Mesopotamia

The first words often said to a child when he or she begins to try to speak are " Tell us story then, " or something similar. From our earliest years we are exposed to story and most children lucky enough to be brought up in loving families, no matter where on our planet, are told stories to help them go to sleep. Thus, the start of the socialization process, the acquisition of language itself, is intricately bound up with the idea of story. This central role of story repeats itself in all forms of creative art, music, song, dance and the visual arts, whether as inspiration or some aspect of illustration or reference. In those cultures where traditional storytelling survives, and that includes Scotland, Ireland and certainly parts of England and Wales, the role of story is absolutely key to how culture has developed over millennia. As J. Isaacs has shown (1980) some of the stories in Australia, referring to giant marsupials, initially dismissed by the western-educated mind as nonsense, fabrication or drink-induced fantasy, were shown to be true in the 1950s when the bones of such animals were found close by human hearth fires and showed signs of both having been butchered and cooked. These bones were found while digging for bauxite, the raw element from which aluminium is made, and the clear stratigraphy allowed the remains to be dated at 40,000 BCE. This means that the dreamtime stories of giant animals, newly classified last century as Diprodotons, had been passed orally for 40 millennia. While it is true that native art in Australia does contain symbolic visual referents that are linked to the telling of, and probably remembering of, stories, the aboriginal peoples had no alphabet and thus no written literature. Nothing surviving in literature has anything like this dateable antiquity. Stories survive. Why do they survive? One example of a widely known story is that of King Arthur, his Queen Guinevere and Modred, his nephew, or in some versions, his illegitimate son. This story was told in many locations throughout the British Isles and beyond but attained its best-known form as a result of the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the first half of the twelfth century, and Thomas Malory whose Morte d'Arthur was published n 1485. In the best-known tale, Arthur leaves a kingdom or nation at peace while he goes off to Rome on a pilgrimage, a well-attested habit of Christian kings. He leaves his queen in charge but she immediately takes up with Modred, and they usurp the throne. Arthur hears of this on his journey to Rome and returns to raise an army against the usurpers. In the Battle of Camlaan he kills Modred but receives an apparently fatal blow himself. He is visited on the battlefield by Morgan and her eight sisters who come from the Isle of Avalon. They then return to the Isle of 1 Story here is taken to mean all material used in the process of storytelling no matter its origin.

The Classical World, 2002

to Hollywood, the Western storytelling tradition has canonised a distinctive set of narrative values characterised by tight economy and closure. This book traces the formation of that classical paradigm in the development of ancient storytelling from Homer to Heliodorus. To tell this story, the book sets out to rehabilitate the idea of 'plot', notoriously disconnected from any recognised system of terminology in recent literary theory. The first part of the book draws on current developments in narratology and cognitive science to propose a new way of formally describing the way stories are structured and understood. This model is then used to write a history of the emergence of the classical plot type in the four ancient genres that shaped it -Homeric epic, fifth-century tragedy, New Comedy, and the Greek novel -with new insights into the fundamental narrative poetics of each.

In Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Peters charts the arc not of communication methods or technologies, but the way in which we conceive of communication. Not how do we communicate, but how have we thought about communicating. Hawking is invoked, on the one hand, because contemporary conceptualizations of narrative, in particular their trajectories through the 20th century, are the progeny of multifarious efforts to develop a science of narrative. On the other, Hawking’s seminal monograph, A Brief History of Time (1988), distills an impossibly immense subject -- the history of the universe -- into an impossibly compact space. Narrative may not be so sprawling an object of study as the entire cosmos, but it is, nonetheless, an expansive topic. This paper represents an attempt to trace the variegated, interrelated, evolving, diffuse, and sometimes circuitous ways in which we conceive of narrative. This effort begins with a dispute between (who else?) Aristotle and Plato. Whereas Aristotle provided a rudimentary codification of narrative as form, Plato critiques its use. We then spring forward several millennia to find Georg Lukacs challenging the dominance of the Aristotelean framework, and anticipating by nearly a century Marie-Laure Ryan’s call for a “media-conscious narratology” (Ryan and Thon 4). I traverse the well-trod terrains of Russian Formalism and French Structuralism, and investigate how these movements and their devotees aspired to develop scrupulous empirical principles that would transform the study of narrative and literature into a science: narrative’s scientific turn. A Structuralist splinter faction turned their attention to temporal dynamics, laying the groundwork for narratology. Narratology focuses on the centrality of time (as both interior and exterior to narrative), narrative as a coagulant of historical and temporal coherence, and the twin influences of tradition and cultural context. As an important tangent to print-centric narratology, I discuss the recuperation of orality both as a formidable field in its own right, and as implicative of the importance of identifying medium-specific narrative affordances. In their indispensable accounts of oral storytelling systems, Albert Lord and Walter J. Ong illustrate how narrative, media, and cognition interrelate. Following orality, I provide a brief overview of how narrative theories and epistemologies filtered into other fields and disciplines such as postmodernism, historiography, and cognitive science. In the penultimate section, I will explore the dramatic narrative transmutations prompted by the ascendance of the computer, and the (still acrimonious) collision of stories and games. In closing, I will examine recent attempts to (once again) formulate a “unified theory” of narrative that can account for its protean, media-inflected instantiations, and I suggest several lines of inquiry for how the study of narrative might proceed from this point forward.

