New Perspectives On Narrative Perspective

Offers an interdisciplinary approach to narrative perspective, with essays by leading scholars of literary studies, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and film and media criticism.

The contributors in this collection question what kinds of relationships hold between narrative studies and the recently established field of multimodality, evaluate how we might develop an analytical vocabulary which recognizes that stories do not consist of words alone, and demonstrate the ways in which multimodality brings into fresh focus the embodied nature of narrative production and processing. Engaging with a spectrum of multimodal storytelling, from ‘low tech’ examples encompassing face-to-face stories, comic books, printed literature, through to opera, film adaptation and television documentary, stretching beyond to narratives that employ new media such as hypertext, performance art, and interactive museum guides, this volume examines the interplay of semiotic codes (visual, oral, aural, haptic, physiological) within each case under scrutiny, thereby exposing both points of commonality and difference in the range of multimodal narrative experiences.

Stories do not actually exist in the (fictional or factual) world but are constituted, structured and endowed with meaning through the process of mediation, i.e. they are represented and transmitted through systems of verbal, visual or audio-visual signs. The terms usually proposed to describe aspects of mediation, especially perspective, point of view, and focalization, have yet to bring clarity to this field, which is of central importance, not only for narratology but also for literary and media studies. One crucial problem about mediation concerns the dimensions of its modeling effect, particularly the precise status and constellation of the mediating agents, i.e. author, narrator or presenter and characters. The question is how are the structure and the meaning of the story conditioned by these different positions in relation to the mediated happenings perceived from outside and/or inside the storyworld? In this volume, fourteen articles by international scholars from seven different countries address these problems anew from various angles, reviewing the sub-categorization of mediation and re-specifying its dimensions both in literary texts and other media such as drama and theater, film, and computer games.

Why is it that we tend to think about our lives as stories? Why do we strive to create coherent narratives that reflect a particular perspective? What happens when we discover multiple, perhaps conflicting perspectives in our narratives? Following groundbreaking work in the study of narrative identity in the last 20 years, the scholars of this volume have expanded and merged their theories of narrative identity with new perspectives in fields such as narratology, literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, gender studies and history. Their contributions focus on the significance of perspective in the formation of narrative identities, probing the stratagems and narrative means of individuals in testing out personae for themselves.

Narrative Research, once the domain of structuralist literary theory, has over the last 15 years developed into an international and interdisciplinary field. It is now commonly agreed that storytelling functions as a fundamental cognitive tool for sense-making and meaning production, and that human beings structure and communicate lived experience through oral, written and visual stories. Entitled Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, this volume collects fifteen essays which look at narrative and narrativity from various perspectives, including literary studies and hermeneutics, cognitive theory and creativity research, metaphor studies, film theory and intermediality, as well as memory studies, musicology, theology and psychology. The topics touch on a wide range of issues, such as the current state of narratology and its potential for development, narrativity in visual and auditive art forms, the cultural functions of narrative, and the role of narrative concepts across the disciplines. The volume introduces interested newcomers to the ongoing debate, reflecting the diversity of research questions and methodological approaches involved. It takes a critical, yet cautiously optimistic stance with regard to the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between narrative researchers, and invites experienced readers from any discipline interested in narrative to join this important debate, which promotes the exchange of ideas, concepts and methods between the humanities and the social sciences.

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in narratology and is now available in a second, completely revised and expanded edition.Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned narratologists elucidate central terms of narratology, present a critical account of the major research positions and their historical development and indicate directions for future research.

This book is a stylistic study of D. H. Lawrence's presentation of narrative viewpoint. The focus is mainly on Lawrence's third novel, Sons and Lovers, occupying a crucial position in his oeuvre and judged by critics to be his first mature piece. While sharing many features typical of nineteenth-century novels, it marks the emergence of a new technique of writing consciousness that functioned as a precursor to the modernist practice of dialogic shifts across viewpoints. Through a detailed linguistic analysis, Sotirova shows that different characters' viewpoints are not simply juxtaposed in the narrative, but linked in a way that creates dialogic resonances between them. The dialogic linking is achieved through the use of devices that have parallel functions in conversational discourse - referring expressions, sentence-initial correctives and repetition. The book uses stylistics to resolve current controversies in narratology and Lawrence criticism. In approaching the study of narrative viewpoint from the angle of discourse, Sotirova arrives at cutting-edge insights into Lawrence's work. This book will be required reading for stylisticians, narratologists, literary linguists and literary studies scholars.