With striking consistency Morris’s 1877 epic Sigurd meets the principal criteria of its genre. The poem makes its story the vehicle for conveying culturally definitive lore and values, and imbues its heroic actors with the aim of earning a place in that story. The first paginal opening of the 1898 Kelmscott edition embodies this consistency, in imagery and typography that constitute a bibliographical and prosodic rite of passage inducting the reader into a balance of fullness with order that typifies the whole. This aesthetic-ethical balance is then repeatedly thematized along the poem’s synchronic and diachronic axes: e.g., on one hand panoramic vistas, on the other hand sweeping narrative renditions of cosmology and prophecy; or the pivotal “house” figure, which doubles as doomed architectural structure and as tragically concatenated lineage. Morris’s epic moreover incorporates, among other constituent modes like pastoral and romance, the newly ascendant Victorian genre of domestic fiction, which, after dominating the story with the novel-like marital intrigue and foregrounded subjectivity of book 3, yields across the final book to the epic obsequies of Sigurd and Brynhild and the final conflagration of the royal palace at Gudrun’s implacably vindictive hand.

At the heart of the versatility of Sun Tzu’s thinking – and a basic reason it is so extraordinarily conducive to digital age applications – stands its unswerving emphasis on the pivotal importance of information as a resource for strategic actors.

The chapter explores the nature of narrative, the various definitions that are used and how we should define narrative in relation to applied research. We need to make a distinction between narratives – the stories – and narrative processes – the means by which we are able to construct and use stories. The chapter also explores the key characteristics of narratives, such as temporality and meaning. All narratives have certain key characteristics, though researchers and theoreticians do not agree on precisely what these characteristics are. Narratives must be rule-based, or we wouldn't understand each other. They must relate to characters and actions, cause and effect and occur over time. They are also changeable. For instance, we have science stories that are about current theory, but we accept that theory changes over time. This is similar to our life stories, that change as new events and new interpretations are created.

This chapter focuses on the kind of writing that takes shape as story, writing that is made up in the sense of being composed. It argues that this kind of writing matters to us because it is an expression of narrative consciousness. It is important, and has a distinctive quality, drawing us in, entertaining and instructing us. And sometimes it has a particular kind of magic that is both compelling and immersive, enticing us into the written. To a greater or lesser extent, this sort of writing is crafted. This is because writing a narrative involves a range of different kinds of decisions – decisions about what to focus on, what things to emphasise, what to hint at or to leave out, the order of telling and more subtle effects like the relationship of the narrator to the events described. Although this chapter focuses on literature, it also includes a consideration of micronarratives on social media. It concludes with a consideration of more problematic literature – writing in which unhelpful attitudes and prejudices are rehearsed and spread.

This chapter considers ethical prototypes, which give needed specificity to the very general ethical orientations defined by principles and parameters. In ethical decision and behavior, we are concerned with sequences of actions and the motivations guiding these actions. In other words, we are concerned with stories. In this chapter, I argue that the prototypes at issue in specifying our ethical orientations are, most importantly, the universal story structures that I have sought to isolate in earlier works – heroic, romantic, sacrificial, family separation, seduction, revenge, and criminal investigation. These narrative structures are inseparable from human emotion systems. Indeed, story universals are shaped by emotion–motivation systems (along with some general patterns in emotion intensification); those systems (and patterns) account for their universality. In addition, these story genres are of crucial importance for the way we think about and respond to various worldly concerns, such as politics. The third chapter extends these arguments to ethics.

Just as the second chapter provides a literary development of the relatively abstract first chapter, so too the fourth chapter provides literary developments of the cross-cultural genres treated in the third chapter. Specifically, this chapter considers literary cases of all the prominent, universal genres, examining their implications for ethical evaluation and action. In keeping with the cross-cultural range of these genres, this chapter considers works from different time periods and different regions. It includes discussions of the Bhagavad Gītā, Hamlet, and All’s Well That Ends Well, Yuan period Chinese dramas (The Zhao Orphan and Selling Rice in Chenzhou), as well as more recent fiction and nonfiction from India (Nectar in a Sieve) and Australia (Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence). The longest section develops a particularly detailed interpretation of the sacrificial structure in F. W. Murnau’s film, Nosferatu. I undertake a more extensive development of this analysis to illustrate more clearly the impact of story structure on moral response.

