Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (New Accents (Routledge (Firm)).)

Theorizing language 3 article. That disclosure changed the way the story was read. Once its status altered from being a case study to a compositeand thus fictional -portrait, so did its linguistic claim of being a re-presentation or transcription of an actual situation as opposed to being a representation or facsimile of one. Like narrative, then, the term "'fiction'"' also directs our attention to a story's medium of telling: language. Far from being a special or exceptional use of language, fiction, we propose, more accurately indicates how words mean than is normally thought. The relation between language and meaning, between words and what they refer to, is a highly complex one. To start explaining this complexity, we are going to look first at a type of language that does not rely on words at all and so does not immediately raise questions about referentiality: the language of driving. This example can help reorient the way we think about language;it can guide us to conceive of language as a powerful system of meaning-making. Then we shall look at some uses of language drawn from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to show how verbal language works as a system similar to driving. With these examples we are laying the ground for discussing a theory of language and the production of meaning.

Telling Stories overturns traditional definitions of narrative by arguing that any story, whether a Bette Davis film, a jeans ad, a Jane Austen novel of a 'Cathy' comic, must be related to larger cultural networks. The authors show how meanings and subjectivity do not exist in isolation, but are manufactured by the narratives our culture reads and watches every day. They call for a critical practice that, through the fracturing of texts, can alter the grounds of knowledge and interpretation. This timely study will interest critics of narrative and culture, as well as students wanting to extend post-Saussurean theories to poopular and canonical cultures, and to the dynamics of story-telling itself.

Telling Stories overturns traditional definitions of narrative by arguing that any story, whether a Bette Davis film, a jeans ad, a Jane Austen novel or a 'Cathy' comic, must be related to larger cultural networks. The authors show how meanings and subjectivity do not exist in isolation, but are manufactured by the narratives our culture reads and watches every day. They call for a critical practice that, through the fracturing of texts, can alter the grounds of knowledge and interpretation. This timely study will interest critics of narrative and culture, as well as students wanting to extend post-Saussurean theories to poopular and canonical cultures, and to the dynamics of story-telling itself. In clear and readable prose, informed by semiotics, narratology, psychoanalysis, feminism, and film theory, this book offers a method of analyzing how meanings and subjectivity are produced by the narratives our culture reads and watches every day Argues that any story, whether a Bette Davis film or a Jane Austen novel, must be related to larger cultural networks. Calls for a critical practice that revises our conception of narrative through the fracturing of texts. Steven Cohan And Linda M. Shires. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes. This book introduces a theoretical framework for studying narrative fiction.