Understanding Narrative by James Phelan (9780814206331)

Description - Understanding Narrative by James Phelan

Playing off "Understanding Fiction", the title of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's textbook, "Understanding Narrative" reveals and explores changes in the landscape of narrative theory and interpretation since that influential handbook defined the terrain. In particular, this collection of new essays represents new conceptions of "understanding" and broadens "narrative" to encompass not just canonical fiction but also travel writing, visual art, film and music. Each of the ten essays is an example of what James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz call "theorypractice": a self-reflective inquiry that simultaneously interprets and investigates the grounds of interpretation. These essays, in other words, resist the easy and one-way application of fixed theoretical strategies to text. Instead, they call upon a variety of theoretical perspectives to inform their interpretative practice while deploying their interpretations to revise theory.
Although the contributors demonstrate affiliations with different theoretical movements - including Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, reader-criticism and post-structuralism - their inquiries suggest significant shortcomings in the popular practice of classifying critical output according to a static model of theoretical "schools". The contributors' dynamic "theorypractice" presented here draws upon diverse theoretical principles according to the specific demands of their inquiries, staking out their arguments not by simple opposition, but by striking different balances in the theoretical material on which they draw. Offering essays that consider familiar and unfamiliar narratives from Bronte's "Shirley" to Myra Page's "Moscow Yankee", from Mozart's "Prague Symphony" to Mungo Park's "Travels in the Interior of Africa", "Understanding Narrative" exemplifies the range of work that this series seeks to promote. Students and scholars of British and American literature, film, and critical theory should find this volume a useful addition to the series.

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