2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative/Open Access Series in Informatics , 2013

This paper seeks to investigate some of the defining elements of narrative. The underlying assumption of my discussion is that the terms “narrative” and “story” do not refer to clearly defined, self-enclosed genres. Rather, they are part of a spectrum which embraces all forms of texts. Similarly, narratives and stories are not independent discourses but rather are an integral part of virtually all forms of discourse, be it day-to-day conversation or more specialized discourses. In order to analyze the relationship between narratives and other modes of discourse, we introduce the concept of narrativity. Narrativity refers to a collection of textual attributes. All texts exist along a continuum of greater or lesser narrativity, depending on the number and prominence of the narrative attributes they contain. When we refer to a text as a story, we mean that it contains a critical mass of narrativity. Most theorists of narrative have defined narrativity purely in terms of “dynamism”–that is, the extent to which a text portrays transition and change. To this I have added the quality of “specificity”. Specificity refers to the extent to which a text focuses on a particular time or place, a unique event, or individual people and objects. Many if not most texts contain a certain degree of narrativity. We established, however, that in order to be considered a story the text must present a sequence of at least two interrelated events that occurred once and only once in the past. In other words, a story must have a certain degree of dynamism in that it portrays the transition from at least one event to another. It must also have specificity at least to the degree that the text narrates events that happened at a fixed time in the past. This theoretical framework allows us to chart the relationship between different types of texts within a single discourse. It also gives us a vocabulary for discussing different parts of more complex narratives which often contain elements of varying narrativity. The paper then goes on to discuss the concept of narrative structure, arguing that narrative structure is not an inherent attribute of narrative texts but a framework that the reader imposes on the text in order to make it intelligible in terms of other narratives. The structure which the reader abstracts from a given narrative will be heavily dependent on the context of the narrative with in a wider discourse.

2001

2008

Defining narrative The bare minimum Simply put, narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events. "Event" is the key word here, though some people prefer the word "action." Without an event or an action, you may have a "description," an "exposition," an "argument," a "lyric," some combination of these or something else altogether, but you won't have a narrative. "My dog has fleas" is a description of my dog, but it is not a narrative because nothing happens. "My dog was bitten by a flea" is a narrative. It tells of an event. The event is a very small one-the bite of a fleabut that is enough to make it a narrative. Few, if any, scholars would dispute the necessity of at least one event for there to be narrative, but there are a number who require more than this. Some require at least two events, one after the other (Barthes, Rimmon-Kenan). And more than a few go even further, requiring that the events be causally related (Bal, Bordwell, Richardson). To both of these camps, my examples of narrative above would appear too impoverished to qualify. In my own view and that of still others (Genette, Smith 1), the field of narrative is so rich that it would be a mistake to become invested in a more restrictive definition that requires either more than one event or the sense of causal connection between events. Both of the latter are more complex versions of narrative, and in their form and the need that brings them into being they are well worth study in their own right. But in my view the capacity to represent an event, either in words or in some other way, is the key gift and it produces the building blocks out of which all the more complex forms are built. That said, it is important to note that most of us-scholars, readers, viewersfind it difficult sometimes to call some longer, more complex works narratives, even though they contain numerous examples of these little, and sometimes not so little, narrative building blocks. This is one of the reasons why there has been such a debate about what deserves the title of narrative. Marie-Laure Ryan put the matter well: narrative is a "fuzzy set defined at the center by a solid core of properties, but accepting various degrees of membership." 2 John Bunyan's

