Introduction

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages 3-21

  Herman, David ^a  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84900775171     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521856965.001     Document Type: Chapter

References (58)

1. David Rudrum concerning attempts to define narrative. The exchange can be found in two issues of the journal Narrative, namely, 13:2 and 14:2. Further, Ryan has posted on her website a follow-up to the published exchange: http://lamar.colostate.edu/∼pwryan?rudrumresponse.htm. Ryan's and Rudrum's respective positions bear relevantly on the working definition of narrative that I propose in this introduction, where I characterize narrative both as resource for representation and as a mode of communicative practice.
2. See my discussion of sample texts 1, 2, and 3 below; also, for a fuller account of narrative viewed as a discourse practice David Herman, “Narrative Theory after the Second Cognitive Revolution.” In Lisa Zunshine (ed.) Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming). Here the term people is shorthand for “embodied human or human-like individuals invested with felt, conscious awareness of the situations and events recounted in the narrative.”
3. Matti Hyvärinen, “Towards a Conceptual History of Narrative” (http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume 1/001 04 hyvarinen.pdf). In Matti Hyvärinen, Anu Korhonen, and Juri Mykkänen (eds.) The Travelling Concept of Narrative (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2006: http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume 1?index.htm), p. 20.
4. Martin Kreiswirth, “Narrative Turn in the Humanities.” In David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 377-82.
5. William Labov and Joshua Waletzky, “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience.” In June Helm (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), pp. 12-34
6. Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du “Décaméron” (The Hague: Mouton, 1969).
7. For more on the widespread influence of the “Labovian” approach to narrative inquiry, see chapter 9 of this volume and Michael Bamberg (ed.) special issue on “Oral Versions of Personal Experience: Three Decades of Narrative Analysis,” The Journal of Narrative and Life History 7:1-4 (1997), pp. 1-415.
8. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” In Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill andWang, 1977), p. 79.
9. Hyvärinen, “Towards a Conceptual History of Narrative,” for arguments that true interdisciplinarity in narrative research has not yet been achieved.
10. Relevant book series include Frontiers of Narrative, published by the University of Nebraska Press, Narratologia, published by Walter de Gruyter, Studies in Narrative, published by John Benjamins, and Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, published by the Ohio State University Press. Journals regularly featuring articles on narrative include, among others, Ancient Narrative, Image (&) Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory, Language and Literature, Narrative, Narrative Inquiry, New Literary History, Poetics, Poetics Today, and Style.
11. The symposium on “Narrative Intelligence” sponsored in November 1999 by the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, assembled computer scientists, designers of computer games, philosophers, linguists, and theorists of literary narrative. For its part, the 2004 interdisciplinary symposium on “The Travelling Concept of Narrative” held at the University of Helsinki sought to connect humanistic and social-scientific trends in narrative research, as did the symposium on “Narratology beyond Literary Criticism” held at the University of Hamburg the previous year.
12. Texana is a small community located in the western, mountainous part of this state in the southeastern region of the U.S.
13. Keith Oatley, “Emotions.” In Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 273-5.
14. In this transcript, I have edited out details important for other kinds of discourse analysis. Also, for ease of reference, I have divided the transcript of the speaker's discourse into numbered clauses. ALL CAPS indicate words that were emphatically lengthened during their production, whereas two dots (.) mark pauses or hesitations by the speaker. NSF Grant BCS-0236838 supported research on this narrative, and I am indebted to Christine Mallinson for helpful conversations about the story.
15. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). For a critique of Bruner's distinction between paradigmatic and narrative reasoning, however
16. David Herman, “Narrative, Science, and Narrative Science.” Narrative Inquiry 8:2 (1998), pp. 379-90. Also for an argument that Bruner engages in narrative imperialism (whereby the notion of story comes to encompass everything and thereby ceases to be useful), and for a balanced assessment of that argument
17. Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17 (December 2004), pp. 428-52
18. James Phelan, “Who's Here? Thoughts on Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism.” Narrative 13:3 (2005), pp. 205-10.
19. William Labov, “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax.” In Language in the Inner City (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), p. 379.
20. The role of emotions and emotion discourse in narrative. On the concept of “tellability,” see Neal R. Norrick's discussion in chapter
21. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact.” In On Autobiography. Edited by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 3-30.
22. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), p. 4.
23. George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
24. Eleanor Rosch, “Principles of Categorization.” In Bas Aarts, David Denison, Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova (eds.) Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 91-108.
25. Conversely, people engaging in a debate might use stories to support their positions. Hence, when talking about a texttype category, I am referring to what category the text as a whole can most plausibly be slotted into, though I recognize that there will not necessarily be consensus about how to categorize a given text or artifact.
26. Harold F. Mosher, Jr., “Towards a Poetics of Descriptized Narration.” Poetics Today 3 (1991), pp. 425-45.
27. Janet Levin, “Qualia.” In Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 693-4, and also chapter 17 of the present volume. In some cases, however, descriptions do involve a time-sequence: recipes, for example, describe a specific sequence of cooking procedures. Hence the need for feature (ii), discussed below.
28. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd edition. Translated by Laurence Scott, revised by Louis A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968)
29. Tzvetan Todorov, “La Grammaire du récit.” Langages 12 (1968), pp. 94-102.
30. Claude Bremond, “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities.” Translated by Elaine D. Cancalon, New Literary History 11 (1980), pp. 387-411
31. Emma Kafalenos, Narrative Causalities (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).
32. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” p. 11.
33. Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 48-50.
34. David Herman, “Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments.” In James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.) A Companion to Narrative Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), pp. 19-35.
35. David Herman, “Introduction.” In David Herman (ed.) Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 1-30.
36. Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology, and David Herman, “Toward a Transmedial Narratology.” In Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.) Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 47-75.
37. Michael Bamberg (ed.) special issue on “Oral Versions of Personal Experience: Three Decades of Narrative Analysis” and special issue on “Narrative-State of the Art,” Narrative Inquiry 16:1 (2006)
38. Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and chapter 9 of this volume.
39. Boris Tomashevskii, “Thematics.” In Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (eds.) Russian Formalist Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 61-95
40. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” pp. 93-4.
41. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 53-6.
42. Victor Shklovskii, Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990).
43. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale.
44. A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Translated by Danielle McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 207. See chapter 13 of this volume for a fuller presentation of Greimas's theory of actants.
45. . Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” pp. 85-8;
46. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).
47. Monika Fludernik, “Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present.” In James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.) A Companion to Narrative Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), pp. 48-51. Also, see chapter 16 of this volume for a discussion of how ideas from functionalist linguistics and other approaches to language study are productive for narrative inquiry.
48. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957).
49. James E. Miller, Jr. (ed.) Theory of Fiction: Henry James (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), p. 1
50. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 24-5. As chapter 7 of this volume discusses, narrative scholars today generally use the term focalization rather than point of view when analyzing issues of perspective.
51. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, pp. 149-50.
52. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). See chapter 14 of this volume for more on the history and aims of rhetorical theories of narrative.
53. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
54. Matti Hyvärinen, “Towards a Conceptual History of Narrative”
55. Monika Fludernik, “Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present”
56. David Herman, “Introduction” to Narratologies; Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, “Postclassical Narratology.” In David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 450-1
57. Ansgar Nünning, “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments: Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term.” In Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Mller (eds.) What is Narratology? (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), pp. 239-75.
58. Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.) Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).