A Companion to Narrative Theory

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. The essays represent all the major critical approaches to narrative - narratological, rhetorical, feminist, post-structuralist, historicist - and investigate and debate the relations among them. In addition, they stretch the boundaries of the field by considering narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine, and in a variety of media, including film, music, and painting. The volume is divided into six parts: competing accounts of the history of the field; examinations of recurrent problems; suggestions for theoretical revisions and innovations; explorations of the relations among form, history, politics, and ethics; analyses of the way narrative operates in different disciplines and in media beyond the written word; and speculations about the future of narrative and of narrative theory. At the same time, it offers provocative analyses of a wide range of works, both canonical and popular, from the Bible through novels by Dickens, Woolf, and Arundhati Roy on to Bernard Herrmann's film music and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. Among its contributors are many of the leading figures in the field, including such early pioneers as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller, and Gerald Prince.

Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue:
Histories of Narrative Theory (I):A Genealogy of Early Developments
Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present
Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating the History of Narrative Theory
New Light On Stubborn Problems:
Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?
Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches
Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: TolstoyÆs Kreutzer Sonata
Henry James and ôFocalization,ö or Why James Loves Gyp
What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other
The Pragmatics of Narrative Fiction
Revisions And Innovations:
Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses
They Shoot Tigers, DonÆt They?: Path and Counterpoint in The Long Goodbye
Spatial Poetics and Arundhati RoyÆs The God of Small Things
The ôIö of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology
Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film
Self-Consciousness as a Narrative Feature and Force: Tellers vs. Informants in Generic Design
Effects of Sequence, Embedding, and Ekphrasis in PoeÆs ôThe Oval Portraitö
Mrs. DallowayÆs Progeny: The Hours as Second-Degree Narrative
Narrative Form And Its Relationship To History, Politics, And Ethics:
Genre, Repetition, Temporal Order:Some Aspects of Biblical Narratology
Why WonÆt Our Terms Stay Put?: The Narrative Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historicized
Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House
Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwanÆs Atonement
The Changing Faces of Mount Rushmore: Collective Portraiture and Participatory National Heritage
The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists
On a Postcolonial Narratology
Modernist Soundscapes and the Intelligent Ear: An Approach to Narrative Through Auditory Perception
In Two Voices, or: Whose Life/Death/Story Is It, Anyway?
Beyond Literary Narrative:
Narrative in and of the Law
Second Nature, Cinematic Narrative, the Historical Subject, and Russian Ark
Narrativizing the End: Death and Opera
Music and/as Cine-Narrative or: Ceci nÆest pas un leitmotif
Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative
öIÆm Spartacus!ö
Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth Through a Glass, Darkly
Epilogue
Narrative and Digitality: Learning to Think With the Medium
The Future of All Narrative Futures
Glossary
Index
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