Re: The Cambridge Introduction To Narrative
Pilato Hull
Russian literature arrived late on the European scene. Within several generations, its great novelists had shocked - and then conquered - the world. In this introduction to the rich and vibrant Russian tradition, Caryl Emerson weaves a narrative of recurring themes and fascinations across several centuries. Beginning with traditional Russian narratives (saints' lives, folk tales, epic and rogue narratives), the book moves through literary history chronologically and thematically, juxtaposing literary texts from each major period. Detailed attention is given to canonical writers including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, as well as to some current bestsellers from the post-Communist period. Fully accessible to students and readers with no knowledge of Russian, the volume includes a glossary and pronunciation guide of key Russian terms as well as a list of useful secondary works. The book will be of great interest to students of Russian as well as of comparative literature.
What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now revised and expanded in its third edition, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes one new chapter. The glossary and bibliography have been expanded, and new sections explore unnatural narrative, retrograde narrative, reader-resistant narratives, intermedial narrative, narrativity, and multiple interpretation. With its lucid exposition of concepts, and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing impresses through its historical and thematic scope and the wide range of texts it covers as well as its discussion of the issues that preoccupy the field in the twenty-first century. In a different format, there would have been more space for extended discussions of specific texts and potentially longer chapters on what Youngs sees as key developments in the field, such as postcolonial and gender and sexuality perspectives. However, as this book is part of the Cambridge Introduction series, it fulfills its brief by providing a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the field of travel writing, which combined with a few in-depth case studies gives readers a good overview of the history of travel writing and its challenges and opportunities in the twenty-first century.
We connect our lives to masterplots, the degree to which gives that masterplot rhetorical impact - The greater the cultural specificity, the greater its practical force in everyday life - Rags to riches - Skilled lawyers, politicians, advertisers, etc can create rhetorical leverage by telling narratives in a way that activate masterplots to the audience - Power comes from moral force
The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative is designed to help readers understand what narrative is, how it is constructed, how it acts upon us, how we act upon it, how it is transmitted, and how it changes when the medium or the cultural context change. Porter Abbott emphasises that narrative is found not just in the arts but everywhere in the ordinary course of peoples lives. Abbott grounds his treatment of narrative by introducing it as a human phenomenon that is not restricted to literature, film, and theatre, but is found in all activities involving the representation of events in time. At the same time, he honours the fact that out of this common capability have come rich and meaningful narratives that we come back to and reflect on repeatedly in our lives. An indispensable tool for students and teachers alike, this book will guide readers through the fundamental aspects of narrative.
Definitions must account for distinctions and interactions between narrative as a term referencing a literary (disciplinary) genre in a more discrete sense and as one signifying a significant aspect of knowledge production, the making of social relations and realities and making of our identities and our sense of self.
Definitions must take into account how narrative functions to link, pattern, sequence and relay the historical events, interactions, locations and visual and verbal images employed in our ways of knowing.
We do not have direct, real-time visual access to the entities and events inside living human bodies. Despite the increasingly precise apparent access facilitated by medical-imaging technology, we still rely, finally, on representational and discursive tools in order to visualize and think about living organs, or microbes, or pathophysiological processes that we cannot simply watch. Focusing on a range of representations of events beneath surfaces, from Jaws to X-rays to a short story about a white blood cell, this article examines the ways in which metaphor and narrative function, both in biomedical science and the popular imagination, as interdependent technologies for visualizing entities and events inside human bodies.
It should therefore not be surprising that, given the range of artifacts and media falling under its purview, the many disciplines it involves, and the multiplicity of projects relevant for if not directly associated with it, research at the intersection of narrative theory and the sciences of mind at present constitutes more a set of loosely confederated heuristic schemes than a global framework for inquiry. Nonetheless, a number of key concerns cut across the various approaches to the mind-narrative nexus; these concerns can be linked to the two broad lines of inquiry mentioned above, i.e. (1) research on narrative as a target of interpretation and (2) scholarship on stories as a resource for sense making. On the one hand, what mental states and processes support narrative understanding, allowing readers, viewers, or listeners to navigate storyworlds to the extent required for their purposes in engaging with a given narrative (Herman 2013a: chaps. 1, 3)? How do they use medium-specific cues to build on the basis of the discourse an interpretation of what happened when, or in what order; a broader temporal and spatial environment for those events, as well as an inventory of the characters involved; and a working model of what it was like for these characters to experience the more or less disruptive or non-canonical events that constitute a core feature of narrative representations (Herman 2009: chap. 5)? On the other hand, insofar as narrative constitutes a way of structuring and understanding situations and events, still other questions suggest themselves for researchers working in this area. To what domains are stories especially suited as instruments of mind (Herman 2013a: chaps. 2, 6)? Is it the case that, unlike other such instruments (stress equations, deductive arguments, graphs and scatterplots, etc.), narrative is tailor-made for gauging the felt quality of lived experiences (Fludernik 1996; Herman 2009: chap. 6; 2013a: chaps. 2, 7)?
Arguably, questions such as these could not have been formulated, let alone addressed, within classical frameworks for narrative study (but cf. Barthes [1966] 1977 and Culler 1975 for early anticipations). The mind-narrative nexus can thus be thought of as a problem space that opened up when earlier, structuralist models were brought into dialogue with disciplines falling under the umbrella field of the cognitive sciences.
Approaches to narrative and mind continue to emerge, evolve, and cross-pollinate, and it is difficult to predict which of these approaches will be the most generative going forward, let alone what impact they will ultimately have on the broader field of narratology. Spanning research on narrative viewed as a target of interpretation as well as scholarship on stories taken as an instrument of mind, relevant studies include:
Since important contributions and refinements continue to be made to the focal areas for research listed in section 3.2, all of these areas also constitute, in effect, topics for further investigation. In addition, several other, overarching issues warrant further consideration when it comes to study of the mind-narrative nexus.
The narrative turn, which happens in History at the seventies and in Social Sciences at the eighties, blurs the border between reality and fiction, and shows the structural, aesthetic and thematic similarity between fiction and facts. Narratology arises in this context with the aim of becoming a scientific discipline, which aspires to study both narrative and narration; the narrated as the act of narrating.
The Internet has multiplied the creation and circulation of storytelling to an unthinkable rate in the Gutenberg era, and it has made the consumption of the products from the cultural industries one of the bastions of the worldwide economy. The spread of the internet has promoted the expansion of narratives in all areas of knowledge. It also stimulates continuous feedback between reality and fiction. Digital storytelling has thus become the prevalent communicative modality not only in politics, but also in science and even in daily interactions between people through social networks.
This course covers the different stages of evolution of narrative theories and genres of discourse, The aim is to rethink the concepts and foundations of this field of study, as well as their application to the construction and interpretation of stories. The objective isto provide students with the conceptual tools necessary to understand and analyze both fictional and factual digital narratives and genres.
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