Ova knjiga je jedan vrlo fin uvod u pri膷u o narativima i naratolo拧kom pristupu prou膷avanju knji啪evnosti. Jednostavno, lako se 膷ita, vi拧e usmjereno ka primjerima iz knji啪evnosti i filma, manje pa啪nje posve膰eno nizanju definicija i nekom strogom poja拧njavanja pojmova. Jedna od boljih stvari: odli膷ni spiskovi primarnih i sekundarnih izvora na kraju svakog poglavlja.
"chapter one: narrative and life" "chapter two: defining narrative" "chapter three: the borders of narrative" "chapter four: the rhetoric of narrative" "chapter five: closure" "chapter six: narrative" "chapter seven: interpretation" "chapter eight: three ways to interpret narrative" "chapter ten: character and self in narrative"
If anyone could give me a clue about why half of the reviews for this are in Persian, that'd be great.
A functional introduction to the topic, assuming next to no knowledge from the reader. That necessarily means there's a great deal of "no duh" material, but it is nice to read academic writing that isn't slathered in dubiously necessary jargon and 10 layers of "theory". Clearly intended to be excerpted for undergrad courses, and parts of it could even be used in high school classes.
On nearly every page are subtitled paragraphs with a dark background that present other perspectives, points of ambiguity, controversy, or complete disagreement with the main text, functioning as large-scale parentheticals. Each chapter ends with two sections, one on more advanced and specific academic books, and one on primary sources, works of fiction/autobiography/history/etc. especially relevant to the chapter. These are not merely lists but compact summaries and recommendations. There is a detailed glossary which also functions as a topical index, along with a regular index and bibliography.
A wide array of topics are covered, necessarily briefly, including the definitions of narrative, the difference between story and plot/narrative discourse (aka histore and r茅cit or fabula and sjuzet depending on which foreign language you want to unnecessarily loanword in concepts that already exist in English), the outer limits of narrative, rhetoric, conflict and closure, characters, narration, narrative gaps, themes and motifs, the relation between truth and fiction, problems of adaptation, and more.
The final few chapters are closer to straight essays, with a chapter on competing narratives structured around the trial of Lizzie Borden, one on interpretation contrasting the views of Aristotle, Freud, Propp and L茅vi-Strauss on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and one on the question of the necessity of narrative closure via an analysis of the early talkie The Jazz Singer, the filmed version of which has a different ending than the script, complicating the amount and kind of closure offered by the ending. While none of these essays are bad, they don't have the machinegun pace of the earlier chapters, which mostly relied on toy examples or short excerpts from the usual suspects like Flaubert/Tolstoy/Beckett, and rarely presented a sustained argument.
Some lip service is paid to non-textual and non-theatrical stories like movies, comics, and paintings, and when discussing plays it usually dwells on plays as performances that are watched rather than plays as texts that are read.
Chapter three, "The Borders of Narrative", was the most interesting to me, covering frame stories, paratexts, hypertexts, role-playing games, MMOs, and games of sport. This chapter caused much musing about what the fuck Homestuck is, which after many years now causes a minimum of psychic damage. Its usage of in-story retconning changing the real-life comic itself probably warranted at least a mention, but I suppose it'll be many years before we have academics both young enough to have read it and old enough to admit to it. The discussion on tabletop RPGs questions to what extent their sessions can be considered stories, and the points raised apply about equally to improv theatre.
A brief discussion of Batman as being a transmedial narrative, having made its point of origin irrelevant, and now spreads itself through a distributed mixture of media (movies, games, tv shows, comics) was intriguing.
How stories鈥攁ll kinds of stories鈥攚ork, explained clearly in terms that do not require a graduate degree in linguistics . . . with digressions into more technical areas for those who are interested. Highly recommended for fiction lovers who would like to look 'under the hood' and learn more about how narrative works.
It's my first full read of a text on the subject and was included in a list of recommended readings for my first English subject in a Bachelor of Arts program.
Abbott's text helps you start on the right foot in interpreting narrative as it's easy to understand and provides relatable or commonly read texts as examples.
I'll definitely be referring back to it many times over the next semester.
Good read. Abbott鈥檚 strength is leveraging myriad examples of narratives that make the points come to life. Since narratives are 鈥渢he principal way鈥� in which we understand time, and that often times we cannot even understand the world 鈥渦ntil it鈥檚 out in a narrative mode,鈥� Abbott does the subject remarkable justice.
Jasno i pregledno sa dobrim primjerima. Vrlo je korisna i namijenjena je svim prou膷avaocima knji啪evnosti, a ne samo naratolozima kako ponegdje isti膷u. Ranije sam je 膷itala i koristila u dijelovima pa tek sad vidim kako je u cjelini dobro i pametno organizovana.
I read this for my college Foundations of Literary Analysis class. We read this side by side with Critical Terms for Literary Study by Frank Lentricchia. This book was informative and for an english textbook wasn't too torturous to read. Chapters were broken up to make it easier to keep track of vocabulary and chronology of concepts. One thing I really liked about this textbook is that it was helpful for my learning in the class and was a good guide for me to keep track of everything we went over in the course. The book we read with this book, Critical Terms for Literary Study, has a lot of the same concepts, but was basically the vocabulary that was described and applied in the Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, but those same vocabulary words were each divided into their own separate essays in Critical Terms for Literary Study, basically taking 20 pages to define a single word whereas in Cambridge Introduction to Narrative the vocabulary words were clearly and concisely defined with brief paragraphs, making it easier to memorize. All in all, this textbook isn't too bad for required reading in an english class. I would recommend this book long before Critical Terms for Literary Study.