Narratology

Narratology denotes both the theory and the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception. In principle, the word can refer to any systematic study of narrative, though in practice the use of the term is rather more restricted (see below). It is an anglicisation of the French word narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov in his Grammaire du Décaméron (1969), and has been retrospectively applied to many studies that were described otherwise by their authors. Although a lineage stretching back to Aristotle's Poetics may be traced, modern narratology is most typically said to begin with the Russian Formalists, and in particular with Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928).

Due to the origins of the term, it has a strong association with the structuralist quest for a system of formal description that can usefully be applied to any narrative (the analogy being with the grammars by reference to which sentences are parsed in some forms of linguistics). This aim has not, however, characterised all work that is today described as narratological; Percy Lubbock's groundbreaking work on point of view, The Craft of Fiction (1921), is a case in point. Jonathan Culler argues that the many strands of (what he regards as) narratology are all united by a recognition "that the theory of narrative requires a distinction between... 'story' - a sequence of actions or events, conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse - and... 'discourse', the discursive presentation or narration of events", but admits that this is only implicit in the work of many of the authors he is grouping together in this way. The distinction was originally proposed by the Russian Formalists, who used the terms fabula and sujet, but a succession of other pairs has preserved what is essentially the same dichotomy (e.g., histoire/discours, histoire/récit, story/plot). In the structuralist period, it has been assumed that sjuzhet and fabula could be investigated separatly, giving birth to two very different traditions: thematic (Propp, Bremond, Greimas, Dundes, etc.) and modal (Genette, Prince, etc.) narratology. The former, initiated by Propp, is mainly limited to a semiotic formalization of the sequences of the actions told, when the latter investigates on how these actions are told, stressing specially on voice, point of view and transformation of the chronological order, rhythm and frequence. However, many authors, such as Meir Sternberg, Paul Ricoeur, and Raphaël Baroni have insisted that thematic and modal narratology should never be considered separately, specially when dealing with the function and interest of narrative sequence and plot.

To some extent, the designation of work as narratological or otherwise may have more to do with the university department in which it takes place than with any specific theoretical position. Although a narratological approach can be taken to any narrative at all, and the classic studies (for example, Propp's) were often of non-literary narratives, the term "narratology" is most likely employed within the disciplines of literary theory and literary criticism. Examples of systematic narrative study that would not typically be described as narratological would include sociolinguistic studies of oral storytelling, such as those of William Labov, and studies in conversation analysis or discourse analysis that deal with narratives arising in the course of spontaneous verbal interaction. However, constituent analysis of a type where narremes are considered to be the basic units of narrative structure could be included either in linguistics, in semiotics, or in literary theory.

See also

• Narrative
• Narreme as the basic unit of structural narratology
• Narrative structure
• Narrative design
• Post-structuralist narrative theory
• Suspense

External links

• Introduction to Narratology by Dino Felluga
• "Musical Narratology" by William Echard, review of A Theory of Musical Semiotics by Eero Tarasti, foreword by Thomas A. Sebeok.
• The Narrative Act: Wittgenstein and Narratology by Henry McDonald
• Story-Systems
• Narrative theory bibliography (A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology)
• Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative by Manfred Jahn
• Narratology: The Study of Story Structure