'Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it is as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose and just as he tells it out in his sleep, he changes into an uncontradictable judiciary with a gown and a gavel and you are embarrassed to have heard anything.' Was there ever such an instance of the pot calling the kettle black? Moore's poems too seem to harbour a secret behind their complicated surfaces, and in her work as well one feels the brisk, moral conclusions are a bit too abrupt, and not completely transparent as summaries of the prismatic turns that precede them. Despite her intense 'capacity for fact' which won the admiration of Objectivists such as William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, Moore's sensibility, and even her idea of what poetry is, brings her closer to the abstract, philosophical Stevens. 'No fact is a bare fact, no individual fact is a universe in itself', wrote Stevens, celebrating Moore's creation of 'an individual reality' out of the diversity of idiom and image that is the record of the world imagined. The task of the poet is to bring 'the thing' into an aesthetic integration where it takes on the character of an artist's world, created or discovered. Moore recognised early that Stevens too was creating such an 'individual reality'. She was one of the first to appreciate Harmonium in her review 'Well Moused, Lion', in which she admires the 'riot of gorgeousness' in his imagination. 'One is excited by the sense of proximity to Java peacocks, golden pheasants, South American macaw feather capes, Chilcat blankets, hair seal needlework, Singalese masks, and Rousseau's paintings of banana leaves and alligators.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle [Aldington], 1886-1961), with these initials as her authorial signet, had a literary career as an author of lyric poetry, long poems, essay/memoirs and novels and, briefly, as a film-maker and actress. Born in the United States from a well-to-do, intellectual family, adherents of Moravian Protestantism, H.D. became an expatriate writer and British citizen, living in London and later in Switzerland. She had a complex relational life as a bisexual woman, was married with one daughter (from an affair), enjoyed a number of erotic relationships with men and women, and lived in a companionate, lesbian relationship with Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983) for the majority of her life. She was theoretically and personally invested in psychoanalysis, archaeological discoveries, classical culture, cinema, the occult and comparative religious study; she also meditated the array and meanings of her erotic and relational ties in richly layered prose and poetry, including memoirs of her brief but important analysis with Freud. Both world wars profoundly affected her writing. Indeed, many of modernism's most distinctive long poems were written in large measure to confront these wars, to give accounts of their damage and to construct alternative meanings.

H.D.'s critical reputation, like that of many other modernist women, was quite uneven until the advent of feminist scholarship. Despite her full writing career and panoply of fascinating texts, she was seen as Imagist (or short-poem writer) only, localised to some work in the 1910s as fully representative, with her total oeuvre sometimes marginalised and discredited. Some poets and fewer academics (like Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and L. S. Dembo) always insisted on her pertinence; H.D.'s own careful archive at Beinecke Library, Yale University, set up by H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, assisted the recovery of her importance by a growing number of scholars.

In the widest sense, “character” designates any entity, individual or collective - normally human or human-like - introduced in a work of narrative fiction. Characters thus exist within storyworlds, and play a role, no matter how minor, in one or more of the states of affairs or events told about in the narrative. Character can be succinctly defined as storyworld participant.

Now, for its part, the storyworld itself divides into the spheres of narration and of the narrated, the telling and what is told about. “Character” in the narrower sense is restricted to participants in the narrated domain, the narrative agents. Characters are introduced in the text by means of three kinds of referring expressions: proper names (including letters and numbers), such as Don Quixote; definite descriptions, such as the knight of mournful countenance; and personal pronouns (I, she). Names and definite descriptions occurring in a given work often originate with it, hence introducing original fictions, or occur already in earlier works by the same author or by others, thereby yielding new versions of the original fiction, or pick out an actual person, thus yielding a literary, sometimes highly fictionalized, version of the real individual.

Narrative theory is a flexible tool, useful for analyzing elements of storytelling common across a wide range of media. A detailed vocabulary for the mechanics of plotting or elements of characterization can help us understand a novel, television show, comic book, videogame, film, opera, or any other form of storytelling. Although the concepts explored in this collection can be applied productively to any medium, we must also be aware of the ways that any specific medium creates particular storytelling parameters, constraining some options while enabling others. Thus the goal of this chapter is to outline some of the specific narrative facets that are common to moving-image storytelling as found within film and television, and to explore how these two media function as major narrative forms in contemporary culture.

