What Stories Are by Thomas M. Leitch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fine treatment of the ambitious task of defining “story,” considering literary, Cinema, and theatric media. Leitch clearly lays out many of the challenges, including with the fiction/non-fiction vagueries, as well as teleographic (having a designed message or point) vs discursive (having a tendency toward continuing indefinitely), and described stories as being definitively concerned with the struggle between these two opposites.
My critiques first: being written many years before the concept of cognitive narrative would be a term, I still wish he would have more carefully considered the difference between narrative (narrated) and story (the inchoate form that exists before mediation and narration).
The treatment the book offers would have been wonderfully aware of new media in 1986, discussing soap operas (“narratives without an ending”) and classic films. I spent several chapters imagining how interesting would be inclusion of modern film, show series, and video games. I also especially enjoyed the chapter on character, in which he insightfully addresses that story characters are NOT people.
Although Leitch doesn’t quite manage to answer his title question in a clear fashion, he illustrates that narratives are often about the experiencing of them. The experience of this book was likewise very worthwhile.
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