The study of narrative has traveled a great distance since Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale early in the century, gathering speed it would seem exponentially. When Tzvetan Todorov invented the term "narratology" in 1969, there was still a rough consensus that the field could be accommodated by a set of useful terms and distinctions. Those terms and distinctions are still useful, but with the increasing scrutiny to which they have been subjected, the sense of accommodating the field has been blown away. Almost all the established terms and distinctions are at issue. In short, this is a lively period for narrative theory. Even in the three years since I last gave this seminar, the field had seen much new work by a new generation of scholars (Meir Sternberg, Marie-Laure Ryan, Monica Fludernick, James Phelan, Lubomír Dolezel, Peter Rabinowitz, Emma Kafalenos, David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Uri Margolin, Brian Richardson, Dan Shen, David Richter, and others).
This seminar aims to be foundational, that is, to be useful to you, regardless
of your interests or theoretical disposition. After an introductory class
in which I will lay out some of the terms and distinctions that have survived
and proven their usefulness, we will spend the next two weeks probing issues
connected to the fabula/sjuzhet distinction, first formulated by Tomashevsky
and ever since at the center of narrative theory. The next two weeks will
focus on the reader/audience of narrative, with the second of these weeks
devoted to contributions from the sciences of cognition. Week 6 looks in the
other direction (though it isn't exactly the other direction) toward the author,
real or implied, dead or alive. I attach a great deal of importance to the
disputed concept of closure, both present and absent, needed and feared, so
we will spend week 7 on it. Week 8 is broadly concerned with questions relating
to the representation of the real in narrative, including history, autobiography,
and self-understanding. Finally, we will look at some of the work that has
been done on narrative in film. There has been much study of narrative in
other media as well, but outside the verbal modes of narrative, film seems
to be where most of the action is.
I put much stress on discussion in seminars and therefore on participation.
Students will also have several opportunities to introduce our discussions.
I will explain more about how this works when we meet on the 5th. I like to
have a short piece of writing (4-5 pages) before the middle of the quarter
as a get-acquainted exercise (you with me, I with you), but the major written
work will be the long essay. The last meeting of the course will be a colloquium
(with terminal pizza obbligato) in which each student reports on his or her
work in progress.
I have ordered three texts for this course: H. P. Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative; B. Richardson, Narrative Dynamics, and D. Herman, Narratologies. I blush to say it, but the first of these is a handy resource into the basics of the field. It also can give you some idea of my take on the field, though my ideas have shifted a bit in the year and a half since it was published. The other two are serviceable collections of essays, a number of which we will be reading. There is also a reader for the course, available from AS Publications.
Syllabus
January 5 Introduction: In this introductory class, I shall work with
you through a series of central terms and concepts in the study of narrative.
As we shall continually come back to these terms and to the issues that surround
them, this will be an important class.
Demonstration text: Beattie, Ann. "Snow" (Reader)
January 12 Events and their representation I: Our central focus in
this and the following week is the distinction between fabula & sjuzhet
or (as it was adapted in the American strain of narratology) story and narrative
discourse. Arguably, the founding distinction of the modern study of narrative,
the distinction expresses an insight as vexed as it is powerful. The object
in this first session is to give some sense of the foundational approaches
(formalist, structuralist, and phenomenological) that have meant so much to
the systematic study of narrative.
Demonstration text: Hemingway, Ernest. "Cat in the Rain" (Reader)
Essays for discussion:
Tomashevsky, Boris. "Story, Plot, & Motivation" (Richardson)
Barthes, Roland. "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives"
(Reader)
Genette, Girard. "Order, Duration, & Frequency" (Richardson)
Martin, Wallace. "Narrative Structure: a Comparison of Methods"
(Reader)
Ricoeur, Paul. "Narrative Time" (Richardson)
Lodge, David. "Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text"
(Reader)
Recommended:
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. "Story: Events" (Rimmon-Kenan 1983)
Propp, Vladimir. "Fairy-Tale Transformations" (Richardson)
Chatman, Seymour. "Story: Events" (Chatman, 1978)
January 19 (Martin Luther King Day, we'll have to find another day &
time to meet). Events and their representation II: In this session, we
will look at some later developments in which earlier understandings of the
fabula/sjuzhet distinction have been extended or contested.