Film and television share a common visual and aural form, and thus many of their specific storytelling practices are similar; however, the two media diverge in crucial ways, with sufficiently different structures that we cannot analyze film and television narratives identically. By examining these media comparatively, we can see how film and television differ from literature in areas such as narration, perspective, temporality, and comprehension, and diverge from each other regarding plot structures and viewer engagement. To explore aspects of moving-image narration and to exemplify the particular ways that film and television narratives function, this chapter explores two popular examples: the film of The Wizard of Oz; and the television series Lost.

'Our age beyond any doubt has been, and will continue to be, the Age of Eliot', wrote the novelist and critic Conrad Aiken in a commemorative essay which appeared shortly after T. S. Eliot's death in 1965. Opinion on the other side of the Atlantic concurred: the headline over Eliot's obituary in the London Times declared him 'The Most Influential English Poet of His Time'. Consensus so uniform inevitably invites dissent, and it was only six years later that the distinguished critic Hugh Kenner published a provocative and influential book, one still essential for anyone striving to assess Anglo- American modernism. Its title, The Pound Era, implicitly repudiated the widespread belief that Eliot had dominated his age. It was Ezra Pound, instead, who had reshaped the poetic and literary sensibility of a generation. Four decades later, a reader may legitimately wonder which of these arresting figures was truly the major poet of his time. Yet to pose that question in that way may also obscure more than it illuminates. For what does it mean to declare that one poet or another was 'the poet of his age'? Would it be a strictly historical statement, a question of how many readers preferred or even purchased the works of either? Would it be a matter, say, of counting up the number of book reviews and news items that featured one or the other? Or a matter, say, of somehow measuring influence, totalling the number of imitators that later gathered around either? There are countless ways that we might reformulate that question, but one good starting point might be to reconsider the decade that was most plainly the era of neither, or perhaps of both - the decade when Pound and Eliot collaborated to achieve a profound transformation in the conventions of modern poetry, the years 1914 to 1923.

The computer can be used to extend or demolish traditional narrative concepts in all sorts of ways, but its ability to combine narration and simulation has been particularly significant in digital art, electronic literature, and video games. In narrating, computers represent events either by directly outputting narrative text, graphics, and sound or by generating this from some underlying representation of what has happened. In simulating, computers determine what happens in some model world, using a system of rules. Approaches developed by narrative scholars can provide specific insights into how simulation and narration function and interrelate in digital works.

Consider this excerpt from a transcript of interaction with Steven Meretzky’s 1985 interactive fiction A Mind Forever Voyaging – input from the user, also known as the interactor, is shown in italics:

1. >go northeast

2. Church Lobby

3. The regional central headquarters of the Church is an architectural splendor; light spills down from above, giving the illusion that the countenance of God is gazing down upon a visitor in full force and fury. A huge image of a radar dish, symbol of the Church, hangs above the inner sanctums to the east, and impressively tall arched doorways lead out to the northwest and southwest.

4. A wooden rack in the lobby, for the purpose of distributing literature about the church, contains one pamphlet.

5. WARNING: Record buffer full. Auto-deactivation of record feature.

1. >exit simulation mode

2. Aborting to Communications Mode

3. – SIMULATION TERMINATED –

1. >PEOF

2. Dr. Perelman’s Office

3. This is the office of your creator, Dr. Abraham Perelman. It is cluttered and disorganized. Overstuffed bookshelves line the room. Perelman’s desk is covered with a number of items, including a decoder, a map of the city, a ball-point pen, and a printout of a magazine article. Steam from a cup of coffee is fogging the lens of your visual unit.

4. Doctor Perelman is sitting at his desk, reading through stacks of papers and occasionally typing on his desk terminal.

1. >perelman, look at the record buffer

2. Perelman looks intrigued. “You’ve recorded something interesting, eh? Let me get a few of my colleagues together, and we’ll view the buffer. I’ll let you know when we’re done, okay?” He leaves the room.

