A Theory Of Narrative

The purpose of this book is to provide a clear and systematic account of the complexities of fictional narration which result from the shifting relationship in all storytelling between the story itself and the way it is told.

Relying on the structure and methodology of classical and postclassical narratology, this book explores the phenomena of story and narrative, narrator, focalization, character, time and space, as well as the beginning and the ending of a narrative. It upgrades the theory of the unreliable narrator and introduces three new categories that have until now been exclusively used to refer to unreliable narrators, namely commentators, interpreters and evaluators.

Narrative is a powerful element of human culture, storing and sharing the cherished parts of our personal memories and giving structure to our laws, entertainment, and history. We experience narrative in words, pictures, and film, yet regardless of how the tale is told, story remains independent from the media that makes it concrete. Narrative follows humans wherever they travel and adapts readily to new forms of communication. Constantly evolving and always up-to-date, narrative is a necessary strategy of human expression and a fundamental component of human identity. In order to understand human interaction, award-winning scholar Rick Altman launches a close study of narrative's nature, its variation in different contexts, and the method through which it makes meaning. Altman's approach breaks away from traditional forms of analysis, identifying three basic strategies: single-focus, dual-focus, and multiple-focus. Unpacking an intentionally diverse selection of texts, Altman demonstrates how these strategies function in context and illustrates their theoretical and practical applications in terms of textual analysis, literary and film history, social organization, religion, and politics. He employs inventive terminology and precise analytical methods throughout his groundbreaking work, making this volume ideal for teaching literary and film theory and for exploring the anatomy of narrative on a more general level.

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.

Narrative is a powerful element of human culture, storing and sharing the cherished parts of our personal memories and giving structure to our laws, entertainment, and history. This text presents a wide-ranging and wholly original approach to understanding the nature of narrative.

The essays in Narrative/Theory constitute a short course in the theory of fiction representing most of the current perspectives in the contemporary conversation about narrative, literary and otherwise. It could be used as a primary text in a course in the theory of fiction for which no currently adequate textbook exists; but we expect the book to find its widest use as an ancillary text for courses in the novel, the short story, and film, where it can be used to enrich and deepen students' understanding of the concepts involved in the analysis of narrative.

This book offers an original new conception of visual story telling, proposing that drawing, depictive drawing and narrative drawing are produced in an encompassing dialogic system of embodied social behavior. It refigures the existing descriptions of visual story-telling that pause with theorizations of perception and the articulation of form. The book identifies and examines key issues in the field, including: the relationships between vision, visualization and imagination; the theoretical remediation of linguistic and narratological concepts; the systematization of discourse; the production of the subject; idea and institution; and the significance of resources of the body in depiction, representation and narrative. It then tests this new conception in practice: two original visual demonstrations clarify the particular dialectic relationships between subjects and media, in an examination of drawing style and genre, social consensus and self-conscious constraint. The book’s originality derives from its clear articulation of a wide range of sources in proposing a conception of narrative drawing, and the extrapolation of this new conception in two new visual demonstrations.

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.