阿波特 劍橋敘事學導論 英文版

1、h. porter abbottthe cambridge introduction tonarrativecambridge university press 2002the cambridge introduction to narrative is designed to help readers understand what narrative is, how it is constructed, how it acts upon us, how we act upon it, how it is transmitted, and how it changes when the me

2、dium or the cultural context change. porter abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in the arts but everywhere in the ordinary course of peoples lives. abbott grounds his treatment of narrative by introducing it as a human phenomenon that is not restricted to literature, film, and theatre

3、, but is found in all activities that involve the representation of events in time. at the same time, he honors the fact that out of this common capability have come rich and meaningful narratives that we come back to and reflect on repeatedly in our lives. an indispensable tool for students and tea

4、chers alike, this book will guide readers through the fundamental aspects of narrative.h. porter abbott is professor in the department of english at the university of california, santa barbara. he is the author of the fiction of samuel beckett: form and effect, diary fiction: writing as action, beck

5、ett writing beckett: the author in the autograph, and editor of on the origin of fictions: interdisciplinary perspectives, a special issue of the journal substance.published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridgethe pitt building, trumpington street, cambridge, united kingdomcambridge

6、 university pressthe edinburgh building, cambridge cb2 2ru, uk40 west 20th street, new york ny 10011-4211, usa477 williamstown road, port melbourne, vic 3207, australiaruiz de alarcon 13, 28014 madrid, spaindock house, the waterfront, cape town 8001, south africafor jason and

7、byram cambridge university press 2002this book is in copyright. subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of cambridge university press.first published 2002 reprinted 200

8、3 (twice)printed in the united kingdom at the university press, cambridgetypeface bembo 11/12.5 pt. system latex2fi tb1a catalogue record for this book is available from the british library.isbn 0 521 65033 x hardback isbn 0 521 65969 8 paperbackcontentslist of illustrations preface acknowledgmentsc

9、hapter 1 narrative and life1the universality of narrative 1 narrative and time 3 narrative perception 6chapter 2 defining narrative 12the bare minimum 12 story and narrative discourse 14 the mediation (construction) of story constituent and supplementary events narrativity 22chapter 3 the borders of

10、 narrative 25framing narratives 25 paratexts 26the outer limits of narrative 27 is it narrative or is it life itself? 31chapter 4 the rhetoric of narrative 36the rhetoric of narrative 36 causation 37 normalization 40 masterplots 42 narrative rhetoric at work 46chapter 5 closure 51conflict: the agon

11、51closure and endings 52closure, suspense, and surprise 53closure at the level of expectations 54closure at the level of questions 56the absence of closure 57chapter 6 narration 62a few words on interpretation 62the narrator 63voice 64focalization 66distance 67reliability 69free indirect style 70nar

12、ration on stage and screen 72chapter 7 interpreting narrative 76the implied author 77underreading 79overreading 82gaps 83cruxes 85repetition: themes and motifs 88chapter 8 three ways to interpret narrativethe question of wholeness in narrative 93 intentional readings 95 symptomatic readings 97 adapt

13、ive readings 100chapter 9 adaptation across media 105adaptation as creative destruction 105 duration and pace 107 character 109 figurative language 111gaps 114 focalization 115 constraints of the marketplace 118chapter 10 character and self in narracharacter vs. action 123flat and round characters 1

14、26can characters be real? 127types 129autobiography 131life writing as performative 134chapter 11narrative contestationa contest of narratives 138 a narrative lattice-work 142 shadow stories 144 motivation and personality 146 masterplots and types 148 revising cultural masterplots 150 battling narra

15、tives are everywherechapter 12 narrative negotiationnarrative negotiation 157 critical reading as narrative negotiation closure, one more time 168 the end of closure? 171notes 176bibliography 183glossary and topical index 187index of authors and narratives 198prefacethe purpose of this book is to he

16、lp readers understand what narrative is, how it is constructed, how it acts upon us, how we act upon it, how it is transmitted, how it changes when the medium or the cultural context changes, and how it is found not just in the arts but everywhere in the ordinary course of peoples lives, many times

17、a day. this last point is especially important. we are all narrators, though we may rarely be aware of it. a statement as simple as i took the car to work qualifies as narrative. as we seek to communicate more detail about events in time, we become involved in increasingly complex acts of narration.