Demonstration text: Zoline, Pamela, "The Heat-Death of the Universe"
(Reader)
Essays for discussion:
Culler, Jonathan. "Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative"
(Reader).
Brooks, Peter. "Narrative Desire" (Richardson)
Winnett, Susan. "Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, &
Principles of Pleasure" (Richardson)
Richardson, Brian. "Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern
& Nonmimetic Fiction" (Richardson)
Bordwell, David. "Principles of Narration" (Reader)
Recommended:
Bremond, Claude. "The Logic of Narrative Possibilities" (New Literary
History 11 [1980], 387-411)
Greimas, A.-J. "Reflections on Actantial Models" (Greimas)
Herman, David. "Toward a Socionarratology: New Ways of Analyzing Natural-Language
Narratives" (Herman)
January 26 The reader/audience: In this session, we shift our attention
from the formal attributes of narrative to what was always implicit and often
explicit in formalist study - what goes on in readers as they read.
Demonstration text: Pam Houston. "How to talk to a Hunter" (Reader)
Essays for discussion:
Calvino, Italo. from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Reader)
Ong, Walter J. "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction" (Reader)
Iser, Wolfgang. "The Reading Process: a Phenomenological Approach"
(Reader)
Warhol, Robyn. "Guilty Cravings: What Feminist Narratology Can Do for
Cultural Studies" (Herman)
Barthes, Roland. from S/Z (Reader)
Hutcheon, Linda. "Modes and Forms of Narrative Narcissism" (Reader)
Recommended:
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. "The Text & its Reading" (Reader)
Prince, Gerald. "Introduction to the Study of the Narratee" (Tomkins)
Sternberg, Meir, "What is Exposition? An Essay in Temporal Delimitation"
(Sternberg)
February 2 Cognitive approaches to narrative: This session logically
follows the last since cognitive approaches to narrative are, for the most
part, approaches to the ways in which readers and audiences process narrative.
For years, the humanistic (& structuralist) study of narrative and the
study of narrative in psychology and cognitive science have sailed along in
blissful (some would say willed) ignorance of each other. Recently, there
have been profitable efforts by a small but increasing number of scholars
on either side to close this gap.
Demonstration text: Welty, Eudora. "No Place for You, my Love" (Reader)
Essays for discussion:
Gerrig, Richard J. & Giovanna Egidi. "Cognitive Psychological
Foundations of Narrative Experiences" (Reader)
Turner, Mark. "Double-scope Stories" (Reader)
Margolin, Uri. "Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, & Literary
Narrative" (Reader)
Jahn, Manfred. "'Speak, friend, and enter': Garden Paths, Artificial
Intelligence, and Cognitive Narratology" (Herman).
Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Cyberage Narratology: Computers, Metaphor, &
Narrative" (Herman)
Kafalenos, Emma. "Not Yet Knowing . . ." (Herman)
Recommended:
Jahn, Manfred. "Frames, Preferences, & the Reading of Third-Person
Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology" (Poetics Today 18:4 [winter
1997): 441-68).
Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Stacks, Frames, & Boundaries" (Richardson)
Chafe, Wallace. "Some Things that Narratives Tell Us about the Mind"
(Britton)
Schank, Roger C. "Knowledge Is Stories" (Schank)
Storey, Robert. "What Is Art for?": Narrative & the Ludic Reader"
(Storey)
Herman, David. "Scripts, Sequences, & Stories: Elements of a Postclassical
narratology" (PMLA 112:4 [1997]: 1046-59).
February 9 The author: It turns out that little if anything was settled
when Barthes and Foucault announced the death or irrelevance of the author.
Issues connected with this subject remain as vital and usefully provocative
as ever.
Demonstration text: James, Henry. "The Desolation Bench" (Reader)
Essays for discussion:
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author" (Reader)
Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" (Reader)
Ginsburg, Ruth and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. "Is There a Life after Death?"
