Topic
Narratology
About: Narratology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2833 publications have been published within this topic receiving 50998 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theory.
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TL;DR: This article explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Matheson's (1954) science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend, and argue that readers' understanding of these other minds plays an important role in their empathetic experience and their ethical judgement of the novel's main character.
Abstract: For Palmer (2004, 2010), and other proponents of a cognitive narratology, research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences provides insights into readers’ experiences of fictional minds. In this article, I explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Matheson’s (1954) science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. I draw upon empirical research into ‘mind attribution’ in social psychology, and apply Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), and its notion of ‘construal’, as a framework for the application of such findings to narrative. In my analysis, I suggest that readers’ attribution of mental-states to the vampires in Matheson’s novel is strategically limited through a number of choices in their linguistic construal. Drawing on online reader responses to the novel, I argue that readers’ understanding of these other minds plays an important role in their empathetic experience and their ethical judgement of the novel’s main character and focaliser, Robert Neville. Finally, I suggest that the limited mind attribution for the vampires invited through their construal contributes to the presentation of a ‘mind style’ (Fowler, 1977) for this character.
32 citations
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TL;DR: The authors make a distinction between the epistemic and linguistic perspectives of fiction and fictional worlds theories, and make some progress toward a fuller characterization of the rhetorical nature of fictionality by identifying what is excluded by the perspectives of a generalized narrativity and fictional world theory.
Abstract: The concept of fictionality has been undermined by developments in two distinct areas of research in recent years: on the one hand, the interdisciplinary ambitions of narrative theory have tended to conflate fictionality with a general notion of narrativity that encompasses nonfictional narrative; on the other hand, fictional worlds theory, in response to philosophical and linguistic concerns, has sought to disarm fictionality by literalizing fictional reference. Dorrit Cohn, in The Distinction of Fiction, has made a case against the former tendency in the interest of her own reassertion of a generic focus upon fiction as "nonreferential narrative," although this involves no confrontation with fictional worlds theory, which does not contest the generic integrity of fiction (12). My concern here is somewhat different, in two respects: I want to allow a little more force to those narratological perspectives that tend to merge the concept of fictionality with that of narrativity; and I want to distinguish more sharply between my own understanding of fictionality and the way it is framed by the philosophical and linguistic perspectives of fictional worlds theories. These differences arise because in my view the concept at stake is not fiction as a generic category, but fictionality as a rhetorical resource. By identifying what is excluded by the perspectives of a generalized narrativity and fictional worlds theory, I hope to make some progress toward a fuller characterization of the rhetorical nature of fictionality. This undertaking will lead me to a reconsideration of the concept of mimesis in relation to narrative fictions, from which vantage point I want to draw an analogy between "fiction" and "exercise" that I think captures something of the distinctiveness of the fictional use of narrative.
32 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors apply a method of narrative analysis to investigate the discursive contestation over the Iran nuclear deal in the United States and explore the struggle in the US Congress between narratives constituting the deal as a US foreign policy success or failure.
Abstract: This article applies a method of narrative analysis to investigate the discursive contestation over the ‘Iran nuclear deal’ in the United States. Specifically, it explores the struggle in the US Congress between narratives constituting the deal as a US foreign policy success or failure. The article argues that foreign policy successes and failures are socially constructed through narratives and suggests how narrative analysis as a discourse analytical method can be employed to trace discursive contests about such constructions. Based on insights from literary studies and narratology, it shows that stories of failures and successes follow similar structures and include a number of key elements, including a particular setting; a negative/positive characterization of individual and collective decision-makers; and an emplotment of success or failure through the attribution of credit/blame and responsibility. The article foregrounds the importance of how stories are told as an explanation for the dominance or marginality of narratives in political discourse.
31 citations
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01 Aug 1997
TL;DR: In this paper, a self-contained study of the Euripidean messenger-speech is presented, where the authors make use of analytical tools deriving from narratology and drama-theory.
Abstract: This book, consisting of three self-contained studies, deals with the Euripidean messenger-speech. The first study concerns the form of the messenger-speech, which is that of a first-person narrative, and the consequences of this form. The second study analyses the messenger's style of presentation. In the third study the place and function of the messenger-speech within the play is discussed. Although scholars have dealt with the messenger-speech before, there is no single, up-to-date work of reference available. The present study aims at filling this void, while making use of analytical tools deriving from narratology and drama-theory. Eight appendices are added, which provide the reader with complete lists of phenomena discussed in the main text. Often considered transparent and self-explanatory, the messenger-speeches are now shown to be both complex and subtle texts.
31 citations
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01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: In this paper, the first stages of the Anglo-French conflict later known as the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) are discussed, and it is argued that the Gascon passages have wider implications for the Chroniques, Froissart's work as a whole and the writing of history in the fourteenth century.
Abstract: Jean Froissart’s Chroniques , composed of four Books, relate the first stages of the Anglo-French conflict later known as the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). This thesis explores Froissart’s textual journey(s) to Gascon lands (south-west of modern-day France) and history/stories. Relying on Gerard Genette’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theories, it uses literary and narratological tools to analyse three passages from Book I and III concerned with Gascony: the Earl of Derby’s Gascon campaigns (Chapter 1); the Black Prince’s Gascon campaigns and the principality of Aquitaine (Chapter 2); Froissart’s personal journey to and stay at the court of Gaston Febus, count of Foix-Bearn (Chapter 3). One aim of the study is to investigate the representation of the region but it also argues that the Gascon passages have wider implications for the Chroniques , Froissart’s work as a whole, and the writing of history in the fourteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, Froissart’s ‘history’ was often disparagingly discussed by scholars due to factual inaccuracy and literary embellishments: such a ‘historical narrative’, it was felt, fell short of history and was nothing more than an entertaining story presenting outdated chivalric ideals. Although this approach has been partly revised, some critics still view the Chroniques’ earlier Books as being a narratively straightforward reflection of such a chivalric ideology, lacking critical hindsight on fourteenth-century events and society, and thus presenting paradoxical and irreconcilable tensions with later Books to the extent that they are occasionally deemed to be an entirely different kind of work than their later counterparts. The narrative thread of Froissart’s Gascon (hi)story explored here allows the revision of such views and shows that Froissart’s narrative is far from narratively and ideologically straightforward. This complexity is present as early as the first versions of the Book I, which should be envisaged in parallel, not in opposition, with the ‘later’ Chroniques . Similarly, the various tensions (e.g. fiction/history; ideal/real) underpinning the whole work, manifested in the portrayal of Gascony/the Gascons, are best approached in terms of co-existence, not antagonism. Such a multi-faceted work (a mirror and/or product of the fourteenth century?), a mi-chemin between history and fiction, between conflicting yet co-existing perspectives, is precisely what makes Froissart’s Chroniques valuable to literary critics, philologists, and historians alike.
31 citations