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This chapter represents a narratological breakdown of the tale. Drawing on the theory of Seymour Chatman, Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, I discuss the tale and its relationship to the ʿUdhrī love tale, the popular epic and the novel in terms of its discourse, setting, characters and events. I argue that the tale has a plot with a ‘homophonic’ texture, whereby a ‘melody’ of singular events (such as the abduction, torture and rescue of Laylā) overlays a ‘drone’ of repeated events (namely battle scenes). I conclude with a comparison of the tale with its twentieth-century novelistic adaptation and a discussion of what the comparison reveals about the pre-history of the Arabic novel.

This chapter presents ten relatively uncontroversial generalizations about the Book of Mormon's language, style, organization, and religious claims. It then discusses the often overlooked role of the narrators, with a focus on Nephi, who is portrayed as writing about events in his early life retrospectively many years later. The narrators in the Book of Mormon function quite differently from those of the Bible in that they are named individuals with particular personalities, ambitions, and perspectives. A note on methodology argues that the same sort of imaginative narrative analysis can be applied to both fiction and history, as has been asserted by theorists such as Seymour Chatman and Peter Lamarque.

This is the chapter that introduces the rather idiosyncratic positive views about our epistemic relations to fiction film that are defended in this book. First, in agreement with Kendall Walton and others, it is maintained that, in watching a movie (a fiction film), viewers imagine seeing a relevant segment of the fictional world. Second, this position is defended against an important objection that was originally raised by Gregory Currie. Replying to the objection requires thinking through some basic issues about what “imagining seeing” does and does not involve, and the requisite reflections are significantly initiated in this chapter. Second, a positive account is outlined of what audio-visual narration in traditional movies amounts to. This is what the author calls “the Mediated Version of the Fictional Showing Thesis,” and it is discussed at greater length in Chapter 3 and especially Chapter 4.

If movies have narrators at all, then characteristically they will be rather radically effaced. A number of important critics (Noël Carroll, Berys Gaut, Andrew Kania) have written skeptically about the reasonableness of postulating “effaced” narrators even in literature. They hold that these same objections apply in spades to purportedly effaced narrators in movies. In doing so, they have raised fundamental issues about the concept of “narration” as it applies to literary fictions. The author argues that their objections are misconceived, and, in addition, replies to some related objections that bear on other aspects of the basic relation between narration and narrators. This chapter bears mostly on the theory of narrative fiction for literature, but parallel issues about movies recur in the next chapter.

This chapter discusses various theoretical constructs, such as laws, models, and conceptual frameworks, in information-seeking behavior. It first looks at theories in library and information science (LIS), including “in-house” theories. In particular, it examines the work of Elfreda Chatman, the most notable LIS theorist in human information interaction, like her theory of life in the round and living life in the round. Another theory developed by Chatman is the theory of normative behavior, which consists of four concepts: social norms, worldview, social types, and human information behavior. The chapter then turns to theories borrowed from other fields such as psychology and phenomenography.

This chapter argues that the willingness of the poststructuralist narratologists (particularly Chatman, Lanser, Brooks, and de Lauretis) to look beyond the confines of twentieth-century linguistics and semiotics for their critical concepts and models re-energizes narratology’s relationship with ancient poetics. At the same time, the poststructuralist drive to push beyond the established boundaries of narratology and into a much wider domain of narrative ‘texts’—looking outside the narrow field of literary narrative into media such as film, music, and visual culture—rediscovers Aristotle’s Poetics and the anticipation of cross-medial narrative theory found there.