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. The essays represent all the major critical approaches to narrative - narratological, rhetorical, feminist, post-structuralist, historicist - and investigate and debate the relations among them. In addition, they stretch the boundaries of the field by considering narratives in different disciplines, such as law and medicine, and in a variety of media, including film, music, and painting.
The volume is divided into six parts: competing accounts of the history of the field; examinations of recurrent problems; suggestions for theoretical revisions and innovations; explorations of the relations among form, history, politics, and ethics; analyses of the way narrative operates in different disciplines and in media beyond the written word; and speculations about the future of narrative and of narrative theory. At the same time, it offers provocative analyses of a wide range of works, both canonical and popular, from the Bible through novels by Dickens, Woolf, and Arundhati Roy on to Bernard Herrmann's film music and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. Among its contributors are many of the leading figures in the field, including such early pioneers as Wayne C. Booth, Seymour Chatman, J. Hillis Miller, and Gerald Prince.

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