Narratives

30 Dec 2000 21:11

---

A pretentious word for "stories" — akin to calling movies you like "cinema" — but one we seem stuck with. (Who thought to translate grand recit as "meta-narrative", and are they beyond justice?) How important are they actually to the way we think? Are there any invariants in human stories, or (not quite the same thing) constraints they all must follow? What would non-human stories look like? (I've read Joseph Campbell on such matters and find him profoundly unconvincing; the continental incomprehensibles even more so. But William Calvin, Daniel Dennett and Joan Didion are not voices to be lightly brushed aside...)

Sometimes groups seem to organize themselves around particular stories ("narrative communities"). What are the social and cognitive mechanisms? Are the stories really important to the process? What kinds of stories make good rallying-points? What makes a story spread? Does it matter how the story spreads?

See also: Epics and Oral Poetry; Linguistics; Literary Criticism; Myths; Novels; The Thousand and One Nights

See:
• J. M. Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology [Full text free online]
• Marissa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response [Experimental cognitive psychology applied to evaluate conjectural theories of narrative. Extremely impressive.]
• William Calvin, The Cerebral Symphony [Especially chs. 3, 4 and 12.]
• Daniel Dennett
  • Consciousness Explained
  • "Producing Future by Telling Stories" (in Brainchildren)
• Joan Didion, The White Album [see esp. the title essay. Also many of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and After Henry. --- These are now all collected in the aptly-titled We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live.]
• Catherine Emmott, Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Approach
• Albert Lords, The Singer of Tales
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Models for a Literary Theory [Discussion at tedious length]
• Roger Schank, Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory [Partly about the cognitive psychology of stories, narrative memory and conversation, and partly about how to get computers to tell and understand stories. Mostly good, but he has a very narrow idea of what consistutes "understanding" or "explanation" (one according to which his own book is not an explanation of story-telling!), and makes grandiose, unsupported claims for the extent to which thinking and memory is narrative. There is a new edition, unseen by me, in Northwestern's "Rethinking Theory" series. The combination of literary theorists with the artificial intelligentsia would be enough to give me the willies, if I thought either party knew how to actually do anything in the Realized World.]

To read (with thanks to David Dickey for recommendations):
• Tim Bayne and Elisabeth Pacherie, "Narrators and comparators: the architecture of agentive self-awareness", Synthese 159 (2007): 475--491 ["an agent's narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounded in the very machinery responsible for action-production."]
• Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
• Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic
• Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot
• N. Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart
• Wallace Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing
• Michael Dyer, In-Depth Understanding: A Computer Model of Integrated Processing for Narrative Comprehension
• William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction
• Arthur C. Graesser, Keith K. Millis and Rolf A. Zwaan, "Discourse Comprehension," Annual Review of Psychology 48 (1997) 163--89
• Melanie C. Green (ed.), Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations
• T. Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition
• Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives
• David Herman
  • (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences [Blurb]
  • Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative [Thanks to Jonathan Goodwin for giving me a copy of his interesting review (Style 38 (2004): 114--126).]
  • Universal Grammar and Narrative Form
• Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion
• Daniel D. Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons
• Jarmo Laaksolahti and Magnus Boman, "The Anticipatory Guidance of Plot," cs.AI/0206041 [Foreseeing undesirable plot twists by means of finite automata, with special application to computer games]
• Charlotte Lind, Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence
• Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction
• Erik T. Mueller, "Prospects for In-Depth Story Understanding by Computer," cs.AI/0003003
• Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck
• Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair
• Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature
• Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling
• Pearce, Structure in Narrative
• Rafael Pérez y Pérez and Mike Sharples, An Introduction to Narrative Generators: How Computers Create Works of Fiction
• William Lovell Randall, The Stories We Are
• Marie-Laure Ryan
  • Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
  • Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory [Thanks to Raymond Johnson for the rec.]
• Christian Salmon, Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind
• Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book
• Harold Scheub, Story
• Robert Scholes, James Phelan and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative
• Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System
• E. S. Tan, Emotion and the Structure of Film: Film as an Emotion Machine
• Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction
• Mark Turner, The Literary Mind
• Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
• Tal Yarkoni, Nicole K. Speer and Jeffrey M. Zacks, "Neural substrates of narrative comprehension and memory", NeuroImage 41 (2008): 1408--1425 [PDF reprint]
• Lisa Zunzhine, Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative