Showing papers by "Marie-Laure Ryan published in 1990"

Stacks, Frames and Boundaries, or Narrative as Computer Language

Abstract: On the map of narrative, as on the map of the world, boundaries are everywhere: boundaries within the representing discourse, and boundaries within the represented reality (the "semantic domain" of the text); boundaries with gates to get across, and boundaries with only windows to look through. While geographic boundaries divide space in a random pattern, narrative boundaries present a concentric structure: each territory is contained within another, and as a traveler crosses the narrative space, he must reenter in reverse order each of the territories encountered on the way. This concentric structure is reflected in the family of metaphors through which narratologists have traditionally attempted to deal with the divisions of discourse and story: framing, embedding, and Chinese boxes (cf. Todorov 1971; Stewart 1978; Chambers 1984; Bal 1985; Young 1987; McHale 1987). The concepts of the frame family have become so deeply ingrained in our thinking about narrative that we tend to forget their metaphorical nature. Together with this nature, we also tend to forget their relativity, and we feel no need to look any further for descriptive models. In the present paper, I propose to complement the standard metaphors of framing and embedding with another way to talk about narrative boundaries: the metaphor of the stack, which comes from computer science and is widely used in the