(Herman)
Booth, Wayne. "Our Many Different Businesses with Art" (Reader)
Chatman, Seymour. "In Defense of the Implied Author" (Reader)
Recommended:
Booth, Wayne. "Telling as Showing: Dramatised Narrators, Reliable &
Unreliable" (Booth)
Nünning, Ansgar. "Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Implied
Author" (Anglistic 8 [1997]: 95-116)
Simion, Eugen. "Barthes as Biographer" and "Barthes: The Return
of the Author to the Text" (Simion)
February 16 (Presidents Day, we'll have to find another day & time
to meet) Closure: In my own view, closure - both realized and suspended,
both sought and evaded, by both texts and readers - is important enough to
deserve a whole session.
Demonstration texts: Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Oval Portrait" (Reader),
Cortázar, Julio. "Blow-up" (Reader)
Essays for discussion:
Miller, D. A. "Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel" (Richardson)
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "Endings & Contradictions" (Richardson)
Rabinowitz, Peter. "Reading Beginnings & Endings" (Richardson)
Reising, Russell. "Loose Ends: Aesthetic Closure & Social Crisis"
(Richardson)
Recommended:
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending
Rabinowitz, Peter. "End Sinister: Neat Closure as Disruptive Force"(Phelan
1989)
February 23 Narrative & the representation of actual events: history,
autobiography, etiology: In this session we bear down on two related issues
- "truth" in narrative (and particularly the issue of narrative
distortion in the representations of "actual" events) and the role
of narrative in self-representation & self-understanding.
Demonstration text: McCarthy, Mary. "Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?"
(Reader)
Essays for discussion:
White, Hayden. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact" (Richardson)
Armstrong, Nancy & Leonard Tennenhouse. "History, Poststructuralism,
and the Question of Narrative" (Reader)
Dolezel, Lubomír. "Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting
the Postmodernist Challenge" (Herman)
Bruner, Jerome. "The Narrative Construction of Reality" (Reader)
Nelson, Katherine. "Finding One's Self in Time" (Reader)
Young, Katharine. "Narratives of Indeterminacy: Breaking the Medical
Body into its Discourses" (Herman)
Recommended:
White, Hayden. "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality"
(Mitchell)
Louis O. Mink, "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist" (Mitchell)
Marilyn Robinson Waldman, "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711"
(Mitchell)
White, Hayden. "The Narrativization of Real Events" (Mitchell)
March 1 Narrative in film: This week brings us back to the limits
of narrative (when is it narrative and when is it something else?). We will
key our discussion to Bordwell's controversial and highly challenging use
of the term "narration" in the analysis of film (already introduced
in the third week of the seminar).
Demonstration text: Hitchcock, Alfred. Rear Window
Essays for discussion:
Chatman, Seymour. "What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa)"
(Reader)
Deleyto, Celestino. "Focalization in Film Narrative" (Reader)
Bordwell, David. "The Viewer's Activity" (Reader)
Chatman, Seymour. "The Cinematic Narrator" (Reader)
Thompson, Kristin. "The Concept of Cinematic Excess" (Reader)
Recommended:
Eisenstein, Sergei. "Dickens, Griffith, and Ourselves" (Eisenstein,
Selected Works, vol III)
Branigan, Edward. "Narration" (Branigan).
March 8 Colloquium: As in other graduate seminars, we will finish with a mini conference in which you will be given an opportunity to present a short paper based on the work in progress you are doing on your long essay.
Selected Foundational Works on Narrative
Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP,
2002.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto:
U of Toronto
P, 1985.
Barthes, Roland. "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives"
in Image
-Music Text, reprinted in A Barthes Reader, Susan Sontag (ed.). New York:
Hill
& Wang, 1982, 251 295.
---------------. S/Z, Richard Miller (trans.). New York: Hill & Wang, 1974.
Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and
Film.
Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1990.
----------------. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca:
Cornell U P, 1978.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness
in
Fiction. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1978.
----------------. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.
Genette, Gèrard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method, trans. Jane
E. Lewin. Ithaca:
Cornell U P, 1972.
----------------. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Jane E. Lewin
(trans.). Cambridge:
Cambridge U P, 1997.
Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.
----------------. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin: Mouton, 1982.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London:
Methuen,
1983.
Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. New York: Oxford
U P,
1966.
More Reading of Interest
Andrew, Dudley. "Adaptation" in Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford:
Oxford U P, 1984,
98-104.
Aristotle, trans. Ingram Bywater. "De Poetica [Poetics]" in Richard
McKeon (ed.),
Introduction to Aristotle. New York: Random House, 1947, 624-667.