18、 we are also the constant recipients of narrative: from newspapers and television, from books and films, and from friends and relatives telling us, among other things, that they took the car to work. therefore, though much of this book is devoted to narrative in literature, film, and drama, it groun

19、ds its treatment of narrative by introducing it as a human phenomenon that is not restricted to literature, film, and theater, but is found in all activities that involve the representation of events in time. in its early chapters, the book moves back and forth between the arts and the everyday. at

20、the same time, the book honors the fact that out of this common capability have come rich and meaningful narratives that we come back to and reflect on repeatedly m our lives.this book is descriptive rather than prescriptive; it seeks to describe what happens when we encounter narrative, rather than

21、 to prescribe what should happen. all along the way questions arise that are very much alive in current work on narrative. these are often tough issues, and, with a few important exceptions (as for example the definition of narrative that i employ), i try to keep these issues open. in organization,

22、the book introduces the subject of narrative by moving outward from simplicity to complexity, from the component parts of narrative in chapters two and three to its numerous effects, including its extraordinary rhetorical power and the importance of the concept of closure, in chapters four and five.

23、 chapter six deals with narration and the key role of the narrator.chapters seven and eight, in taking up issues connected with the interpretation of narrative, shift the focus from the power of narrative to the power of readers and audiences. in this sense, narrative is always a two-way street. wit

24、hout our collaboration, there is no narrative to begin with. and if it is true that we allow ourselves to be manipulated by narrative, it is also true that we do manipulating of our own. these chapters take up this interplay of audiences and narratives in the process of interpretation and culminate

25、in chapter eights treatment of three fundamentally different ways of reading that we all engage in: intentional, symptomatic, and adaptive. the differences between them are important and bring in their wake different understandings of what we mean by meaning in narrative.chapter nine turns to the di

26、fferences that different media make in narrative and to what happens when you move a story from one medium to narrate it in another. chapter ten opens out the subject of character, both as a function of narrative and as intimately connected with what we loosely call the self in autobiography. in the

27、 final two chapters, we return to the broad subject of narratives role in culture and society. much of politics and the law is a contest of narratives. chapter eleven looks at the ways in which these conflicts of narrative play out, particularly in the law. and in chapter twelve, i look at the ways

28、in which narrative can also be an instrument by which storytellers and readers seek to negotiate the claims of competing and often intractable conflicts. stories, for example, that are told over and over again (cultural masterplots) are often efforts to settle conflicts which are deeply embedded in

29、a culture.in this book, i have endeavored to avoid writing another anatomy of narrative, of which there are fine examples available in print (genette, 1980; prince, 1987). instead, i have sought at all times to restrict focus to the most useful concepts and terminology. the field of narratology has

30、produced a great arsenal of distinctions and terms. i have kept my selection of these to a minimum, using only those that are indispensable. these key terms will be found throughout the book and are featured in boldface in the glossary. as such, this is a foundational book. the tools and distinction

31、s it supplies can be employed across the whole range of nameable interpretive approaches.nonetheless, by selecting the terms i do and by treating them the way i do, i have written a study that is bound to be controversial. the simple reason for this is that all studies of narrative are controversial

32、. despite a burst of energetic and highly intelligent research over the last thirty years and the genuine progress that has been made, there is not yet a consensus on any of the key issues in the study of narrative. if, like language, narrative is an inevitable human capability that we deploy every

33、day without conscious effort, it is also, like language, a complex and fascinating field that often seems to defy our best analytical efforts at exactitude. therefore, and above all else, i have aimed at clarity in this introduction to narrative. i have also been highly selective in recommending, at

34、 the ends of chapters two through twelve, secondary texts that seem at this date to have stood the test of time (though for some areas, like hypertext narrative, the works have only barely been tested). at the same time, it is important to acknowledge here the assistance i have received from the wor

35、k on narrative by many brilliant scholars, among them: m. m. bakhtin, mieke bal, ann banfield, roland barthes, emile benveniste, wayne booth, david bordwell, edward branigan, claude bremond, peter brooks, ross chambers, seymour chatman, dorrit cohn, jonathan culler, jacques derrida, umberto eco, mon

36、ika fludernik, gerard genette, a. j. greimas, david herman, paul hernadi, wolfgang iser, roman jakobson, fredric jameson, robert kellogg, frank kermode, george p. landow, claude levi-strauss, wallace martin, scott mccloud, j. hillis miller, bill nichols, roy pascal, gerald prince, vladimir propp, pe

