Exam#1

Question 1

What is Narrative?

Answer 1

Something that we all engage in.

Question 2

Genre

Answer 2

1. Kind; sort; style.
2. A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of
   literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or
   purpose.
   Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as
   new genres are invented and the use of old ones is
   discontinued.

Question 3

Examples of genre

Answer 3

Castaway Narrative
Science Fiction
Buddy Film

Question 4

Abstract Time

Answer 4

Provide a grid of regular intervals with
which we can locate events. (e.g., second, century,
microwave frequency oscillations, etc.)

Question 5

Narrative Time

Answer 5

Allows events to create the order of
time. Not necessarily any length at all. [Paul Ricoeur
calls this “human time”]

Question 6

Nonfictional/Factual Narrative

Answer 6

: Details of the narrative can
be verified outside of the narrative. These narratives are
referential or advance claims of referential truthfulness.

Question 7

Fictional Narrative:

Answer 7

Details of the narrative cannot be verified
outside of the narrative. These narratives do not advance
claims of referential truthfulness.

Question 8

Are the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction rigid?

Answer 8

No.fictional

narratives often rely on nonfictional details in their narration.

Question 9

Mimetic

Answer 9

An emphasis on the components that work
together to create the illusion of a plausible world
inhabited by plausible characters. Foregrounds the
relationship between the reader and the text. Here, we
attend to the content of the text.

Question 10

Synthetic

Answer 10

An emphasis on those artificial components
that work together to create the text. Foregrounds a
text’s artificiality and its status as constructed object.
Here, we attend to the form of the text

Question 11

Thematic

Answer 11

An emphasis on those components that

raise or refer to larger, abstract concepts.

Question 12

Narrativity

Answer 12

“The set of properties characterizing
narrative and distinguishing it from
nonnarrative; the formal and contextual
features making a (narrative) text more or
less narrative, as it were” (Prince 65).
“Narrativity is a matter of degree that does
not correlate to the number of devices,
qualities or, for that matter, words that are
employed in the narrative” (Abbott 25).

Question 13

Prose Narrative Fiction

Answer 13

The representation of an (at least partially)
fictional event or series of events through
the medium of printed, prosaic language.

Question 14

stories consist of three basic elements:

Answer 14

⦿ Events
⦿ Entities involved in the events
• “Characters” can be thought of as entities with
human characteristics
⦿ Storyworld or setting

Question 15

Constituent and Supplementary Events

Answer 15

⦿Constituent Events: necessary for the
story to be the story it is.
⦿Supplementary Events: unnecessary for
the story. They can be removed and the
story will still be recognizably the story
that it is

Question 16

Are supplementary events really

supplementary?

Answer 16

“Constituent events are only necessarily
more important than supplementary events
insofar as we are concerned with the
sequence of events that constitute the story
itself. But supplementary events can be
very important for the meaning and overall
impact of the narrative”

Question 17

Narrative Definitions:

A Review

Answer 17

™ Abbott: The representation of an event or a series of
events.
™ Our modification: The representation of an (at least
partially) fictional event or series of events through the
medium of printed, prose language.
™ Phelan: Somebody telling somebody else on some
occasion and for some purpose(s) that something
happened.

Question 18

Everything Matters

Answer 18

Arguably everything in the text contributes to its impact and
our interpretation of it, and so everything has some
rhetorical function. Change one thing, and the effect of the
whole changes, if only subtly. (Abbott 40)
[M]inor details, parts that are quite unnecessary to the
story—like supplementary events and the setting—can exert
considerable rhetorical leverage on the way we read.
(Abbott 52)

Question 19

Causation and

post hoc ergo propter hoc

Answer 19

[“after this, therefore because of this”]
In the Newtonian universe, which is the universe we grow
up in, effects always follow causes. So there is a good
empirical basis to explain why, when reading narratives,
we should be tempted to apply this paradigm more quickly
than we ought to. The error lies in passing from the valid
assumption that all effects follow their causes to that false
one that to follow something is to be an effect of that thing

Question 20

Another Chicken/Egg:

Cause/Effect

Answer 20

It is the effect that causes us to produce a cause; a
tropological operation then reorders the sequence . . . . This
latter sequence is the product of discursive forces, but we treat it
as a given, as the true order. (Abbott 44)
1. Experience pain on wrist
2. Notice a mosquito on wrist
3. Construct narrative in which the pain is produced by
the mosquito.

