Robert Scholes

An Essay on Fiction of the Future

Structural Fabulation

James Phelan

Research Professor of Modern Culture and Media Professor Emeritus of English Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media and Andrew W Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus Robert Scholes

Robert Kellogg

For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been an essential work for students of literature, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg offered a compelling history of narrative from antiquity to the twentieth century. Their main goal was to describe and analyze the nature of narrative's key elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. The Fortieth Anniversary Edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter by James Phelan on developments in narrative theory since 1966. This new material describes the principles and practices of structuralist, cognitive, feminist, and rhetorical approaches to narrative, paying special attention to their work on character, plot, and narrative discourse. A continued leader in the field of narrative studies, The Nature of Narrative offers unique and invaluable histories of both narrative and narrative theory.

Revised and Expanded

The Nature of Narrative

For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written narrative and an appendix on the interior monologue in ancient texts. The fortieth anniversary edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966 by James Phelan. This chapter describes the principles and practices of structuralist, cognitive, feminist, and rhetorical approaches to narrative, paying special attention to their work on plot, character, and narrative discourse. A continued leader in the field of narrative studies, The Nature of Narrative offers unique and invaluable histories of both narrative and narrative theory.

Essays and Fiction by Conrad, Dinesen, Lawrence, Orwell, Faulkner, Ellison

Some Modern Writers

Providing the most thorough coverage available in a single volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a rich variety of international writers and their works in three genres: short fiction, poetry, and drama. Newly revised and expanded introductory essays discuss the principal characteristics of each genre and offer students an overview of contemporary critical perspectives. The new fourth Canadian edition adds fiction by Charles G.D. Roberts and poems by John Donne, Alexander Pope, W.B. Yeats, and Archibald Lampman. Organized chronologically by author and birth date, the impressive scope of authors and strong Canadian representation make this volume the essential text for introductory literature courses.

Fourth Canadian Edition

Elements of Literature

Carl H. Klaus

Michael Silverman

What does it mean to be a westerner? With all the mythology that has grown up about the American West, is it even possible to describe "how it was, how it is, here, in the West--just that," in the words of Lynn Stegner? Starting with that challenge, Stegner and Russell Rowland invited several dozen members of the western literary tribe to write about living in the West and being a western writer in particular.West of 98gathers sixty-six literary testimonies, in essays and poetry, from a stellar collection of writers who represent every state west of the 98th parallel--a kind of Greek chorus of the most prominent voices in western literature today, who seek to "characterize the West as each of us grew to know it, and, equally important, the West that is still becoming." InWest of 98, western writers speak to the ways in which the West imprints itself on the people who live there, as well as how the people of the West create the personality of the region. The writers explore the western landscape--how it has been revered and abused across centuries--and the inescapable limitations its aridity puts on all dreams of conquest and development. They dismantle the boosterism of manifest destiny and the cowboy and mountain man ethos of every-man-for-himself, and show instead how we must create new narratives of cooperation if we are to survive in this spare and beautiful country. The writers seek to define the essence of both actual and metaphoric wilderness as they journey toward a West that might honestly be called home. A collective declaration not of our independence but of our interdependence with the land and with each other,West of 98opens up a whole new panorama of the western experience.

Essay, Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Film

Eric S. Rabkin

A concise guide to the intellectual, social, and scientific elements that comprise the history and background of science fiction, to the genre's main developments, and to its most significant writers

History, Science, Vision

Science Fiction

In this lucid book an eminent scholar, teacher, and author takes a critical look at the nature and direction of English studies in America. Robert Scholes offers a thoughtful and witty intervention in current debates about educational and cultural values and goals, showing how English came to occupy its present place in our educational system, diagnosing the educational illness he perceives in today’s English departments, and recommending theoretical and practical changes in the field of English studies. Scholes’s position defies neat labels—it is a deeply conservative expression of the wish to preserve the best in the English tradition of verbal and textual studies, yet it is a radical argument for reconstruction of the discipline of English. The book begins by examining the history of the rapid rise of English at two American universities—Yale and Brown—at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Scholes argues that the subsequent fall of English—discernible today in college English departments across the United States—is the result of both cultural shifts and changes within the field of English itself. He calls for a fundamental reorientation of the discipline—away from political or highly theoretical issues, away from a specific canon of texts, and toward a canon of methods, to be used in the process of learning how to situate, compose, and read a text. He offers an eloquent proposal for a discipline based on rhetoric and the teaching of reading and writing over a broad range of literatures, a discipline that includes literariness but is not limited to it.

