Narrative Theory

Kent Puckett is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2008) and War Pictures: Cinema, History, and Violence in Britain, 1939–1945 (forthcoming).

• 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.

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