In progress:
» Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind
» Zoonarratology: Narrative Pathways to Nonhuman Worlds
The first of these monographs-in-progress explores the nexus of narrative and mind by focusing on aspects of narrative worldmaking; it suggests how ideas developed by scholars of narrative can inform, and not just be informed by, developments in the sciences of mind. The second study puts narratological research into dialogue with areas that include cognitive ethology, critical animal studies, and related fields. This study investigates how stories can be used to figure nonhuman worlds--and to project as well as question boundaries between the domains of the human and the nonhuman.
Recently published:
» Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical DebatesCo-authored by David Herman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, and published by Ohio State University Press, this book addresses core concepts of narrative--narration, character, time, space, etc.--from four different perspectives; it also features a section in which the co-authors respond to each other's approaches.
» Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory
This special issue of the journal SubStance (40.1) was co-guest edited with Jared Gardner. It is the first extended, multi-author study of how ideas from narrative theory can be brought to bear on graphic narratives and how, reciprocally, the richness and complexity of graphic narratives might pose challenges to existing models of story.
» The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English
This book, published in the Frontiers of Narrative book series, is the first of its kind: a collection of new essays by specialists in different literary periods who, using a range of research tools, discuss trends in the representation of consciousness in English-language narrative discourse from 700 to the present. With each contributor using using several case studies to examine the evolution of techniques for consciousness representation, the volume aims to provide new perspectives on the strategies used to represent minds in stories, and to suggest the variety of analytic approaches that can help illuminate those strategies.
» Teaching Narrative Theory
This volume, coedited by David Herman, Brian McHale, and James Phelan, was published in December 2010 in the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching Book Series. The volume focuses on strategies for teaching aspects of narrative theory in various pedagogical contexts.
Previous projects:
» Muriel Spark: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives
A revised and expanded version of the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to Muriel Spark (MFS 54.3, fall 2008), this volume focuses on one of the most important and innovative writers in English coming to maturity in the second half of the twentieth century. It will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in spring 2010.
The volume aims to take stock of Spark’s enduring legacy—her status as an author whose writing practices have reshaped ways of understanding the scope and nature of fiction itself. The essays assembled in the volume explore, from multiple perspectives, the situation of Spark's work within the landscapes of postwar writing. What is more, the contributors collectively suggest the continuing relevance of Spark's oeuvre for the narrative traditions, representational projects, and broader cultural formations of the twenty-first century.
»Basic Elements of Narrative
Designed to be useful for a variety of audiences, from specialists in narrative theory to students and general readers, this book was published by Wiley-Blackwell in early 2009. Most generally, the book seeks to characterize what stories are and how they work. Viewing narrative in three ways-as a cognitive structure, a type of text, and a resource for communicative interaction-the book explores key aspects of narrativity across various semiotic media, including storytelling in face-to-face interaction, print texts, film, and graphic narratives. The study draws on developments in fields ranging from sociolinguistics and discourse analysis to social psychology, categorization theory, and the philosophy of mind, while also engaging with multiple traditions of narrative scholarship. It also features a glossary of key terms and a very full bibliography.
» The Cambridge Companion to Narrative
Published in 2007, this volume contains chapters written by an international team of experts in the field and focusing on core aspects of narrative. Each chapter presents a reader-friendly survey of scholarly approaches to the issue named in the chapter title, shows how those approaches can be brought to bear on a relatively well-known “tutor-text” or illustrative example, and indicates directions for further research on the topic under investigation.
» Přirozený jazyk vyprávění [Narration in Natural Language]. Trans. Bohumil Fořt. Brno-Prague: Czech Academy of Sciences], 2005.
Drawing on ideas from sociolinguistics and discourse analysis as well as concepts from narrative theory, this volume assembles research on natural-language narratives that were elicited in contexts of face-to-face interaction. The book, which was published in the Edice Theoretica Book Series edited by Tomáš Kubíček and Petr A. Bílek, seeks to build bridges between humanistic and social-scientific approaches to narrative.
» Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (coedited with Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan)
Published in 2005, and reprinted in paperback in 2007, the Encyclopedia is designed to be a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary reference work; it contains around 450 entries written by more than 200 international experts in the field. Entries cover terms, concepts, approaches, genres, and other matters relevant to the study of narrative in multiple settings, media, and disciplinary contexts, from the humanities and social sciences to clinical medicine, journalism, narrative therapy, and the arts.
» Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences
This book was published in October, 2003, by the Publications of the Center for the Study of Language and Information (or CSLI Publications, distributed by the University of Chicago Press). Click here to find the volume in the press's online catalog.
Consisting of 12 new essays by researchers in several disciplines, this volume focuses on narrative as a crossroads where cognitive-scientific research in a variety of fields can be synergistically combined, yielding new insights into narrative and suggesting new directions for the cognitive sciences themselves. The fields represented in the volume include cognitive psychology, social psychology, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, psychotherapy, and literary theory, as well as recent hybridizations such as cognitive narratology. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences is thus designed to have broad, cross-disciplinary appeal, aimed as much at students and scholars in the social sciences as humanists, cultural theorists, and specialists in narrative fiction.
» Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative
This book was published in 2002 in the Frontiers of Narrative book series at the University of Nebraska Press. It was co-winner of the Perkins Prize ("most significant contribution to narrative studies") awarded by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature for books published in 2002.
The book combines narratology, linguistics, and cognitive science to develop new tools for narrative analysis. Developing a broad interpretation of narrative as a discourse genre and a cognitive style, as well as a resource for literary writing, the book begins from the premise that stories have emerged from humans' shared attempts to make sense of and manage the complexities of experience.
With chapters on basic problem areas in narrative theory, including action sequences, character, speech representation, temporal ordering, spatial reference, and modes of perspective-taking, the study uses a variety of tutor texts to explore the potentials and limits of classical, structuralist narratology. The book's overarching argument is that stories should be construed as strategies for building mental representations of the world. Narratives not only have a logic but also are a logic in their own right, providing an unreplaceable resource for structuring and comprehending experience, a distinctive way of coming to terms with time, process, change. Offering a comprehensive reassessment of previous theories of narrative, Story Logic should appeal to a variety of audiences, from discourse analysts, media theorists, and historians of the novel, to specialists in critical theory, communication studies, historiography, and sociolinguistics.