A Companion to Narrative Theory

The 35 original essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory constitute the best available introduction to this vital and contested field of humanistic enquiry. - Comprises 35 original essays written by leading figures in the field - Includes contributions from pioneers in the field such as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller and Gerald Prince - Represents all the major critical approaches to narrative and investigates and debates the relations between them - Considers narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine - Features analyses of a variety of media, including film, music, and painting - Designed to be of interest to specialists, yet accessible to readers with little prior knowledge of the field

James Phelan is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the editor of the journal Narrative and the author of several books in narrative theory, the most recent of which are Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005) and Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007). Peter J. Rabinowitz is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College. His previous publications include Before Reading (1987) and Authorizing Readers (coauthored with Michael Smith, 1998). He is also a music critic and serves as a contributing editor of Fanfare. Phelan and Rabinowitz are coeditors of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, which now has more than twenty-five titles to its credit.

Notes on Contributors x Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Narrative Theory 1 James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz Prologue 1 Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments 19 David Herman 2 Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present 36 Monika Fludernik 3 Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating the History of Narrative Theory 60 Brian McHale PART I New Light on Stubborn Problems 73 4 Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother? 75 Wayne C. Booth 5 Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches 89 Ansgar F. Nünning 6 Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata 108 Tamar Yacobi 7 Henry James and ''Focalization,'' or Why James Loves Gyp 124 J. Hillis Miller 8 What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other 136 Dan Shen 9 The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality 150 Richard Walsh PART II Revisions and Innovations 165 10 Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses 167 Brian Richardson 11 They Shoot Tigers, Don't They?: Path and Counterpoint in The Long Goodbye 181 Peter J. Rabinowitz 12 Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things 192 Susan Stanford Friedman 13 The ''I'' of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology 206 Susan S. Lanser 14 Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film 220 Robyn R. Warhol 15 Self-consciousness as a Narrative Feature and Force: Tellers vs. Informants in Generic Design 232 Meir Sternberg 16 Effects of Sequence, Embedding, and Ekphrasis in Poe's ''The Oval Portrait'' 253 Emma Kafalenos 17 Mrs. Dalloway's Progeny: The Hours as Second-degree Narrative 269 Seymour Chatman PART III Narrative Form and its Relationship to History, Politics, and Ethics 283 18 Genre, Repetition, Temporal Order: Some Aspects of Biblical Narratology 285 David H. Richter 19 Why Won't Our Terms Stay Put? The Narrative Communication Diagram Scrutinized and Historicized 299 Harry E. Shaw 20 Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in David Copperfield and Bleak House 312 Alison Case 21 Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan's Atonement 322 James Phelan 22 The Changing Faces of Mount Rushmore: Collective Portraiture and Participatory National Heritage 337 Alison Booth 23 The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists 356 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson 24 On a Postcolonial Narratology 372 Gerald Prince 25 Modernist Soundscapes and the Intelligent Ear: An Approach to Narrative Through Auditory Perception 382 Melba Cuddy-Keane 26 In Two Voices, or: Whose Life/Death/Story Is It, Anyway? 399 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan PART IV Beyond Literary Narrative 413 27 Narrative in and of the Law 415 Peter Brooks 28 Second Nature, Cinematic Narrative, the Historical Subject, and Russian Ark 427 Alan Nadel 29 Narrativizing the End: Death and Opera 441 Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon 30 Music and/as Cine-Narrative or: Ceci n'est pas un leitmotif 451 Royal S. Brown 31 Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative 466 Fred Everett Maus 32 ''I'm Spartacus!'' 484 Catherine Gunther Kodat 33 Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth Through a Glass, Darkly 499 Peggy Phelan Epilogue 34 Narrative and Digitality: Learning to Think With the Medium 515 Marie-Laure Ryan 35 The Future of All Narrative Futures 529 H. Porter Abbott Glossary 542 Index 552