Hoja de Trabajo 6: Narrativa

SPN 305: Introducción a Estudios Literarios - Otoño 2014

Hoja de Trabajo: 6. Narrativa

1. Since the 1960s narrative has come to dominate literary education. However, poetry is often required, novels and short stories have become the core of the curriculum. (83)

2. Literary and cultural theory have increasingly claimed cultural centrality for narrative. Stories are the main way we make sense of things. (83)

3. We make sense of events through possible stories; philosophers of history have argued that the historical explanation follows not the logic of science causality but the logic of story. (84)

4. The theory of narrative relies on notions of plot, of different kinds of narrators, of narrative techniques.(84)

5. Requirements of a story: Aristotle said that plot is the most basic feature if narrative, that good stories must have beginning, middle, and end, and that give pleasure because of the rhythm of their ordering…Theorists have proposed various accounts for this order. Essentially, though a plot requires a transformation. There must be an initial situation, a change involving some sort of reversal, and a resolution that marks the change as significant. (85)

6. Unlike poetry, which gets lost in translation, plot can be preserved in translation from one language or one medium into another: a silent film or a comic strip can have the same plot as short story. (86) IMPORTANTE PARA NUESTRAS LECTURAS DE LRP

7. There are two ways of thinking about plot: (a) plot is a way of shaping events to make them into a genuine story; writers and readers shape events into a plot in their attempts to make sense of things; (b) plot is what gets shaped by narratives, as they present the same ‘story’ in different ways.

8. The three levels that make up a narrative: events, plot and discourse function as two oppositions: between events and plot, and between story and discourse. Plot or story is the material that is presented, ordered from a certain point of view by discourse (different versions of the same story). But plot itself is already a shaping of events. A plot can make a wedding the happy ending of the story or the beginning of a story-or can make it a turn in the middle. What readers actually encounter is the discourse of a text: the plot is something readers infer from the text, and the idea of elementary events out of which this plot was formed is also an inference or construction of the reader. (86-7)

9. Some key questions that identify meaningful vsriation: (a) Who speaks? (b) Who speaks to whom? (c) Who speaks when? (d) Who speaks what language? (e) Who speaks with what authority? (f) Who sees? (variables: temporal, distance and speed, and limitations of knowledge).

10. Theorists also discuss the function of stories..Story-tellers are always warding off the potential question: ‘So what?’ But what makes a story ‘worth it’? What stories do? First, they give pleasure. The pleasure of narrative is linked to desire and knowledge (92-93).  Second, stories also have the function of teaching us about the world, showing us how it works, enabling us to –through the devices of focalization- to see things from other vantage points, and to understand others’ motives that in general are opaque to us. Characters in novels (see quote page 93).

11. Through the knowledge they present, narratives police. Novels in the Western tradition show how aspirations are tamed and desires adjusted to social reality…In so far as we become who we are through a series of identifications, novels are a powerful device for the internalization of social norms. But narratives also provide a mode of social criticism. (93)

12. Finally, the basic question for theory in the domain of narrative is: Is narrative a fundamental form of knowledge (giving knowledge to the world as sense making) or is it a rhetorical structure that distorts as much as it reveals? There seems that we cannot answer this question…Instead we need to move back and forth between awareness of narrative as rhetorical structure and a study of narrative as the principal kind of sensemaking at our disposal.(94)