Narratology

About: Narratology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2833 publications have been published within this topic receiving 50998 citations. The topic is also known as: narrative theory.

Storytelling in Time and Space: Studies in the Chronotope and Narrative Logic on Screen

Abstract: This paper is intended to contribute to the theoretical studies of two issues: chronotope, and narrative architectonics. It explores the narrative forms of the ritual journey, and expands the notion of the chronotope of ordeal, associated with a journey. A new type of chronotope, a derivative from the chronotope of ordeal proposed by Bakhtin, and yet a separate form of artistic time-space continuum—the chronotope of rise and fall—is introduced and explored in this paper. In narrative theory after Bakhtin and in film theory after Deleuze an interest in the exploration of fictional time-

Transmedial Narratology Revisited: On the Intersubjective Construction of Storyworlds and the Problem of Representational Correspondence in Films, Comics, and Video Games

Abstract: Located within the more encompassing project of a genuinely transmedial narratology, this article's focus is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to further our understanding of strategies of narrative representation and processes of narrative comprehension across media by developing a transmedial conceptualization of storyworlds as intersubjective communicative constructs; on the other hand, it will zoom in on transmedial as well as medium-specific forms of representational correspondence ( sensu Currie), examining the question to what extent spectators of films, readers of comics, and players of video games may choose to apply variations of the principle of charity ( sensu Walton) in cases where default assumptions about the relation between a narrative representation and the storyworld(s) it represents become problematic or even collapse entirely.

Universal grammar and narrative form

Abstract: In a major rethinking of the functions, methods, and aims of narrative poetics, David Herman exposes important links between modernist and postmodernist literary experimentation and contemporary language theory. Ultimately a search for new tools for narrative theory, his work clarifies complex connections between science and art, theory and culture, and philosophical analysis and narrative discourse.Following an extensive historical overview of theories about universal grammar, Herman examines Joyce's "Ulysses," Kafka's "The Trial," and Woolf's "Between the Acts" as case studies of modernist literary narratives that encode grammatical principles which were (re)fashioned in logic, linguistics, and philosophy during the same period. Herman then uses the interpretation of universal grammar developed via these modernist texts to explore later twentieth-century cultural phenomena. The problem of citation in the discourses of postmodernism, for example, is discussed with reference to syntactic theory. An analysis of Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" raises the question of cinematic meaning and draws on semantic theory. In each case, Herman shows how postmodern narratives encode ideas at work in current theories about the nature and function of language.Outlining new directions for the study of language in literature, "Universal Grammar and Narrative Form" provides a wealth of information about key literary, linguistic, and philosophical trends in the twentieth century.

Where the Bodies are Buried: Cartesian Dispositions in Narrative Theories of Character

Abstract: What does the recent explosion of work on the body have to offer narrative the ory? And what does narrative theory have to offer work on the body? These two questions frame the following essay. Such questions presume that the intersection of the two areas of inquiry has not been mapped out, and indeed, this is the case. As Daniel Punday has recently observed, "Despite its signal importance to so many schools of contemporary criticism, the human body has largely failed to garner a sig nificant place in narratology" (227). On the other hand, though much work on the body addresses the body's representation in written discourse, very little if any of it operates from a specifically narratological frame of reference. Nowhere is this theo retical gap more pronounced than in theories of character formation, which through out the twentieth century have focused on action, interiority, and consciousness. Narratology's neglect of the body when analyzing character can in part be traced to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's influential Laoco?n (1766). Lessing's famous dictum "[Succession of time is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter" inaugurated a distinction between the two media that has been taken as ax iomatic in twentieth-century narrative theory (91). What has been equally influential,

Det var en gång ett land... : Berättelser om svenskhet i historieläroböcker och elevers föreställningsvärldar

Abstract: The first purpose of this dissertation is to encircle meaning conveying narrations about Sweden and “Swedishness” in history textbooks, published between 1931 and 2009. The second aim is to show which of these narratives, or parts of them, that are expressed by a selection of contemporary students. Another ambition has been to show how textbook narratives have been transferred or transformed over time and what factors may have influenced these changes. An overall goal of the thesis has been to emphasize the existential dimensions of the subject of history. It is through narrations that individual and collective identities are constructed. The dissertation has a hermeneutical perspective, and derives inspiration from the methods of narrative theory and conceptual history, primarily from the thoughts of Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Jorn Rusen, Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner. Five meta-narratives about “Swedishness” are identified in the material: the narrative of neutrality, the narrative of the prosperity or welfare country, the narrative of the role model country of democracy, the narrative of the stranger and the narrative of the world’s most gender equal country. Certain narrations seem to have had a stronger position than others in the macro-rhetoric and the culture of history, with the result that the other narratives will be adapted to the dominant narrative moral. The various narratives have therefore interacted more during certain periods than others, which would have meant a greater potential to affect the narrative identity. When trying to find any comprehensive explanations for the changes one can look for answers in the authors’ intentions and personal experiences, events contemporary with the authors and the historical cultural context in which the narratives are rooted. In general the historical cultural context has had the greatest influence over the narratives’ design. All of the textbook narratives are represented in the student texts, but they are often constructed across different time spans and have a slightly different moral. The moral of the narratives, both of the textbooks’ and the students’, is often that the Swedes are morally superior. (Less)