A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If: Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Autor Marie-Laure Ryanen Limba Engleză Hardback – 2 aug 2022
The question of how narratives actually do the work of world-building transcends disciplines: from cosmology to philosophy, digital culture, popular culture, and literary theory. In A New Anatomy of Storyworlds, Marie-Laure Ryan investigates the narratological importance of the concept of world in its various manifestations. She uses a wide array of works—from Sokal’s hoax to Maus, from Saussure to Barthes, from Kafka to virtual reality—to interrogate key narratological concepts. By revisiting and redefining concepts such as narrator, plot, character, fictionality, mimesis, and diegesis, Ryan reexamines the major controversies that have enlivened narratology: Does narrative necessarily involve a narrator? Is the notion of implied author useful? Do texts that challenge our experience of the real world require a different narratology? Is the distinction between fictional and factual narratives gradual or binary? Ultimately, Ryan grounds narratology in the concept of world to propose an alternative to the rhetorical, feminist, unnatural, and cognitive approaches that currently dominate the field, thus broadening the frame through which we view story and world-building.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215081
ISBN-10: 0814215084
Pagini: 240
Ilustrații: 1 b&w image, 3 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
ISBN-10: 0814215084
Pagini: 240
Ilustrații: 1 b&w image, 3 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Recenzii
“Ryan leaves other critics with a well-stocked toolbox for future analysis. … A New Anatomy of Storyworlds is a rigorous and ambitious exploration of the concept of storyworld in nearly every corner of the narratological map.” —Jon Hegglund, DIEGESIS
“For me, the more impactful academic writing is not that which convinces, but that which offers information and thought in a way that supports me in considering the topic. A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If achieves that on a multitude of levels … It was refreshing to find such a useful book that brings together concise foundational thought on topics typically scattered across disciplines and texts.” —Edward Wells, South Central Review
“A New Anatomy of Storyworlds is a lucid and inspiring book. Apart from updating and developing the terminology of Ryan’s framework, it participates in an impressive number of classic and recent theoretical debates. … Perhaps one of Ryan’s best books to date.” —Jeppe Barnwell, Society for Danish Language and Literature
“A New Anatomy of Storyworlds is a lucid, rich, and engaging study of fundamental narratological concepts, as well as controversial narratological elements. Ryan’s impressive work will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts beyond traditional narratology.” —Gerald J. Prince, author of Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative
Notă biografică
Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the author of Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media and coauthor, with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, of Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative.
Extras
In standard literary criticism, the notion of world has long been used in an informal way to describe the distinctive character of an author’s creative activity, the inner vision that manifests itself either in an individual text or in the author’s total production. There is a world of Proust, a world of Homer, or a world of Jane Austen. But as long as literary theory remained focused on the signifier, at the expense of the signified, this informal use of world could not gel into a theoretical concept. From New Criticism to deconstruction, the “textualist” critical movements inspired by the linguistic turn of the fifties and sixties were too focused on language, on écriture, to pay attention to the concept of world, but if they had done so, they would have conceived world as an infinite sum of meanings that could not be paraphrased (a favorite battle cry of New Criticism was indeed “The heresy of paraphrase”), and that could not be separated from the text. It follows from these positions that the text is the only mode of access to its world. And because textualism is reluctant to isolate a narrative level of meaning from the global textual world, it implicitly adhered to a strict formula: one text—one world—one story.
After the linguistic turn came the narrative turn of the eighties, and narrative or story became prominent. One of the effects of the narrative turn was a shift of attention that, without ignoring the signifier, restored the importance of the signified. While stories are transmitted by discourse, which means by text, they remain inscribed in our minds long after the signifiers have vanished from memory. This means that story is a cognitive rather than a linguistic construct. The fact that stories can be summarized, adapted, and translated, and that they can be told by various media, emancipates them from language and makes them somewhat independent from the particular signs through which they are transmitted. The structuralist idea that Cinderella and a Chinese folk tale could be versions of the same story, which was heretical for textualism (Smith 1981), becomes very acceptable for a narratologist. Instead of one text, one world, one story, one could now have the possibility of many texts—one world—one story, or, if one assumes that every different version of a story creates a distinct world, many texts, one story, many worlds.
The next step in this development is the emancipation of the concept of world from the concept of story. If we conceive world as a spatiotemporal environment made of a sum of existents that the story modifies through its constitutive events, then there is no reason to limit worlds to one story, because several distinct sequence of events can take place simultaneously or successively in the same environment. The phenomenon of transfictionality (Saint-Gelais 2011) demonstrates that existing storyworlds can be expanded through new stories. While transfictionality is arguably as old as fictional storytelling itself, contemporary culture, whether popular or highbrow, implements the full range of possible relationships between text, world, and story.
After the linguistic turn came the narrative turn of the eighties, and narrative or story became prominent. One of the effects of the narrative turn was a shift of attention that, without ignoring the signifier, restored the importance of the signified. While stories are transmitted by discourse, which means by text, they remain inscribed in our minds long after the signifiers have vanished from memory. This means that story is a cognitive rather than a linguistic construct. The fact that stories can be summarized, adapted, and translated, and that they can be told by various media, emancipates them from language and makes them somewhat independent from the particular signs through which they are transmitted. The structuralist idea that Cinderella and a Chinese folk tale could be versions of the same story, which was heretical for textualism (Smith 1981), becomes very acceptable for a narratologist. Instead of one text, one world, one story, one could now have the possibility of many texts—one world—one story, or, if one assumes that every different version of a story creates a distinct world, many texts, one story, many worlds.
The next step in this development is the emancipation of the concept of world from the concept of story. If we conceive world as a spatiotemporal environment made of a sum of existents that the story modifies through its constitutive events, then there is no reason to limit worlds to one story, because several distinct sequence of events can take place simultaneously or successively in the same environment. The phenomenon of transfictionality (Saint-Gelais 2011) demonstrates that existing storyworlds can be expanded through new stories. While transfictionality is arguably as old as fictional storytelling itself, contemporary culture, whether popular or highbrow, implements the full range of possible relationships between text, world, and story.
Cuprins
Introduction Grounding Narratology in the Concept of World Chapter 1 Truth: Discourse Types and Theories of Truth Chapter 2 Fiction: The Possible Worlds Approach to Fiction and Its Rival Theories Chapter 3 Narrator: Decomposing a Theoretical Primitive Chapter 4 Characters: Textual, Philosophical, and “World” Approaches to Character Ontology Chapter 5 Plot: Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design Chapter 6 Mimesis and Diegesis: Complementing Each Other Chapter 7 Parallel Worlds: Physics, Narrative, and the Multiverse Chapter 8 Impossible Worlds: Dealing with Logical Contradiction Chapter 9 Virtual Worlds: Narrative and VR Technology Chapter 10 Transmedia Worlds: Industry Buzzword or New Narrative Experience?
Descriere
Grounds narratology in the concept of world to propose an alternative to the rhetorical, feminist, unnatural, and cognitive approaches that currently dominate the field.