondam comrade Jack, "But humanism stands for the whole person, the whole individual, striving to become as conscious and responsible as possible about everything in the universe."' In its emphasis on personal and societal wholeness, this passage is part of a network of assertions that seems to set The Golden Notebook squarely against tendencies of most other experimental fiction being written during the early 1960s-especially against the decentered subject and the destabilized narrative structure of the emerging literary movement that would be called postmodernism. Yet two considerations suggest that Doris Lessing's most famous novel has more in common with the narrative ruptures of postmodern writing than either its critical reception or its own injunctions to holism might indicate. First, the pervasive rhetoric of psychic integrity, unity of vision, and narrative coherence is repeatedly aligned with the orthodox Marxism that Anna finally repudiates. Second, this rhetoric resounds through a work that ultimately breaks down its major characters without even making a gesture at reassembling them, and that bifurcates its plot to the point where two separate and irreconcilable versions of a story jostle uneasily for ontological supremacy-for the status of being the account of what "really" happened. To adopt Lessing's own terminology from the 1971 introduction to The Golden

Defining the Fictive American Vietnam War Film: In Search of a Genre

Abstract: What should the Vietnam War look like on film? What were the motifs, visual, and thematic, that would emerge as dominant, that would reappear in film after film-with greater or lesser variations-to evolve into a codified 'Vietnam style' ? Gilbert Adair Vietnam on Film The "visual style" that Adair alludes to is the concept of genre and its application to films about Vietnam. One of the major academic pursuits in critical discourse is the application of categories to certain "like" narratives in literature and cinema studies. This "pursuit" has become a major source for critical discourse in film. However, while such discourse should be predicated upon precise standardization, terms such as genre are often used with idiosyncratic designation. Three areas that deserve attention when attempting to apply a precise standardization to films about the Vietnam war are found in three general questions: what is the technical term "genre" and how is it applied to critical concerns in film study; is there a commonality of these films that would categorize them into groups for comparison and contrast; and what, if anything, is the standardization that is constant throughout the categories developed. A discussion of the term "genre" and its specific application to film studies will be beneficial in answering the question: Is there a Vietnam war film genre? GENRE Historically, the term genre was borrowed from literary criticism; etymologically, it came from Latin/French roots related to the concept of "kind" or "type". The Greeks used the term to describe the three main topics of poetry-lyric, epic, and drama-each represented a distinct form of presentation. Through transformations of such literary critics as Northrop Frye, the term evolved to distinguish between the novel, short story, essay and possibly film.1 A more modern application is found in Thrall and Hibbard's classic Handbook to Literature which contends that "Genre classification implies that there are groups of formal or technical characteristics existing among works of the same kind regardless of time or place of composition, author, or subject matter. . . ."2 These definitions underscore the idea of "type." Critically there is a distinction between certain kinds of feature films as compared to other feature films (i.e. a western from a detective story), but these definitions do not focus on the precise standardization that would separate one narrative structure from another. The distinction between the use of genre in literary criticism and film criticism is found in the writings of film critics John Cawelti, Stanley Solomon, and Stuart Kaminsky.3 Kaminsky in American Film Genres presents an argument for this distinction. He writes that the "usage [of the term] will result in a change of meaning for the word genre, particularly when it is applied to film analysis."4 Instead of the literary distinction between genres as the form of presentation (novel, short story, essay or radio and television play), a film genre will be distinct by a film's motifs and styles within the presentation (such as comedy, western, detective, science fiction and war films). Thus, for a film genre, subject matter is a valued critical dimension. However, the distinction cannot be based on a single motif or style, but a series of motifs and styles which are similar in all members of the classification. These styles will give a body of "like" films structure and design that will be immediately recognized as a western genre or, in this discussion, a warfilm genre. In order to adapt the use of generic criticism to film, the basis of determining what a film genre is should be clarified. Kaminsky suggests that genres in film criticism must be rigorously defined. Genre in film, if it is to have meaning, must have a limited scope, a limited definition. These films must have clearly defined constants so that the traditions and forms within them can be clearly seen and not diluted into abstractions. …

Anaphora in Popular Stories: Implications for Narrative Theory

Abstract: Recent work in a variety of fields, including literary criticism, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and computer science, has been rife with theories of narrative, in particular narrative structure. The goal of this article is to evaluate, by exploring data on anaphora in narratives, two specific models of narrative structure, Story Grammar and Conceptual Dependency, whose underlying assumptions are shared by a wide range of theorists and to comment in general on re-visioning narrative theory.

Callimachus and the Muses. Some aspects of narrative technique in Aetia 1-2

Abstract: Books 1-2 of Callimachus’ Aetia display a highly innovative narrative structure, subtly blending traditional and modern elements under the sign of literary allusion and poetological self-reflection.

