Reading Narrative is, in the author's words, a book about "how to make sense of stories or how to identify the ways they may fail to make sense". Hillis Miller presents discussions of narratives and dialogues in the Western European tradition -- the works of such writers as Sophocles, Plato, Shakespeare, Henry James, Kierkegaard, Laurence Sterne, Proust, Balzac, and Elizabeth Gaskell.Miller's new readings of Aristotle's Poetics, Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Gaskell's Cranford, Pater's "Apollo in Picardy", and many other works generate a comprehensive and original theory of narrative as he addresses questions about the ends, beginnings, and middles of the narrative line. Miller demonstrates the uses of multiple narrators, abrupt shifts in syntax (anacoluthon), indirect discourse, interwoven plots, and figures of speech -- including irony, "the master trope that is not a trope". His narrative analysis, in which line images function as salient examples. draws the reader's attention in the same way that a master storyteller holds an audience.
- ISBN10 0806130970
- ISBN13 9780806130972
- Publish Date 1 November 1998
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 2 June 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Oklahoma Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 304
- Language English