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Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

31 May 1980-
About: The article was published on 1980-05-31 and is currently open access. It has received 1885 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Narrative structure & Narrative criticism.
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Journal ArticleDOI

16 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The post-classical nature of narratology was explicitly discussed in a 1997 article by David Herman as mentioned in this paper, entitled "Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Post-Classical Narratology".
Abstract: HE ‘POSTCLASSICAL NARRATOLOGY’ category, if not the label, and the distinction classical/postclassical were explicitly discussed for the first time in a 1997 article by David Herman entitled “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology.” Two years later, in the introduction to Narratologies: New Perspectives in Narrative Analysis, a collection of articles edited by Herman, the narratologist underlined the distinction he had outlined, and he emphasized the postclassical nature of the texts he had gathered. In 2005 Monika Fludernik took up this distinction, while modulating it, in her “Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present.” There she sketched one or two histories of the evolution of narratological studies and briefly characterized some recent tendencies of narratology. Thus, it seems that the distinction proposed by Herman was compelling enough to acquire mainstream (“historical”) status in less than ten years. 1 In what is called its classical phase, narratology may be viewed as a scientifically motivated, structuralist inspired theory of narrative which examines what narratives have in common as well as what enables them to differ narratively from one another. It refers back to Saussurean linguistics through its interest in narrative langue rather than narrative paroles, what allows a narrative to mean rather than what that narrative means. Particularly successful in the 1960s and 1970s, it includes among its most famous representatives the French or Francophonic founding fathers (Roland Barthes and the veritable manifesto constituted by his “Introduction a l’analyse structurale des recits”), Tzvetan Todorov (who coined the very term “narratologie” and defined it in his Grammaire du Decameron as the “science du recit” 2 ), Gerard Genette (probably the most influential of all narratologists), A. J. Greimas (and the Semiotic School of Paris), Claude Bremond (and his Logique du recit), important continuators like Mieke Bal or Seymour Chatman, distant cousins like Wayne Booth or Franz Stanzel, and (Russian as well as Jamesian-American) formalist or quasi-formalist ancestors. Indeed, classical narratology can itself be characterized as formalist. It distinguishes conceptually between Gehalt and Gestalt, matter and manner, or—to use Hjelmslevian terminology—substance and form. It locates the specificity of narrative as opposed to non-narrative in the form (not the substance) of narrated content and narrating expres

16 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper used computational modeling and large-scale pattern detection to develop a theory of global textual transmission as a process of turbulent flow using stream-of-consciousness narration as a discrete set of linguistic features and rhetorical elements.
Abstract: This article uses computational modeling and large-scale pattern detection to develop a theory of global textual transmission as a process of turbulent flow. Specifically, it models stream-of-consciousness narration as a discrete set of linguistic features and rhetorical elements and uses this model to track the movement of this modernist technique across generic boundaries (from anglophone modernism to more popular genres) and linguistic ones (from English to Japanese). Oscillating between statistical models and moments of close reading, the article shows how a quantitatively scaled-up approach, rather than reinforcing an image of global textual flows as singular and monolithic, illuminates world literature as a system constituted by patterns of divergence in structure and of difference in sameness.

16 citations

Book ChapterDOI
12 Nov 2012
TL;DR: The premise is that suspending disbelief at narrative improbabilities is a skill required to construct narrative coherence and the concluding argument is that these heightened demands may be turned into rhetorical tools.
Abstract: The paper accommodates Espen Aarseth's concept of virtuality and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of suspension of disbelief to the context of modern story forms. The primary focus will be on the videogame. The premise is that suspending disbelief at narrative improbabilities is a skill required to construct narrative coherence. Constructing narrative coherence of stories that contain virtual elements entails supplementary suspension of disbelief at virtual improbabilities, suspension of virtual disbelief. Since increasing the degree of virtuality often increases the requisite traversal effort, virtuality can be said to set increased demands on story traversal as well. This results in the dilemma of virtual balance: while virtuality has the potential to strengthen diegesis, it on the other hand sets heightened demands on story traversal and narrative coherence. The concluding argument is that these heightened demands may be turned into rhetorical tools.

16 citations


Cites background from "Story and Discourse: Narrative Stru..."

  • ...Regardless, the components of a narrative work are extremely challenging to bisect for the sides of oppositions repeatedly turn out to be indissociable; a position shared even by renowned structuralists such as Émile Benveniste [3], Gérard Genette [18, 19] and Seymour Chatman [7]....

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Book ChapterDOI
12 Nov 2012
TL;DR: An implementation of Distributed Drama Management is described, which aims to retain the benefits of Emergent Narrative such as believability and agility of response to user actions, but attempts to provide a structurally and emotionally consistent experience.
Abstract: In this technical paper, we describe an implementation of Distributed Drama Management (DDM). DDM is a concept which involves synthetic actor agents in an Emergent Narrative scenario acting on both an in-character level, which reflects the concerns of the characters, and an out-of-character level, which reflects the concerns of a storyteller. By selecting the most "dramatically appropriate" action from a set of autonomously proposed actions, Distributed Drama Management aims to retain the benefits of Emergent Narrative such as believability and agility of response to user actions, but attempts to provide a structurally and emotionally consistent experience.

16 citations