"A joke is usually a narrative⋯⋯We can, in short, study narrative as a process, the activity of selecting, arranging, and rendering story material in order to achieve specific time-bound effects on a perceiver. I shall call this process narration, and it is the central concern of this book."
"⋯⋯The historian must be something of a critic or theorist; the critic usually inherits theoretical and historical presuppositions.⋯⋯"
"The basic difference is between telling and showing. The secondary difference lies within the category of telling: does the poet speak in his own voice or through a character's?"