A Companion To Narrative Theory

by Phelan, James; Rabinowitz, Peter J.

• ISBN13: 9781405114769
• ISBN10: 1405114762
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-08-19
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

The 35 original essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory constitute the best available introduction to this vital and contested field of humanistic enquiry. Comprises 35 original essays written by leading figures in the field Includes contributions from pioneers in the field such as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller and Gerald Prince Represents all the major critical approaches to narrative and investigates and debates the relations between them Considers narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine Features analyses of a variety of media, including film, music, and painting Designed to be of interest to specialists, yet accessible to readers with little prior knowledge of the field

Author Biography

James Phelan is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the editor of the journal Narrative and the author of several books in narrative theory, the most recent of which are Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005) and Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007).

Peter J. Rabinowitz is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College. His previous publications include Before Reading (1987) and Authorizing Readers (coauthored with Michael Smith, 1998). He is also a music critic and serves as a contributing editor of Fanfare.

Phelan and Rabinowitz are coeditors of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, which now has more than twenty-five titles to its credit.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	x
Acknowledgments	xvii
Introduction: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Narrative Theory	1	(18)
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz
Prologue
1 Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments	19	(17)
David Herman
2 Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present	36	(24)
Monika Fludernik
3 Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating the History of Narrative Theory	60	(105)
Brian McHale
PART I New Light on Stubborn Problems	73	(92)
4 Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?	75	(14)
Wayne C. Booth
5 Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches	89	(19)
Ansgar F. Nünning
6 Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata	108	(16)
Tamar Yacobi
7 Henry James and "Focalization," or Why James Loves Gyp	124	(12)
J. Hillis Miller
8 What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other	136	(14)
Dan Shen
9 The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality	150	(15)
Richard Walsh
PART II Revisions and Innovations	165	(118)
10 Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses	167	(14)
Brian Richardson
11 They Shoot Tigers, Don't They?: Path and Counterpoint in The Long Goodbye	181	(11)
Peter J. Rabinowitz
12 Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things	192	(14)
Susan Stanford Friedman
13 The "I" of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology	206	(14)
Susan S. Lanser
14 Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film	220	(12)
Robyn R. Warhol
15 Self-consciousness as a Narrative Feature and Force: Tellers vs. Informants in Generic Design	232	(21)
Meir Sternberg
16 Effects of Sequence, Embedding, and Ekphrasis in Poe's "The Oval Portrait"	253	(16)
Emma Kafalenos
17 Mrs. Dalloway's Progeny: The Hours as Second-degree Narrative	269	(14)
Seymour Chatman
PART III Narrative Form and its Relationship to History, Politics, and Ethics	283	(130)
18 Genre, Repetition, Temporal Order: Some Aspects of Biblical Narratology	285	(14)
David H. Richter
19 Why Won't Our Terms Stay Put? The Narrative Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historicized	299	(13)
Harry E. Shaw
20 Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House	312	(10)
Alison Case
21 Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan's Atonement	322	(15)
James Phelan
22 The Changing Faces of Mount Rushmore: Collective Portraiture and Participatory National Heritage	337	(19)
Alison Booth
23 The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists	356	(16)
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
24 On a Postcolonial Narratology	372	(10)
Gerald Prince
25 Modernist Soundscapes and the Intelligent Ear: An Approach to Narrative Through Auditory Perception	382	(17)
Melba Cuddy-Keane
26 In Two Voices, or: Whose Life/Death/Story Is It, Anyway?	399	(14)
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
PART IV Beyond Literary Narrative	413	(102)
27 Narrative in and of the Law	415	(12)
Peter Brooks
28 Second Nature, Cinematic Narrative, the Historical Subject, and Russian Ark	427	(14)
Alan Nadel
29 Narrativizing the End: Death and Opera	441	(10)
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
30 Music and/as Cine-Narrative or: Ceci n'est pas un leitmotif	451	(15)
Royal S. Brown
31 Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative	466	(18)
Fred Everett Maus
32 "I'm Spartacus!"	484	(15)
Catherine Gunther Kodat
33 Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth Through a Glass, Darkly	499	(16)
Peggy Phelan
Epilogue
34 Narrative and Digitality: Learning to Think With the Medium	515	(14)
Marie-Laure Ryan
35 The Future of All Narrative Futures	529	(13)
H. Porter Abbott
Glossary	542	(10)
Index	552