Question 21

Normalization

Answer 21

Bringing a collection of events into narrative coherence,
rendering them plausible, and allowing one to see how they all
“belong.”
“You could, in fact, argue . . . that our need for narrative form is
so strong that we don’t really believe something is true unless we
can see it as a story” (Abbott 44).
“The unwillingness to tolerate the condition of unknowing in
which we all live may lie behind the ancient and persistent
tendency to believe that some powerful force controls all aspects
of our lives—a power, in other words, that has already written
the story in which our lives unfold” (Abbott 45)

Question 22

Masterplots

Answer 22

We seem to connect our thinking about life, and
particularly about our own lives, to a number of
masterplots that we may or may not be fully aware of. To
the extent that our values and identity are linked to a
masterplot, that masterplot can have strong rhetorical
impact. We tend to give credibility to narratives that are
structured but it.
Masterplots are drawn on to establish the framework
within which the narrative can be seen as credible

Question 23

Masterplots and Genre

Answer 23

Genre: A recurrent literary form [from French for
“kind”]
™ Can apply to large categories, e.g., novel, poetry,
drama, etc.
™ Can also apply to subsets within these categories, e.g.,
picaresque, gothic, dystopian, etc.
™ One text can exhibit many different generic
characteristics

Question 24

Narrator vs. Author

Answer 24

NEVER confuse flesh-and-blood authors with narrators.
They are different entities on different planes of existence.
™ Twain: “An autobiography is the truest of all books; for
though it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the
truth . . . the remorseless truth is there, between the lines,
where the author-cat is raking dust upon it, which hides
from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell . . .
the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of
his wily diligences” (68).

Question 25

Direct/Indirect Discourse

Answer 25

Direct Discourse: Citing a character’s own words (i.e.,
quotation). (In comics: speech bubbles.)
™ Indirect Discourse: The reporting of a character’s words
through narration (i.e., paraphrase).
™ Direct Thought: The direct reporting of a character’s
thoughts. (In comics: thought bubbles.)
™ Indirect Thought: The reporting of a character’s thoughts.

Question 26

Voice

Answer 26

Who it is we “hear” doing the narration
™ Homodiegetic: The narrative voice derives from a character or entity
within the universe of the narrative.
™ Heterodiegetic: The narrative voice derives from a character or entity
outside of the universe of the narrative.

Question 27

Focalization

Answer 27

The lens through which we see characters and events in the

narrative.

Question 28

Distance

Answer 28

The narrator’s degree of involvement in the story she tells.
Robinson Crusoe (so far)
™ Voice: Homodiegetic narration
™ Focalization: through the visions of the character-narrators.
™ Distance: ?

Question 29

H. Porter Abbott’s

Unreliable Narrators

Answer 29

Unreliable Narrators
™ Two kinds of unreliable narrators:
™ Those we trust for the facts but not for the interpretation
™James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
™Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
™Forrest Gump
™Others?
™ Those whom we cannot even trust for the facts
™Akira Kurosawa, Rashamon
™Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (?)
™The Usual Suspects
™Others?

Question 30

James Phelan’s

Unreliable Narrators

Answer 30

™ 3 main roles of the narrator
™ Reporting
™ Interpreting
™ Evaluating
™ Unreliable Reporting: Narrator’s unreliability deals with
characters, facts, and events.
™ Unreliable Interpreting: Narrator’s unreliability deals with
knowledge and perception.
™ Unreliable Evaluating: Narrator’s unreliability deals with
ethics and judgment.

Question 31

James Phelan’s

Unreliable Narrators

Answer 31

™ With unreliable narrators, readers can either:
™ Reject the narration and reconstruct a more satisfactory account, or
™ Accept what the narrator says but supplement the account.
™ 6 kinds of unreliability:
™ Misreporting, Misreading, Misevaluating
™ Underreporting, Underreading, Underevaluating
™ Remember: These concern unreliable narrators.
™ Is the narrator in Robinson Crusoe unreliable? If yes, how? If
no, why?

Question 32

NORTHROP FRYE

Answer 32

A writer is being allegorical whenever it is clear that

he is saying “by this I also (allos) mean that.”

Question 33

STRUCTURES OF METAPHOR

Answer 33

Each metaphor contains within it two essential elements:
• Vehicle: The image that carries the weight of comparison.
• Tenor: The concept or thing to which the metaphor refers.
The metaphor is the name for the co-presence of the two elements in
the form of the two sets of ideas being related and never reducible to
either one. The tenor and its metaphorical relationship to the vehicle is
not always explicitly stated.