Text as contract: the nature and function of narrative discourse in the Erzahlungen of Heinrich von Kleist

Abstract: Contents: Kant Crisis as a Crisis of Language - The Fall as Sprachversehen - The Deconstruction of the Narrative World - Towards a Narrative Construct

The Principle of Cyclicity in Charles Dickens' The Signalman

Abstract: Theorists of narrative have made a number of attempts to interpret narrative äs a series of recurring cycles noted examples are those of Propp, Lotman, and Bromond. Narratives are seen, for instance, äs sequences of lack (the prince lacks a bride), search for a solution to the lack (the prince sets out to find a princess), a series of hindrances and complications (the dragon won't let the prince come near the object of his desire) and removal of the lack (the dragon is conquered, the objections of in-laws and friends are eliminated). Such schemes are sometimes applicable to a short story, for instance to Rudyard Kiplingfs \"At the End of the Passage\", but usually at the expense of gross reduction and simplification. Yet the fundamental idea of cycles in plot elements can be a fruitful one. It might serve to illuminate a number of stories which have been reprinted for years and consumed by generations of readers, but of which a structuralist analysis has not appeared. Such a story is Dickens* \"The Signalman\", originally called \"No. l Branch Line. The Signalman\". It contains a number of what in linguistics are called \"recurring partials\" elements of language which recur at intervals, such äs word stems and verb patterns. This principle can be applied to a literary text: the

Folk and Literary Narrative in a Postmodern Context: The Case of the Märchen

Abstract: A colleague reads my essay on postmodern revisions of Snow White (AaTh 709) and asks: \"Are you officiating over the funeral rites of a genre which, lifted out of the nexus of oral circulation, gets caught up in the self-reflexive-intertextual-structurations of postmodernism?\" \"Am I?\" I ask myself. A TV commercial reminds me that \"Once upon a time, it was easy to be a consumer .. .* I wake up to the merry, carefree voice of Goldilocks on the radio: her gold bank card has allowed her to pay off the bears' hospitality. In an interview, Margaret Atwood states that folk and fairy tales are, like biblical stories and Greek myths, the foundations of the Western Imagination; hasn't Robert Coover said that too? And what about John Barth? The magazine Heavy Metal features the grotesque tale of \"Snow Whitish (she's a little off-color 'cause she's got a cold).* Italo Calvino's posthumous, incomplete, and untranslated collection on the five senses has us overhearing a fairy tale king's hearing problems ... On the box of a Japanese product which soothes minor pain and itch, Snow White bends over her little friends protectively, a good mother with the best lotion at hand. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical \"Into the Woods,\" an amusing and fearless contemporary look at fairy tales, is quite a success in New York City. Angela Carter's revision of Perrault's fairy tales sells well in England: L·! contes du temps passe become, äs the title of her collection indicates, a contemporary Bloody Cbamber where we lie \"In the Company of Wolves.\

Realism and Narrative Form

Abstract: When Henry James reviewed Middlemarch in 1873 he saw it as setting a limit to the development of the ‘old-fashioned English novel’. As a consequence his critical response to George Eliot veered between the two alternatives of respect and condescension as he both acknowledged the impossibility of a contemporary novelist repeating her kind of achievement in the novel and attempted to define the alternative aims and qualities for fiction which were eventually to find full realisation within his own novels. ‘How bravely rounded a little world the author has made it’, he wrote of Middlemarch, with how dense an atmosphere of interests and passions and loves and enmities and strivings and failings, and how motley a group of great folk and small, all after their kind, she has filled it, the reader must learn for himself. … The author has commissioned herself to be real, her native tendency being that of an idealist, and the intellectual result is a very fertilizing mixture. The constant presence of thought, of generalizing instinct, of brain, in a word, behind her observation, gives the latter its great value and her whole manner its high superiority.1

The Framework of Le Palace, Histoire and Les Géorgiques

Abstract: More than a synonym for ‘narrative structure’, the concept of ‘narrative frame’ which I have been employing so far refers to the system of narrative order emanating from a stable ‘point fixe’ which in most conventional novels either takes the form of a reliable narrator (as in first person narratives) or a fixed spatiotemporal setting (as in third person narratives). In other words, as Uspensky and Lotman underline in their reference to visual art, the stress is on perspective. Narrative frame is the perspective from which the narration is formulated, as well as the perspective from which the reader can decode this formulation. However, the main characteristic of the ‘nouveau roman’ is that this frame is fundamentally undermined. As the previous chapter showed, the ‘point fixe’ of narrative perspective in La Route des Flandres is missing. Whilst the narrative perspective in this novel may be described as the self-conscious awareness of an ‘absent frame’, in Le Palace the perspective is one of ‘multiple frame’, and in Histoire it may be termed ‘frame shift’. The profound disintegration of narrative perspective which gathers pace in La Bataille de Pharsale and culminates in Les Georgiques will be discussed later.

Hallucination and Point of View in La Tentation de saint Antoine

Abstract: Over the past twenty-five years, as readings of Flaubert's texts have become increasingly concerned with the definition of various narrative structures, the study of point of view has been inextricably tied to determining how his nar ratives generate (or, to some minds, subvert) meaning.2 Thus it is that almost all hermeneutical approaches have been concerned with point of view in one way or another, the procedure usually being to establish the principal or authoritative narrational axis (or perhaps a pseudo-authoritative one) and then to plot and analyze the departures from it. Point of view is not a new concern, of course, and has occupied readers of Flaubert for as long as there have been studies on style indirect Ubre and irony. Nor does this question originate in critical debate; Flaubert's manuscripts show him aware of changes in perspec tive.3 Despite the excellent and numerous analyses of this topic already in print, we need to take a further look at point of view in La Tentation de saint An toine. The reason is simply (and perhaps not surprisingly) that the preoccupa tion in Flaubert studies with structure is with narrative structure and that this