Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1996"

Towards a 'natural' narratology

Abstract: In this ground breaking work of synthesis, Monika Fludernik combines insights from literary theory and linguistics to provide a challenging new theory of narrative. This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of narrative, represents the epitome of a centuries long developmental process.

Narratology: An Introduction

Abstract: Narrative Structure: Fabula 1. Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives 2. Claude Bremond, The Logic of Narrative Possibilities 3. A. J. Greimas, Reflections on Actantial Models Narrative Structure: Story 4. Jonathan Culler, Fabula and sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative: Some American Discussions 5. Meir Sternberg, What is Exposition? An Essay in Temporal Delimitation 6. Meike Bal, Focalization 7. Paul Ricoeur The Time of Narrating (Erzahlzeit) and Narrated Time (erzahlte Zeit) Narrative Structure: Text 8. Wayne Booth, Types of Narration 9. Walker Gibson, Authors, Speakers, Readers and Mock Readers 10. F.K. Stanzel, A New Approach to the Definition of the Narrative Situations 11. Gerard Genette, Voice 12. Gerald Prince, Introduction to the Study of the Narratee 13. Linda Hutcheson, Modes and Forms of Narrative Narcissim: Introduction of a Typology Narratology and Film 14. Celestino Deleyto, Focalisation in Film Narrative 15. Edward Branigan, Story World and Screen Post Structuralist Narratology 16. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot 17. Teresa de Lauretis, Desire in Narrative 18. Hayden White, The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality 19. J. Hillis Miller, Line

Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative

Abstract: Roof's ambitious, wide-ranging book links narrative theory, theories of sexuality, and gay and lesbian theory to explore the place of homosexuality, and specifically the lesbian, in the tradition of western narrative. According to Freud, perversions are the necessary obstacles in a heroic plot of normal heterosexual development; and homosexuality is the nineteenth century's classic case of perversion. Roof builds on Freud to illustrate that a structural understanding of narrative enforces a heterosexual paradigm, a sense of meaning that provides psychological stability for the reader. Looking at film, television, and lesbian novels, Roof explores how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform, determine, and reproduce one another. She identifies the paradigmatic lesbian story, its unvarying repetition, and how it might be recast. Understanding identification as a narrative practice, and narrative as typically heterosexual and reproductive, Roof shows how sexuality and narrative must be disentangled to alter oppressive social practices.Come As You Are marks a significant contribution to lesbian and gay studies, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism.

Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction

Abstract: This book explores the concepts of nationality and culture in the context of nineteenth-century Scottish fiction, through the writing of Walter Scott, James Hogg, R. L. Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant. It describes the relationship between speech writing as a foundation of the literary construction of a particular national identity, exploring how orality and literacy are figured in nineteenth-century preoccupations with the definition of 'culture'. It further examines the importance of romance revival in the ascendancy of the novel and the development of that genre across a century which saw the novel stripped of its female associations and accorded a masculine authority, touching on the sexualization of language in the discourse between women's narrative (oral) and men's narrative (written). The books importance for literary studies lies in the investigation of some of the consequences of deconstruction. It explores how the speech/writing opposition is open to the influence of social and material forces. Focusing on the writing of Scott, Hogg, Stevenson, and Oliphant, it looks at the conflicts in narratological experiments in Scottish writing, constructions of class and gender, the effects of popular literacy and the material condition of books as artefacts and commodities. This book is the first to offer a broad picture of the interaction of Scottish fiction and modern theoretical thinking, taking its roots from a combination of deconstruction, narrative theory, the history of orality, linguistics and psychoanalysis.

Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers

Abstract: Carefully melding theory with close readings of texts, the contributors to this study explore the role of gender in the struggle for narrative control of specific works by British writers Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson and Mina Loy. This collection of 12 essays is devoted to feminist narratology - the combination of feminist theory with the study of the structures that underpin all narratives. Until recently, narratology has resisted the advances of feminism in part, as some contributors argue, because theory has replicated past assumptions of male authority and point of view in narrative. Feminist narratology, however, contextualizes the cultural constructions of gender within its study of narrative strategies. Nine of these essays are original, and three have been revised for publication in this volume.

Telling decisions: The role of narrative in organizational decision making

Abstract: When we made the decision, we had already made the decision. Corporate decision (?) maker Organizational decision theory and the research that supports it depend largely on narrative: the selective, ordered representation of events as told, the telling of this representation to others, and the successive retellings of this telling. To discover how anything happens in an organization, we ask people to tell us stories. To convince others that we know something about how things happen in organizations, we construct and tell stories about those stories. As others react to our stories, they tell stories about the stories we have told – and so on. Philosophers (Johnson, 1993; MacIntyre, 1981) argue that narrative is a meaning-making form and process that is central to human experience and conduct. “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 216). Human conduct is by nature “storied” (Sarbin, 1986): We think, imagine, and choose according to narrative structures. We connect information – random or otherwise – to form patterns and plots. These patterns and plots produce meaning , defined here, according to the literary theory of narrative, as the excess of the “straightforward copy of events recounted” (Barthes, 1982, p. 289). In this chapter, I argue that narrative is a form of human understanding comparable to heuristics in decision theory (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982).

Narrative Structures for New Media: Towards a New Definition

Abstract: ARISTOTLE’S POETICS IS AN INADEQUATE NARRATIVE MODEL for the creation of computer interactive art, contrary to the thesis laid down by Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre. Although she opened up space for a rather tantalizing dialogue in this area, it is to non-Western cultures that one should look for narrative structures that fit the sophistication of Western new technologies. The theories and processes of African oral literature provide the groundwork for such a narrative model. A comparison of contemporary postmodern thought and African oral literature shows that they share many attributes. Through a description of her work, which challenges the notion of book arts and narrative theory, as well as through an exploration of the advanced mathematical theory of fuzzy logic, the author opens the door for a discussion of narrative that crosses cultural, aesthetic, and academic boundaries. In this concept of narrative, nuance, indeterminacy, and polyventiality are major players.

‘Anchored narratives' and the interface of law, psychology and semiotics

Abstract: Narrative has become an important paradigm in both psychology and semiotics (Section 1). Three applications of narrative theory to fact finding in criminal cases--Bennett & Feldman (1981), Jackson (1988a, derived from the semiotics of Greimas), Wagenaar (1995; Wagenaar, van Koppen & Crombag, 1993)--are here compared in terms of their conceptions of narrative, application to the courtroom process itself, and epistemological assumptions (Sections 2-4). A recent English case, regarded by some as a miscarriage of justice, is used as a case study to illustrate different approaches from psychology and semiotics (Section 5). The Conclusion (Section 6) considers the potential 'remediability' of the courtroom search for truth implied by these various approaches, and the implications of this analysis for the interdisciplinary study of witness testimony and jury research in the 'normal' case (where there is no suggestion of miscarriage of justice). Language: en

History Literature, and Society in the Book of Acts: Internal repetition in Luke–Acts: contemporary narratology and Lucan historiography

Abstract: INTRODUCTION In her 1984 essay, “Jesus–Paul, Peter–Paul, and Jesus–Peter Parallelisms in Luke–Acts: A History of Reader Response,” Susan Marie Praeder surveyed the cataloging and analysis of parallelisms in Luke–Acts from the nineteenth century to 1983. In particular, she noted how different approaches to Lucan studies – tendency criticism (Schneckenburger, Bauer, Schwegler, Zeller), radical criticism (Bauer), literary criticism (Morgenthaler), typological criticism (Goulder), and redaction criticism (Talbert, Mattill, O'Toole, Radl, Muhlack) – have produced lists of alleged parallelisms that continue to share a significant degree of overlap, even if these data have then been subjected to disparate interpretations. Noting that parallelisms have been understood, for example, “as proof of literary sequences and structures, lack of historicity, and certain theological concerns,” she maintains nonetheless that, “although interpretations of the parallelisms have tended to be relatively short-lived, the proposed parallelisms lend some con-tinuity to the history of interpretation. At the same time, she cautions against what we might call parallelomania – i.e. the undisciplined ransacking of Luke–Acts for recurring patterns of narration – and urges readers (1) to be more forthcoming regarding their criteria for locating parallelisms and (2) not to confuse their findings with authorial intent. In their words of caution, some redaction critics have gone much further, querying whether such “correspondences” or “parallel structures” have much relevance at all for attempts at discerning the theology of the Evangelist. After all, in whose mind do these phenomena occur – Luke's or the modern reader's? Against the backdrop of such concerns, we will argue that, from the standpoint of our reading of the narrative of Luke– Acts, authorial intentions are less material than are the manifold interpretive responses supported by the narrative itself.

Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition

Abstract: Although scholars have extensively studied the affinities between Henry Field's novels and modern genres, they have paid little attention to his use of the classical tradition in developing his narrative theory and practice. This book rectifies this desideratum in Fielding scholarship by considering his use of classical literature in his novels, periodical essays, and miscellaneous writings.

Narrative and Research in Professional Communication

Abstract: This article explores narrative theory and research in fields closely allied with professional communication to clarify the value of narrative to our discipline. It addresses the move in many fields to reconceptualize research as narrative. Placing narrative within a postmodernist frame, it examines the centrality of ethnography within a postmodernist view. The importance of ethnography in research is related to two key narrative questions that ethnographic theorists in other disciplines are addressing: Who is telling the ethnographic story? For what purposes is the story told? This article supports the importance of taking a critical stance toward these questions and discusses the implications of postmodernist ethnographic theory for research in professional communication.

Communities under fire: Empowering families and children in the aftermath of homicide

Abstract: This article presents an empowerment approach to clinical services for families and children surviving homicides. Narrative theory is used to integrate child, family and community interventions. The article presents a framework for the examination of narratives and guidelines for co-constructing narratives that empower children, families and communities.

Implications of a Feminist Narratology: Temporality, Focalization and Voice in the Films of Julie Dash, Mona Smith and Trinh T. Minh-ha

Abstract: ...................................................435 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT................................ 437

"I was born from the earth": Reconstructing the adoption self-narrative in the treatment of a preadolescent girl.

Abstract: The various elements of the adoption story are examined in light of narrative theory, and three components that constitute the self-narrative of the adoptee—the birth, the placement, and the adopti...

The Convergence of Analogical and Dialectic Imaginations in Legal Discourse

Abstract: The dialogue over the role of narrative in the making and interpreting of law and in legal practice is often stalemated by confusion about the complex relationships between narrative and other forms of legal reasoning. Are narrative and rules opposing methods for interpretation and persuasion? Does narrative theory assert that lawyers can win cases by presenting a sympathetic story, without regard for the governing rule of law? If so, it is no wonder that conversations about narrative theory are so difficult. This article explores the relationship between narrative and other forms of legal interpretation and persuasion. It relies on David Tracy’s concepts of the “analogical” imagination (finding meaning in story and metaphor) and the “dialectic” imagination (approaching story and metaphor with suspicion, preferring instead to find meaning from systematic reasoning). The article examines the roles of narrative in law creation (how judges decide questions of law) and in legal hermeneutics (what lawyers do with rules). The article concludes that poetry and prose (stories and rules) each have an important role to play and must remain in constructive relationship with each other.

Introduction to 'Narratology'

Abstract: 'Narratology: An Introduction' provides an introduction and overview of Narratology, a rapidly growing field in the humanities. Literary narratologists have provided many key concepts and analytical tools which are widely used in the interdisciplinary analysis of such narrative features as plot, point of view, speech presentation, ideological perspective and interpretation. The introduction explains the central concepts of narratology, their historical development, and draws together contemporary trends from many different disciplines into common focus. It offers a compendium of the development of narratology from classical poetics to the present.

