Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Plot, Time, Closure, and Frames, edited by Brian Richardson, is the only volume to bring together several essential essays on the major facets of narrative movement and transformation. It includes the most widely cited and discussed essays on narrative beginnings, temporality, plot and emplotment, sequence and progression, closure, and frames. Each area of the anthology includes several critical accounts from a number of different positions that serve to trace the evolution of the field and reproduce the debates that are currently in progress. Readers are thus able to encounter a wide range of positions on a single subject as well as identify a single approach, such as feminism, psychoanalysis, formalism, or deconstruction, and follow it across adjacent fields. Each section is prefaced by an introduction that situates the essays historically and points the interested reader to additional work in the field, including the most recent critical interventions. A list of short stories with particularly interesting deployments of time, plot, closure, and frames is also provided.

The book includes such classic statements as Forster on story and plot, Propp on the structure of the folktale, R. S. Crane on plot, Tomashevsky on story, plot and motif, Bakhtin on the chronotope, and Genette on narrative time. There are essential feminist essays by Nancy K. Miller on plot and plausibility, Rachel Blau DuPlessis on closure, and Susan Winnett on narrative and desire; these are complemented with newer pieces by Susan Stanford Friedman on spatialization and Robyn Warhol on serial fiction. Other major contributions include Said on beginnings, Hayden White on historical narrative, Peter Brooks on plot, Paul Ricoeur on time, D. A. Miller on closure, James Phelan on progression, and Derrida on the frame. Recent essays from the perspectives of cultural studies, postmodernism, and artificial intelligence bring this collection right up to the present.

Available July 2002

Contents

Acknowledgments
General Introduction

PART 1,  TIME
Introduction: Narrative Temporality

1. Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel
M. M. Bakhtin
2. Order, Duration, and Frequency
Gerard Genette
3. Narrative Time
Paul Ricoeur
4. Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern
and Non-Mimetic Fiction
Brian Richardson

PARTII, PLOT
Introduction: Plot and Emplotment

5. Story and Plot
E. M. Forster
6. Fairy Tale Transformations
Vladimir Propp
7. The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones
R. S. Crane
8. The Argument of Comedy
Northrop Frye
9. Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction
Nancy K Miller
10. Narrative Desire Peter Brooks Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative and Principles of Pleasure
Susan Winnett

PART III, NARRATIVE SEQUENCING
Introduction: Narrative Progressions and Sequences

12. Story, Plot, and Motivation
Boris Tornashevsky
13. Text Generation
Jean Ricardou
14. The Historical Text as Literary Artifact
Hayden White
15. Narrative Progression
James Phelan
16. Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative
Susan Stanford Friedman
17. Queering the Marriage Plot: How Serial Form Works in Maupin'S Tales of the City
Robyn Warhol

PART IV, BEGINNINGS AND ENDS
Introduction: Openings and Closure

18. Beginnings
Edward Said
19. The Sense of a Beginning
A. D. Nuttall
20. Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel
D. A. Miller
21. Endings and Contradictions
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
22. Reading Beginnings and Endings
Peter Rabinowitz
23. Loose Ends: Aesthetic Closure and Social Crisis
Russell Reising

PART V, NARRATIVE FRAMES
Introduction: Narrative Frames and Embeddings

24. The Literary Frame
John Frow
25. Stories within Stories: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative 331
William Nelles
26. The Parergon
Jacques Derrida
27. Stacks, Frames, and Boundaries
Marie-Laure Ryan

Bibliography
Relevant Short Narratives