Basic Elements of Narrative

The Author David Herman teaches in the Department of English at Ohio State University, where he co-founded Project Narrative, a new interdisciplinary initiative designed to promote stateof-the-art research and teaching in the area of narrative studies. He is editor of the Frontiers of Narrative book series and also the new journal Storyworlds, both published by the University of Nebraska Press. Having published many research articles on aspects of narrative, he is the author, editor, or coeditor of eight books in the field, including Universal Grammar and Narrative Form (1995), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Theory (1999), Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (2002), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (coedited with Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 2005), and The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (2007).

• Preface ixAcknowledgments xivThe Elements xvi1 Getting Started: A Thumbnail Sketch of the Approach 1Toward a Working Definition of Narrative 1Profiles of Narrative 7Narrative: Basic Elements 92 Framing the Approach: Some Background and Context 23Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Narrative Theory 23Major Trends in Recent Scholarship on Narrative 263 Back to the Elements: Narrative Occasions 37Situating Stories 37Sociolinguistic Approaches 40Positioning Theory 55The Narrative Communication Model 63Conclusion 744 Temporality, Particularity, and Narrative: An Excursion into the Theory of Text Types 75From Contexts of Narration to Narrative as a Type of Text 75Text Types and Categorization Processes 79Narrative as a Text-Type Category: Descriptions versus Stories versus Explanations 89Coda: Text Types, Communicative Competence, and the Role of Stories in Science 1005 The Third Element; or, How to Build a Storyworld 105Narratives as Blueprints for Worldmaking 105Narrative Ways of Worldmaking 108Narrative Worlds: A Survey of Approaches 118Configuring Narrative Worlds: The WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN Dimensions of Storyworlds 128Worlds Disrupted: Narrativity and Noncanonical Events 1336 The Nexus of Narrative and Mind 137The Consciousness Factor 137Consciousness across Narrative Genres 139Experiencing Minds: What It’s Like, Qualia, Raw Feels 143Storied Minds: Narrative Foundations of Consciousness? 153Appendix 161Literary Narrative: Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) 161Narrative Told during Face-to-Face Communication: UFO or the Devil (2002) 166Excerpted Panels from Ghost World (1997), a Graphic Novel by Daniel Clowes 173Screenshots from Terry Zwigoff’s Film Version of Ghost World (2001) 178Glossary 180Notes 195References 215Index 235

"This book has some very valuable pieces of narrative wisdom that would be useful to scholars in narrative theory, literary analysis and sociolinguistics...It is, however, a complete and solid companion for those con­cerned with the important task of further developing the field of narrative inquiry." (Discourse Studies, December 2010) "In Basic Elements of Narrative the eminent narratologist David Herman offers new ideas about what narrative is . . .The interdisciplinary nature of this chicken-and-egg question-whether narratives represent what it's like to live in our world or we learn from narratives what it's like to live in our world-serves as an excellent indication of the breadth of the audience for which Herman's book will be thought-provoking." (Papers on Language and Literature, 2010)