37、ter j. rabinowitz, eric rabkin, david richter, paul ricoeur, brian richardson, robert scholes, shlomith rimmon-kenan, marie-laure ryan, saint augustine, victor shklovsky, franz stanzel, tzvetan todorov, boris tomashevsky, hayden white, and trevor whittock.i want to give special thanks for hands-on a

38、ssistance to josie dixon who caught on to the idea of this book right away and never failed in her encouragement. her successor at cambridge university press, ray ryan, together with rachel de wachter, gave helpful guidance during the later stages. derek attridge read at least two versions of the ma

39、nuscript for cambridge and made some sharp suggestions which i incorporated. fiona goodchild, jon robert pearce, paul hernadi, and anita abbott all read it through (the latter more than once!). i am thankful to them for their many shrewd and helpful comments. to my teaching assistants and many stude

40、nts over the years in a course called the art of narrative, i send my thanks for their ability and (more important) their willingness to pose wonderful questions i never would have thought to ask. finally, thanks are long overdue to my former colleague hugh kenner, whose ability to make revelatory c

41、onnections, and to do so with an efficiency that always surprises, is to my mind unsurpassed.acknowledgmentsthe author and publisher are grateful for permission to quote from the following texts.a common confusion, by franz kafka, from willa and edwin muir (trans.), the great wall of china, copyrigh

42、t 1936, 1937 by heinr. mercy sohn, prague. copyright 1946 and renewed 1974 by shocken books, inc. reprinted by permission of schocken books, distributed by pantheon books, a division of random house, inc.bedtime story, by jeffrey whitmore reprinted with permission from the worlds shortest stories ed

43、ited by steve moss, copyright 1998, 1995 by steve moss, published by running press, philadelphia and london.taboo, by enrique anderson ibert, from isabel reade (trans.), the other side of the mirror, copyright 1966 by southern illinois university press.chapter 1narrative and lifethe universality of

44、narrativewhen we think of narrative, we usually think of it as art, however modest. we think of it as novels or sagas or folk tales or, at the least, as anecdotes. we speak of a gift for telling stories. but as true as it is that narrative can be an art and that art thrives on narrative, narrative i

45、s also something we all engage in, artists and non-artists alike. we make narratives many times a day, every day of our lives. and we start doing so almost from the moment we begin putting words together. as soon as we follow a subject with a verb, there is a good chance we are engaged in narrative

46、discourse. i fell down, the child cries, and in the process tells her mother a little narrative, just as i have told in this still unfinished sentence a different, somewhat longer narrative that includes the action of the childs telling ( i fell down, the child cries).given the presence of narrative

47、 in almost all human discourse, there is little wonder that there are theorists who place it next to language itself as the distinctive human trait. fredric jameson, for example, writes about the all-informing process of narrative which he describes as the central function or instance of the human m

48、ind. jean-francois lyotard calls narration the quintessential form of customary knowledge. whether or not such assertions stand up under scrutiny, it is still the case that we engage in narrative so often and with such unconscious ease that the gift for it would seem to be everyones birthright. perh

49、aps the fullest statement regarding the universality of narrative among humans is the opening to roland barthess landmark essay on narrative (1966). it is worth quoting at length:the narratives of the world are numberless. narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves di

50、stributed amongst different substances - as though any material were fit to receive mans stories. able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novel

51、la, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of carpaccios saint ursula), stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with

52、the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. all classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. caring nothing for the division between good and bad lit

53、erature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.3barthes is right. there are, of course, narrative genres (literary kinds) -the novel, the epic poem, the short story, the saga, the tragedy, the comedy, the farce, the ballad, the western, and

54、so on - in which narrative provides the overall structure. we call them narratives and expect them to tell a story. but if you look at any of the so-called non-narrative genres, like, say, the lyric poem, which is frequently featured as pre-eminently a static form -that is, dominated not by a story

55、line but by a single feeling - you will still find narrative. drink to me, onely, with thine eyes, wrote ben jonson in the first line of his song: to celia, and already we have a micro-narrative brewing - look at me - overlaid by another micro-narrative which acts as a metaphor - drink to me.drink t

56、o me, onely, with thine eyes,and i will pledge with mine; or leave a kisse but in the cup,and he not looke for wine. the thirst, that from the soule doth rise,doth aske a drinke divine: but might i of joves nectar sup,i would not change for thine. i sent thee, late, a rosie wreath,not so much honoring thee, as giving it a hope, that thereit could not withered bee. but thou thereon didst onely breath,and sentst it backe to mee: since when it growes, and smells, i sweare,not of itself, but thee.here you have a poem dedicated to the expression of a powerful