Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method

Again, wrote about it extensively on my blog. But this book reframed many of my thoughts on narrative.Like, we shouldn't call it "interior monologue" but "immediate speech," if you think about it. Or "point of view" but "mood," because, and this was interesting, all narratives by definition require a narrator, an "I," to so say anything that "view" gives a visual misinterpretation of the potential of telling a story centered on a "character" in the story, or one outside of it.Read the book for real.

As expected

This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to look seriously at narrative theory. Genette's analysis of the construction of time in narrative discourse is the still the model for theorists writing since then. Such categories as order, frequency, and duration in the narrative presentation of story-time show how narrative decisions on the part of authors can have dramatically different rhetorical effects. Genette views these narrative strategies as a form of rhetorical figuration and gives them terms drawn from classical rhetoric (e.g., "prolepsis" for a flashing forward, "analepsis" for a flashback). Genette's work is one of the clearest of all the French theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who became popular among literary critics and theorists in the US. His work is easily the most empirical of his academic geration of French theorists and perhaps the most likely to be useful in generations to come.

I have had 5 books published (nonfiction) and have been working on a novel. I wish I had studied this book when I was a student. It is superb--essential, in my opinion, for anyone writing fiction. It is not, however, an easy read.Besides being a writer, I am also a doctor and a commercial aircraft pilot. This book reminds me of getting an instrument rating, when "the lights come on" in understanding aviation. For the first time, I feel that I truly understand the nature of narrative.

This book is indispensable for any literature student or anyone curious to know how methods of analysis taught at school came to be. Genette can get slightly confusing at times and he does establish so many definitions that onecan get lost. Still I retained a good amount of information.This is a good translation and the edition is comfortable to read with an aesthetically pleasing cover.I definitely recommend it.

Interesting, but a bit dense.

Spedizione puntuale, il libro un po' sciupato in un angolo ma niente di grave

Really helpful and beneficial to my degree. A hive of information!!!