Showing papers on "Narrative structure published in 1989"

Historical narrative and the young reader

Abstract: (1989). Historical narrative and the young reader. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 28, Learning Through Text, pp. 114-119.

Stories Lived and Stories Told: The Narrative Structure of Late Adolescent Moral Development

Abstract: The ongoing debate about how to describe and explain late adolescent moral development is highlighted most clearly in the contrast between the work of Kohlberg and Perry. This paper addresses this deb

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.

On limiting the narrative paradigm: Three case studies

Abstract: While narrative is studied in any number of fields as a form of discourse, only in communication studies has it been claimed that all forms of discourse can be viewed as types of narrative. One way of testing such an all‐encompassing interpretation of narrative is to apply the assumptions of the narrative paradigm to works that traditionalists would not consider to be stories. This essay applies the principles of narrative probability and fidelity to three works—a book attacking religious fundamentalism, a short film attacking Pat Robertson and an allegorical science fiction novel that retells the story of Job—in order to test the paradigm. If all rhetoric can be understood through the narrative paradigm, then the paradigm should be equally applicable to all three works. The analysis of the works, however, reveals that narrative approaches are of little use when applied to discourse that does not tell a story. Additionally, the standards for narrative rationality are difficult to apply and inapplicable to...

The medieval Greek romance

Abstract: Preface Note on transliteration Maps Introduction Part I. 1071-1204: 1. The twelfth-century background 2. The literary tradition 3. The 'proto romance' Diyenis Akritis 4. The renaissance of a genre 5. The twelfth-century texts Part II. 1204-1453: 6. The first 'modern Greek' literature 7. The original romances: the texts and their stories 8. The original romances: narrative structure 9. Translations and adaptations of western romances 10. Genealogy of the romances 11. Common elements of the romances: oral background vs textual interference 12. Reception Conclusions Notes References.

Medieval narrative and modern narratology : subjects and objects of desire

Abstract: Evelyn Vitz's book, which began as a series of independent articles, includes chapters on a wide variety of medieval genres autobiographical apologia, dream allegory, chanson de geste, saint's life, and short tale from Abelard's Historia Calamitatum to Guillaume de Lords' Roman de la Rose. Her studies embrace both well-known works like the Lais of Marie de France, and less-studied pieces such as La Fille du Comte de Ponthieu. In each study, Vitz is preoccupied with different aspects of the self. The thread unifying these very different narratives is set out in the introductory essay: "to a striking degree each narrative genre specializes in certain relations among potential subjects in certain kinds of desire as providing motivation and closure to the narrative" (6). In order to approach medieval representations of the self, she makes use of narratological models (particularly those outlined by Greimas and Todorov), which nevertheless prove themselves unequal to the task. One of the striking features of this book is the author's critique of the models that she uses: in applying modern models to medieval narratives, Vitz manages to expose much of the ideological bias implicit in the supposedly neutral analysis of narrative structure. As she confronts contemporary

Sitcoms and Single Moms: Representations of Feminism on American TV

Abstract: Among American broadcast television practices, the situation comedy constructed around a single white career woman or mother emerged in the 1970s as a preferred fictional site for a "feminist" subject position. Such examples as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, One Day at a Time, and Alice are representative of the television industry's attempt to draw upon feminist consciousness raising as a contextual frame. Popular critics frequently agree that "Mary" symbolized the independent woman of the 1970s.' Some critics have actually gone so far as to claim that Alice's subliminal message is "Sisterhood Is Powerful" or that One Day at a Time is about television's "first feminist."2 Periodicals aimed exclusively at female audiences (including Ms., Vogue, McCalls, Glamour, and Working Woman) have cited Alice, One Day at a Time, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (MTM) as exemplary feminist representations, and have particularly hailed Kate & Allie as the progressive outcome of such a continuous line.3 These TV shows make feminism meaningful (as cultural values and social practice) only within the ways that past and present sitcoms, television's general representation of women, and topical issues admit and circulate notions of feminism. The genre's political feminism must also conform to American television's material base, a governing system of economic exchange that functions to renegotiate sociopolitical "difference" as a cultural affirmation of patriarchal values. The sitcom of the 1970s and 1980s thus offers a reformist or liberal feminism as "progressive" even while it simultaneously works to disavow it. Television scholars have already identified the ways in which particular television texts identified as "feminist" redirect independent, assertive female characters into safely traditional female categories. Arguing that central female characters must be returned ultimately to the conventional narrative structures of family melodrama or heterosexual romance, critics have demonstrated that a woman's position can only be inscribed narratively in relationship to male prerogatives. For example, Serafina Bathrick notes how the narrative trajectory of The Mary Tyler Moore Show textually repositions Mary-the single, professionally minded independent woman-into romantic or familial categories so that she emerges as a self-sacrificing, nurturant figure of True Womanhood.4 Robert Deming agrees that while MTM "might have opened up a new repre-

Narrative and argument

Abstract: Introduction: new relationships between narrative and argument? Texture and meaning argument as social action divine dialogues - the role of argument in the narrative discourse of a five year old storyteller learning to control different written registers arguing a telling story from children's arguments and narratives contexts for developing argument at 16-plus persuading as storying - essays, narrative and the college writing course if it's narrative, why do nothing but generalise?

