Annotated, grouped by what each source is good for. Starred items are the recommended first three.
15.1 On the distribution of attention
- ★ Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many (2003). The indispensable book for this chapter and the one that converts its central metaphor into an analytic. Demanding but lucid; the introduction and the chapter on Le Père Goriot are sufficient for most purposes. Read it for the claim that minor characters are compressed rather than small, and that the character compression is legible on the page.
- Levin, Richard. The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (1971) and Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), ch. 2. The prehistory of the same problem in drama, where attention is distributed across plots rather than across interiorities. Chapter 14 (The Subplot) uses both.
- Moretti, Franco. On form and quantity; useful for students who want to see character-systems measured rather than described.
15.2 On focalisation and its vocabulary
- ★ Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse (1980). The separation of voice from focalisation, and the tripartite scheme. Read the chapter on mood; the rest of the book belongs to Chapters 5 and 7 of this textbook.
- Bal, Mieke. Narratology (4th ed., 2017). The most usable elaboration of focalisation as a subject–object relation, and the best account of embedded focalisation. Consult rather than read straight through.
- Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction (1983). The clearest short synthesis in English; the chapter on focalisation is the single best introduction for a student meeting the term for the first time.
- Stanzel, Franz K. A Theory of Narrative (1984). The typological circle. Harder going than Genette, and worth it for the insight that narrative situations shade into one another rather than dividing.
- Uspensky, Boris. A Poetics of Composition (1973). The four planes of point of view. Underread, and the sharpest instrument available for analysing a narration that is inside a character on one plane and outside on another.
15.3 On consciousness in fiction
- ★ Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds (1978). The systematic taxonomy of consciousness-rendering, and the source of the psycho-narration / narrated monologue / quoted monologue distinction that §3.2 uses to price the empathy budget. Precise, and the vocabulary is worth acquiring permanently.
- Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds (2004). The argument that readers build whole minds from evidence far wider than quoted thought. The best available corrective to the belief that a character needs viewpoint in order to have an interior.
- Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable Sentences (1982). The linguistic account of represented speech and thought. Technical; for students with a grammar background.
- Wood, James. How Fiction Works (2008). Free indirect style, accessibly, with excellent examples. Short.
15.4 On empathy, and its limits
- Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel (2007). Essential, and essential specifically as a corrective. Read it before writing anything that claims fiction makes people better; the chapter on empathy’s unreliable transfer is the one that matters.
- Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction (2006). Theory of mind and levels of intentionality; lively and full of readings. Use the intentionality material to think about what a viewpoint grant costs a reader.
- Kidd and Castano (2013); Panero et al. (2016). Read as a pair. The clearest available lesson in how a widely reported finding about fiction and social cognition fares under replication.
15.5 On the historical argument
- Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction (1921). Read as a period document and an advocacy, not as a manual. It is the origin of most of what a workshop teaches about viewpoint, and reading it cures the belief that the rules are natural law.
- James, Henry. The Art of the Novel (1934). The prefaces. Difficult, self-delighting, and the source of the reflector and of the house-of-fiction image.
- Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (1927). The immediate dissent from Lubbock, and the position this chapter adopts. Also the origin of flat and round characters, which Woloch’s model substantially improves on.
15.6 Within this textbook
- Chapter 1 (The Purposes of a Scene) — the domains model, of which §4 is the viewpoint-side transposition.
- Chapter 3 (The Dialogue Exchange) — voice differentiation at sentence level, the complement to §5.3.
- Chapter 5 (The Transition) — the mechanics of the crossing, the anchor, and the cost of a frame switch. Read §4.5 and §6.3 there alongside §6.5 here.
- Chapter 6 (The Chapter Break) — where the boundary falls, and the deferral cut.
- Chapter 7 (Backstory and Flashback) — retrospective narration and the relation between a narrating and an experiencing self.
- Chapter 14 (The Subplot) — the attention tax; the same argument as the empathy budget, applied to page space rather than to identification. Woloch is the shared source.
- Chapter 9 (The Opening Pages) — §4.6 there, on the formal contract and the requirement to declare multi-viewpoint structure early. §6.6 here supplies the mechanism.
- Chapter 10 (The Prologue) — the bounded grant in its most familiar form.