Content area
Full Text
David Herman. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. xvi + 477 pp.
In this innovative and ambitious monograph, David Herman attempts to counteract most of the shortcomings of structuralist narratology and other traditional approaches to narrative, offering nothing less than a cutting-edge synthesis and critique of interdisciplinary narrative theory. Drawing on models and insights from cognitive science, linguistics, discourse analysis, and structuralist narratology, Herman reassesses the relations between these fields of study, arguing that "narrative theory and language theory should instead be viewed as resources for-elements of-the broader endeavour of cognitive science" (2).
Although this review cannot do justice to the complexity and impressive scope of Story Logic, it is possible to give a brief synopsis of the book's structure, which, despite the comprehensiveness of Herman's wide-ranging theory and analyses, is crystal clear in exposition. Redrawing the whole "architecture of inquiry," Herman maintains that narrative is not just a discourse genre and a resource for writing, but also a cognitive style. In using the phrase "story logic" in the title of his study, he means to suggest that narratives not only have a logic but also are a logic in their own right because stories are cognitive strategies that help humans make sense of their world (22). Conceiving of narrative "as a strategy for creating mental representations of the world" and of narrative comprehension as "a process of...