Recent Theories of Narrative PDF Download

Author: Wallace Martin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801493553
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252

View

Book Description

Author: Ivor Goodson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415603617
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 162

View

Book Description
This title looks at the contemporary need to study life narratives, considers the emergence and salience of life narratives in contemporary culture, and discusses different forms of narrativity.

Author: Brian Richardson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803219385
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 297

View

Book Description
George Eliot wrote that "man cannot do without the make-believe of a beginning." Beginnings, it turns out, can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres. The international and interdisciplinary scope of these essays, representing every major theoretical perspective--including feminist, cognitive, postcolonial, postmodern, rhetorical, ethnic, narratological, and hypert.

Author: Sylvie Patron
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496224507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

View

Book Description
Twentieth-century narratology fostered the assumption, which distinguishes narratology from previous narrative theories, that all narratives have a narrator. Since the first formulations of this assumption, however, voices have come forward to denounce oversimplifications and dangerous confusions of issues. Optional-Narrator Theory is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on the narrator from the perspective of optional-narrator theories. Sylvie Patron is a prominent advocate of optional-narrator theories, and her collection boasts essays by many prominent scholars--including Jonathan Culler and John Brenkman--and covers a breadth of genres, from biblical narrative to poetry to comics. This volume bolsters the dialogue among optional-narrator and pan-narrator theorists across multiple fields of research. These essays make a strong intervention in narratology, pushing back against the widespread belief among narrative theorists in general and theorists of the novel in particular that the presence of a fictional narrator is a defining feature of fictional narratives. This topic is an important one for narrative theory and thus also for literary practice. Optional-Narrator Theory advances a range of arguments for dispensing with the narrator, except when it can be said that the author actually "created" a fictional narrator.

Author: Mari Hatavara
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317524616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

View

Book Description
Offering an interdisciplinary approach to narrative, this book investigates storyworlds and minds in narratives across media, from literature to digital games and reality TV, from online sadomasochism to oral history databases, and from horror to hallucinations. It addresses two core questions of contemporary narrative theory, inspired by recent cognitive-scientific developments: what kind of a construction is a storyworld, and what kind of mental functioning can be embedded in it? Minds and worlds become essential facets of making sense and interpreting narratives as the book asks how story-internal minds relate to the mind external to the storyworld, that is, the mind processing the story. With essays from social scientists, literary scholars, linguists, and scholars from interactive media studies answering these topical questions, the collection brings diverse disciplines into dialogue, providing new openings for genuinely transdisciplinary narrative theory. The wide-ranging selection of materials analyzed in the book promotes knowledge on the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making through narrative, necessary for navigating the contemporary, mediatized cultural landscape. The combination of theoretical reflection and empirical analysis makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students in fields including literary studies, social sciences, art, media, and communication.

Author: Daniel D. Hutto
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262263173
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 371

View

Book Description
An argument that challenges the dominant "theory theory" and simulation theory approaches to folk psychology by claiming that our everyday understanding of intentional actions done for reasons is acquired by exposure to and engaging in specific kinds of narratives. Established wisdom in cognitive science holds that the everyday folk psychological abilities of humans—our capacity to understand intentional actions performed for reasons—are inherited from our evolutionary forebears. In Folk Psychological Narratives, Daniel Hutto challenges this view (held in somewhat different forms by the two dominant approaches, "theory theory" and simulation theory) and argues for the sociocultural basis of this familiar ability. He makes a detailed case for the idea that the way we make sense of intentional actions essentially involves the construction of narratives about particular persons. Moreover he argues that children acquire this practical skill only by being exposed to and engaging in a distinctive kind of narrative practice. Hutto calls this developmental proposal the narrative practice hypothesis (NPH). Its core claim is that direct encounters with stories about persons who act for reasons (that is, folk psychological narratives) supply children with both the basic structure of folk psychology and the norm-governed possibilities for wielding it in practice. In making a strong case for the as yet underexamined idea that our understanding of reasons may be socioculturally grounded, Hutto not only advances and explicates the claims of the NPH, but he also challenges certain widely held assumptions. In this way, Folk Psychological Narratives both clears conceptual space around the dominant approaches for an alternative and offers a groundbreaking proposal.

Author: Mark Currie
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137268123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

View

Book Description
How have developments in literary and cultural theory transformed our understanding of narrative? What has happened to narrative in the wake of poststructuralism? What is the role and function of narrative in the contemporary world? In this revised, updated and expanded new edition of an established text, Mark Currie explores these central questions and guides students through the complex theories that have shaped the study of narrative in recent decades. Postmodern Narrative Theory, Second Edition: • establishes direct links between the workings of fictional narratives and those of the non-fictional world • charts the transition in narrative theory from its formalist beginnings, through deconstruction, towards its current concerns with the social, cultural and cognitive uses of narrative • explores the relationship between postmodern narrative and postmodern theory more closely • presents detailed illustrative readings of known literary texts such as Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and now features a new chapter on Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man. Approachable and stimulating, this is an essential introduction for anyone studying postmodernism, the theory of narrative or contemporary fiction.

Author: Alex Callinicos
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822316459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

View

Book Description
Pursuing this objective, Alex Callinicos critically confronts a number of leading attempts to reconceptualize the meaning of history, including Francis Fukuyama's rehabilitation of Hegel's philosophy of history and the postmodernist efforts of Hayden White and others to deny the existence of a past independent of our representations of it. In these cases philosophical arguments are pursued in tandem with discussions of historical interpretations of, respectively, Stalinism and the Holocaust.

Author: Tory Young
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000346153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189

View

Book Description
This book argues for the importance of narrative theories which consider gender and sexuality through the analysis of a diverse range of texts and media. Classical Narratology, an allegedly neutral descriptive system for features of narrative, has been replaced by a diverse set of theories which are attentive to the contexts in which narratives are composed and received. Issues of gender and sexuality have, nevertheless, been sidelined by new strands which consider, for example, cognitive, transmedial, national or historical inflections instead. Through consideration of texts including the MTV series Faking It and the papers of a nineteenth-century activist, Queer and Feminist Theories of Narrative heeds the original call of feminist narratologists for the consideration of a broader and larger corpus of material. Through analysis of issues including the popular representation of lesbian desire, the queer narrative voice, invisibility and power in the digital age, embodiment and cognitive narratology, reading and racial codes, this book argues that a named strand of narrative theory which employs feminist and queer theories as intersectional vectors is contemporary and urgent. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice.

Author: Lee Roy Beach
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527581632
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 210

View

Book Description
The renowned naturalist, Loren Eisely, observed that we humans have given up the “certainty of the animal that what it senses is exactly there in the shape the eye beholds.” The big question is, what did we get in return? This book provides a convincing answer to this question, arguing that, instead of recording reality, your brain uses your experience to create a story, a narrative, about how what happened to you in the past led to what is happening to you now. This narrative is your private reality. The book continues by showing how replacing recorded reality with private narrative enabled humans to anticipate the fundamentally unknowable immediate and remote future and expose potential threats. It then shows how private narrative enabled complex thought and communication with others. Drawing upon a wide range of research, the book provides a stimulating new way of viewing human experience, thinking, communicating, and action.