Basic Elements of Narrative E-Book

David Herman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 454

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Basic Elements of Narrative outlines a way of thinking about what narrative is and how to identify its basic elements across various media, introducing key concepts developed by previous theorists and contributing original ideas to the growing body of scholarship on stories. * Includes an overview of recent developments in narrative scholarship * Provides an accessible introduction to key concepts in the field * Views narrative as a cognitive structure, type of text, and resource for interpersonal communication * Uses examples from literature, face to face interaction, graphic novels, and film to explore the core features of narrative * Includes a glossary of key terms, full bibliography, and comprehensive index * Appropriate for multiple audiences, including students, non-specialists, and experts in the field

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

The Elements

1. Getting Started: A Thumbnail Sketch of the Approach

Toward a Working Definition of Narrative

Profiles of Narrative

Narrative: Basic Elements

2. Framing the Approach: Some Background and Context

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Narrative Theory

Major Trends in Recent Scholarship on Narrative

3. Back to the Elements: Narrative Occasions

Situating Stories

Sociolinguistic Approaches

Positioning Theory

The Narrative Communication Model

Conclusion

4. Temporality, Particularity, and Narrative: An Excursion into the Theory of Text Types

From Contexts of Narration to Narrative as a Type of Text

Text Types and Categorization Processes

Narrative as a Text-Type Category: Descriptions versus Stories versus Explanations

Coda: Text Types, Communicative Competence, and the Role of Stories in Science

5. The Third Element; or, How to Build a Storyworld

Narratives as Blueprints for Worldmaking

Narrative Ways of Worldmaking

Narrative Worlds: A Survey of Approaches

Configuring Narrative Worlds: The WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN Dimensions of Storyworlds

Worlds Disrupted: Narrativity and Noncanonical Events

6. The Nexus of Narrative and Mind

The Consciousness Factor

Consciousness across Narrative Genres

Experiencing Minds: What It’s Like, Qualia, Raw Feels

Storied Minds: Narrative Foundations of Consciousness?

Appendix

Literary Narrative: Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)

Narrative Told during Face-to-Face Communication:UFO or the Devil (2002)

Excerpted Panels from Ghost World (1997), a Graphic Novel by Daniel Clowes

Screenshots from Terry Zwigoff’s Film Version of Ghost World (2001)

Glossary

Notes

Index

This edition first published 2009 © 2009 David Herman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herman, David, 1962–Basic elements of narrative / by David Herman.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-4153-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4051-4154-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title.PN212.H46 2009 808—dc22

2008023250

For Susan, whose story is interwoven with mine

Preface

The Scope and Aims of This Book

This book outlines a way of thinking about what narrative is and how to identify its basic elements across the many communicative media in which stories are produced and interpreted, exchanged and transformed. Relevant storytelling media range from print texts, television, and spoken discourse in face-to-face interaction to comics and graphic novels, cinema, and computer-mediated environments such as e-mail, blogs, hypertext narratives, and interactive fiction. (I focus special attention here on face-to-face storytelling, print texts, graphic narratives that involve word–image combinations, and, to a lesser extent, film.) The book does not purport to offer an exhaustive survey of competing approaches to the problems of narrative study into which it delves from a specific, focused perspective. Yet that perspective, which I hope will prove relevant for creators of stories as well as narrative analysts, is itself a distillation of ideas developed by scholars working in quite disparate traditions within the field – and also in other, more or less closely neighboring fields. Thus, even as it makes its own case for how to characterize core features of narrative and cross-compare the way those features manifest themselves in various storytelling media, the book does provide a synoptic introduction to key ideas about narrative. In this sense, the book is designed both to whet the reader’s appetite for more details about the traditions of narrative scholarship in which my own study is grounded, and to provide a basis for assessing those traditions from the vantage-point developed here.