Unnatural' narratology has been a thriving new field of narrative theory in recent years. What its various sub-fields share is that they are concerned, very broadly, with narratives that transcend the parameters of conventional realism. One of the field's promises is that it can also account for earlier 'unnatural' narrative scenarios, for instance in ancient and medieval literature. Focusing on two recent publications by Alber and Richardson, this essay challenges the historical trajectory the movement envisages. Paying special attention to the influence of religion on premodern narratives and its implications for the concept of the unnatural, this essay argues that unnatural narratology is reductionist and adheres to a structuralist paradigm, and thus cannot do justice to the idiosyncrasies of premodern narrative forms and functions. An alternative approach to the unnatural as a dynamic form is introduced as an outlook.

2017

In the first half of the 20th century, the appeal of short story continued to grow. Literally hundreds of writers delved into this enigmatic genre, including few eminent poet and prolific novelist of the time, and had contributed vigorously in the publication of their short fictional prose .In the 20th century, Germany, France, Russia and the US lost their domination over the genre. That laid a way for innovative writers emerged in places, like Japan_:Akutagwa Ryunsuke, Prague_:Franz Kafka and Argentina_:Jorge Luis Borges. Literary journals with international circulation such as Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic Review, Scribner's Magazine and Harriet weaver's Egoist_ provided a deliberate exposure for young fledgling writers in honing their skills in the art. The short stories for its efficiency, lucid flow and its technical agility have gained immense popularity over the years. Above all, this particular genre is providing modern tellers, with a chance to experiments and come out with innovative ideas. The unerring preciseness, delicately emphatic characterization and extraordinary rhythm of effortless writings are some of the peculiar traits of modern short story writers. But, as in conventional term, "short story" is a brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with limited characters as such. The earliest precursors to short story can be found in the oral storytelling traditional ways ,as well as episodes from ancient Mediterranean epics such as "The epic of Gelgamesh " and Homer's "Illiad ". Anecdotes, fairy tales and parables are all example of oral storytelling tradition that helped in shaping this genre. The earliest tales from India comprises tales in Pali language "the Jatakas" having composed in religious frame and another hugely popular "The panchatantra'. The other noteworthy assemblage of formidable tales is "Kathasaritsagar""(ocean of rivers of stories),a series of tales recounted in narrative verse in the 11th century .Throughout the history ,Mankind have enjoyed various narratives, including Jests ,Anecdotes, Short Myth and Concise Historical legends. A short story constitutes a large part of the milieu that zeroed in on tendencies apparent in every modern society. The short story writing themes are ranging from mythological fable, to miniature epic of love, to savagely hilarious tales of sexual comeuppance. Tales that are also related to marital difficulties, human relationship with its alienating tendencies, illicit passion and the diasporic families dealing with their own dilemmas in their drastically alienated societies. These tales are an emblematic product of maturity_ forceful, vigorous and unclouded by illusions. These stories succeed in the trenchancy of its satire, in its manifestation of swooping indignation with growing resentment at social injustices and in its persistent humanity with which writers enliven their works. These www.

The Ancient Novel and the Frontiers of Genre, ed. Marília P. Futre Pinheiro, Gareth Schmeling, Edmund P. Cueva, 2014

Despite the fact that postmodern aesthetics deny the existence or validity of genres, the tendency nowadays is to assume that there was in Antiquity a homogeneous group of works of narrative prose fiction that, despite their differences, displayed a serious of recurrent, iterative, thematic, and formal characteristics, which allows us to label them novels. The papers assembled in this volume include extended prose narratives of all kind and thereby widen and enrich the scope of the canon. The essays explore a wide variety of texts, crossed genres, and hybrid forms, which transgress the boundaries of the so-called ancient novel, providing an excellent insight into different kinds of narrative prose in antiquity.