Bhabha, Homi K. (ed.). Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990.
Boardman, Michael M. Narrative Innovation and Incoherence. Durham: Duke U
P,
1992.
Booth, Alison. Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure.
Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1993.
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge, 1992.
Britton, Bruce K. & A. D. Pellegrini (eds.). Narrative Thought &
Narrative Language.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. New York: Random House, 1985.
Brooks, Peter and Paul Gewirtz (eds.). Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric
in the Law.
New Haven: Yale U P, 1996.
Bruner, Jerome. "Two Modes of Thought" in Actual Minds, Possible
Worlds, Cambridge:
Harvard U P, 1986, 11-43.
-----------------. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and
Giroux, c2002.
-----------------. "The Narrative Construction of 'Reality'" in
Massimo Ammaniti and
Daniel N. Stern (eds.), Psychoanalysis and Development: Representations and
Narratives. New York: New York U P, 1994, pp. 15-38.
Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of
Fiction.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
-----------------. Room for Maneuver: Reading Oppositional Narrative. U of
Chicago P,
1991.
Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.
Fehn, Ann, Ingeborg Hoesterey, and Maria Tatar (eds.). Neverending Stories:
Toward a
Critical Narratology. Princeton U P, 1992.
Fludernick, Monica. Towards a Natural Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. London: Harcourt, 1927.
Gibson, Andrew. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh U P, 1996.
Greimas, Algirdas-Julien. Structural Semantics:an Attempt at a Method, trans.
Daniele McDowell, et al. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.
Hayles, N. Katherine (ed.), Technocriticism and Hypernarrative, Special Issue,
Modern
Fiction Studies 43:3 (1997).
Herman, David (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis,
Columbus:
Ohio State U P, 1999.
------------------ (ed.). Narrative Theory & the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI, 2003.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from
Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1974.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act.
Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1981.
Kermode, Frank. The Art of Telling. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1983.
--------------. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative.
Cambridge:
Harvard U P, 1979.
--------------. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction.
Oxford: Oxford
U P, 1966.
Landow, George P. "Reconfiguring Narrative" in Hypertext 2.0: the
Convergence of
Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P,
1997; revised, 178-218.
Lanser, Susan Snaider. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative
Voice.
Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1992.
Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1986.
Mezei, Kathy (ed.). Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British
Women
Writers. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996.
Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema
and Other
Media. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1981.
Mihailescu, Calin-Andrei, and Walid Hamarneh (eds.). Fiction Updated: Theories
of
Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics. U of Toronto P, 1996.
Miller, J. Hillis. Reading Narrative Discourse. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.). On Narrative. U of Chicago P, 1981.
Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven:
Yale
U P, 1994.
O'Neill, Patrick. Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory. U of Toronto P, 1994.
Pascal, Roy. The Dual Voice : Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in
the
Nineteenth-Century European Novel. Manchester: Manchester U P, 1977.
Phelan, James. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and
the
Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.
---------- (ed.). Understanding Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State U P, 1994.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics
of
Interpretation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1987.
Rabkin, Eric S. Narrative Suspense. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1973.
Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative.
Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997.
Richter, David H. Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction.
Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1974.
---------. Narrative/Theory. New York: Longman, 1996.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, Volumes I, II, & III, Kathleen McLaughlin
and David
Pellauer(trans.). Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984, 1985, 1988.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation,
Subjectivity. Columbus: Ohio State U P, 1996.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative
Theory.
Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1991.
Schank, Roger C. Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence. Evanston: Northwestern
U P, 1990.
Simion, Eugen. The Return of the Author. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1996.
Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
Storey, Robert. Mimesis & the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations
of
Literary Representation. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1996)
Sturgess, Philip J. M. Narrativity: Theory and Practice. Oxford U P, 1992.
Tomkins, Jane P (ed.). Reader-Response Criticism: from Formalism to Post-
Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.
Torgovnick, Mariana. Closure in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1981.
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1973.
-----------. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1987).
Whittock, Trevor. Metaphor and Film. Cambridge U P, 1990.
Williams, Jeffrey. Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British
Tradition.
Cambridge U P, 1998.
Recommended Journals
Poetics Today
Narrative
Narrative Inquiry
Image & Narrative, an e-journal at http://millennium.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/narrative/