In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, W. B. Yeats (1865- 1939) pronounced with careful qualification: 'I too have tried to be modern.' This statement, simultaneously tentative and emphatic, sums up the difficulties both of considering Yeats as a modernist tout court and of taking the measure of the undoubted modernism of his work from 1900 onwards. Not least of the factors seemingly setting him at a remove from this literary revolution is the fact that he was a member of an earlier generation than Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), who were a couple of decades younger than him. Yeats, in fact, is at once inside and outside this movement. On one level, he may be viewed as an instigator and central practitioner of modernist poetry but, on another level, he is of note because he deviates from, or implicitly unsettles, any historiographical or conceptual map of modernism that we might want to adopt. Yeats, unlike Pound or Eliot, the poets with whom he is most closely connected in the early decades of the twentieth century, awkwardly occupies the roles of eminent precursor, revolutionary pioneer, sceptical antagonist and belated exponent of modernism. Multiplying such complications, in his later work, he appears in part to renege on some of the political radicalism of high modernism while never abandoning its creative potential and its anarchic promotion of change and social renewal. Paradoxically, Yeats is both a proleptic modernist and a late arrival in a movement that he helped to shape but never fully embraced.

This is how the story of Emily Brontë's novel, Wuthering Heights, begins. Like most stories, it begins with a beginning. This is a more important point than it may seem: all stories move only in one direction, forward through time. If there is a knowable beginning, that's where they begin. If there is a knowable end, that's where they end. The process of telling is the story's narration, and at this point Ellen (Nelly) Dean, a servant in the household, is its narrator. This distinction between story and narration is also important. It is an implicit acknowledgment that a story is understood as having a separate existence from its narration. As such, it can be told in different ways by different narrators. Were Hindley or Cathy our narrator at this point, the narration of this story would be different, with different words, different emotional inflections, different perspectives, and different details. These narrators might even contradict each other.

Debates concerning the topics of gender and sexuality were ubiquitous in the West around the turn of the century. Active women's movements throughout Europe, the British Isles and the United States brought women's legal rights and social positioning to political consciousness, and the study of sexuality fuelled the new fields of psychology and sociology, as well as being a favourite topic of the popular press. This period coined the words 'homosexuality' (first used in the USA in 1892) and 'feminism' (around 1910), and there was enormous interest in both defining and blurring boundaries between 'masculine' and 'feminine' behaviours. In the late nineteenth century, normative categories had primarily to do with gendered, not sexual, behaviour and experience - whether one manifested appropriate characteristics for a man or woman. Heterosexuality was assumed, but masculinity or femininity were the salient markers for the cultural norm, and initially also for the new sexually directed vocabulary. Sexual object choice became linked to categories of sexuality only later in the century and after a period of definitional murkiness, when individuals perceived as manifesting the general mental characteristics of the opposite sex were considered to be sexually 'inverted', 'homosexual' or belonging to a 'third-sex'. Moreover, this mental state was judged according to appearance (clothes, haircut), professional choices and manner. Hence, during these decades, there was opportunity for a fluidity of personal performance or definition among categories of sexual being, even as there was increasing pressure for stricter normative and more sexually focused categorisation. The scholarship on these evolving gender and sexual normative definitions is now vast, and no aspect of modernist poetry remains untouched by them - from an understanding of individual poets' anxieties and desires in relation to their changing times, to the readings of particular poems, to analysis of the new aesthetic as it was practised and theorised by this generation of writers.

From the outset, theories of drama and theories of narrative have been closely linked. Aristotle's Poetics, still the starting-point for any narrative theory, devotes more space to drama than to epic. The topics he covers, including character, plot, beginnings and endings, poetic justice, and the goals of representation, are as relevant to narrative theory as to a poetics of drama. Classic statements about these and other aspects of narrative, whether from the Renaissance, neo-classical, or Romantic periods, are likewise filled or even dominated by references to drama, as a look at the critical work of Castelvetro, Sidney, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, and Coleridge makes clear. Quite simply, if you are going to discuss plot and character, you must take drama and its theorists into account. Furthermore, performed stories, whether in drama, film, ballet, or video, have an additional enacted dimension that can interact with many of the other elements of narrative, particularly in the cases of character, time, and space. Strangely, while cinema was quickly brought into the fold of narrative theory, most notably in Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse, drama has lagged behind, leaving a number of important theoretical contributions in the wings, as it were. Some recent theorists, following Genette, restrict the definition of narrative to stories that are told or narrated rather than enacted (though even in this limited case, as we will see, drama has important contributions to make). Many if not most theorists, however, follow Roland Barthes, who stated that “narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio's Saint Ursula), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation.” I will be using this broader conception of narrative in the pages that follow.

