"this book ... is not an overview of approaches to narrative. It is, rather, my best attempt to harvest and make readable what is known about how audiences and the forms of narrative interact" (p.xv). There wasn't much that was new for me here, so maybe my grap of theory's improving. Points that I made a note of were
- "This human tendency to insert narrative time into static, immobile scenes seems almost automatic, like a reflex action. We want to know not just what is there, but also what happened" (p.7)
- "The term "closure" can refer to more than the resolution of a story's central conflict. It has to do with a broad range of expectations and uncertainties" (p.57)
- "In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote the conclusion of King Lear, not only saving Cordelia's life but also marrying her off to Edgar ... That version held the English stage for the next 160 years" (p.58)
- "Actually in all narratives there are already at least two worlds, not one. They correspond to the levels of narrative. 1) The storyworld in which the characters reside and the events take place. 2) The world in which the narration takes place." (p.169)
- "Crux: A critical point, often a gap, in a fictional narrative where there is an insufficiency of cues, or where cues are sufficiently ambiguous, to create a major disagreement in the intentional interpretation of the narrative" (p.231)
I like the term Hayden White used - "emplotment" - for the tendency to twist historical facts to make them into "masterplots" (standard story skeletons like "rags to riches").
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