Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1980"

Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories

Abstract: Contemporary narrative theory is, in many respects, a quite sophisticated area of study: it is international and interdisciplinary in its origins, scope, and pursuits and, in many of its achievements, both subtle and rigorous. It also appears to be afflicted, however, with a number of dualistic concepts and models, the continuous generation of which betrays a lingering strain of naive Platonism and the continued appeal to which is both logically dubious and methodologically distracting. The sort of dualism to which I refer is discernible in several of the present essays and is conspicuous in the title of Seymour Chatman's recently published study, Story and Discourse. That doubling (that is, story and discourse) alludes specifically to a two-leveled model of narrative that seems to be both the central hypothesis and the central assumption of a number of narratological theories which Chatman offers to set forth and synthesize. The dualism recurs throughout his study in several other sets of doublet terms: "deep structure" and "surface manifestation," "content plane" and "expression plane," "histoire" and "r&it," "fabula" and "sjuiet," and "signified" and "signifier"-all of which, according to Chatman, may be regarded as more or less equivalent distinctions: "Structuralist theory argues that each narrative has two parts: a story (histoire) [that is,] the content... and a discourse (discours), that is, the expression, the means by which the content is communicated."'

What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (And Vice Versa)

Abstract: The study of narrative has become so popular that the French have honored it with a term-la narratologie. Given the escalating and sophisticated literature on the subject, its English counterpart, "narratology," may not be as risible as it sounds. Modern narratology combines two powerful intellectual trends: the Anglo-American inheritance of Henry James, Percy Lubbock, E. M. Forster, and Wayne Booth; and the mingling of Russian formalist (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, and Vladimir Propp) with French structuralist approaches (Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov). It's not accidental that narratology has developed during a period in which linguistics and cinema theory have also flourished. Linguistics, of course, is one basis for the field now called semiotics-the study of all meaning systems, not only natural language. Another basis is the work of the philosopher Charles S. Peirce and his continuator, Charles W. Morris. These trees have borne elegant fruit: we read fascinating semiotic analyses of facial communication, body language, fashion, the circus, architecture, and gastronomy. The most vigorous, if controversial, branch of cinema studies, the work of Christian Metz, is also semiotically based. One of the most important observations to come out of narratology is that narrative itself is a deep structure quite independent of its medium. In other words, narrative is basically a kind of text organization, and that organization, that schema, needs to be actualized: in written words, as in stories and novels; in spoken words combined with the movements of actors imitating characters against sets which imitate

Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot

Abstract: HAT FOLLOWS is intended primarily as a discourse on plot, // a concept which has mostly gone unhonored in modern criticism, no doubt because it appears to belong to the popular, even the commercial side of literature. "Reading for the plot," we were taught, is a low form of activity. Long caught in valuations set by a criticism conceived for the lyric, the study of narrative has more recently found its way back to a quasi-Aristotelian view of the logical priority of plot in narrative forms. In the wake of Russian Formalism, French "narratology" has made us sensitive to the functional logic of actions, to the workings of sequence and transformation in the constitution of recognizable narrative units, to the presence of codes of narration that demand decoding in consecutive, irreversible order.' Plot as I understand it, however, suggests a focus somewhat more specific than the questions of structure, discourse, and narrativity addressed by most narratology. We may want to conceive of plot less as a structure than as a structuring operation, used, or made necessary, by those meanings that develop only through sequence and succession: an interpretative operation specific to narrative signification. The word plot, any dictionary tells us, covers a range of meanings, from the bounded piece of land, through the ground plan of a building, the chart or map, the outline of a literary work, to the sense (separately derived from the French complot) of the scheme or secret machination, to the accomplishment of some purpose, usually illegal. All these meanings, I think, usefully cohere in our common sense of plot: it is not only the outline of a narrative, demarcating its boundaries, it also suggests its intention of meaning, the direction of its scheme or machination for accomplishing a purpose. Plots have not only design, but intentionality as well. Some narratives clearly give us a sense of "plottedness" in higher degree than others. Our identification of this sense of plottedness may provide a more concrete and analyzable way into the question of plots than an abstract definition of the subject, and a way that necessarily finds its focus in the readership of plot, in the reader's recogni-

Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text: A Pluralistic Approach to Ernest Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain"

Abstract: It is a commonplace that the systematic study of narrative was founded by Aristotle, and scarcely an exaggeration to say that little of significance was added to those foundations until the twentieth century. Narrative theory in the intervening period was mainly directed (or misdirected) at deducing from Aristotle's penetrating analysis of the system of Greek tragedy a set of prescriptive rules for the writing of epic. The rise of the novel as a distinctive and eventually dominant literary form finally exposed the poverty of neoclassical narrative theory, without for a long time generating anything much more satisfactory. The realistic novel set peculiar problems for any formalist criticism because it worked by disguising or denying its own conventionality. It therefore invited and received criticism which was interpretative and evaluative rather than analytical. It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that something like a poetics of fiction began to evolve from the self-conscious experiments of novelists themselves, and was elaborated by literary critics. At about the same time, developments in linguistics, folklore and anthropology stimulated a more broad-ranging study of narrative, beyond the boundaries of modern literary fiction. For a long time these investigations were pursued on parallel tracks which seldom converged. In the last couple of decades, however, the Anglo-American tradition of formalist criticism, essentially empirical and text-based, theoretically rather underpowered but critically productive, has encountered the more systematic, abstract, theoretically rigorous and "scientific" tradition of European structuralist

Dynamic Structures in Narrative Literature: "The Dialogic Principle"

Abstract: 1. We are interested here in defining narrativity. One must presuppose that literary communication involves multidimensional unfolding of the realms of possible sign-usage and sign-production. Such unfolding is conditioned by the possible doubling of all constituents (addresser, addressee, reference, etc.; Jakobson, 1960: 353, cf. note 6 below), in the communicative situation. Accordingly, narrativity should not be limited to merely one level, whether the level of macrostructure (e.g., as in generative narratology), the structure of discourse (e.g., in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon or German narrative theory), or microstructure (which is usually neglected). Narrativity is to be seen, rather, as a

Narrative Theory and Textual Interpretation: Hofmannsthal’s “Sommerreise” as Test Case

Abstract: The article demonstrates how models and insights developed within structural-semiotic narrative theory can be applied in the historical interpretation of literary texts. The analysis, which is intended here as an example, attends to the relationship between immanent poetics, conception of art and historical consciousness in a text by Hofmannsthal.