Identity and alterity (or otherness) are key concerns in the context of postcolonial studies, which focuses on the power relations between colonizer and colonized. Until recently, however, the centrality of identity and alterity for narrative theory has not been sufficiently recognized. While the final part of my chapter will focus on identity and alterity in postcolonial narratives, I will begin by considering two more general questions; namely (1) the status of identity in narrative and narrating (outside a postcolonial framework); and (2) the importance of alterity, difference, or deviation from cultural, societal, narrative, and stylistic norms that are constitutive of storytelling. The basic argument of the chapter is that issues of identity and alterity are relevant to all narratives, even though - for thematic and ideological reasons - they seem to be more prominently addressed in postcolonial texts.

In the past fifteen years, as the “narrative turn in the humanities” gave way to the narrative turn everywhere (politics, science studies, law, medicine, and last, but not least, cognitive science), few words have enjoyed so much use and suffered so much abuse as narrative and its partial synonym, story. The French theorist Jean-François Lyotard invokes the “Grand Narratives” of a capitalized History; the psychologist Jerome Bruner speaks of narratives of identity; the philosopher Daniel Dennett describes mental activity on the neural level as the continuous emergence and decay of narrative drafts; the political strategist James Carville attributes the loss of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election to the lack of a convincing narrative; and “narratives of race, class and gender” have become a mantra of cultural studies. Gerald Prince regards the contemporary use of the term narrative as a hedging device, a way to avoid strong positions: “One says 'narrative' instead of 'explanation' or 'argumentation' (because it is more tentative); one prefers 'narrative' to 'theory,' 'hypothesis,' or 'evidence' (because it is less scientistic); one speaks of a 'narrative' rather than 'ideology' (because it is less judgmental); one substitutes 'narrative' for 'message' (because it is more indeterminate).” Another narrative theorist, Peter Brooks, attributes the surging popularity of the word to a more positive cause: “While I think the term has been trivialized through overuse, I believe the overuse responds to a recognition that narrative is one of the principal ways we organize our experience of the world - a part of our cognitive tool kit that was long neglected by psychologists and philosophers.”

'Said Yo-Yo: / “What part ob yu iz deh poEM?”.' Tucked away in one of the late Cantos that Ezra Pound wrote during his thirteen-year incarceration in St Elizabeths hospital, this question from a fellow inmate is offered as light relief in a passage which has already praised Adolf Hitler as a leader 'furious from perception'. In such a context, readers are unlikely to linger over Yo-Yo's question, cast as it is in a damaged idiom that serves only to reinforce the apparent obtuseness of its underlying assumption: Pound is a poet, ergo his poem must exist somewhere in his person. The association is silly, of course, though it has a certain irony when proposed in a place where bodies are hardly at their best. But, whether or not it is recorded here for that reason, Yo-Yo's question does remind us that, while a modernist poetics seems to emerge from a distrust of earlier conceptions of poetry as ethereal and disembodied, it is also founded in a partial and strategic dissociation of the poet from the poem. In light of this, to ask where the poem 'is' - to wonder which part of the poet's person it might seem to occupy - might prompt us to ask where it comes from in the first place, a question of a rather different order and one which may shed more light on modernist poetics than Yo-Yo could have suspected. Traditional answers to the conundrum frequently appeal to the function of memory, especially the Platonic form of recollection, and in practice, of course, especially in periods before our own, poetry did have close ties to memory, not least through the common practice of learning by heart.

Mina Loy's poem 'Brancusi's Golden Bird' was first published, next to a photograph of Brancusi's sculpture, in the same 1922 issue of the Dial as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. If The Waste Land has become familiar as a pivotal text in the institutionalisation of Eliot, Loy's poem remains unassimilated, still suggestive for what might become of twenty-first-century neomodernism. 'Brancusi's Golden Bird' is one among several poems in which Loy finds analogues and affiliations in the persons and works of her contemporaries. Elliptical and witty, these poems carve out transfers of energy from language used as an imagistic mode of description to a more synthetic, aesthetic compound. Combining free-verse forms, vowel over consonant patterns, with a sense of the play of concretion on the page, her poems have a sculptural and musical palpability. 'Brancusi's Golden Bird' moves from what might seem like a representation of another medium towards a poetics whose delight in Latinate concretion sits deftly across line breaks and intimations of a new silence in writing: