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Poetics Today 24.1 (2003) 143-144



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Brian Richardson, ed., Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. xi + 399 pp.

This anthology aims to bring together essays that represent the rich body of work on the most important aspects of narrative, thus fulfilling a need that is increasingly felt as "narrative theory continues to embrace more areas of analysis," and "the basic aspects of narrative dynamics are increasingly recognized as being prominent in an ever expanding number of disciplines" (3). The essays included are intended to represent a variety of viewpoints and approaches: in his general introduction to this volume, Brian Richardson mentions Russian formalism, the Chicago (neo-Aristotelian) school, archetypal criticism, structuralism, Freudian theory, feminist poetics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and cognitive science. One can find here early classics (e.g., E. M. Forster on story and plot; Boris Tomashevsky on fabula, syuzhet, motifs, and motivations; Vladimir Propp on the folktale; Mikhail Bakhtin on the Chronotope; and Ronald S. Crane on the concept of plot), later studies that have also achieved a kind of classical status (e.g., Gerard Genette on order, duration, and frequency; and Hayden White on the "emplotment" of historical narratives), and work done in the last two decades by critics such as D. A. Miller, Peter Brooks, Peter Rabinowitz, James Phelan, Nancy Miller, Marie-Laure Ryan, Susan S. Friedman, and Brian Richardson himself.

The book contains twenty-seven pieces and is divided into five sections: on narrative temporality, plot, sequencing, beginnings and ends, and narrative frames (both in the sense of boundaries between the narrative and what lies outside it and of boundaries within narrative, mainly embedded narratives). The division among the first three topics seems rather arbitrary, since the notions of plot, temporality, and sequence are so inextricably bound up with each other; almost every piece that appears in one of these sections [End Page 143] could have appeared in the two others. Each section is preceded by an introduction, in which the editor tries to place the chosen material within the larger body of work in the field, outlines some relevant historical background, suggests the directions that contemporary discussions seem to be heading toward, and offers additional bibliographical resources.

Some of the pieces constitute whole articles, while others are representative excerpts from longer studies. Richardson's choice of excerpts is usually judicious but is somewhat questionable in a few cases. For example, it seems to me that the extracts from Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot, which appear under the title "Narrative Desire" (130–37), fail to do full justice to Brooks's study: since they deal mainly with "desire" as an explicit theme of plots, while the main interest of Brooks's argument lies in his conceptualization of desire as a basic structural principle of narrative organization (and narrative's reading process).

On the whole, the book provides a valuable selection of essays for students of narrative and covers quite a lot of ground in terms of both topics and approaches. Such an ambitious anthology, however, might have included more examples—or even a whole section—of systematic approaches to the problems concerning the very definition of narrative, a fundamental issue which is certainly not yet settled and which is addressed, in most of the essays in this volume, only implicitly or perfunctorily.

In his general introduction to the book, Richardson expresses great optimism regarding the current state of research in the field, claiming, "It is . . . safe to say that the last dozen years or so has produced a body of theoretical work on narrative that is unparalleled in its range, depth, subtlety, and sophistication" (6). Nonetheless, I must say that the general impression I got from reading this book was almost the exact opposite: whenever earlier studies are juxtaposed with recent ones, the former tend to be much more impressive and inspiring than the latter. None of the recent studies of "Time" selected here presents as rich and wide-ranging an outlook as Bakhtin's; none of the recent studies of "Plot" reflects a...

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