Exam#1 Flashcards
What is Narrative?
Something that we all engage in.
Genre
- Kind; sort; style.
- 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.
Examples of genre
Castaway Narrative
Science Fiction
Buddy Film
Abstract Time
Provide a grid of regular intervals with
which we can locate events. (e.g., second, century,
microwave frequency oscillations, etc.)
Narrative Time
Allows events to create the order of
time. Not necessarily any length at all. [Paul Ricoeur
calls this “human time”]
Nonfictional/Factual Narrative
: Details of the narrative can
be verified outside of the narrative. These narratives are
referential or advance claims of referential truthfulness.
Fictional Narrative:
Details of the narrative cannot be verified
outside of the narrative. These narratives do not advance
claims of referential truthfulness.
Are the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction rigid?
No.fictional
narratives often rely on nonfictional details in their narration.
Mimetic
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.
Synthetic
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
Thematic
An emphasis on those components that
raise or refer to larger, abstract concepts.
Narrativity
“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).
Prose Narrative Fiction
The representation of an (at least partially)
fictional event or series of events through
the medium of printed, prosaic language.
stories consist of three basic elements:
⦿ Events ⦿ Entities involved in the events • “Characters” can be thought of as entities with human characteristics ⦿ Storyworld or setting
Constituent and Supplementary Events
⦿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
Are supplementary events really
supplementary?
“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”
Narrative Definitions:
A Review
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.
Everything Matters
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)
Causation and
post hoc ergo propter hoc
[“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
Another Chicken/Egg:
Cause/Effect
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.
Normalization
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)
Masterplots
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
Masterplots and Genre
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
Narrator vs. Author
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).
