Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories
ISBN: 9780803237735
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Nebraska Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Discourse analysis Narrative; Emotions in literature; Narration (Rhetoric);

Stories engage our emotions. WeOCOve known this at least since the days of Plato and Aristotle. What this book helps us to understand now is how our own emotions fundamentally organize and orient stories. In light of recent cognitive research and wide reading in different narrative traditions, Patrick Colm Hogan argues that the structure of stories is a systematic product of human emotion systems. Examining the ways in which incidents, events, episodes, plots, and genres are a function of emotional processes, he demonstrates that emotion systems are absolutely crucial for understanding stories.
Hogan also makes a case for the potentially integral role that stories play in the development of our emotional lives. He provides an in-depth account of the function of emotion within storyOCoin widespread genres with romantic, heroic, and sacrificial structures, and more limited genres treating parent/child separation, sexual pursuit, criminality, and revengeOCoas these appear in a variety of cross-cultural traditions. In the course of the book Hogan develops interpretations of works ranging from TolstoyOCOs "Anna Karenina" to African oral epics, from Sanskrit comedy to Shakespearean tragedy.
Integrating the latest research in affective science with narratology, this book provides a powerful explanatory account of narrative organization.