Narrative Form

This revised and expanded handbook concisely introduces narrative form to advanced students of fiction and creative writing, with refreshed references and new discussions of cognitive approaches to narrative, nonfiction, and narrative emotions.

In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels, Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison’s seven later novels. Love comes in a new and surprising shape in each of the later novels; for example, Love presents it as the deep friendship between little girls; in Home it acts as a disruptive force producing deep changes in subjectivity; and in Jazz it becomes something one innovates and recreates each moment—like jazz itself. Each novel’s unconventional idea of love requires a new experimental narrative form. Wyatt analyzes the stylistic and structural innovations of each novel, showing how disturbances in narrative chronology, surprise endings, and gaps mirror the dislocated temporality and distorted emotional responses of the novels’ troubled characters and demand that the reader situate the present-day problems of the characters in relation to a traumatic African American past. The narrative surprises and gaps require the reader to become an active participant in making meaning. And the texts’ complex narrative strategies draw out the reader’s convictions about love, about gender, about race—and then prompt the reader to reexamine them, so that reading becomes an active ethical dialogue between text and reader. Wyatt uses psychoanalytic concepts to analyze Morrison’s narrative structures and how they work on readers. Love and Narrative Form devotes a chapter to each of Morrison’s later novels: Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child.

Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.

By redefining established topics of narratology, research has become highly diversified. The contributions to this volume neither synthesize developments nor work from shared postulates, but represent a fresh look at ongoing issues. Some scrutinize focalisation in a linguistic framework or in a poststructuralist vein; others take on reliable and unreliable narration in a pronominal perspective or the "unaddressed" reader who upsets the tidy schemes of narrative communication. Also outlined are a possible worlds approach to narrative time, a systematic treatment of metanarrative and a transgeneric application of narratology to poetry. The sequential ordering of narratives as a way of controlling reader response is examined in one article and in another is seen to elicit intertextual configurations. Both divergent and complementary, the contributions seek to integrate into narratological categories and methods the dynamic processes of narrative itself.

Taking readers back to the basic act of storytelling that is at the heart of Scripture, Karen Lee-Thorp offers an artful retelling of the major stories of the Bible. With lean prose and an ear for subtlety, her carefully chosen vignettes come together in an unforgettable rehearsal of the great story of redemption.

In this bold study James M. Decker argues against the commonly held opinion that Henry Miller’s narratives suffer from ‘formlessness’. He instead positions Miller as a stylistic pioneer, whose place must be assured in the American literary canon. From Moloch to Nexus through such widely-read texts as Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Decker examines what Miller calls his ‘spiral form’, a radically digressive style that shifts wildly between realism and the fantastic. Drawing on a variety of narratological and critical sources, as well as Miller’s own aesthetic theories, he highlights that this fragmented narrative style formed part of a sustained critique of modern spiritual decay. A deliberate move rather than a compositional weakness, then, Miller’s style finds a wide variety of antecedents in the work of such figures as Nietzsche, Rabelais, Joyce, Bergson and Whitman, and is viewed by Decker as an attempt to chart the journey of the self through the modern city. Henry Miller and Narrative Form affords readers new insights into some of the most challenging writings of the twentieth century and provides a template for understanding the significance of an extraordinary and inventive narrative form.

Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustical questions “who hears?” and “who listens?” For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. “Resonance” opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors—Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman—the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that “drift” through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music. A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for “resonance” as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of “voice” and “sound” across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book’s engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.

The purpose of this book is to provide a clear and systematic account of the complexities of fictional narration which result from the shifting relationship in all storytelling between the story itself and the way it is told.

Cultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century America examines the interplay between the familiar and the forgotten in tales of America's first century as a nation. By studying both the common concerns and the rising tensions between the known and the unknown, the told and the untold, this book offers readers new insight into the making of a nation through stories. Here, identity is built not so much through the winnowing competition of perspectives as through the cumulative layering of stories, derived from sources as diverse as rumors circulating in early patriot newspapers and the highest achievements of aesthetic culture. And yet this is not a source study: the interaction of texts is reciprocal, and the texts studied are not simply complementary but often jarring in their interrelations. The result is a new model of just how some of America's central episodes of self-definition -- the Puritan legacy, the Revolutionary War, and the Western frontier -- have achieved near mythic force in the national imagination. The most powerful myths of national identity, this author argues, are not those that erase historical facts but those able to transform such facts into their own deep resources. Book jacket.

In a major rethinking of the functions, methods, and aims of narrative poetics, David Herman exposes important links between modernist and postmodernist literary experimentation and contemporary language theory. Ultimately a search for new tools for narrative theory, his work clarifies complex connections between science and art, theory and culture, and philosophical analysis and narrative discourse. Following an extensive historical overview of theories about universal grammar, Herman examines Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's The Trial, and Woolf's Between the Acts as case studies of modernist literary narratives that encode grammatical principles which were (re)fashioned in logic, linguistics, and philosophy during the same period. Herman then uses the interpretation of universal grammar developed via these modernist texts to explore later twentieth-century cultural phenomena. The problem of citation in the discourses of postmodernism, for example, is discussed with reference to syntactic theory. An analysis of Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover raises the question of cinematic meaning and draws on semantic theory. In each case, Herman shows how postmodern narratives encode ideas at work in current theories about the nature and function of language. Outlining new directions for the study of language in literature, Universal Grammar and Narrative Form provides a wealth of information about key literary, linguistic, and philosophical trends in the twentieth century.