Retelling/rereading - Karl Kroeber

"In this passionate,
erudite, and far-ranging book, Kroeber renews for our multi-cultural
age a fundamental argument: the stories we tell, hear, read, and see
make a difference to the lives we read."--Jonathan Arac, University of
Pittsburgh

In
this highly readable and thoroughly original book, Karl Kroeber
questions the assumptions about storytelling we have inherited from the
exponents of modernism and postmodernism. These assumptions have led to
overly formalistic and universalizing conceptions of narrative that
mystify the social functions of storytelling. Even "politically correct"
critics have Eurocentrically defined story as too "primitive" to be
taken seriously as art. Kroeber reminds us that the fundamental value of
storytelling lies in retelling, this paradoxical remaking anew that
constitutes story's role as one of the essential modes of discourse. His
work develops some recent anthropological and feminist criticism to
delineate the participative function of audience in narrative
performances.

In
depicting how audiences contribute to storytelling transactions,
Kroeber carries us into a surprising array of examples, ranging from a
Mesopotamian sculpture to Derek Walcott's Omeros; startling
juxtapositions, such as Cervantes to Vermeer; and innovative readings of
familiar novels and paintings. Tom Wolfe's comparison of his Bonfire of
the Vanities to Vanity Fair is critically analyzed, as are the
differences between Thackeray's novel and Joyce's Ulysses and Flaubert's
Madame Bovary. Other discussions focus on traditional Native American
stories, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Calvino's If on a winter's night
a traveler, and narrative paintings of Giotto, Holman Hunt, and Roy
Lichtenstein. Kroeber deploys the ideas of Ricoeur and Bakhtin to
reassess dramatically the field of narrative theory, demonstrating why
contemporary narratologists overrate plot and undervalue story's
capacity to give meaning to the contingencies of real experience.
Retelling/Rereading provides solid theoretical grounding for a new
understanding of storytelling's strange role in twentieth-century art
and of our need to develop a truly multicultural narrative criticism.