Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1992"

Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory

Abstract: From the Publisher: In this important contribution to narrative theory, Marie-Laure Ryan applies insights from artificial intelligence and the theory of possible worlds to the study of narrative and fiction. For Ryan, the theory of possible worlds provides a more nuanced way of discussing the commonplace notion of a fictional "world," while artificial intelligence contributes to narratology and the theory of fiction directly via its researches into the cognitive processes of texts and automatic story generation. Although Ryan applies exotic theories to the study of narrative and fiction, her book maintains a solid basis in literary theory and makes the formal models developed by AI researchers accessible to the student of literature. The first part of the book seeks a more sophisticated application of the theory of possible worlds to the definition of fictionality. While fiction is a mode of travel into textual space, narrative is a journey within the confines of this space. The second part introduces the idea of a semantic domain consisting of a plurality of alternate possible worlds. This notion is developed into a theory of narrative conflict, which leads to an account of the forward movement of plot. By combining the philosophical back ground of possible world theory with models inspired by AI, the book fulfills a pressing need in narratology for new paradigms and an interdisciplinary perspective.

Narrative Comprehension and Film

Abstract: Narrative is one of the ways we organise and understnad the world. It is found everywhere: not only in films and books, but also in everday conversations and in the nonfictional discourses of journalists, historians, educators, psychologists, attorneys and many others. Edward Branigan presents a telling exploration of the basic concepts of narrative theory and its relation to film - and literary - analysis, bringing together theories from linguistics and cognitive science, and applying them to the screen. Individual analyses of classical narratives form the basis of a complex study of every aspect of filmic fiction exploring, for example, subjectivity in Lady in the Lake, multiplicity in Letter from and Unknown Woman, post-modernism and documentary in Sans Soleil.

Modernist Fiction: An Introduction

Abstract: To many writers of the early twentieth century, modernism meant not only the reshaping or abandonment of tradition but also an interest in psychology and in new concepts of space, time, art, and language. Randall Stevenson's important new analysis of the genre presents a lucid, comprehensive introduction to modernist fiction, covering a wide range of writers and works.Drawing on narrative theory and cultural history, Stevenson offers fresh insights into the work of such important modernists as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. In addition he discusses the work of Marcel Proust, an important figure in the development of modernism in Europe.This illuminating book places the new imagination of the modernist age in its historical context and looks at how and why the pressures of early twentieth century life led to the development of this distinctive and influential literary form. This accessible account of modernism, modernity, and the novel will be welcomed by students, scholars, and general readers alike.

Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction

Abstract: "Narrative as Theme is a brilliant critical performance, admirably lucid and rich in substance." (Ross Chambers, University of Michigan). "The questions raised by Prince's book are at the heart of contemporary critical thought: what do narratives tell the reader about the ways they construct themselves as stories about a certain 'reality'? What do they tell us about their own truth-value and the techniques they use to convey it? What do they tell us about the hermeneutics of either telling or reading a story?" (Ora Avni, Yale University). In literature the very act of narration often constitutes a theme: everyone is familiar with narration that interrupts the story, that provides an ironic gloss on the action, that exposes the narrator, that serves to deceive. In Narrative as Theme Gerald Prince offers the first book-length study of the theme of narrative and of the relationship between narrative and truth in fiction. In the first part, theoretical in nature, Prince considers the notion of theme as well as the theme of narrative itself, surveys the research that has come out of that notion, and isolates starting points for the investigation of narrative as theme. Of particular interest to narratologists will be his discussion of the "disnarrated," all those passages of a text that consider what did not or does not happen but could have. He shows how the disnarrated is an important guide to reading the theme of narrative. The second part focuses on seven French novel: Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, Voltaire's Candide, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Sartre's La Nausee, Maupassant's Bel-Ami, Claude Simon's La Route des Flandres, and Patrick Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures. Written in first and third person, absorbed or not in the act of narration, variously concerned with history, ethics, and psychology, these classical, modern, and postmodern works exemplify basic positions with regard to the truth or value of narrative. His Dictionary of Narratology, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1987, confirmed Gerald Prince as one of the world's leading narratologists. He is a professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of "Persuasion"

Abstract: Persuasion is a novel constructed around what was, for its time, a radically unusual narrative premise: the love affair that should have culminated in a marriage to end a conventional romance novel has gone bad, and the heroine of the piece must begin again, eight and a half years later, on her quest for narrative closure. It is a story of lost love regained, of oppositions reconciled. Feminist readers in the 1990s may wish, like Anne Elliot, to reclaim an old attachment. Is it time for feminist critics to stop worrying and learn to love Jane Austen again? According to Julia Prewitt Brown, feminist readers of Austen are often among the novelist's detractors. Brown has recently taken to task such influential feminist critics as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nina Auerbach, Mary Poovey, and Claudia Johnson for having misprized Austen's politics by taking too literally (and too ahistorically) Austen's insistence upon marrying off her heroines. Brown's "polemical reading" suggests that "a feminist literary criticism that is worthy of the name" (313) would take a socio-political approach different from the one that has so far dominated Anglo-American feminism. Brown finds "the true philosophical basis of feminism in Mary Wollstonecraft," not in J. S. Mill; she privileges a communityor global-based ideal over individualism, and implies that anyone reading from this more genuine feminist angle will come to appreciate Austen properly. Positioning herself as taking a broader view than Austen's "feminist detractors," Brown concludes that "we can only be grateful that Jane Austen's place in history is not dependent on the narrow approach of feminists writing today" (313). What could be more narrow, though, than an approach that identifies one "true" philosophical basis for feminism, or, for that matter, than a call for revising reading strategies that limits the available possibilities to variations among ways of looking at heroines as if they were historical figures subject to the socio-political constraints of their author's era? The kinds of feminist-historicist criticism that delimit Brown's horizons tend to treat characters as if they were "real people," whose marital fate depends upon their situation in history. But what happens when a feminist resists the powerful temptation to think of Jane Austen's heroines as persons, and scrutinizes them as functions of texts, instead? Feminist narratology (the study of narrative structures and strategies in the context of cultural constructions of gender) provides a method

Beyond the News Story: News as Discursive Composition

Abstract: The article discusses newspaper news stories in terms of linguistic and literary narratology. It regards the news as a discursive composition, which is produced by the journalist-mobilized news narrator, singling out relevant pieces of information from the discourses of real-life actors, ordering them into definite relationships and binding them together in a linking discourse. The article presents a detailed analysis of the properties of the narrator's linking discourse and of the ways in which the narrator, in making the news, can shape his or her point of view of the discourses of the actors in the news so as to support or undermine them. The article is intended primarily as a methodical experiment, and it concludes that, if appropriately modified, narratological tools and concepts are well suited to the structural analysis of news.

The Point of Stories: On Narrative Communication and Its Cognitive Functions

Abstract: The word "narrativity" is a linguistic parvenu, the Anglo-Saxon version of a term which, in one form or another, has only recently made it into various European languages. To be sure, this newcomer is derived from a word with an illustrious pedigree in classical rhetoric: the word narratio (cognate with the older Latin word for "knowing," gnarus), designating that part of a discourse in which the facts of the matter under discussion were stated. The recent spawning of the term "narrativity" and its relatives can be ascribed to a number of related causes, but above all to the structuralists' recognition of the existence of "narrative" as a specific representational form which, while manifested in different forms and cultures, constitutes a distinct object of knowledge (Barthes 1981 [1966]: 7). The subsequent development of "narratology" as a branch of literary studies has led to a number of important insights into the nature and function of that cross-cultural phenomenon. In recent years, moreover, as a spate of publications illustrates (see, e.g., Ehlich 1980; Ankersmit, Doeser, and Kibedi-Varga 1990; Barry 1990; Nash 1990), there has also been an increasing recogni-

Retelling / Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times

Abstract: "In this passionate, erudite, and far-ranging book, Kroeber renews for our multi-cultural age a fundamental argument: the stories we tell, hear, read, and see make a difference to the lives we read."--Jonathan Arac, University of PittsburghIn this highly readable and thoroughly original book, Karl Kroeber questions the assumptions about storytelling we have inherited from the exponents of modernism and postmodernism. These assumptions have led to overly formalistic and universalizing conceptions of narrative that mystify the social functions of storytelling. Even "politically correct" critics have Eurocentrically defined story as too "primitive" to be taken seriously as art. Kroeber reminds us that the fundamental value of storytelling lies in retelling, this paradoxical remaking anew that constitutes story's role as one of the essential modes of discourse. His work develops some recent anthropological and feminist criticism to delineate the participative function of audience in narrative performances. In depicting how audiences contribute to storytelling transactions, Kroeber carries us into a surprising array of examples, ranging from a Mesopotamian sculpture to Derek Walcott's Omeros; startling juxtapositions, such as Cervantes to Vermeer; and innovative readings of familiar novels and paintings. Tom Wolfe's comparison of his Bonfire of the Vanities to Vanity Fair is critically analyzed, as are the differences between Thackeray's novel and Joyce's Ulysses and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Other discussions focus on traditional Native American stories, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, and narrative paintings of Giotto, Holman Hunt, and Roy Lichtenstein. Kroeber deploys the ideas of Ricoeur and Bakhtin to reassess dramatically the field of narrative theory, demonstrating why contemporary narratologists overrate plot and undervalue story's capacity to give meaning to the contingencies of real experience. Retelling/Rereading provides solid theoretical grounding for a new understanding of storytelling's strange role in twentieth-century art and of our need to develop a truly multicultural narrative criticism.

Cather, canon, and the politics of reading

Abstract: What makes Willa Cather such an anomaly in American literature, and why are her late fictions so rarely read in high school and university classrooms? What is it exactly that renders them unclassifiable in the prevailing critical assessments of Cather's work? Why, in other words, are these writings so difficult to interpret? Deborah Carlin addresses these and other questions by examining the ways in which certain reading communities have placed - or, more often, ignored - Cather's complex and unsettling post-1925 fiction within canonical formulations. Employing interpretive strategies drawn from narratology, feminism, and deconstruction, Carlin focuses on five female-centred late fictions: "My Mortal Enemy" (1926), "Shadows on the Rock" (1931), "Lucy Gayheart" (1935), and "Sapphira and the Slave Girl" (1940). She argues that Cather's later works have been largely overlooked for two reasons: they confound reader expectations by revising conventional fictional forms; and they raise troubling questions about race, class, sexuality, and power, especially with regard to women. Carlin's work, besides its focus on Cather's most problematic writings, has a theoretical approach to issues of narrative and gender. Rather than chart Cather's intellectual biography through the texts, as others have done, Carlin shows how the late fictions reflect self-conscious experimentation with narrative form and, at the same time, reveal ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, feminist impulses.

A Marxism for the postmodern? Jameson's Adorno.

Abstract: Fredric Jameson is by general acclaim the leading Marxist critic in North America. Author of a series of books that set the pace for radical literary culture in the United States during the 1970s through their reception of European theoretical trends (Sartre, German Marxist cultural criticism, Russian formalism, and French structuralism), he turned in the 1980s first to the elaboration of a distinctly political form of narratology (The Political Unconscious),' and then, most famously, to a theorization of postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism" a pioneering if ambiguous Marxist appropriation of the concept of postmodernism that has provoked wide-ranging critical discussion.2

Death and Vocation: Narrativizing Narrative Theory

Abstract: Literary critics mistrust periodization, that basic act of literary history, because they are suspicious of narrative. Where does this suspicion come from? And why has it arisen, paradoxically, together with the growing authority of the concept of narrative itself? This essay places the rise of narrative theory in the contexts of professionalism, decolonization, and the nineteenth-century novel. Gerard Genette’s account of the triumph of “discourse” over “story” parallels the upward mobility of many nineteenth-century novelistic protagonists. Even denying that narrative theory can be narrativized, as Jonathan Culler does, has similarities to the vocational crisis in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Each of these narratives functions as a rhetoric of professional legitimation, leading outward from some account of “the ‘storiness’ of the story”-the role, for example, of death for Walter Benjamin and Frank Kermode-to a sense of vocation anchored in the concerns of an extraprofessional public.

Fictions of the Self

Abstract: There are so many analogies and parallels between different Brookner novels — in structure, theme and even the smallest incidental detail — that it is natural to ask whether all nine may not in fact be variations on a single subject; or even, in some sense, related versions of what is essentially one monolithic fiction. Such hypotheses may be tested by a judicious combination of structuralist narratology and the autobiographical approach.

Matthew's Emmanuel Messiah : a paradigm of presence for God's people

Abstract: The motif of divine presence is a clear phenomenon within the Gospel of Matthew. The modern critical means for assessing the ancient biblical text have multiplied to the point, some claim, of disparity. This study employs both narrative and redaction criticism in an attempt to respond authentically to the structural, historical and theological dimensions of Matthew's Gospel. This study begins with the presumption of the wholeness and integrity of Matthew's narrative, and assumes the gospel story to have an inherently dramatic structure which invites readers to inhabit imaginatively its narrative world and respond to its call. But since we are concerned with the role of both reader and author, this study also assumes a text with an historical author and context. The introduction focuses on the meta-critical dilemma facing New Testament students - what is the text and how do we read it? - and seeks some balance in terms of Krieger's analogy of the text as both window and mirror. Proposed is a narrative reading of Matthew's presence motif alongside a redaction critical assessment of it. In Chapter 2 the elements of narrative theory are introduced and relevant terms defined: the structure of narrative, the function of the narrator, points of view. Chapter 3 becomes an exercise in narrative reading, with Matthew's presence motif providing the focus, and the implied reader’s interaction with the story being predominant in interpretation. Characters, rhetorical devices, and points of view are discussed, to understand the motif's development throughout the story's progress. The thrust of Chapter 4 is thereafter to examine divine presence as a dominant motif within Matthew's most important literary context: the Jewish scriptures. Here the primary paradigms of divine presence provided by the Patriarchs, the Sinai experience, and the Davidic-Zion traditions are assessed. Chapter 5 follows with a more detailed examination of the OT "I am with you/God is with us" formula and its µeo' vµwv/ηuwv language, so strongly connected to Matthew's presence motif. Chapters 6-8 build on these investigations with a closer analysis of the three critical "presence passages" of Mt 1:23. 18:20 and 28:20. The passages and their contexts are probed from a redaction critical perspective, guided by the narrative investigation of Chapter 3, and the background from Chapters 4 and 5.The three major "presence passages" examined in Chapters 6-8 are also complimented by a number of secondary issues: worship, wisdom, the Spirit and the poor in Matthew, and their relation to Jesus' divine presence. These are discussed in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 summarizes and looks briefly at some implications. Matthew' presence motif proves to be an important element of the Gospel’s rhetorical design, redactional strategy and Christology. The presence of Jesus, the Emmanuel Messiah, exhibited in his risen authority, becomes the focus of his people's hopes and experiences in the post-Easter world. What the presence of Yahweh was to his people. Jesus now provides in a new paradigm for his people - his followers, the little ones, the poor and the marginalized, from all nations.

Beyond Propp and Oedipus: Towards expanding narrative theory

Abstract: Aspects of theory surrounding both narrative and reception of film is examined and interrogated. The structural analysis offered by Propp, among other theorists, and insights of psychoanalysis are considered to rework the Oedipal scenario. This paper draws on ideas around transgression and refers to aspects of Oedipus’s life which are largely ignored as the focus of psychic scenario. The narratives of two films. On the Wire and Mississippi Masala are examined in relation to contradictions surrounding their reception.

Song and Story

Abstract: Not long ago, allusions to musical narrative were likely to elicit only a few well-worn, largely pat and dismissive, formulas about program music No more: narrative has proved to be something of a bellwether for the current rise of criticism and hermeneutics in music scholarship It is now virtually a disciplinary subfield, with a steady presence on the American Musicological Society's convention programs and a growing bibliography Carolyn Abbate's Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century is a highly sophisticated contribution to this new field, a book that helps to sophisticate the field itself and to enrich its critical possibilities The book's arguments deserve the closest consideration, and its questions will remain pivotal even where its answers are themselves questionable The foremost of these questions is deceptively simple: In just what sense can music be said to narrate? It is not a question that has been asked often enough Work in musical narratology can be said to have concentrated on three different topics, each corresponding to a different aspect of narrative as a writing practice' The most prominent topic, identified especially with the work of Anthony Newcomb, has been emplotment, the configuring of eventsequences into coherent wholes The popularity of this musical reading-for-the-plot can be explained in part by the obvious importance that most Western art music accords to the

Devils, Sermon Stories, and the Problem of Popular Belief in the Middle Ages

Abstract: Narratives, like history, impose form and order upon events; their selection and sequential arrangement make sense of the action, creating a story rather than presenting a series of disconnected events. This overall design is as often implicit as it is explicit. The act of interpetation involves both responding to what is explicit in the text and also exposing what is latent in it; it thus involves reading between the lines and interpreting the silences. All narratives invite the active involvement of the reader, offering clues for interpretation which we solve by drawing on our previous experience of narratives as well as on a range of cultural assumptions.' Modern narrative theory is as interested in how readers read as in what authors intend; it enables us to analyse texts in a way which reveals what readers are invited to supply, what is implicit in them. This paper uses narrative theory as a means of uncovering the implict beliefs and assumptions underlying a number of medieval stories about devils.

Freud's narrative. from case history to life story

Abstract: Reeder J. Freud's Narrative. From Case History to Life Story. Int Forum Psychoanal 1992;l:Sl-60. Stockholm. ISSN 0803-706X In awareness of the recent interest in the narrative activity of the psychoanalytic experience, the present paper attempts to delineate the place and function of narrativity in Freud's writings. It is argued that he lacked an understanding of the meaning of the life history of the patient for the alleviation of the latter's symptoms. Therefore he stuck to his well-known archaeological model of psychoanalytical treatment and did not elaborate a specific theory of narrativity. On the other hand, a concern for the problems of narrativity appears in his considerations regarding the case history, which, however, is not constructed for the benefit of the patient, but for communication with the medical community. Beside this, it is possible to find in his writings the precursors of a narrative theory, some of which are examined in the last section together with an attempt to create ...

Roman en film - stories in woorde en beelde ’n Voorstel vir ’n gevorderde kursus in literatuurwetenskap

Abstract: In this article a course in narratology, in which the emphasis falls on films based on specific novels, is discussed. The article is mainly informative, giving details about the principles on which the course is based, explaining the way in which the course was developed and outlining the contents of the course. In the last part of the article three examples of the approach which is followed are given and the bibliography can be seen as a basic reading list for such a course. The article is an empirical report which puts forward a possible way in which the study of films on an advanced level can be approached.

"It's Stories Still": la reflexividad en las narraciones de Samuel Beckett

Abstract: This paper explores the use of reflexive and metafictional narrative structures in The Unnamable and other texts by Samuel Beckett. Reflexivity is shown to be the structural basis at all textual levels, from the articulation of character and plot development, through the use of narrative voice and modality, to the implied authorial level and the aesthetic stance of the text. Narratology and deconstruction are used as analytical tools to explore the peculiar semiotic productivity of the Beckettian text and draw the aesthetic and philosophical implications of Beckett's use of narrative form.