Chapter 1 gives a thumbnail sketch of the overall approach. In this opening chapter I suggest that narrative can be viewed under several profiles – as a cognitive structure or way of making sense of experience, as a type of text, and as a resource for communicative interaction – and I then use this multidimensionality of narrative as a basis for analyzing it into its fundamental elements. I specify four such elements, arguing that they will be realized in any particular narrative in a gradient, “more-or-less” fashion; hence these elements in effect constitute conditions for narrativity, or what makes a story (interpretable as) a story. After this initial synopsis of my overall argument, chapter 2 interrupts the exposition of the model to review some recent developments in the field of narrative inquiry, providing background and context for my approach. The remaining chapters of the book pick back up with the explication of the model outlined in chapter 1, zooming in on each of the four basic elements in turn. Chapter 3 focuses on the element of situatedness, or how stories are grounded in ( both shape and are shaped by) particular discourse contexts or occasions of telling, providing an overview of some the frameworks that have been developed for studying this aspect of narrative. Chapter 4, which is concerned with the second basic element, event sequencing, steps back from my primary case studies to examine the conceptual underpinnings of the claim that modes of representation can be more or less prototypically narrative, invoking the ideas of text types and text-type categories for this purpose. The chapter uses these ideas to highlight, first, the specific kind of causal-chronological structure that serves to distinguish stories from descriptions, and second, the concern with particularized events (rather than general patterns and trends) that sets stories apart from certain kinds of explanations.

Chapters 5 and 6 bring my main case studies back into the foreground to explore, respectively, the third and fourth elements: on the one hand, worldmaking/world disruption; on the other hand, how stories represent – and perhaps make it possible to experience – what it’s like to undergo events within a storyworld-in-flux. In chapter 5, I draw on Nelson Goodman’s suggestive idea of “ways of worldmaking” (Goodman 1978) to examine what is distinctive about the process by which people use spoken and written discourse, images, gestures, and other symbolic resources as blueprints for creating and updating storyworlds, or global mental models of the situations and events being recounted in a narrative. In chapter 6, I probe the story–mind interface from two different perspectives, discussing how the representation of experiencing minds constitutes a critical property of narrative but also how narrative might afford crucial scaffolding for conscious experience itself. Finally, the glossary at the end of the volume assembles some keywords for narrative study, as well as a list of foundational studies where more information about these keywords can be found.

As this summary suggests, there are multiple routes through the book, which has been designed to accommodate the background and interests of different kinds of readers. Rather than following the chapters in sequence, readers who are unfamiliar with the range of recent scholarship on narrative may wish to begin with chapter 2 to get their bearings within the field, next move back to the synopsis of the model in chapter 1, and then pick up with its further development in chapters 3 and following. Readers with more expertise in narrative theory, meanwhile, may wish to concentrate instead on my characterization of the basic elements of narrative. Alternatively, advanced readers may wish to focus their attention on specific chapters dealing with particular narrative elements.

Readers should also note that the Appendix contains narrative materials to which I frequently revert in my discussion. I provide context for and synopses of all these stories, and readers may wish to familiarize themselves with the illustrative narratives before moving on to the chapters in which they feature as my primary case studies (chapters 3, 5, and 6). Included in the Appendix are: (1) a reproduction of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 story “Hills Like White Elephants”; (2) the full transcript of a story originally told in face-to-face interaction and excerpted at various points in my discussion, namely, Monica’s telling of the narrative to which I have assigned the title UFO or the Devil (based on a phrase used by Monica as she launches her story); and (3) some pages ( sequences of panels) from Daniel Clowes’s 1997 graphic novel, Ghost World, along with (4) screenshots from Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 film adaptation of Clowes’s novel. Although I also discuss a range of other illustrative texts, I use these narratives as examples throughout my analysis in part to maintain a constant focus across chapters, facilitating exploration of the constraints and affordances of various storytelling media, and in part to make the book appropriate as a standalone teaching text, complete with its own small corpus of stories. However, the model presented here is of course meant to be extensible, and those using the book in classroom settings may wish to test its possibilities and limitations by examining other narrative case studies.

Storytelling Media and Modes of Narration

At several points in my discussion (e.g., the previous paragraph) I use the term storytelling media to refer, in general terms, to the various semi-otic environments in which narrative practices can be conducted (see also Ryan 2004). But not all storytelling media are created equal. Some afford multiple communicative channels that can be exploited by a given narrative to evoke a storyworld, whereas others afford only a single channel when it comes to designing blueprints for storyworlds. Thus, as a print narrative with only a verbal information track, Hemingway’s “Hills” can be characterized as monomodal. By contrast, the graphic-novel version of Ghost World, though also a print text, engages in multimodal narration, since the novel exploits both a verbal and a visual information track to engage in narrative ways of worldmaking. Zwigoff’s film adaptation of Ghost World is likewise multimodal, though what were originally word–image combinations are now remediated by way of two different semiotic channels, namely, the filmed image-track and the audiorecorded sound-track.

