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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.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined the expressive affordances of Facebook status updates with the help of three prominent concepts derived from literary narratology and sociolinguistics: experientiality, simultaneity, and tellability.
Abstract: Abstract:The article presents a new method for the analysis of short-form on-line storytelling by assuming an aestheticizing point of view on an everyday narrative practice. It examines the expressive affordances of Facebook status updates with the help of three prominent concepts derived from literary narratology and sociolinguistics: experientiality, simultaneity, and tellability. Conventions of the novel such as the epistolary form are juxtaposed with social media narration, in order to highlight both the intentional artistry and accidental aesthetics of status updates. The article supplements sociolinguistic studies by exposing the existentialist, self-consciously non-communicative facet of Facebook storytelling.

10 citations

Journal Article
22 Jun 2004-Style
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the role of the reader in the process of figuring-forth in a novel, a process of transformation that turns some signs or features of a literary text into characters.
Abstract: 1. The Power of Illusion In the wake of an ever-increasing interest in the characters of Shakespeare's plays since the end of the eighteenth century, John Wilson in 1829 made the following statement: "Shakespeare's characters have long ceased to be poetical creations, and are now as absolute flesh and blood as any other subject of his Majesty's dominions" (963). The striking neglect of the fact that characters tend to emerge from the page when we read novels, plays, or poems--a neglect that was strengthened by the structuralist fixation on the text--has slowly been overcome in recent times by an increased interest in the process of reading. The phenomenon is, after all, widespread enough. Not only do such figures take on a life of their own in that they repeatedly become the protagonists of new works (for example in the Hamlet novels of Georg Britting and Alfred Doblin or in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). More important is the fact that figures like Hamlet or Lady Macbeth, Tom Jones or Huck Finn, Stephen Dedalus or Mrs. Dalloway, Blanche Dubois or Willy Loman, Holden Caulfield or Lolita tend to exist autonomously in the memory of those readers or audiences who have "made their acquaintance" in the respective plays and novels. In order to come closer to an adequate analysis of this process of figuring-forth, it will in the first place be necessary to differentiate between on the one hand "literary character" as the totality of the signs in the text that provide clues for the readers' acts of construction and, on the other hand, the dramatised "figures beyond the text" (Cohan) that readers picture on the stage of their imagination during the process of reading. Since the publication of the original German version of this essay, critics like Steven Cohan, Uri Margolin, Laszlo Halasz, Richard J. Gerri, and David W. Allbritton as well as Thomas Koch and Ralf Schneider have helped to overcome the methodological reduction of literary characters to mere "actants" in structuralist narratology and have started to pay tribute to the creative activity of the reader. What we chiefly find in these more recent studies is an interpretation of literary characters as "mental models" in the sense of cognitive psychology? This may solve some analytical problems but creates a new one--it leaves unexplained why in our imagination we do not encounter mere "mental models" but figures often as much alive as those we meet in everyday life. The experience of this encounter with literary characters will be felt most strongly by the literary scholar who still has the ability to read or to watch a film or theater performance without immediately analyzing it. The strength of the illusion becomes apparent in the fact that one almost inevitably gets involved in the fate of the protagonists despite one's theoretical insight into the artificiality or constructedness of literary characters. Admittedly, for the purpose of analysis one must not remain caught up in this illusion; however, neither should one dismiss it. On the contrary, one has to take this effect properly into account and attempt to explain it as the "primary" phenomenon. 2. The Conditions of Figuring-Forth We gain knowledge of literary characters through literary works--this seems fairly clear. On the other hand, such characters really become figured-forth only in the imagination of the reader or viewer. Since the imagining takes place during the so-called "reception" of a work, the elements or factors necessary for the figuration of a literary character are the text, the imagination of the recipient, and the interaction of the two in the process of reading or listening. The object of investigation here is precisely that interaction, the process of transformation that turns some signs or features of a literary text into characters. How is it possible that powerful figures emerge from pages filled with words and sentences as soon as we begin the process of reading? …

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
24 Apr 2017
TL;DR: Two successful audience/player-centered approaches from filmmaking and education are outlined, along with a tweaking of the successful MDA framework, providing structures for creatives to avoid the problem of design schema tension and create better projects.
Abstract: Game designers and game writers do not have the same understandings, processes, or approaches, and this impedes good practice. This is not due to the two modes being so different or incompatible however, as has been claimed now and in earlier narratology and ludology debates. Instead, this article argues that incompatibilities are due more to the schemas of creation: the mental models we are taught and create with, that thwart more integrated practices. We learn to create and think about games in one way, and narrative in another. This siloing is due to a predictable differentiation rhetoric that occurs at the emergence of a new medium: games are not stories, games are not films, VR is not film, X is understood by not being Y. This arbitrariness of difference facilitates a schism in the creator's mind, where elements, roles and industries become irreconcilable. Indeed, whole swathes of wisdom are put to the side in an effort to be recognised as different. When narrative is used in games, then, developers rely on external design grammars, where models from other artforms are imported and shoehorned. There have been attempts to reduce such siloing, but integration cannot happen merely through recognising common elements or traits within a game object. Instead, this article argues that a common understanding can be found through the common factor of the audience or player. To illustrate this point, two successful audience/player-centered approaches from filmmaking and education are outlined, along with a tweaking of the successful MDA framework, providing structures for creatives to avoid the problem of design schema tension and create better projects.

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 1983-Mln
TL;DR: In this article, the structuralists around Roland Barthes-Claude Bremond, A.J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov-were able to make major analytic strides in understanding the structure of narrative by formulating models for their deductive study.
Abstract: It is undoubtedly to semiolinguistics and structuralism that the enormous interest in narrative and narrative theory in the midtwentieth century may be attributed. Using Vladimir Propp's Morphology and Claude Levi-Strauss' Mythologiques in combination with certain of the Russian formalisms, the structuralists around Roland Barthes-Claude Bremond, A.J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov-were, in French criticism at least, able to make major analytic strides in understanding the structure of narrative by formulating models for their deductive study. The very heart of narrative is laid bare in their work, which Barthes himself celebrated in his famous 1966 essay "Introduction to the Structural Study of Narrative" (translated into English in 1975).1 Narrative, like a primitive myth, is seen by structural analysts as free from all mimetic constraints. It is that form which is not enslaved to reality. This freedom (of will; the arbitrary) is crucially important for structuralism. Narrative is, however, also the locus of a certain lack of freedom. In narrative one discovers the existence of certain

9 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202385
2022210
202188
2020103
2019136
2018197