Narrativity, Coherence and Literariness

Narrativity, Coherence and Literariness PDF Author: Eva Sabine Wagner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110673185
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
The search for the defining qualities of narrative has produced an expansive range of definitions which, largely unconnected with each other, obscure the notion of “narrativity” rather than clarifying it. The first part of this study remedies this shortcoming by developing a graded macro model of narrativity which serves three aims. Firstly, it provides a structured overview of the field of narrative elements and processes. Secondly, it facilitates the classification of narratological approaches by locating them on different stages of narrativity. Finally, it focuses attention on narrative dynamics as interpretative processes by which readers seek to produce narrative coherence. The second part of this study identifies three different narrative dynamics which characterise Laclos’s "Dangerous Connections," Kafka’s "Castle" and Toussaint’s novels. Wagner bases her analyses of these dynamics not only on the texts themselves but also on the ways in which literary scholars imbue the texts with narrative coherence. This book provides a long overdue systematisation of the jumbled field of theories of narrativity and opens new perspectives on the difficult relationship between narrative theory and interpretation.

Narrativity, Coherence and Literariness

Narrativity, Coherence and Literariness PDF Author: Eva Sabine Wagner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110673185
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 650

Get Book Here

Book Description
The search for the defining qualities of narrative has produced an expansive range of definitions which, largely unconnected with each other, obscure the notion of “narrativity” rather than clarifying it. The first part of this study remedies this shortcoming by developing a graded macro model of narrativity which serves three aims. Firstly, it provides a structured overview of the field of narrative elements and processes. Secondly, it facilitates the classification of narratological approaches by locating them on different stages of narrativity. Finally, it focuses attention on narrative dynamics as interpretative processes by which readers seek to produce narrative coherence. The second part of this study identifies three different narrative dynamics which characterise Laclos’s "Dangerous Connections," Kafka’s "Castle" and Toussaint’s novels. Wagner bases her analyses of these dynamics not only on the texts themselves but also on the ways in which literary scholars imbue the texts with narrative coherence. This book provides a long overdue systematisation of the jumbled field of theories of narrativity and opens new perspectives on the difficult relationship between narrative theory and interpretation.

Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture

Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture PDF Author: B. Davies
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230307086
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Investigating modern art, literature, theory and the law, this book illustrates the different ways in which sex, gender and time intersect. It demonstrates that time offers new critical perspectives on sex and gender and makes problematic reductive understandings of sexual identity as well as straight and queer time

Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts

Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts PDF Author: Dirk Wiemann
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501399519
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts draws on the notion of the 'gutter' in graphic narratives – the gap between panels that a reader has to imaginatively fill to generate narrative sequence – to analyse the largely overlooked literary form of the verse novel. Marked at all levels by the tense constellation of segment and sequence, and a conspicuously 'gappy' texture, verse novels offer productive alternatives to the dominant prose novel in contemporary fiction, where a similar 'gappiness' has become a hallmark, as illustrated by the loosely interlaced multi-strand plot structures of influential 'world novels' (Bolaño, Mitchell, Powers). The verse novel is a form particularly prolific in the postcolonial world and among diasporic or minoritarian writers in the Global North. This study concentrates on two of the most prominent areas in which verse novels distinguish themselves from the prose novel to read texts by Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi and others: In 'planetary' verse novels from the Caribbean, Canada, Samoa and Hawai'i, the central trope of the volcano evokes a world in constant un/making; while post-national verse novels, particularly in Britain, modify the established paradigms of imagined communities. Dirk Wiemann's study speculates whether the resurgence of verse novels correlates with the apprehension of inhabiting a world that has become unpredictable and dangerous but also promising: a 'post-prosaic' world.

Making Sense of Narrative Text

Making Sense of Narrative Text PDF Author: Michael Toolan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317224582
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book takes the following question as its starting point: What are some of the crucial things the reader must do in order to make sense of a literary narrative? The book is a study of the texture of narrative fiction, using stylistics, corpus linguistic principles (especially Hoey’s work on lexical patterning), narratological ideas, and cognitive stylistic work by Werth, Emmott, and others. Michael Toolan explores the textual/grammatical nature of fictional narratives, critically re-examining foundational ideas about the role of lexical patterning in narrative texts, and also engages the cognitive or psychological processes at play in literary reading. The study grows out of the theoretical questions that stylistic analyses of extended fictional texts raise, concerning the nature of narrative comprehension and the reader’s experience in the course of reading narratives, and particularly concerning the role of language in that comprehension and experience. The ideas of situation, repetition and picturing are all central to the book’s argument about how readers process story, and Toolan also considers the ethical and emotional involvement of the reader, developing hypotheses about the text-linguistic characteristics of the most ethically and emotionally involving portions of the stories examined. This book makes an important contribution to the study of narrative text and is in dialogue with recent work in corpus stylistics, cognitive stylistics, and literary text and texture.

