Download or read book Coincidence and Counterfactuality written by Hilary P. Dannenberg and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Coincidence and Counterfactuality, a groundbreaking analysis of plot, Hilary P. Dannenberg sets out to answer the perennial question of how to tell a good story. While plot is among the most integral aspects of storytelling, it is perhaps the least studied aspect of narrative. Using plot theory to chart the development of narrative fiction from the Renaissance to the present, Dannenberg demonstrates how the novel has evolved over time and how writers have developed increasingly complex narrative strategies that tap into key cognitive parameters familiar to the reader from real-life experience. ø Dannenberg proposes a new, multidimensional theory for analyzing time and space in narrative fiction, then uses this theory to trace the historical evolution of narrative fiction by focusing on coincidence and counterfactuality. These two key plot strategiesøare constructed around pivotal moments when characters? life trajectories, or sometimes the paths of history, converge or diverge. The study?s rich historical and textual scope reveals how narrative traditions and genres such as romance and realism or science fiction and historiographic metafiction, rather than being separated by clear boundaries are in fact in a continual process of interaction and cross-fertilization. In highlighting critical stages in the historical development of narrative fiction, the study produces new readings of works by pinpointing the innovative role played by particular authors in this evolutionary process. Dannenberg?s original investigation of plot patterns is interdisciplinary, incorporating research from narrative theory, cognitive approaches to literature, social psychology, possible worlds theory, and feminist approaches to narrative.
Download or read book Historicizing Plot A Poetics of Coincidence and Counterfactuality Hilary P Dannenberg Coincidence and Counterfactuality Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction 2008 written by Dorothee Birke and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Current Trends in Narratology written by Greta Olson and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current Trends in Narratology offers an overview of cutting-edge approaches to theories of storytelling. It describes the move to cognition, the new emphasis on non-prose and multimedia narratives, and introduces a third field of research - comparative narratology. This research addresses how local institutions and national approaches have affected the development of narratology. Leading researchers detail their newest scholarship while placing it within the scope of larger international trends.
Download or read book Time Narrative and Emotion in Early Modern England written by Dr David Houston Wood and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Houston Wood suggests that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Wood examines the ways that depictions of time expressed in early modern medical texts reveal themselves in contemporary literary works, demonstrating that the early modern recognition of the self as a palpably volatile entity, viewed within the tenets of contemporary medical treatises, facilitated the realistic portrayal of literary characters and served as a structuring principle for narrative experimentation. The study centers on four canonical, early modern texts notorious among scholars for their structural- that is, narrative, or temporal- difficulties. Wood displays the cogency of such analysis by working across a range of generic boundaries: from the prose romance of Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to the staged plays of William Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale, to John Milton's stubborn reliance upon humoral theory in shaping his brief epic (or closet drama), Samson Agonistes. As well as adding a new dimension to the study of authors and texts that remain central to early modern English literary culture, the author proposes a new method for analyzing the conjunction of character emotion and narrative structure that will serve as a model for future scholarship in the areas of historicist, formalist, and critical temporal studies.
Download or read book Narrating the Past written by A. Robinson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years controversy has surrounded the narrative turn in history and the historical turn in fiction. This book clarifies what is at stake, tracing connections between historiography and life-writing, arguing that the challenges posed in representing the past illuminate issues which are central to all literary narrative.
Download or read book Counterfactual Thinking Counterfactual Writing written by Dorothee Birke and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counterfactuality is currently a hotly debated topic. While for some disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, or psychology counterfactual scenarios have been an important object of study for quite a while, counterfactual thinking has in recent years emerged as a method of study for other disciplines, most notably the social sciences. This volume provides an overview of the current definitions and uses of the concept of counterfactuality in philosophy, historiography, political sciences, psychology, linguistics, physics, and literary studies. The individual contributions not only engage the controversies that the deployment of counterfactual thinking as a method still generates, they also highlight the concept’s potential to promote interdisciplinary exchange without neglecting the limitations and pitfalls of such a project. Moreover, the essays from literary studies, which make up about half of the volume, provide both a historical and a systematic perspective on the manifold ways in which counterfactual scenarios can be incorporated into and deployed in literary texts.
Download or read book The Challenge of Chance written by Klaas Landsman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy. The individual chapters are bound together by a general introduction followed by an opening chapter that surveys 2500 years of linguistic, philosophical, and scientific reflections on chance, coincidence, fortune, randomness, luck and related concepts. A main conclusion that can be drawn is that, even after all this time, we still cannot be sure whether chance is a truly fundamental and irreducible phenomenon, in that certain events are simply uncaused and could have been otherwise, or whether it is always simply a reflection of our ignorance. Other challenges that emerge from this book include a better understanding of the contextuality and perspectival character of chance (including its scale-dependence), and the curious fact that, throughout history (including contemporary science), chance has been used both as an explanation and as a hallmark of the absence of explanation. As such, this book challenges the reader to think about chance in a new way and to come to grips with this endlessly fascinating phenomenon.
