David Herman

Tell me a story : a new look at real and artificial memory

Schank takes a look at the human side of intelligence: thinking, memory, imagination, imagery, and mythology. A bold attempt at showing how the mind assimilates knowledge and how that knowledge is retrieved--a process similar in both humans and machines.

Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory

actant action theory adaptation address addresser and addressee adolescent narrative advertisements African narrative agency allegory alteration alterity anachrony analepsis ancient theories of narrative (Western) ancient theories of narrative (non-Western) anecdote animated film annals anti-narrative apology archetypal patterns architext Artificial Intelligence and narrative atomic and molecular narratives attributive discourse audience Australian Aboriginal narrative authentication author authorial narrative situation autobiography autodiegetic narration autofiction backstory ballad Biblical narrative Bildungsroman biography biological foundations of narrative blog (weblog) catachresis catharsis causality character Chicago school childrens stories (narratives written for children) childrens storytelling Chinese narrative chronicle chronotope cineroman closure codes for reading cognitive narratology coincidence comics and graphic novel coming-out story commentary communication in narrative communication studies and narrative composite novel computational approaches to narrative computer games and narrative concretisation confessional narrative conflict Constance school contextualism (in historiography) conversational storytelling counterfactual history courtroom narrative cultural-studies approaches to narrative cyberpunk fiction dance and narrative deconstructive approaches to narrative defamiliarisation deixis denarration description desire detective fiction dialogism dialogue in the novel diary didactic narrative diegesis digital narrative discourse analysis (Foucault) discourse analysis (linguistics) disnarrated, the distance drama and narrative dramatic irony dramatic monologue dramatic situations dream narrative dual-voice hypothesis dystopian fiction eco-narratives ecriture feminine education and narrative ekphrasis embedding emic and etic emotion and narrative emplotment encyclopedic novel epic epiphany episode epistolary novel ergodic literature ethical turn ethnographic approaches to narrative events and event-types evolution of narrative forms existent experiencing-I experientiality exposition extradiegetic narrator fable fabula fairy tale family chronicle fantastic, the fantasy feminist narratology fiction, theories of Figura (Auerbach) figural narration film narrative first-person narration focalization folklore folktale foregrounding formalism frame theory framed narrative free indirect discourse frequency Freytags triangle function (Jakobson) function (Propp) gapping gaze gender studies genealogy genre fiction genre theory in film studies genre theory in narrative studies gesture gossip Gothic novel grand recit graphic presentation as expressive device hagiography hermeneutics hero heterodiegetic narration heteroglossia historical novel historical present historicis historiographic metafiction historiographic narratology historiography Holocaust narrative homodiegetic narration horizon of expectations horror narrative humour studies and narrative hybrid genres hybridity hypertext hypertext and hypotext (Genette) hypodiegetic narrative identity and narrative ideology and narrative image and narrative immersion implied author implied reader in medias res indeterminacy institutional narrative intentionality interactive fiction interactivity interdisciplinary approaches to narrative interior monologue intermediality intertextuality intradiegetic narrator irony isotopy Japanese narrative joke journalism law and narrative legal fiction legend leitmotif letters as narrative life story linguistic approaches to narrative logic of narrative magical realism Marxist approaches to narrative master narrative media and narrative mediacy medicine and narrative medieval narrative memory mental mapping of narrative metafiction metahistory metalepsis metanarrative comment metaphor metonymy micro-storie mimesis mindscreen mind-style minimal narrative mise en abyme modality mode modernist narrative molecular narratives montage mood (Genette) motif multi-path narrative multi-plot narrative music and narrative myth: thematic approaches myth: theoretical approaches mytheme naming in narrative narratee narrating (Genette) narrating-I narration narrative narrative as argument narrative as cognitive instrument narrative comprehension narrative disorders narrative dynamics narrative explanation narrative in poetry narrative intelligence narrative levels narrative progression narrative psychology narrative semantics narrative situations narrative speed narrative structure narrative techniques narrative therapy narrative transformation narrative transmission narrative turn in the humanities narrative units narrative universals narrative versions narrative, games, and play narrativisation narrativity narrator Native American narrative natural narratology naturalisation Neo-Aristotelianism no-narrator theory nonfiction novel nouveau roman novel, the novella nursery rhyme obituary opera oral cultures and narrative oral history oral-formulaic theory orality organisations and narrative Oulipo palimpsest panfictionality parable paralepsis and paralipsis paratext parody participatory narrative pastiche performance performativity person perspective phenomenology of narrative philosophy and narrative philosophical novel photographs picaresque novel pictorial narrativity plot plot types point point of attack point of view (cinematic) point of view (literary) polyphony pornographic narrative positioning possible-worlds theory postclassical narratology post-colonialism and narrative postmodern narrative postmodern rewrites poststructuralist approaches to narrative pragmatics prison narrative prolepsis prospective narration psychoanalysis and narrative psychological approaches to narrative psychological novel psychonarration queer theory Quixotic novel quotation theory radio narrative reader address reader constructs readerly text, writerly text (Barthes) reader-response theory realeme realism, theories of realist novel reality effect reception theory reference reflector reflexivity reliability remediation repurposing retardatory devices retrospective narration rhetorical approaches to narrative riddle ring-composition roman a clef roman a these romance romance novel Russian Formalism Sanskrit narrative satiric narrative scene (cinematic) schemata science and narrative science fiction screenplay scripts and schemata secondary orality second-person narration semiotics serial form sermon short story shot showing versus telling simple forms simulation and narrative simultaneous narration situation model sjuzhet skaz slash fiction slave narrative soap opera sociolinguistic approaches to narrative sociological approaches to literary narrative sociology and narrative soundtrack space in narrative spatial form spectacle speech act theory speech representation sports broadcast story arc story grammars story schemata and causal structure story-discourse distinction storyworld stream of consciousness and interior monologue structuralist narratology summary and scene surfiction surrealist narrative suspense and surprise syllepsis tabloid narrative tall tale Tel Aviv School of narrative poetics Tel Quel television tellability temporal ordering tense and narrative testimonio text text-world approach to narrative thematic approaches to narrative thematisation theology and narrative third-person narration thought and consciousness representation (film) thought and consciousness representation (literature) thriller time in narrative transfictionality transfocalization and transvocalization transgressive fictions trauma theory travel narrative trebling/triplication truth unnarratable, the unreliable narration urban legend utopian and dystopian fiction verisimilitude virtuality visual narrativity visualisation voice voice-over narration writerly text

Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology

This essay begins by differentiating between narratively organized sequences of events and nonnarrative sequences associated with deductive reasoning, conversational exchanges, descriptions, and re...

Genette meets Vygotsky: narrative embedding and distributed intelligence:

Framed tales, or stories within stories, have garnered considerable attention from theorists of narrative in recent years. By and large, however, story analysts have not sought to account for why the practice of narrative embedding has persisted so long - or why it is so widespread - in the world’s folk traditions and written literatures. Using William Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage as its tutor-text, this article advances a broadly cognitive explanation for the pervasiveness and persistence of narrative embedding across so many different storytelling situations. My central claim is that, in conjunction with the cognitive activities of their interpreters, framed narratives such as The Ruined Cottage constitute intelligent systems - systems that both stage and facilitate the process of shared thinking about past events and about one’s own and other minds. Such systems propagate experiential frames - specifically, the experiences of character-narrators - across time and space. By contrast, in a story that does not involve narrative embedding, there will be a net decrease in the capacity of the system to communicate representations originating from sources potentially quite widely separated in space and time. Narrative embedding thus increases the distributional reach of a framed tale, enhancing the overall power of the knowledge-generating system to which it lends structure. Adapting Barbara Rogoff’s (1990) definition of intelligence as the socially supported ability to solve problems grounded in particular domains of activity, I explore how framed narratives can help distribute intelligence both synchronically (across regions of space and participants and material artifacts within those regions) and diachronically (across different temporal phases of a given spatial region).

Film and television narrative

Narrative theory is a flexible tool, useful for analyzing elements of storytelling common across a wide range of media. A detailed vocabulary for the mechanics of plotting or elements of characterization can help us understand a novel, television show, comic book, videogame, film, opera, or any other form of storytelling. Although the concepts explored in this collection can be applied productively to any medium, we must also be aware of the ways that any specific medium creates particular storytelling parameters, constraining some options while enabling others. Thus the goal of this chapter is to outline some of the specific narrative facets that are common to moving-image storytelling as found within film and television, and to explore how these two media function as major narrative forms in contemporary culture. Film and television share a common visual and aural form, and thus many of their specific storytelling practices are similar; however, the two media diverge in crucial ways, with sufficiently different structures that we cannot analyze film and television narratives identically. By examining these media comparatively, we can see how film and television differ from literature in areas such as narration, perspective, temporality, and comprehension, and diverge from each other regarding plot structures and viewer engagement. To explore aspects of moving-image narration and to exemplify the particular ways that film and television narratives function, this chapter explores two popular examples: the film of The Wizard of Oz ; and the television series Lost .

