A Companion to Narrative Theory (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

594 Pages·2005·2.42 MB·English

by  James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz

N
ARRATIVE
T
HEORY
EDITED BY JAMES PHELAN AND PETER J. RABINOWITZ

A Companion to Narrative Theory
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
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N
ARRATIVE
T
HEORY
EDITED BY JAMES PHELAN AND PETER J. RABINOWITZ
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Contents
Notes on Contributors x
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Narrative Theory 1
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz
Prologue
1 Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments 19
David Herman
2 Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present 36
Monika Fludernik
3 Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating
the History of Narrative Theory 60
Brian McHale
PART I New Light on Stubborn Problems 73
4 Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother? 75
Wayne C. Booth
5 Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing
Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches 89
Ansgar F. Nu¨nning
Contents vii
6 Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability,
Divergent Readings: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata 108
Tamar Yacobi
7 Henry James and ‘‘Focalization,’’ or Why James Loves Gyp 124
J. Hillis Miller
8 What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other 136
Dan Shen
9 The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality 150
Richard Walsh
PART II Revisions and Innovations 165
10 Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative
Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses 167
Brian Richardson
11 They Shoot Tigers, Don’t They?: Path and Counterpoint
in The Long Goodbye 181
Peter J. Rabinowitz
12 Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things 192
Susan Stanford Friedman
13 The ‘‘I’’ of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the
Limits of Structuralist Narratology 206
Susan S. Lanser
14 Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in
Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film 220
Robyn R. Warhol
15 Self-consciousness as a Narrative Feature and Force:
Tellers vs. Informants in Generic Design 232
Meir Sternberg
16 Effects of Sequence, Embedding, and Ekphrasis in Poe’s
‘‘The Oval Portrait’’ 253
Emma Kafalenos
viii Contents
17 Mrs. Dalloway’s Progeny: The Hours as Second-degree Narrative 269
Seymour Chatman
PART III Narrative Form and its Relationship to History, Politics, and Ethics 283
18 Genre, Repetition, Temporal Order: Some
Aspects of Biblical Narratology 285
David H. Richter
19 Why Won’t Our Terms Stay Put? The Narrative
Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historicized 299
Harry E. Shaw
20 Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective
Distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House 312
Alison Case
21 Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative:
Ian McEwan’s Atonement 322
James Phelan
22 The Changing Faces of Mount Rushmore: Collective Portraiture and
Participatory National Heritage 337
Alison Booth
23 The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes
for Narrative Theorists 356
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
24 On a Postcolonial Narratology 372
Gerald Prince
25 Modernist Soundscapes and the Intelligent Ear:
An Approach to Narrative Through Auditory Perception 382
Melba Cuddy-Keane
26 In Two Voices, or: Whose Life/Death/Story Is It, Anyway? 399
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
PART IV Beyond Literary Narrative 413
27 Narrative in and of the Law 415
Peter Brooks