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This book addresses itself to the concept of the implied author, which has been the cause of controversy in cultural studies for some fifty years. The opening chapters examine the introduction of the concept in Wayne C. Booth’s “Rhetoric of Fiction” and the discussion of the concept in narratology and in the theory and practice of interpretation. The final chapter develops proposals for clarifying or replacing the concept.
Taking as its point of departure Nelson Goodman’s theory of symbol systems as delineated in his seminal book “Ways of Worldmaking”, this volume gauges the possibilities and perspectives offered by the worldmaking approach as a model for the study of culture. Its main objectives are to explore the usefulness and scope of the approach for the study of culture and to supplement Goodman’s philosophy of worldmaking with a number of complementary disciplinary perspectives, literary and cultural approaches, and new questions and applications. It focuses on three key issues or concepts which illuminate ways of worldmaking and their interdisciplinary relevance and ramifications, viz. (1) theoretical approaches to ways of worldmaking, (2) the impact of media on ways of worldmaking, and (3) narratives as ways of worldmaking. The volume serves to demonstrate how specific media and narratives affect the worlds that are created, and shows how these worlds are established as socially relevant. It also illustrates the extent to which ways of worldmaking are imbued with cultural values, and thus inevitably implicated in power relations.
Current Trends in Narratology offers an overview of cutting-edge approaches to theories of storytelling. The introduction details how new emphases on cognitive processing, non-prose and multimedia narratives, and interdisciplinary approaches to narratology have altered how narration, narrative, and narrativity are understood. The volume also introduces a third post-classical direction of research ‐ comparative narratology ‐ and describes how developments in Germany, Israel, and France may be compared with Anglophone research. Leading international scholars including Monika Fludernik, Richard Gerrig, Ansgar Nünning, John Pier, Brian Richardson, Alan Palmer, and Werner Wolf describe not only their newest research but also how this work dovetails with larger narratological developments.
"Storyworlds," mental models of context and environment within which characters function, is a concept used to describe what happens in narrative. Narratologists agree that the concept of storyworlds best captures the ecology of narrative interpretation by allowing a fuller appreciation of the organization of both space and time, by recognizing reading as a process that encourages readers to compare the world of a text to other possible worlds, and by highlighting the power of narrative to immerse readers in new and unfamiliar environments. Focusing on the work of writers from Trinidad and Nigeria, such as Sam Selvon and Ben Okri, The Storyworld Accord investigates and compares the storyworl...
Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict discusses the dynamics of change and transformation that underlie the troubled project of modernity and shows how deeply it has been shaped by war and violence. The narrative of war, the emplotment of violence in historic and mainly in symbolic terms, is deeply embedded in the construction of individual and collective memories, but it also helps to shape the mediation of future conflicts.What is ultimately at stake here is the complex figuration and mediation of the violence of war in ever more hyper-mediated ways with direct consequences to the production of identities and processes of cultural memory.
"Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives interrogates the multimodal relationship between fictionality and factuality. The contemporary discussion about fictionality coincides with an increase in anxiety regarding the categories of fact and fiction in popular culture and global media. Today's media-saturated historical moment and political climate give a sense of urgency to the concept of fictionality, distinct from fiction, specifically in relation to modes and media of discourse. Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons explicitly interrogate the relationship of fictionality with multimodal strategies of narrative construction in the present media ecology. Contributors consider the ways narrative structures, their reception, and their theoretical frameworks in narratology are influenced and changed by media composition-particularly new media. By accounting for the relationship of multimodal composition with the ontological complexity of narrative worlds, Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives fills a critical gap in contemporary narratology-the discipline that has, to date, contributed most to the conceptualization of fictionality"--
This book explores the central fictional minds in three of Ian McEwan's most popular narratives. Mind presentation constitutes the main part of characterization in the second phase of McEwan's writing, where his plot structure depends to a large degree on the presentation of the characters’ mental workings. In Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2003), and On Chesil Beach (2007), the construction process of the fictional minds, the degree their functioning is impacted by their experiences, and the way their mental aspect controls their behavior and relationships is critical to the stories. Relying on insights and methods from cognitive narratology, this study follows two purposes: It firstly anal...
The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium is a book of sixteen pieces of scholarly critique on recent Indian novels written in the English language; some on specific literary trends in fictional writing and others on individual texts published in the twenty-first century by contemporary Indian novelists such as Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, K. N. Daruwalla, Upamanyu Chatterjee, David Davidar, Esterine Kire Iralu, Siddharth Chowdhury and Chetan Bhagat. The volume focuses closely on the defining features of the different emerging forms of the Indian English novel, such as narratives of female subjectivity, crime fiction, terror novels, science fiction, campus novels, animal no...
This volume offers a selection of revised versions of the papers presented at the 7th International IDEA Conference held at Pamukkale University in Denizli, Turkey, organised by the Association of English Language and Literary Studies in Turkey. The contributions to this book offer a wide range of research from scholars on a variety of topics in English literature, including Shakespearean studies, Victorian, colonial, and postcolonial literature, poetry, and drama studies. The volume also includes a number of informative research articles on comparative and translation studies which will offer assistance to young scholars in their academic studies. In addition to acting as a guide to young academics, the book will also function as a fruitful reference book in a wide range of English literary studies.
This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.