Question 34

ONE METAPHOR EXAMPLE

Answer 34

Come gather around people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
And if your breath to you is worth saving
Then you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changing
—Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A’Changing”

Question 35

MH ABRAMS

Answer 35

An allegory is a narrative […] in which the agents
and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are
contrived by the author to make coherent sense of
the “literal,” or primary level of signification, and at
the same time to signify the second, correlated
order of signification.

Question 36

ABRAMS:

HISTORICAL/POLITICAL ALLEGORY

Answer 36

Characters and actions that are signified literally in
their turn represent, or “allegorize,” historical
personages and events.

Question 37

ABRAMS:

ALLEGORY OF IDEAS

Answer 37

The literal characters represent concepts and the
plot allegorizes an abstract doctrine or thesis.
The central device is the personification of abstract
entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind, modes
of life, and types of character.

Question 38

QUESTIONS

Answer 38

• Are there ways that RC exemplifies the historical/political allegory? How does
recognizing it as a historical/political allegory reveal certain thematic concerns
in the text?
• Are there ways that RC exemplifies the allegory of ideas? How does recognizing
it as an allegory of ideas reveal certain thematic concerns in the text?
• Which of Abrams’ allegories is more productive for rooting out larger thematic
concerns in Robinson Crusoe: the historical/political allegory or the allegory of
ideas.

Question 39

Intentional Readings:

Understanding the Narrative Grain

Answer 39

In intentional readings, one assumes that a single
creative sensibility lies behind the narrative. The ideas
and judgments that we infer from the narrative are
understood to be in keeping with a sensibility that
intended these effects.
By looking at a narrative as a whole and trying to grasp
an intention behind it, we have a way of grounding a
reading and making the case for its validity.

Question 40

The Implied Author

Answer 40

An implied author is that sensibility (that combination of feeling,
intelligence, knowledge and opinion) that “accounts for” the
narrative. It accounts for the narrative in the sense that the implied
authorial views that we find emerging in the narrative are consistent
with all the elements of the narrative discourse that we are aware of. Of
course, when the real living and breathing author constructs the
narrative, much of that real author goes into the implied author.
But the implied author is also, like the narrative itself, a kind of
construct that among other things serves to anchor the narrative.
We, in our turn, as we read, develop our own idea of this implied
sensibility behind the narrative. (84–85)

Question 41

Underreading / Overreading

Answer 41

As readers, we exercise a power over narrative texts that is arguably as
great as their power over us. After all, without our willing collaboration
[with the text’s synthetic aspects], the narrative[’s mimetic world] does
not come to life. And the price we exact for this collaboration is that we
do not simply absorb the information in the narrative discourse but,
almost invariably, we overlook things that are there and put in things
that are not there. We underread and overread. (86)
[I]nterpretation is a form of closure in that it is an assertion of meaning
within which the text can be accommodated. Even if the interpretation
is an assertion of the text’s multiple ambiguities, that itself is an
embracing formulation. (87)

Question 42

Gaps: Principle of Minimal

Departure

Answer 42

Gaps: Principle of Minimal
Departure
1. Fiction is capable of both truth and falsity, against the formerly
prevalent views among philosophers that they are either false (for
lack of referent) or indeterminate;
2. The real world serves as a model for the mental construction of
fictional storyworlds
3. Fiction is not just an imitation of reality. Texts are free to construct
fictional worlds that differ from the actual world.
4. However, unless prompted by the text our understanding of the
narrative world, characters, and events are model on the actual
world.
• We assume that Robinson Crusoe has two human arms, not eight.
• We assume that gravity works similarly to our world on the island.
• We assume that the goats on the island are not neon green.

Question 43

Narrative Repetition:

Themes / Motifs

Answer 43

Theme: abstract (love, class, violence, race, the base psychosis of human
existence, etc.)
Motif: concrete (dogs, the color orange, blood, repeated phrases, etc.) [We
might say that motifs are mimetic and synthetic repetitions.]
Identifying themes and motifs cannot in itself produce an interpretation,
since the same themes and motifs can lend themselves to any number of
different interpretations. But identifying themes and motifs can help
enormously in establishing what a work is about and where its focus lies,
and that in turn can be used to eliminate some interpretations and to lend
support to others. (95)

Question 44

Reading and Uncertainty

Answer 44

Probably the most difficult thing about reading narratives is to
remain in a state of uncertainty. If a narrative won’t close by itself,
one often tries to close it, even if it means shutting one’s eyes to some
of the details and imagining others that aren’t there, underreading
and overreading. (89)

Question 45

Narrative

Answer 45

: Systems of verbal or visual cues
prompting their readers to spatialize storyworlds
into evolving configurations of participants,
objects, and places.

