The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory ed. by Matthew Garrett (review)

There is a canonical story about the history of narrative theory that, in the barest of bare outlines, runs something like this: back in the 1960s and 1970s narrative theory entered its “classical” phase under the tutelage of structuralism, boasting a freshly-minted neologism for its name—narratologie. Rooted in the Russian Formalist poetics of the 1920s, and with significant input from German and Anglophone scholarship, classical narratology was nevertheless largely a Parisian affair, and its grand masters were all Francophone: Lévi-Strauss, Greimas, Todorov, Bremond, Barthes, Genette. Then, beginning in the late 1980s and the 1990s, and accelerating in the new century, narratology diversified into narratologies, swerving this way and that away from its French structuralist foundations, toward the cognitive sciences, rhetorical theory, feminist theory, media studies, and the wilder reaches of anti-mimetic (unnatural) narrative. In short, classical structuralist narratology morphed into postclassical narratology. David Herman is credited with articulating this narrative of narrative theory, and in particular with distinguishing between its classical and postclassical phases, first in a PMLA article (“Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology,” 1997), then in his introduction to an influential edited volume, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999). The story would be reiterated and fleshed out in subsequent collections, such as A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005), edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, and Postclassical Narratology (2010), edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, and in the pages of journals like Narrative, Poetics Today, and, yes, Style. It would attain something like its canonical form in the collaborative volume, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012), with contributions by Herman, Phelan, Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol. It is no coincidence that all but one of the books I have just named are published by the Ohio State University Press, as is the journal Narrative, and that almost all of the editors are, or have been, affiliated one way or another with Ohio State. There is something distinctly Ohio-State-centric about the canonical story; it expresses, you might say, the view from Columbus.

Strikingly, this is not the story told by The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory. With one exception (to which I will return in a moment), the sixteen essays collected here simply ignore the canonical story—unless they actually propose counter-narratives to it. This seems to be by design. It does not take much reading between the lines of the introduction by Matthew Garrett, the volume’s editor, to detect a revisionist impulse. For instance, he commends the first chapter, Kent Puckett’s long view of narrative theory’s history, for its “generous opening of the house of narrative theory, a letting-in of air and history” (2); what airless spaces are being ventilated here, if not those of the canonical story? It is with manifest reluctance that Garrett deploys the terms “classical” and “postclassical,” and even then he does so gingerly, placing them between scare quotes; most of the contributors to the volume do not use them at all. It is not as though the classical grand masters are slighted here—on the contrary, they figure conspicuously in many of these essays, especially Barthes and Genette (discussed at some length in chapters by Yoon Sun Lee, Hannah Freed-Thall, and David Kurnick, and more briefly elsewhere), as well as the Russian Formalists (Shklovsky in a chapter by Ilya Kalinin, Propp in Judith Roof’s chapter, and Propp, Tomashevsky, and Eichenbaum in Lee’s). By contrast, postclassical trends in narrative theory, and the figures associated with them, are almost entirely absent; David Wittenberg, in his chapter on time, cites Herman on “fuzzy temporality,” John Frow cites the cognitive narrative theorist Lisa Zunshine on theory of mind, and Jonathan Culler, in a chapter on lyric and narrative, paraphrases Phelan—and that is about it. The term “unnatural” narrative appears once, in Valerie Rohy’s chapter on queer narrative theory, but with...