Toward a definition of narrative

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages 22-36

  Ryan, Marie Laure ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 79953676440     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521856965.002     Document Type: Chapter

References (33)

1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Grand narratives, also known as metanarratives, are global explanatory schemes that legitimize institutions, such as the practice of science, by representing them as necessary to the historical self-realization of an abstract or collective entity, such as Reason, Freedom, or the State. Hegel's and Marx's philosophies of history are prototypical examples of Grand Narratives. So are the eschatological scenarios of religion.
2. Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chapter 3.
3. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Hammondsworth, England: Penguin, 1991).
4. William Safire, “On Language.” The New York Times Magazine 5 (December 2004), p. 36.
5. Gerald Prince, “Revisiting Narrativity.” In Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (eds.) Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext?Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context (T übingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999), p. 45.
6. Quoted in Safire, “On Language,” p. 36.
7. Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse. Translated by Marie-Rose Logan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 127.
8. A Dictionary of Narratology, 2nd edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 58.
9. H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 16.
10. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time.” In W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 165.
11. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. ix.
12. Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin: Mouton, 1982), p. 4.
13. Susana Onega, and José Angel, García Landa, “Introduction.” In Onega and Landa (eds.) Narratology: An Introduction (London: Longman, 1996), p. 3.
14. Mieke Bal, Narratology: An Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 182.
15. For instance, David Rudrum, “From Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition.” Narrative 13 (2005), pp. 195-204.
16. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1990).
17. Monika Fludernik, “Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Mode? Narrative Modalities and Generic Categorization.” Style 34:2 (2000), pp. 274-92.
18. Tuija Virtanen, “Issues of Text Typology: Narrative-A ‘Basic’ Type of Text.” Text 12:2 (1992), pp. 293-310.
19. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 11.
20. Bruner, Actual Minds, p.13. The next two quotations are also on p. 13 of this text.
21. Roger Schank and Robert P. Abelson, “Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story,” in Robert S. Wyer (ed.) Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), pp. 1-85.
22. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 4-5 (my emphasis).
23. Turner, The Literary Mind, p. 145.
24. Fotis Jannidis, “Narratology and the Narrative.” In Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (eds.) What is Narratology? (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), pp. 35-54. Degree of narrativity can be understood in two ways, one pertaining to story (or the “what” of a narrative) and the other to discourse (or the “way” such narrative content is presented). In the story sense, the one I am using here, it means the extent to which the mental representation conveyed by a text fulfills the definition of story. In the discourse sense (developed by Prince in Narratology), it means the importance of the story within the global economy of the text and the ease of retrieving it. The same text can present full narrativity in sense 1, but low narrativity in sense 2, when it tells a well-formed story but the progress of the action is slowed down by descriptions, general comments, and digressions. See also the concept of “diluted narrativity”
25. Marie-Laure Ryan, “The Modes of Narrativity and their Visual Metaphors.” Style 26:3 (1992), p. 375.
26. Ryan, “The Modes of Narrativity.” pp. 373-4.
27. Adapted from Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 362.
28. For instance David Herman in Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 87-9.
29. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990);
30. the formula “willing suspension of disbelief” was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the concept of fictional immersion is discussed in Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction (Paris: Seuil 1999)
31. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). The nature of fiction has inspired many more proposals, which cannot be reviewed here.
32. In The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 109-31
33. Dorrit Cohn has identified “signposts of fictionality,” i.e., features that occur only in fiction. Among these features are, on the discourse level, the description of the private thoughts of characters other than the narrator, which presuppose that the narrator has mind-reading abilities; and on the story level, fantastic themes, such as metamorphosis of humans into animals. (Cohn however restricts her analysis to discourse-related signposts.) But these signsposts are optional, and there have been notorious cases of fictional texts being mistaken for biography or autobiography: for instance, the novel Marbot by the German author Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1981) was originally reviewed as the biography of a historical individual, though the character of Marbot was invented by the novelist (Cohn, Distinction, p. 79). By contrast, one cannot imagine critics mistaking a text for a narrative.