Meanwhile, in its original context of telling UFO or the Devil also involved multimodal narration, since Monica recounted her and Renee’s experiences with the big ball using not only the expressive resources of spoken discourse but also (one can infer) the further information track provided by gestures. Thus, in line 5 of the transcribed version of the story, the analyst can hypothesize that pointing gestures accompanied Monica’s use of the demonstrative pronoun in this↑way as well as her subsequent reference to a vector of motion within her and her inter-locutors’ current field of vision: comin up through here (see the Appendix for the full transcript). But my hedges in this context (“one can infer,” “the analyst can hypothesize that”) are themselves pertinent to the topic under discussion, since they underscore that Monica’s original narrative performance is unavailable for analysis in its own right. Instead there is an audiorecording that itself translates the narrative into a different medium – as an act of storytelling that exploits only the channel of spoken discourse. And then my transcript re-translates this remediation into the medium of print! In other words, audiorecording a face-to-face storytelling situation recasts a complex, multi-channel communicative process as monomodal narration, and the act of transcription in turn creates a differently monomodal artifact. The converse situation holds when a print narrative is adapted as a movie; in that case, single-channel, monomodal narration is translated into multimodal storytelling.1

These considerations suggest the relevance of the distinction that theorists such as Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) and Jewitt (2006) draw between modes and media. In their work, modes are semiotic channels (better, environments) that can be viewed as a resources for the design of a representation formulated within a particular type of discourse, which is in turn embedded in a specific kind of communicative interaction. By contrast, media can be viewed as means for the dissemination or production of what has been designed in a given mode; thus media “are the material resources used in the production of semiotic products and events, including both the tools and the materials used” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001: 22). This distinction between modes and media captures the intuition that, as is the case with UFO or the Devil, a text or discourse can be designed in one kind of environment (e.g., face-to-face communication) but distributed or produced in another (e.g., as an audiorecording or a printed transcript). In short, not only do different storytelling media afford different modes of narration (cf. Herman 2004) but what is more, a variety of media can come into play during the process of transmitting, transcribing, and archiving stories, with consequences that need to be explored more fully by narrative analysts.

Acknowledgments

I taught Ghost World in two recent classes at Ohio State University, and I wish to acknowledge, first, some of the students whose insightful comments helped me better understand the range of Clowes’s references and the importance of his achievement, as well as the complex relationship between the graphic-novel and film versions of his narrative. My special thanks go to Josh Steskal, Carrie Waibel, John Nees, Pat Carr, and Aaron Seddon. Further, I wish to acknowledge here just a few of the many other people who have helped me sharpen the arguments presented in this study, rethink the broader context of my approach, or simply maintain the conviction that I should keep working on the book until I could finish it: Porter Abbott, Jan Alber, Anita Albertsen, Jens Brockmeier, Apostolos Doxiadis, Monika Fludernik, Jared Gardner, Richard Gerrig, Per Krogh Hansen, Dan Hutto, Matti Hyvärinen, Brian Joseph, Anne Langendorfer, Barry Mazur, Paul McCormick, Brian McHale, Chris Meister, Sean O’Sullivan, Ruth Page, Bo Pettersson, Jim Phelan, Arkady Plotnitsky, Peter Rabinowitz, Andrew Salway, Debby Schiffrin, Ulrich Schnauss, Roy Sommer, Meir Sternberg, and Michael Toolan. I am also extremely grateful for the comments and criticisms offered by the anonymous reviewer, whose detailed report saved me from a number of errors and infelicities, helped me clarify several of my key claims, and more generally improved the overall quality of this book. At the press, I am grateful to Emma Bennett, Hannah Morrell, Louise Butler, and Janet Moth for their patience, professionalism, and dedication to making this the best book possible. I also thank Ohio State University’s College of Humanities for the publication subvention that helped defray the cost of reprinting some of the material included in the Appendix.