Reconstructing English as a Discipline

The Rise and Fall of English

Robert Scholes’s now classic Rise and Fall of English was a stinging indictment of the discipline of English literature in the United States. In English after the Fall, Scholes moves from identifying where the discipline has failed to providing concrete solutions that will help restore vitality and relevance to the discipline. With the self-assurance of a master essayist, Scholes explores the reasons for the fallen status of English and suggests a way forward. Arguing that the fall of English as a field of study is due, at least in part, to the narrow view of “literature” that prevails in English departments, Scholes charts how the historical rise of English as a field of study during the early twentieth century led to the domination of modernist notions of verbal art, ultimately restricting English studies to a narrow cannon of approved texts. After tracing the various meanings attached to the word “literature” since the Renaissance, Scholes argues that the concept of it that currently shapes the work of English departments excludes both powerful sacred documents (from the Declaration of Independence to the Bible) and pleasurable, profane works that involve the performance of roles like those of clown and teacher in many media (including popular musicals, opera, and film)—and that both sorts of works should be studied in English courses. English after the Fall is a bold manifesto for the replacement of literature with what Scholes calls textuality—an expansive and ecumenical notion of what we read and write—as the primary object of English instruction. This concise and persuasive work is destined to become required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the humanities.

From Literature to Textuality

English After the Fall

The book offers . . . a clutch of examples of semiotics usefully and intelligently applied, which Scholes's patient, cheerful tone and his resolutely concrete vocabulary manage to combine into a breezily informative American confection.-Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement

Semiotics and Interpretation

Robert E. Scholes

The nature and leading exponents of the structuralist movement are considered as well as the structural poetics of fiction and drama

An Introduction

Structuralism in Literature

Fabulation and Metafiction

Adapted for the Canadian market, this anthology designed for students in introductory courses provides selections from three major forms of literature: fiction, poetry, and drama. This revised edition updates writers previously included and also presents selections from writers new to theanthology, such as John Milton, Alexander Pope, Thomas Hardy, E.J. Pratt, Elizabeth Bishop, and Margaret Avison, fiction writers Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Sinclair Ross, and Bharati Mukherjee, and playwrights Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wile, Edward Albee, and Sharon Pollock.The works of fiction range from fables to realism, representing authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov, H.G.Wells, John Barth, Sheila Watson, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant. The poetry section contains a selection of ballads, and four or more works byBritish, American, and Canadian poets, ranging from Shakespeare to contemporary poets such as; Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Earle Birney, P.K. Page, and Margaret Atwood. The plays include George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara; Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie; Samuel Beckett's Krapp's LastTape; and George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.In addition to its rich choices, it offers a survey of the historical development of each gene, brief biographies of each author, lively introductions, and critical remarks, providing a coherent, consistent perspective, one both contemporary and innovative.

“I believe that it is in our interest as individuals to become crafty readers, and in the interest of the nation to educate citizens in the craft of reading. The craft, not the art. . . . This book is about that craft.”—from the Introduction This latest book from the well-known literary critic Robert Scholes presents his thoughtful exploration of the craft of reading. He deals with reading not as an art or performance given by a virtuoso reader, but as a craft that can be studied, taught, and learned. Those who master the craft of reading, Scholes contends, will justifiably take responsibility for the readings they produce and the texts they choose to read. Scholes begins with a critique of the New Critical way of reading (“bad for poets and poetry and really terrible for students and teachers of poetry”), using examples of poems by various writers, in particular Edna St. Vincent Millay. He concludes with a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the fundamentalist way of reading texts regarded as sacred. To explain and clarify the approach of the crafty reader, the author analyzes a wide-ranging selection of texts by figures at the margins of the literary and cultural canon, including Norman Rockwell, Anaïs Nin, Dashiell Hammett, and J. K. Rowling. Throughout his discussion Scholes emphasizes how concepts of genre affect the reading process and how they may work to exclude certain texts from the cultural canon and curriculum.

Robert Scholes

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