Plots (Paperback)

Preface
Introduction, by Robin Feuer Miller
Part I. Literary Plots Deserve Still More Study
1. Plots Arrange Literary Experience
2. Plot Summaries Need More Serious Study
3. The Fabula Arranges the Events in the World the Characters Inhabit; the Siuzhet Arranges the Events in the World the Reader Encounters in the Text
4. Authors Can Relate One Incident to Another Only Chronologically, Spatially, Causally, Associatively, or Narratively
5. Plots are Fractal, Formed from Incidents That Are Formed from Smaller, Similarly Shaped Incidents
6. The Best Authorities Consider Plots and Incidents to Be Tripartite, with a Situation, a Need, and an Action
7. But Siuzhets and the Incidents That Form Them Have Two Parts: An Expectation and Its Fulfillment or Frustration
Part II. The Plot of King Lear Operates Purposefully But Also Reflects the Creative Process
8. For Integrity of Impact, Stages, Actors, and the Audience Need a Unity of Action
9. Shakespeare Replaced the Greek Unity of Action with a New Thematic Unity Based on Parallelism
10. Shakespeare Uses Conflict, the Righting of Wrongs, the Healing of an Inruption or Disruption, and Other Standard Plotting Devices, But His Recognition Scenes Move Us Most
11. Shakespeare Prepares for His Recognition Scenes with Elaborate Lies
12. In King Lear, Shakespeare Uses Elaborated Lies to Psychologize the Gloucester Subplot
13. Tolstoy and Tate Preferred the Comforting Plots of Lear's Sources to Shakespeare's, But Shakespeare Had Considered That Variant and Rejected It
Part III. The Plot of Crime and Punishment Draws Rhetorical and Moral Power from the Nature of Novel Plots and from the European and Russian Tradition Dostoevsky Inherited and Developed
14. European Novelists Elaborated or Assembled Incidents into Plots Long Before Critics Recognized the Sophistication of the New Genre in Plotting Such Subgenres as the Letter Novel and the Detective Novel
15. Dostoevsky Shaped and Was Shaped by the Russian Version of the Nineteenth-Century Novel
16. In Reinventing the Psychological Plot, Dostoevsky Challenged the Current Literary Leaders
17. The Siuzhet of Part 1 of Crime and Punishment Programs the Reader to Read the Rest and to Participate Actively in a Vicious Murder
18. The One-Sidedness of Desire and Violence in Crime and Punishment Is More Peculiar to Dostoevsky's Plotting Than Dostoevshchina
19. Critics Often Attack Crime and Punishment for a Rhetoric That Exploits Causality in Ways They Misunderstand
20. The Epilogue of Crime and Punishment Crystallizes Its Ideological Plot
21. The Plots of Novels Teach Novelistic Justice, Not Poetic Justice
Bibliography
Index
Works by Robert Belknap