Narrative is a powerful element of human culture, storing and sharing the cherished parts of our personal memories and giving structure to our laws, entertainment, and history. We experience narrative in words, pictures, and film, yet regardless of how the tale is told, story remains independent from the media that makes it concrete. Narrative follows humans wherever they travel and adapts readily to new forms of communication. Constantly evolving and always up-to-date, narrative is a necessary strategy of human expression and a fundamental component of human identity. In order to understand human interaction, award-winning scholar Rick Altman launches a close study of narrative's nature, its variation in different contexts, and the method through which it makes meaning. Altman's approach breaks away from traditional forms of analysis, identifying three basic strategies: single-focus, dual-focus, and multiple-focus. Unpacking an intentionally diverse selection of texts, Altman demonstrates how these strategies function in context and illustrates their theoretical and practical applications in terms of textual analysis, literary and film history, social organization, religion, and politics. He employs inventive terminology and precise analytical methods throughout his groundbreaking work, making this volume ideal for teaching literary and film theory and for exploring the anatomy of narrative on a more general level.

Rick Altman makes a genuinely rich and very useful move in the theory of narrative and does so with style, elegance, clarity, and verve. There are even some touches of humor, and the whole is immensely readable. He grounds his argument in a large number of examples, and a good deal of his book's persuasive force derives precisely from the range and variety of these examples. -- L. Ross Chambers, professor emeritus, The University of Michigan

About the Author
Rick Altman is professor of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. Among his many titles on film is Columbia University Press's Silent Film Sound, which won the Limina Award for Best Cinema Studies book, the Theater Library Association Award, and was a finalist for the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award.

Reviews
This is a large, ambitious study that proposes an original, comprehensive theory of narrative. Rick Altman draws on examples ranging from the Bible to Hollywood films, from classical epic and pastoral to medieval heroic poetry, and from saints' lives to nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, British, and American novels, all analyzed within an impressively parsimonious scheme. -- Peter Garrett, University of Illinois An elegant and pertinent theory. -- Matt Campora Media/Culture Reviews



Book Information
ISBN 9780231144285
Author Rick Altman
Format Hardback
Page Count 392
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press