Question 46

Narrative Space

Answer 46

The physically existing environment in which
characters live and move.
• We can distinguish the individual locations in
which narratively significant events take place
from the total space implied by these events.
• Five levels

Question 47

1. Spatial Frames

Answer 47

1. Spatial Frames
   • The immediate surroundings of actual events, the
   various locations shown by the narrative discourse or
   by the image.
   • Spatial frames are shifting scenes of action, and
   they may flow into each other.
   • They are hierarchically organized by relations of
   containment (a room is a subspace of a house), and
   their boundaries may be either clear-cut (the
   bedroom is separated from the salon by a hallway) or
   fuzzy (e.g. a landscape may slowly change as a
   character moves through it). q

Question 48

2. Setting

Answer 48

• The general socio-historico-geographical
environment in which the action takes place. In
contrast to spatial frames, this is a relatively
stable category which embraces the entire text.

Question 49

3. Story Space

Answer 49

The space relevant to the plot, as mapped by the
actions and thoughts of the characters.
• It consists of all the spatial frames plus all the
locations mentioned by the text that are not the
scene of actually occurring events.

Question 50

Narrative (or Story)

World

Answer 50

The story space completed by the reader’s
imagination on the basis of cultural knowledge
and real world experience
• Conceived by the imagination as a coherent,
unified, ontologically full and materially existing
geographical entity, even when it is a fictional
world that possesses none of these properties

Question 51

5. Narrative Universe

Answer 51

The world (in the spatio-temporal sense of the
term) presented as actual by the text, plus all the
counterfactual worlds constructed by characters
as beliefs, wishes, fears, speculations,
hypothetical thinking, dreams, and fantasies.
• In Robinson, this includes the world of the
narrative as well as the world in which January is
dead or the world in which January is dreaming
and still alive in London

Question 52

Narrative’s Multiple Worlds

Answer 52

All narratives include at least two worlds:
1. The storyworld in which characters reside
and the events take place.
2. The world in which the narration takes place.
(Even with homodiegetic or embedded
heterodiegetic narrators, the space-time of
narration is different from the space-time of
the narrative events.)

Question 53

Forking-Path Narratives

Answer 53

Juxtaposes alternate versions of narrative events
in order to show the possible outcomes that
might result from small changes in a single event
or group of events.
• Groundhog Day

Question 54

Metalipses

Answer 54

• When the border between two worlds is violated.
• The author appearing as a character in the
narrative.
• Audience members interacting with the cast.
• Characters rebelling against the narrator
• Here, space is only metaphorical. The boundary
between narrative levels is purely conceptual. No
actual spatial transgression occurs.

Question 55

WINDRUSHER ANECDOTES

Answer 55

Sam King: “I have been here during the war fighting Nazi Germany, and I
came back and help build Britain.”
John Richards: “They tell you it is the ‘mother country; you’re all
welcome, you all British.’ When you come here you realize you’re a
foreigner and that’s all there is to it.”
Arthur Curline: “It’s true racism is more prominent with the younger
generation, this generation doesn’t put up with it; we as old colonials come
here and accept it.”
Vince Reid: “I never associated with white people in any significant
degree, and then school I came across real hostility.”

Question 56

RESPONSE TO WINDRUSH

Answer 56

It happen while he was working in the railway yard, and all
the people in the place say they go strike unless the boss fire
Moses. It was a big ballad in all the papers, they put it under a
big headline, saying how the colour bar was causing trouble
again, and a fellar come with a camera and wanted to take
Moses photo, but Moses say no. A few days after that the
boss call Moses and tell him that he sorry, but as they cutting
down the staff and he was new, he would have to go. (29)

Question 57

NARRATIVE VOICE

Answer 57

[T]he narrating voice varies in vocabulary and in grammar and syntax to suit differing
situations. To make up this flexible language, Selvon draws expertly upon the whole
linguistic spectrum available to the literate West Indian, ranging from English Standard
English to West Indian Standard English to differing degrees of dialect, inventing new
combinations and adding his own emphases. The language of The Lonely Londoners is not
the language of one stratum in the society, not the language of the people meaning ‘the
folk’ or the peasantry, but a careful fabrication, a modified dialect which contains and
expresses the sensibility of a whole society. (Introduction 13)