Homer, Vergil, and Complex Narrative Structures in Latin Epic: An Essay

Abstract: Nikos Kazantzakis was arguably the last major European poet to write epic. Epic, especially in languages no longer understood or spoken outside academic circles, is now the scholar's preserve. The general reader encounters the Iliad and Odyssey in translation and through the intermediacy of scholars who often study the originals for reasons other than poetic, searching Homer for information, linguistic and social, about the Bronze Age. General interest in Hellenistic and Roman heroic epic is waning, despite the flurry of publication, since its appeal is its literary form and its political and intellectual resonances, which have less to allure scholars or readers whose primary interest is not poetry. Much of it lies in what Paul Friedlander called "the graveyard of literary history": extant, but unread. The fall from favor of Statius' once admired Thebaid coincides with the gradual disappearance of epic as a vital narrative form, with the rejection by poets of extended narrative verse, and with the growing feeling among scholars that the value of an epic is in some way proportional to its usefulness as primary source material for other studies. Scholars reacted with overwhelming enthusiasm to Milman Parry's "oral" theory of Homeric composition, and his insistence that the Iliad and Odyssey not be treated as "literary" epics. His theory of the "oral" origins and transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey, which dominated Homeric scholarship for several decades, encouraged the epics to be approached not as the product of a master poetic craftsman but as a patchwork, with evident sutures, of different and sometimes conflicting oral traditions. Observed narrative complexity in the Iliad or Odyssey could be attributed not to artistic design but to felicitous seaming by rhapsodes, or to coincidental juxtaposition of ideas which, however artistically conu-ived they might appear to literary critics, were not the product of conscious artisuy. Ironically, the "oral" theory replaced poetic complexity with other scholarly complexities. Indeed, the chief complaint leveled against the "oral" Homer by literary critics was, until recently, that it "deterred the reader from taking Homer's expression at its face value."'

Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

Abstract: Aimed at students of all levels, this series provides a companion to key works of world literature. This volume examines the metaphoric and narrative structures of "Wuthering Heights" in an attempt to show the underlying oppositions on which the book is built.

Modelos dialógicos en la narrativa de Benito Pérez Galdós

Abstract: Benito Perez Galdos sought a new narrative structure which would revitalize the literary models prevalent in 19th-century Spain. He found such a structure in the creation of a dialogue between normally incompatible texts — between old and new, national and foreign, high culture and low. From the confrontation of these incongruous texts a narrative is born which, through the destruction of textual hierarchies, creates an ambiguous and often duplicitous texture of storytelling. Five paradigms, based upon five Novelas Contemporaneas, are used to exemplify the dialogical structure of the new Galdosian novel.

Poetics of Valentin Kataev's Prose of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract: Contents: A penetrating textual analysis of Kataev's lyrical prose with its unique generic and narrative structure, and bold experiments in the treatement of time and space. The book is a useful and original contribution to the relatively neglected field.

Ernest Hemingway : narrative structure in The sun also rises and A farewell to arms

Abstract: With respect to the work of Ernest Hemingway, it is generally assumed that all questions have been asked and all answers given. This is not the case. Our conceptions of such novels as T h e S u n A l s o R i s e s and A F a r e w e l l t o Arms are based on personality cults (both friendly and hostile) and dated critical appraisals that are themselves influenced by biographic and populist notions. In our rush to take sides and attach meaning, we have overlooked the subtleties of the literature. Recent developments in Hemingway studies suggest that in some cases we have even missed the point entirely. Indeed, a careful, unprejudiced re-examination of these two novels indicates that we may have been reading them erroneously. Both novels are first person narrative presentations, yet, to date, no one has bothered to base a critical investigation e n t i r e l y on this literary specificity. Using the tools of recent narrative theory, this discussion attempts just such a reading. This reading, which pays careful attention to the rhetoric of each narrator, contradicts standard critical interpretations. It finds that Jake Barnes is not a bitter survivor of the so-called "lost generation," but that he is a triumphant spiritual hero. It also finds that Frederic Henry is not a romantic, existential hero, but that he is a liar and a con-artist. While these novels share their narrative perspective, the peculiarities of each require separate approaches. Because Jake

Poetics and Narrative

Abstract: I want to start with a quotation from Hans Frei’s stimulating and seminal book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. Comparing the development of prose fiction and biblical criticism in England and Germany during the eighteenth century, he notes that: In England, where a serious body of realistic narrative literature and a certain amount of criticism of the literature was building up, there arose no corresponding cumulative tradition of criticism of the biblical writings, and that included no narrative interpretation of them. In Germany, on the other hand, where a body of critical analysis as well as general hermeneutics of the biblical writings built up rapidly in the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was no simultaneous development of realistic prose narrative and its critical appraisal.1

Narrative Literacy Patterns of Northern Ute Adolescent Students.

Abstract: The relationship between oral language and academic suzcess as a rationale for the study of narrative structures is discussed in order to determine Northern Ute children's acquisition of "school language" structures. In addition, this paper compares hypotheses concerning the expected linguistic behavior of Northern Ute children in retelling narratives with actual narrative-retelling skills of 41 children to determine if Ute children: (1) demonstrate the ability to retell narratives, (2) construct narratives in a manner predicted by research on mainstream (predominantly Anglo) children, and (3) construct narratives in a manner predicted by previous research on adult and adolescent Northern Utes. It is concluded that success teaching school-language will be accomplished only when both students and teachers recognize the existence, importance, and functions of the homeand school-language traditions and do not try to learn or teach one to the exclusion of the other. Just as Northern Ute children have demonstrated the ability to use context-controlled story grammar categories, they should be given the opportunity to expand this skill into context-controlled language traditions. Contains 33 references.