Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction
Cambridge University Press, 11/14/2016
EAN 9781107033665, ISBN10: 1107033667
Hardcover, 360 pages, 24 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Kent Puckett's Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction provides an account of a methodology increasingly central to literary studies, film studies, history, psychology and beyond. In addition to introducing readers to some of the field's major figures and their ideas, Puckett situates critical and philosophical approaches towards narrative within a longer intellectual history. The book reveals one of narrative theory's founding claims - that narratives need to be understood in terms of a formal relation between story and discourse, between what they narrate and how they narrate it - both as a necessary methodological distinction and as a problem characteristic of modern thought. Puckett thus shows that narrative theory is not only a powerful descriptive system but also a complex and sometimes ironic form of critique. Narrative Theory offers readers an introduction to the field's key figures, methods and ideas, and it also reveals that field as unexpectedly central to the history of ideas.
1. Introduction
story/discourse
2. Action, event, conflict
the uses of narrative in Aristotle and Hegel
2.1. Beginning, middle, and end
Aristotle and narrative
2.2. Tragedy, comedy, and the cunning of reason
Hegel and narrative theory
3. Lost illusions
narrative in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud
3.1. First as tragedy
Karl Marx, narrative, and revolution
3.2. Beyond story and discourse
Friedrich Nietzsche and the limits of narrative
3.3. Narrative and its discontents
Sigmund Freud's story
4. Epic, novel, narrative theory
4.1. Relations stop nowhere
Henry James and the novel's narrative
4.2. Starry maps
Georg Lukács and the comparative analysis of narrative genres
4.3. To kill is not to refute
Mikhail Bakhtin on genre, narrative, and history
4.4. History's scar
Erich Auerbach and narrative thinking
5. Form, structure, narrative
5.1. The hero leaves home
Vladimir Propp and narrative morphology
5.2. Knight's move
Viktor Shklovsky and Russian Formalism
5.3. Differences without positive terms
Ferdinand de Saussure and the Structuralist turn
5.4. The elementary structures of story and discourse
Claude Lévi-Strauss and the narrative analysis of myth
6. Narratology and narrative theory
Kristeva, Barthes, and Genette
6.1. It is what it isn't
Julia Kristeva and Tel Quel
6.2. Parisian gold
Roland Barthes and narrative pleasure
6.3. The knowable is at the heart of the mysterious
Genette's narrative poetics.