Revisiting Loss

Revisiting Loss PDF Author: Wojciech Drąg
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443863424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Loss is the core experience which determines the identity of Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrators and shapes their subsequent lives. Whether a traumatic ordeal, an act of social degradation, a failed relationship or a loss of home, the painful event serves as a sharp dividing line between the earlier, meaningful past and the period afterwards, which is infused with a sense of lack, dissatisfaction and nostalgia. Ishiguro’s narrators have been unable to confine their loss to the past and remain preoccupied by its legacy, which ranges from suppressed guilt to a keen sense of failure or disappointment. Their immersion in the past finds expression in the narratives which they weave in order to articulate, justify or merely understand their experiences. Their reconstructions of the past are interpreted as exercises in misremembering and self-deception which enable them to sustain their illusions and save them from despair. Revisiting Loss is the first book-length study of memory encompassing Ishiguro’s entire novelistic output. It adopts a highly interdisciplinary approach, combining a selection of philosophical (Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean Starobinski) and psychological perspectives (Sigmund Freud, Frederic Bartlett, Jacques Lacan, and Daniel L. Schacter). The book offers a thoroughly researched critical survey drawing on all published critical monographs and collections of academic articles on Ishiguro’s work.

Deconstructing History

Deconstructing History PDF Author: Alun Munslow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415391431
Category : Historiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Surveying the latest research, this welcome second edition of Alun Munslow's successful Deconstructing History provides an excellent introduction to the debates and issues of postmodernist history. This new edition has been updated and revised and, along with the original discussion material and topics, now: assesses the claims of history as a form of 'truthful' explanation discusses the limits of conventional historical thinking and practice, and the responses of the 'new empiricists' to the book's central arguments examines the arrival of 'experimental history' and its implications clarifies the utility of addressing Michael Foucault and Hayden White, and strengthens the analysis of Frank R. Ankersmit's recent work. Along with an updated glossary, and a revised bibliography, this second edition will not only live up to its predecessor's reputation, but will surpass it as the most essential student resource for studying history and its practice.

Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative

Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative PDF Author: Aníbal González
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521414253
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
A broad historical panorama of the journalist/narrative interaction, exploring the impact of journalism and journalistic rhetoric on the development of Spanish American narrative.

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft [4 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft [4 volumes] PDF Author: Richard M. Golden Director, Jewish Studies Program
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1851095128
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1310

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Book Description
The definitive compilation on witchcraft and witch hunting in the early modern era exploring significant people, places, beliefs, and events. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition is the definitive reference on the age of witch hunting (approximately 1430–1750), its origins, expansion, and ultimate decline. Incorporating a wealth of recent scholarship in four richly illustrated, alphabetically organized volumes, it offers historians and general readers alike the opportunity to explore the realities behind the legends of witchcraft and witchcraft trials. Over 170 contributors from 28 nations provide vivid, documented descriptions and analyses of witchcraft trials and locations, folklore and beliefs, magical practices and deities, influential texts, and the full range of players in this extraordinary drama—witchcraft theorists and theologians; historians and authors; judges, clergy, and rulers; the accused; and their persecutors. Concentrating on Europe and the Americas in the early modern era, the work also covers relevant topics from the ancient Near East (including the Hebrew and Christian Bibles), classical antiquity, and the European Middle Ages.

Stories, Meaning, and Experience

Stories, Meaning, and Experience PDF Author: Yanna B. Popova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134738455
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This is a book about the human propensity to think about and experience the world through stories. ‘Why do we have stories?’, ‘How do stories create meaning for us?’, and ‘How is storytelling distinct from other forms of meaning-making?’ are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Although these and other related problems have preoccupied linguists, philosophers, sociologists, narratologists, and cognitive scientists for centuries, in Stories, Meaning, and Experience, Yanna Popova takes an original interdisciplinary approach, situating the study of stories within an enactive understanding of human cognition. Enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition foreground the role of interaction in explanations of social understanding, which includes the human practices of telling and reading stories. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centred approaches that have dominated structuralist and early cognitivist views of narrative meaning, as well as pragmatic ones that view narrative understanding as a form of linguistic implicature. The intersubjective experience that each narrative both affords and necessitates, the author argues, serves to highlight the active, yet cooperative and communal, nature of human sociality, expressed in the numerous forms of human interaction, of which storytelling is one.

The Poetics of Biblical Narrative

The Poetics of Biblical Narrative PDF Author: Meir Sternberg
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253114047
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 597

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Book Description
Meir Sternberg’s classic study is “an important book for those who seek to take the Bible seriously as a literary work.” (Adele Berlin, Prooftexts) In “a book to read and then reread” (Modern Language Review), Meir Sternberg “has accomplished an enormous task, enriching our understanding of the theoretical basis of Biblical narrative and giving us insight into a remarkable number of particular texts.” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion). The result is a “a brilliant work” (Choice) distinguished “both for his comprehensiveness and for the clearly-avowed faith stance from which he understands and interprets the strategies of the biblical narratives.” (Theological Studies). The Poetics of Biblical Narrative shows, in Adele Berlin’s words, “more clearly and emphatically than any book I know, that the Bible is a serious literary work―a text manifesting a highly sophisticated and successful narrative poetics.”