Download or read book The Ancient World in Alternative History and Counterfactual Fictions written by Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing in turn on history, powerful individuals, under-represented voices and the arts, the essays in this collection cover a wide variety of modern and contemporary narrative fiction from Jo Walton and L. Sprague De Camp to T. S. Chaudhry and Catherynne M. Valente. Chapters look into the question of chance versus determinism in the unfolding of historical events, the role individuals play in shaping a society or occasion, and the way art and literature symbolise important messages in counterfactual histories. They also show how uchronic narratives can take advantage of modern literary techniques to reveal new and relevant aspects of the past, giving voices to marginalised minorities and suppressed individuals of the ancient world. Counterfactual fiction and uchronic narratives have been largely up until now the domain of literary critics. However, these modes of literature are here analysed by scholars of Ancient History, Egyptology and Classics, shedding important new light on how cultures of the ancient world have been (and still are) perceived, and to what extent our conceptions of the past are used to explore alternate presents and futures. Alternate history entices the imagination of the public by suggesting hypothetical scenarios that never occurred, underlining a latent tension between reality and imagination, and between determinism and contingency. This interest has resulted in a growing number of publications that gauge the impact of what-if narratives, and this one is the first to give scholars of the ancient world centre-stage.
Download or read book Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual Historical Fiction written by Riyukta Raghunath and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive Possible Worlds framework with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is a literary genre that comprises narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our world, usually speculating on what would have happened had a significant historical event (such as a war) turned out differently. The author develops a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory supplemented by cognitive concepts that account for the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction, a genre which relies heavily on pre-existing knowledge about history and culture. This book will be of interest to anyone working with Possible Worlds, including within the fields of philosophy, literary studies, stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology.
Download or read book Counterfactual Romanticism written by Damian Walford Davies and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-18 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised.
Download or read book Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense written by Leslie Adelson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander Kluge’s revolutionary storytelling for the 21st-century pivots on the production of anti-realist hope under conditions of real catastrophe. Rather than relying on possibility alone, his experimental miniatures engender counterfactual horizons of futurity that are made incrementally accessible to lived experience through narrative form. Innovative close readings and theoretical reflection alike illuminate the dimensional quality of future time in Kluge’s radical prose, where off-worldly orientation and unnatural narrative together yield new sensory perspectives on associative networks, futurity, scale, and perspective itself. This study also affords new perspectives on the importance of Kluge’s creative writing for critical studies of German thought (including Kant, Marx, Benjamin, and especially Adorno), Holocaust memory, contemporary globalization, literary miniatures, and narrative studies of futurity as form. Cosmic Miniatures contributes an experiential but non-empirical sense of hope to future studies, a scholarly field of pressing public interest in endangered times.
Download or read book A Cognitive Approach to Ernest Hemingway s Short Fiction written by Gabriela Tucan and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-09 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do readers make sense of Hemingway’s short stories? How is it possible that the camera-like quality of his narrative can appeal to our senses and arouse our emotions? How does it capture us? With reserved narrators and protagonists engaged in laconic dialogs, his texts do not seem to say much. This book consciously revisits our responses to the Hemingway story, a belated response to his invitation to discover what lies beneath the surface of his iceberg. What this pioneering critical endeavor seeks to understand is the thinking required in reading Hemingway’s short fiction. It proposes a cognitively informed model of reading which questions the resources of the reader’s imaginative powers. The cognitive demonstrations here are designed to have potentially larger implications for the short story’s general mode of knowing. Drawing from both cognitively oriented poetics and narratology in equal measure, this book explains what structures our interaction with literary texts.
Download or read book What s in a Balcony Scene A Study on Shakespeare s Romeo and Juliet and its Adaptations written by Hortensia Pârlog and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As reflected in its title, the central question that drives this book is “what’s in a balcony scene?”, particularly that which appears in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Exploring its representation in a number of adaptations of Shakespeare’s play, this volume shows that there are a number of fresh angles from which to look at this topic, which, in turn, provide unique insights into the balcony scene, As such, the book will appeal to anyone with an interest in Shakespeare, from researchers and students to the general reader.
Download or read book Handbook of Narratology written by Peter Hühn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in narratology and is now available in a second, completely revised and expanded edition. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned narratologists elucidate central terms of narratology, present a critical account of the major research positions and their historical development and indicate directions for future research.
Download or read book Causes and Coincidences written by David Owens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-08-28 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an important departure from theories of causation, David Owens proposes that coincidences have no causes, and that a cause is something which ensures that its effects are no coincidence. In Causes and Coincidences, he elucidates the idea of a coincidence as an event which can be analysed into constituent events, the nomological antecedents of which are independent of each other. He also suggests that causal facts can be analysed in terms of non-causal facts, including relations of necessity. Thus, causation is defined in terms of coincidence, and coincidence without reference to causation. David Owens challenges the ideas associated with Hume, Davidson and Lewis, constructing a theory which distinguishes nomological necessity and sufficiency from their logical counterparts. He is able to offer novel solutions to the major problems of causation, including the direction of causation, the logical form of causal statements, the distinction betwen causal connections and logical connections, and the relationship between psychological and physical causation.
Download or read book Worldviews Science and Us written by Robrecht Vanderbeeken and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2010 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together the lectures presented at the 5th Metaphysics of Science Workshop held from June 2 to 3, 2005, in Ghent, Belgium. The aim of this volume is twofold. First, it fields a selection of ongoing discussions on a central topic in contemporary analytical metaphysics. Authors were asked to encapsulate their lecture topic into a prcis, highlighting the contesting views, accentuating the pro and contra of the main arguments, and shedding light on the origin, the evolution and the eventual offspring of a respective discussion. Second, this volume addresses the methodological question by examining what can be learned if we compare these discussions from a methodological perspective. What are the red herrings and shortcomings? Is an integrated methodology possible? Does each discussion finally await a pluralism of plausible positions or will an overall convincing account be expected? And finally, can analytical metaphysics methodologically assert and investigate their basic assumptions, if not from a common sense stance?