Building routine planning systems and explaining their behavior

It has become increasingly clear to builders of knowledge-based systems that no single representational formalism or control construct is optimal for encoding the wide variety of types of problem solving that commonly arise and are of practical significance. In this paper we identify a class of problem solving activities which we have labeled routine planning. We consider the constructs necessary to represent the problem solving which appropriately characterizes this class, and describe DSPL, a high-level language designed specifically to encompass the required knowledge structures and control methodology for routine planning. Finally, we consider what type of structure is appropriate to represent an agents understanding of how the plan itself works.

A Postclassical Narratology

Reply to Herman, David. “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology.” PMLA. 1997 Oct; 112(5): 1046-59.

Drama and narrative

From the outset, theories of drama and theories of narrative have been closely linked. Aristotles Poetics , still the starting-point for any narrative theory, devotes more space to drama than to epic. The topics he covers, including character, plot, beginnings and endings, poetic justice, and the goals of representation, are as relevant to narrative theory as to a poetics of drama. Classic statements about these and other aspects of narrative, whether from the Renaissance, neo-classical, or Romantic periods, are likewise filled or even dominated by references to drama, as a look at the critical work of Castelvetro, Sidney, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, and Coleridge makes clear. Quite simply, if you are going to discuss plot and character, you must take drama and its theorists into account. Furthermore, performed stories, whether in drama, film, ballet, or video, have an additional enacted dimension that can interact with many of the other elements of narrative, particularly in the cases of character, time, and space. Strangely, while cinema was quickly brought into the fold of narrative theory, most notably in Seymour Chatmans Story and Discourse , drama has lagged behind, leaving a number of important theoretical contributions in the wings, as it were. Some recent theorists, following Genette, restrict the definition of narrative to stories that are told or narrated rather than enacted (though even in this limited case, as we will see, drama has important contributions to make). Many if not most theorists, however, follow Roland Barthes, who stated that “narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccios Saint Ursula ), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation.” I will be using this broader conception of narrative in the pages that follow.

Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf's Flush

Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) takes its place alongside Orlando as a key modernist experiment with the norms and conventions of life writing. Flush is what might be described as a metabiographical text, probing the consequences for life writing, revealing it to be an inextricable entanglement not just of male, female, upper-, and lower-class life histories, but also of human and nonhuman ways of encountering the world. Furthermore, in modeling nonhuman phenomenology, Flush suggests how coming to terms with stories about nonhuman lives calls for a new, “transdisciplinary” paradigm for narrative inquiry.

A la recherche du sens perdu

William C. Dowling’s The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory makes an admirable attempt to introduce recent developments in linguistic semantics—specifically, the work of J. J. Katz—to readers trained in literary criticism and theory. The author argues that Katz’s ideas are relevant to problems of literary interpretation, claiming that they provide a new perspective on the problem of ‘‘determinate meaning’’ in literature. Dowling construes determinate meaning as ‘‘the notion that it is intelligible to say about a line in a poem or a sentence in a novel that it means one thing rather than another thing, X rather than Y’’ (ix). To make a case for the view that literary texts have determinate meanings in this sense, the author draws on three main elements of Katz’s semantic framework. One element is Katz’s linguistic realism, his view that meanings or (to use a technical term in Katz’s scheme) senses are ‘‘objects existing outside the spatio-temporal-causal order in the way thatmanymathematicians and logicians have been led to posit the existence of things like prime numbers and sets and equilateral triangles’’ (; cf. –). A second, related element is the distinction between linguistic types and linguistic tokens—a distinction that figures importantly in Katz’s work. An example would be the difference between the ideal type associated with the English definite article the and its five separate instantiations, or tokens, in the present sentence. The third element is Katz’s theory of decompositional sense structure; ac-