I had support from other sources as well: the Lake View Trail at Prairie Oaks Park; the incredible shapeshifts of cloud and sun in the skies over Madison County, Ohio; and the sustaining power of narrative itself, the multitude of stories from which our lives are woven. But I am most grateful for the loving support of Susan Moss, whose Four Seasons lettuce, Chioggia beets, Sungold tomatoes, and Atomic Red carrots are basic elements of our own evolving story.

In some of the chapters of this book I have drawn on material published in other contexts, and though all this material has since been substantially revised, I am grateful for permission to use it here:

“Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early Developments.” In J. Phelan and P. Rabinowitz (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (pp. 19–35). Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Reprinted by permission.

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman. Excerpts totaling approx. 12–13 pages, taken from pp. 3–21, “Introduction,” by David Herman. Copyright 2007 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.

“Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind: Cognitive Narratology, Discursive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction.” Copyright 2007 The Ohio State University. Originally appeared in Narrative 15(3) (2007), pp. 306–34. Reprinted by permission.

“Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance.” Partial Answers 6(2) (2008), pp. 233–60. Copyright 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission.

“Description, Narrative, and Explanation: Text-Type Categories and the Cognitive Foundations of Discourse Competence.” Poetics Today 29(3). Copyright 2008 the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. Publisher Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission.

“Narrative Theory after the Second Cognitive Revolution.” In Lisa Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Copyright 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is reprinted in its entirety, in the Appendix, by permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Pages 21, 26, 35, and 38 of Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 1997) (sequences A–D in the Appendix) are reprinted by permission of Fantagraphic Books.

Screenshots 1–7 from Terry Zwigoff’s film adaptation of Ghost World © 2001 MGM.

The Elements

A prototypical narrative can be characterized as:

(i)A representation that is situated in – must be interpreted in light of – a specific discourse context or occasion for telling.

(ii)The representation, furthermore, cues interpreters to draw inferences about a structured time-course of particularized events.

(iii)In turn, these events are such that they introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving human or human-like agents, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc.

(iv)The representation also conveys the experience of living through this storyworld-influx, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue. Thus – with one important proviso – it can be argued that narrative is centrally concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers of mind to refer to the sense of “what it is like” for someone or something to have a particular experience. The proviso is that recent research on narrative bears importantly on debates concerning the nature of consciousness itself.

For convenience of exposition, I abbreviate these elements as (i) situatedness, (ii) event sequencing, (iii) worldmaking/world disruption, and (iv)what it’s like.

1

Getting Started

A Thumbnail Sketch of the Approach

Toward a Working Definition of Narrative

The overall aim of this book is to sketch an account of some of the distinctive properties of narrative. At a minimum, stories concern temporal sequences – situations and events unfolding in time. But not all representations of sequences of events are designed to serve a storytelling purpose, as we know from recipes, scientific explanations of plant physiology, and other genres of discourse. What else is required for a representation of events unfolding in time to be used or interpreted as a narrative? This book develops strategies for addressing that question, and the present chapter provides a thumbnail sketch of my approach. The next chapter then situates the approach in the context of the growing body of research on stories and storytelling, while the remaining chapters provide a more detailed description of the model presented in synoptic form here.

One of the main goals of this book is to develop an account of what stories are and how they work by analyzing narrative into its basic elements, thereby differentiating between storytelling and other modes of representation. Here at the outset, it may be helpful to provide an orienting statement of features that I take to be characteristic of narrative.1 A relatively coarse-grained version of the working definition of narrative on which I will rely in this study, and that I spell out in more detail as I proceed, runs as follows: rather than focusing on general, abstract situations or trends, stories are accounts of what happened to particular people2 – and of what it was like for them to experience what happened – in particular circumstances and with specific consequences. Narrative, in other words, is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change – a strategy that contrasts with, but is in no way inferior to, “scientific” modes of explanation that characterize phenomena as instances of general covering laws. Science explains the atmospheric processes that (all other things being equal) account for when precipitation will take the form of snow rather than rain; but it takes a story to convey what it was like to walk along a park trail in fresh-fallen snow as afternoon turned to evening in the late autumn of 2007.