Showing papers on "Narratology published in 1981"
TL;DR: The theory of narrative which is presented in Theorie des Erziihlens' and from which the following is an extract (mainly of chapter six) concentrates on the process of narrative transmission as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The theory of narrative which I have presented in Theorie des Erziihlens' and from which the following is an extract (mainly of chapter six) concentrates on the process of narrative transmission. It is based on the assumption that mediacy (Mittelbarkeit) is the generic characteristic that distinguishes narrative from drama, poetry and, as a rule, also from film. Being a complex generic phenomenon, mediacy has to be analyzed on the basis of its chief constitutive elements. These are presented in the form of the following oppositions of distinctive features: identity and non-identity of the realism of the fictional characters and of the narrator (first-/third-person narration); internal and external perspective (limited point of view/omniscience); teller-character and reflector-character as agents of transmission (telling/showing). The structural significance of these basic oppositions emerges from the observation that a transformation of a narrative text determined by one pole of one of these oppositions into a text dominated by its opposite elements usually alters the meaning of the narrative. In this way the central chapters of the Theorie attempt a verification of the structural significance of these oppositions. Illustrations are drawn mainly from English, American and German novels, ranging from DeFoe, Sterne, and Goethe, to Thomas Mann, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, M. Frisch, and Vonnegut. In the teller/reflector opposition we perceive two contrary manifestations of mediacy of presentation, the generic characteristic of all narrative: on the one hand overt mediacy, when the process of narrative transmission becomes part of the thematic texture of the story; and on the other hand covert or dissimulated mediacy, which produces in the reader the illusion of immediacy of presentation. Almost all narrative texts, a few shorter stories excepted, oscillate
42 citations
TL;DR: A convergence of two lines of interpretation, two approaches to the semiotics of theater, which at first sight are quite independent, can be found in this article, where the authors try to arrive at a convergence.
Abstract: I shall try to arrive at a convergence of two lines of interpretation, two approaches to the semiotics of theater, which at first sight are quite independent. The first of these relates the play to all the other works which are narrative in character, in virtue of the incontrovertible fact that a theatrical text narrates events, in whole or in part imaginary, and that they are interconnected. The other line of interpretation sets its sights on the specific nature of theater, whose constituent element is exposition in mimetic form (characters who speak, without the narrator's intervening). Aristotle had already made the distinction when, on the one hand, he contrasted theatrical mimesis effected by "characters in action" (TrpCrr77oVrE) and narrative diegesis, and, on the other, located in action (ti00Ooq) the content both of a play and also of a narrative text (the epic).
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the coherence of the fictional world is seen not as a constructed and conventional coherence but as an effect of the real world coherence, and the notion of presented world is used to define the form of its presentation.
Abstract: N THE LAST twenty or thirty years interest in the analysis of narrative has shifted from the structure of plot and character to narrative situation, the act of speaking through which a fictional world is constructed. But this shift has done little to overcome the basic dualism of narrative theory. Through the dichotomy of narrative discourse and represented reality the categories of analysis come to refer to two disparate ontological realms: that of textual enunciation, and that of a represented world which is in some sense extralinguistic and prior to the form of its presentation. Even when "presented world" is placed within quotation marks, to indicate the pseudoreferential status of literary signification, the category remains ambivalent; the coherence of the fictional world is seen not as a constructed and conventional coherence but as an effect of the coherence of the real world.
2 citations