Jasmine’s Reviews > The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative > Status Update

"...the past is open to interpretation, and since our culture and our personal identity and how we address the future are all to some extent shaped by how we read the past, it's especially important to keep an eye out both for how historians shape the stories they tell and also for what they may have left out." (p.156)

In short, the past is open to interpretation, and since our culture and our personal identity and how we address the future are all to some extent shaped by how we read the past, it's especially important to keep an eye out both for how historians shape the stories they tell and also for what they may have left out. (p.156)

Reviewers who complain that a film or play is a poor "translation" of the original may miss the fact that adaptation across media is not translation in anything but the loosest sense. In fact, it can sometimes be the attempt to make a strict translation that winds up in failure. (p.112)

The critic Harold Bloom has argued that all great works of art are necessarily powerful misreadings of great works of art that precede them. (p.108)

Identifying themes and motifs cannot in itself produce an interpretation, since the same themes and motifs can lend themselves to any number of different interpretations. But identifying themes and motifs can help enormously in establishing what a work is about and where its focus lies, and that in turn can be used to eliminate some interpretations and to lend support to others. (Interpreting narrative p. 95)

The first point almost everyone in the field of narrative will agree on nowadays with regard to narrators is that they should not be confused with authors. The narrator is variously described as an instrument, a construction, or a device wielded by the author. (p.68)

Is there something necessarily wrong or inferior about a narrative that closes with moral clarity? Conversely, isn't it an easy thing to build confusion into one's narrative? In short, the presence or absence of closure by itself can not be taken as a standard of narrative failure or success. (Closure, p. 64)

Narrative by its arrangement of events gratifies our need for order, of which perhaps the commonest is the perception of cause. If this can make a narrative a gratifying experience, it can also make it a treacherous one, since it implicitly draws on an ancient fallacy that things that follow other things are caused by those things: "post hoc ergo propter hoc" ("after this, therefore because of this"). (p.43)

It is not uncommon in narrative to find embedded narratives within embedded narratives, each serving as framing narrative for the one nested within it. One of the more extreme examples is Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'. In this novel, readers make their way in and then out of a succession of at least six different narratives, each with its own narrator, nested like Chinese boxes. (p.29)