Analyzing World Fiction
Analyzing World Fiction
New Horizons in Narrative Theory
Why are many readers drawn to stories that texture ethnic experiences and identities other than their own? How do authors such as Salman Rushdie and Maxine Hong Kingston, or filmmakers in Bollywood or Mexico City produce complex fiction that satisfies audiences worldwide? In Analyzing World Fiction, fifteen renowned luminaries use tools of narratology and insights from cognitive science and neurobiology to provide answers to these questions and more.
With essays ranging from James Phelan's "Voice, Politics, and Judgments in Their Eyes Were Watching God" and Hilary Dannenberg's "Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media: Voice and Cultural Identity in Television" to Ellen McCracken's exploration of paratextual strategies in Chicana literature, this expansive collection turns the tide on approaches to postcolonial and multicultural phenomena that tend to compress author and narrator, text and real life. Striving to celebrate the art of fiction, the voices in this anthology explore the "ingredients" that make for powerful, universally intriguing, deeply human story-weaving.
Systematically synthesizing the tools of narrative theory along with findings from the brain sciences to analyze multicultural and postcolonial film, literature, and television, the contributors pioneer new techniques for appreciating all facets of the wonder of storytelling.
Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author and editor of eleven books, including Postethnic Narrative Criticism; the MLA–award winning Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas; Why the Humanities Matter; Your Brain on Latino Comics; and A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction.
- How to Use This Book (Frederick Luis Aldama)
- Part I: Voice
- 1. U.S. Ethnic and Postcolonial Fiction: Toward a Poetics of Collective Narratives (Brian Richardson)
- 2. Language Peculiarities and Challenges to Universal Narrative Poetics (Dan Shen)
- 3. Reading Narratologically: Azouz Begag's Le Gone du Chaâba (Gerald Prince)
- 4. Jasmine Reconsidered: Narrative Structure and Multicultural Subjectivity (Robyn Warhol)
- 5. Voice, Politics, and Judgments in Their Eyes Were Watching God: The Initiation, the Launch, and the Debate about the Narration (James Phelan)
- 6. Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media: Voice and Cultural Identity in Television Documentary and Comedy (Hilary P. Dannenberg)
- Part II: Emotion
- 7. Anger, Temporality, and the Politics of Reading The Woman Warrior (Sue J. Kim)
- 8. Agency and Emotion: R. K. Narayan's The Guide (Lalita Pandit Hogan)
- 9. The Narrativization of National Metaphors in Indian Cinema (Patrick Colm Hogan)
- 10. Fear and Action: A Cognitive Approach to Teaching Children of Men (Arturo J. Aldama)
- Part III: Comparisons and Contrasts
- 11. The Postmodern Continuum of Canon and Kitsch: Narrative and Semiotic Strategies of Chicana High Culture and Chica Lit (Ellen McCracken)
- 12. Initiating Dialogue: Narrative Beginnings in Multicultural Narratives (Catherine Romagnolo)
- 13. "It's Badly Done": Redefining Craft in America Is in the Heart (Sue-Im Lee)
- 14. Nobody Knows: Invisible Man and John Okada's No-No Boy (Josephine Nock-Hee Park)
- 15. Intertextuality, Translation, and Postcolonial Misrecognition in Aimé Césaire (Paul Breslin)
- Afterword. How This Book Reads You: Looking beyond Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory (William Anthony Nericcio)
- Works Cited and Filmography
- Contributor Notes
