Story Logic

Featuring a major synthesis and critique of interdisciplinary narrative theory, Story Logic marks a watershed moment in the study of narrative. David Herman argues that narrativeøis simultaneously a cognitive style, a discourse genre, and a resource for writing. Because stories are strategies that help humans make sense of their world, narratives not only have a logic but also are a logic in their own right, providing an irreplaceable resource for structuring and comprehending experience. Story Logic brings together and pointedly examines key concepts of narrative in literary criticism, linguistics, and cognitive science, supplementing them with a battery of additional concepts that enable many different kinds of narratives to be analyzed and understood. By thoroughly tracing and synthesizing the development of different strands of narrative theory and provocatively critiquing what narratives are and how they work, Story Logic provides a powerful interpretive tool kit that broadens the applicability of narrative theory to more complex forms of stories, however and wherever they appear. Story Logic offers a fresh and incisive way to appreciate more fully the power and significance of narratives.

This book may be viewed not only as n post-Proppian, post-Greimassian reconstruction and theoretical advance but also as a neo-Proppian, neo-Greimassian remodelling of story logic leading to an integrated descriptive model which focuses, by design, on narrative semiotics as a branch of descriptive poetics. The investigation and the revision of the actantial model and the narrative schema are made concrete through multiple small narratives from literary fiction, specifically Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, a parable of Pascal, and a historical chronicle. The modifications which Therese Budniakiewicz proposes are turned, as it were, backward towards a theoretical foundation that is both re-found and re-founded, and what emerges is a methodology of textual analysis the scope of which extends to include hermeneutics and interpretation. At the same time, through the analysis the author makes of the 'contractual and communication events' and the central position she gives to the Sender and Receiver, the book is led to place emphasis on the social and interactional nature of discourse and, thereby, integrating the basics of narrative within the framework of law and society and justice. By putting the theory in perspective while carefully analyzing its premises and by consolidating a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary concepts crucial to narrative, Fundamentals of Story Logic will be welcomed by all students of fiction, narratology, and the classical Greimas.

This book illuminates how technique serves 'story logic,' the particular way fiction makes meaning. Writers raid the cupboard of theory looking for what works, and generic rules don't account for the rich variety of strategies they employ. For writers who are past the beginner stage, Brady offers a closer look at craft fundamentals, including plot, characterization, patterns of imagery, and style. The lively, lucid discussion draws on vivid examples from classic and contemporary fiction, ranging from George Eliot and William Faulkner to Haruki Murakami and Toni Morrison. Because it supplies the analytical tools needed to read as a writer, this text will enrich the reader's approach to any work of fiction, energizing discussion in a workshop or craft course.

Drawing largely on Propp's and Greimas' work on the narrative, this book is aimed at consolidating and extending their views through a series of concrete applications. The volume offers a critical examination of narrative structure in terms of its two basic syntactic units or sets of operations, namely the “eventual or dynamic configurations corresponding to communication or to contract or, more general, to the structure of exchange.” Because of the emphasis it lays on the logical frame underlying the syntagmatic dimension of the story, the book contributes to an integrated descriptive model deliberately centered on “narrative semiotics as a branch of descriptive poetics.” The discussion of value in its social and legal context brings to light the links between the theory of narrative and its anthropological sources. This book shows that a strict concern with story logic requires a reevaluation of the basic premises of semiotic theory and raises important epistemological questions about its evolution.

"A raw and unfiltered journey into the life and mind of Bobby Hall, who emerged from the wreckage of a horrifically abusive childhood to become an era-defining artist ... A self-described orphan with parents, Bobby Hall began life as Sir Robert Bryson Hall II, the only child of an alcoholic, mentally ill mother on welfare and an absent, crack-addicted father. After enduring seventeen years of abuse and neglect, Bobby ran away from home and--with nothing more than a discarded laptop and a ninth-grade education--he found his voice in the world of hip-hop and a new home in a place he never expected: the untamed and uncharted wilderness of the social media age"--

Over the past decade, the question of whether there is a mental logic has become subject to considerable debate. There have been attacks by critics who believe that all reasoning uses mental models and return attacks on mental-models theory. This controversy has invaded various journals and has created issues between mental logic and the biases-and-heuristics approach to reasoning, and the content-dependent theorists. However, despite its pertinence to current issues in cognition, few cognitive scientists really know what the mental-logic theory is, and misapprehensions are prevalent. This volume is a comprehensive presentation of the theory of mental logic and its implications for cognition and development, including the acquisition of language. The theory offered here has three parts. Part I is the mental logic per se that contains a set of inference schemas. Part II is a reasoning program that applies the schemas in lines of reasoning, including a direct-reasoning routine and more sophisticated indirect-reasoning strategies. Part III of the theory is pragmatic, proposing that the basic meaning of each logic particle is in the inferences that are sanctioned by its inference schemas.

Three complete novels, one of them a Hugo Award finalist, with a number of short stories.

An unprecedented reading of Hegel’s Logic that sets this difficult work in a dialogue with literary texts. In this book, Angelica Nuzzo proposes a reading of Hegel’s Logic as “logic of transformation” and “logic of action,” and supports this thesis by looking to works of literature and history as exemplary of Hegel’s argument and method. By examining Melville’s Billy Budd, Molière’s Tartuffe, Beckett’s Endgame, Elizabeth Bishop’s and Giacomo Leopardi’s late poetry along with Thucydides’ History in this way, Nuzzo finds an unprecedented and productive way to render Hegel’s Logic alive and engaging. She argues that Melville’s Billy Budd is the most successful embodiment of the abstract movement of thinking presented in Hegel’s Logic, connecting Billy Budd’s stutter to the puzzlingly inarticulate beginning of Hegel’s Logic, “Being, pure Being,” identical with “Nothing,” and argues that the Logic serves as an especially appropriate tool for understanding the sudden violent action that strikes Claggart dead. Through these and other readings, Nuzzo finds a fresh way to address interpretive issues that have remained unresolved for almost two centuries in Hegel scholarship, and also presents well-known works of literature in an entirely new light. This account of Hegel’s Logic is framed by the need for an interpretive tool able to orient our understanding of the contemporary world as mired in an unprecedented global crisis. How can the story of our historical present—the tragedy or the comedy we all play parts in—be told? What is the inner logic of our changing world? Angelica Nuzzo is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the author of Memory, History, Justice in Hegel and the editor of Hegel on Religion and Politics, also published by SUNY Press.