(Re)‐telling stories: Narrative theory and the practice of client counselling

Abstract: The field of narrative studies is currently influencing methodology in many areas of research and learning in the arts and social sciences historiography, psychology, philosophy, theology, therapy and education amongst others. Researchers in these domains have used narrative theory to help them examine how narratives concerning professionals are constructed, and what this tells us of the professionals themselves, their view of their profession, their place within it, and their relations with clients. Most of these studies emphasise the teleological role that narrative inquiry can play in providing individuals with the opportunities to achieve new understandings about the nature and process of practice and the communities within such practice is enacted. This article describes the application of aspects of narrative theory to legal education. It describes the use to which narrative criticism was put in a third level module on clinical legal skills at Glasgow Caledonian University. Some key concepts in narrative theory were used in class discussion of videotaped client counselling interviews between solicitors and clients. The narrative concepts were also reinforced in other areas of the module dealing with negotiation and writing skills. Through the discussion of the videotapes and reflective practice using recipes, students came to a deeper appreciation of the experience of one important aspect of legal practice. [T]he study of narrative, like the study of other significant human creations, has taken a quantum leap in the modern era. No longer the province of literary specialists who borrow their terms from psychology and linguistics, the study of narrative has become an invaluable source of insight for all the branches of human and natural science’. Why is there such a rush to storytelling? Why has narrative become such an important and recurring theme in legal scholarship these days? It is with this question that the editor Kim Lane Scheppele opened the Foreword to a special issue in 1989 of the Michigan Law Review on the place of narrative in legal discourse. Throughout the eighties and especially in America there was a steady growth in the number of articles and books concerned with law and narrative; and in the nineties there has been no slackening of interest: narrative and especially narrative theory remains a recurring interest for lawyers. There are two clear strands to the research. First, the law and literature movement has used narrative theory to analyse the relations between literature and law, and to critique the place of law in society. Second, those involved in ‘critical lawyering’, clinical skills, and the ethnography of legal discourse have employed narrative theory teleologically in order to open up new

The Two-Headed Deer: Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa

Abstract: India's epic poem, the Ramayana, is a dramatic, ever-evolving tale of a prince and his bride, their adventures and dilemmas, and demons. Joanna Williams studies the art of the Ramayana in Orissa, a region known for its elegantly carved temples. There she researched both literary and visual art works, interviewed artists, and observed them at work. With depth and originality, Williams considers how Indian art tells a story in distinctive ways. Her narratological study takes into account many familiar genres of visual art: illustrated manuscripts, drawings on palm leaf paper, wall paintings, shadow plays, temple sculpture, and painted cloth "pata". Included are discussions of pan-Indian versions of the epic, which include film, video, and the comic strip; and those local to Orissa, including rural theatre and festivals. Noting that we often treat images designed to be seen in sequence as separate pictures, Williams argues that con-sidering several Ramayana images in sequence reveals their qualities of variety, surprise, and emotional development, promoting an understanding of "how" the story is told. She discusses the artists' narrative strategies and offers interpretations of how and why artists made their choices. Williams persuasively argues against critics who believe that Indian art, indeed any traditional art, is conventional and lacks individual technique or vision. Her analysis across a variety of genres offers a new model for art historians; at the same time anthropologists, folklorists, and scholars of literature and narratology will find her work of great value.

Acts of narrative : textual strategies in modern German fiction

Abstract: Because German literary criticism tends to be strongly historicist in character, modern and postmodern German narrative has remained relatively unexplored by poststructuralist critics. In the eight individual analyses of twentieth-century German texts that make up this book, Patrick O'Neill deviates from the theoretical mainstream. O'Neill applies the principles of structuralist and poststructuralist narratology to a selection of narratives from both modernist and postmodernist German authors: Mann, Kafka, and Hesse, and Canetti, Grass, Johnson, Handke, and Bernhard. O'Neill's approach rests on three assumptions: first, that all stories are stories told in particular ways; second, that these particular ways of telling stories are interesting objects of study in and for themselves; and third, that modern German fiction includes a number of narratives that allow us to indulge that interest in ways that are themselves compelling. The relationship of story and discourse is central to Acts of Narrative; in particular, each of the texts under analysis continually foregrounds the active role of the reader, which O'Neill sees as an inescapable feature of modern and postmodern narrative as a semiotic structure. The volume might be described as an exercise in semiotic narratology, exploring a variety of aspects of the semiotics of narrative as a discursive system. Acts of Narrative provides a fresh and challenging approach to German literary texts that will interest both those whose concern is narrative theory and critical practice and those who study modern and postmodern German or comparative literature.

THE BRITISH COMMUNIST NOVEL OF THE 1930s AND 1940s. A ‘PARTY OF EQUALS’? (AND DOES THAT MATTER?)

Abstract: IF it is accepted that, between the Scylla of High Theory and the Charybdis of 'cultural studies', there is still a space where radical critics can fruitfully engage in the practice of literary criticism; and if it is accepted, moreover, that literary evaluation should not be left to belletristic conservatives, still stubbornly innocent of 'Theory', then a number of questions have to be considered. For example, how ought literary theory to be deployed in the production of sensitive evaluations of literature? How, in particular, can the contemporary theory that has to do with the novel (most typically, narratology plus Bakhtin plus post-structuralist deprecations of realism) be made to do anything other than deplore authoritarian modes of narration and vaunt the carnivalesque? And how ought radical theory to treat literature that is avowedly progressive but cast in a form that much theory has deemed to be conservative?

Politics and ethics in cultural criminology

Abstract: This essay offers both a critique of the theory and practice of criminology and an alternative programme via a sketch of a cultural criminology utilising cultural and literary analysis. The first part of the essay calls for the problematisation of the issues of value and representation in the criminological project and offers a competing account of the theoretical basis of the project of criminology based upon a cultural politics of difference and the ethics of radical alterity. The second part of the essay is a demonstration of how this theoretical basis might operate in practice through a “cultural criminological” reading of Maurice Blanchot's novelThe Most High (1948, 1996). This novel is an account of the relationship between language and transgression in a totalitarian society at “the end of history”. An alteration in the discursive practices of the criminological project premised upon a competing theoretical perspective suggests that criminology (specifically the relation between law and transgression, deviancy and regulation) can become an important element in explanations regarding the organisation and disorganisation of contemporary urban culture utilising the strengths of its prior application (specifically narratology) and abandoning its fear of culture.

The end of literature: Reflections on literature and ethics

Abstract: Metaphysical scepticism and historical consciousness have sharpened our awareness of the limitations of language and rational discourse. This emphasis in critical theory offers a challenge to the Christian literary critic. Reflection on the nature and importance of teleology provides a way of refocusing criticism on the centrality of ethics rather than on truth claims in the study of literature. Using Ricoeur as a counter to the scepticism of Derrida, Christian literary theory can find a way to situate itse lf in the postmodern world. By understanding teleology in the context of narrative theory, as opposed to the contexts of eschatology and utopia, Christian theory can find a way of recovering the place of religion and ethics in literary criticism.

A wrinkle in historical time

Abstract: gained from the different meanings uncovered in the general march of history along the path which runs from Bossuet (Jacques-Binigne) to Toynbee (Arnold), and which is punctuated by the edifices of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx. Everyone knows very well that they are worth as little for directing research into the recent past as they are for making any reasonable presumptions about the events of tomorrow. Besides, they are modest enough to postpone their certainties until the day after tomorrow, and not too prudish either to admit the retouching that permits predictions about what happened yesterday." (Lacan, Ecrits 51) THE NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY, since the ground-breaking work of Hayden White (Metahistory) and Roland Barthes ("The Discourse of History") has succeeded in confounding many of the traditional assumptions regarding not only the methods and means of historical inquiry, but its ends as well. Having, in its most radical form, blurred the boundaries between openly rhetorical and fictive discourses and the supposedly objective pursuit of truth that was History, narratological analysis has managed to problematize the "historical," as both a category and a discipline in most fields outside of traditional history departments (the obvious example being literature). Paradoxically, perhaps, in these same disciplines-in particular that of literature-there has begun to appear a renewed interest in self-consciously historical approaches to the subject-matter, to the extent that, insomuch as the "historical" has undergone a severe critique of its epistemological foundations, it has at the same time emerged as a valid, and indeed preferred, parameter of literary research. One explanation for this curious phenomenon is that those of us who work in the field of literary studies, content with narratology's coup, have become complacent in the certainty of our relativistic claims, and have felt justified in settling the historical territories newly annexed by theory without taking into account the practical difficulties brought on by that "conquest." What are we, as "cultural historians," to do with the "historical" now? What does it mean to historicize a text? How do we rationalize "historical readings" in an epistemological

Void and Voice: Questioning Narrative Conventions in André Gide's Major First-Person Narratives

Abstract: A close reading of Andre Gide's three major first-person narratives - L'Immoralist, La Porte etroite and La Symphonie pastorale - through the lens of semiotics and narratology. The author argues Gide's position as a pre-postmodernist who uses narrative strategies to connect story and self.