As it goes with God, so it goes with the human being: The assault on God, then, entails a radical refashioning of the human being created in the image and likeness of God. Hence Chapter 11 examines what Emil Fackenheim calls the Nazis’ “most characteristic, most original product,” in order to see how and why the Muselmann embodies the essence of the Holocaust. The chapter opens by examining Primo Levi’s remark in Survival in Auschwitz that the Muselmänner have no story. Here I show that the human being who harbors a trace of the divine image is a human being with a story and a name. Having a story entails telling a story. The Muselmänner embody a stark, faceless silence, without a story, without a name, “the divine spark dead within them,” as Levi says. The chapter explains that the Muselmann is not the product of starvation, exhaustion, and brutality. No, the Muselmann is the Jew who has been forbidden to pray,the tohave children, to marry - the Jew who has been robbed of his name, his soul, and who has seen his children and his parents murdered before his eyes.

The short story as a way into discussions of plot. The event-plot short story. Synchronised (reader and character) moments of discovery as a key pleasure in fiction. Poetic justice. The relationship of the character to the theme. The Chekhovian / slice-of-life / anti-plot short story. Plot is sidelined as a prime focus in favour of narratives reflective of human experience. Plot and time: plot is only available in retrospect and the location of the reader in – and in relationship to – the narrative defines the meaning of the story. Telling it slant: the usefulness of an indirect route to meaning.

‘Plot may depend not so much on a sequence of events unfolding chronologically as on what the protagonists and the reader know about the events and when they know it.’

That psychologists, among others, have sought to contain identity in one way or another stands to reason; it is important, at times, to get hold of what we can. It is equally important, however, to recognize and avow the existence of phenomena that resist this getting-hold and that therefore require something else, something better suited to the phenomena in question. In the case of identity, this something, I suggest, is literature, broadly conceived. In offering this perspective, I make no claims at all about the coherence or continuity of identity. Nor do I seek to specify what form of literature is required. Some identities may lend themselves to comparatively smooth beginning-middle-end tales; others, to more modern or post-modern forms; others still, perhaps, to the free verse of poetry. It all depends on the questions one asks, the person doing the questioning, and, not least, the history that precedes us, uncontainable and unnamable though it is. Whatever else identity may be, it remains something of a mystery. Rather than this being cause for despair, however, it is cause for celebration – quiet celebration, founded in the unending inspiration of what we do and cannot know about our own deepest strata.

In adapting his own speeches about the Creole rebellion, Frederick Douglass narrativized aspects of Madison Washington’s life to craft The Heroic Slave (1853). The novella, Douglass’s only foray into writing fiction, remains important for what it reveals about his shifting understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics as well as for what it illuminates about the arc of nineteenth-century African American literary history. With respect to his perspective on abolitionist politics in particular, Douglass used the occasion of writing The Heroic Slave to intimate a new position on physical violence and the right of revolution. With respect to African American literary history, The Heroic Slave marked a pivot towards the novel by a cadre of African American intellectuals in the years immediately before the Civil War.

Methodological frameworks for assessing philosphical content pixelated across narrative, law, and poetry are proposed. Examples of the philosophical use of narrative and its interpenetration with poetry and law illustrate the methodological strictures.

As learners of negotiation, the first step to overcome the blocking of our advance is to become aware of our limited understanding, know-how, and/or thinking. This is not a pleasant experience. Plato linked it to a “torpedo’s shock.” Such a moment of aporia, however, is necessary for us to realize the need to “flip the coin”: i.e. to look at the other, opposite site of what we already know to be true to complete our understanding, know-how, and/or thinking.

This chapter is prompted by Coetzee’s longstanding interest in stories and storytelling, an interest that is registered across his critical essays and reviews, and thematized in several of his works. Focusing on In the Heart of the Country, The Master of Petersburg, and The Childhood of Jesus, as well as the computer poem ‘Hero and Bad Mother in Epic’, the chapter charts the relationship between the kinds of story that Coetzee has told – generally limited in the scope of their plots and the number of their principal characters – and the forms of narration he has adopted, which vary from the first-person character narration of certain of his early and middle fictions, to the tightly focalized external narration of his later works, to the dialogue-heavy and somewhat affectless narration of the Jesus novels. In each case, it is suggested that the particular form of narration is related to the particular truth with which the work in question seeks to confront its readers.