This book attempts to provide a basic theory for all narratives, in order to shake narratology off its age-long novel-centrism. There are storytellings everywhere in human culture, from primitive to modern times. The scholarship of narratology has been developed for centuries, and this includes the emancipatory Post-Classical Narratology of recent decades.This book gives a classification of all narratives including performative narratives (such as theater, visual broadcasting, ceremony, competition), semi-performative narratives (such as cinema), and mental narratives (such as dream and hallucination), among which conative narratives, such as advertisement, promise and divination, are a unique kind. This book provides and discusses the criteria that can make distinctions clear and unconfusing. Each kind of narrative is given a detailed discussion on its factual and fictional variations.

Calls attention with a detailed expounding of the possibility of a taxonomy of all narrative in an all embracing scheme Attempts to systematically analyze the characteristics of the division between fictional and factual narratives Analyzes the characteristics of the division between the recording and performative narratives

Autorentext

Yiheng Zhao is a Professor of Semiotics and Narratology at the College of Literature & Journalism, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China; currently, Director of The Institute of Semiotics & Media Studies (ISMS); Chairman of the Academic Committee of The Association of Chinese Communication and Semiotic Studies (ACCS); and Member of the Collegium of The International Association of Semiotic Studies (IASS).

Since the late 1970s, he wrote two dozen of books and around 250 essays on those topics. His major works in English include The Uneasy Narrator (1994), Toward a Modern Zen Theatre (2001), The Muse from Cathay (1983), and The River Fans Out (2000). He wrote and published extensively in Chinese, including Semiotics of Literature (1984), Comparative Narratology (1994), The Lure of the Other Bank (2003), Semiotics: Principles and Problems (2011), A General Narratology (2013), and Philosophical Semiotics (2017) in Chinese. Part of his works were republished in his 8-volume Selected Works (2013).

Inhalt

Textual Intentionality.- Performative Narrative.- Mental Narrative.- Conative Narrative.- Factual and Fictional Narratives: Double Segregations.- Narrator.- Secondary Narrativization.- Revisiting Fabula and Syuzhet.- The Problem of Time in a General Narratology.- The Problem of Plot.- The Negational Dynamics of Plot Development.- The Omni-text and the General Implied Author.- Unreliability of Narrative.- Personality-Filling in Narrative Frame.- Stratification, Transgression, Cyclical Transgression.- Meta-Narrative.