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.

Mediapolis : aspects of texts, hypertexts, and multimedial communication

Abstract: Texts, hypertexts and narratology semiotic and philosophical approaches aspects of media and technology criticism media cultural development.

Joint Attention, Semiotic Mediation, and Literary Narrative

Abstract: In this paper I discuss the importance for narrative theory of the concept, drawn from developmental psychology, of “joint attention”. In the first part, I explain the basic concept and its significance for the emergence of narrative in young children. In the second part I draw out the implications of this genetic approach for our understanding of the nature of narrative signification: where classical narratology is based on a chain of representational and “communicative” dyads (signifier/signified and sender/receiver), joint attention integrates these functions into a triadic semiotic by which the sign mediates between three poles: the producer of the sign, the receiver of the sign and the object of their joint attention. In the third part, taking Boccaccio’s Decameron as an example, I illustrate how this approach to the semiotics of narrative elucidates aspects of literary narrative that are obscured by the classical semiotic. Joint attention offers affordances for quasi-recursive re-contextualization, since the object of joint attention may consist of another act of joint attention: literary narrative can create complex joint attentional structures by which the story is “seen” through nested perspectival prisms of embedded narrative and character.

Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory

Abstract: This special issue assembles an international group of scholars to explore emerging connections between comics studies and narrative theory—two fields which, until the last five to ten years, have developed largely in parallel, without much cross-fertilization or even interaction. The signs of this new convergence of scholarly interests and research practices are unmistakable. Recent meetings of the Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the International Society for the Study of Narrative have increasingly featured papers and sessions on the intersections between scholarship on narrative and research on comics and graphic novels. Further, recent publications have featured narratologically oriented work by analysts of graphic narrative, including Jeanne Ewert’s and Erin McGlothlin’s path breaking studies of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Pascal Lefevre’s analysis of “Narration in Comics” in the inaugural issue of Image [&] Narrative, Teresa Bridgeman’s work on bande dessinee, and Richard Walsh’s discussion of “The Narrative Imagination across Media” in Modern Fiction Studies’ special issue on “Graphic Narrative” (2006). In Francophone scholarship, there is a longstanding tradition of studying comics using semiotic concepts, which are part of the foundation for contemporary narratology. This tradition reached something of a culmination in Thierry Groensteen’s recently translated monograph The System of Comics (discussed by Craig Fischer and Charles Hatfield in this issue). Yet for all of these incipient cross-disciplinary connections, the present issue is the first of its kind: a sustained, multi-author study organized around the question of how ideas from contemporary narrative theory can be brought to bear on graphic narratives, and how, reciprocally, the richness and complexity of narratives told in words and images might pose challenges to existing models of story. We use the term graphic narrative theory as a shorthand for the new, hybridized field of study in which questions of this kind are central, and which the essays gathered here collectively work to promote. In this introduction, we provide context for understanding the ongoing disciplinary reconfiguration—the continuing expansion of interest in storytelling via words and images—that has made this special

Narrative as a hermeneutical relationship to the unconscious

Abstract: In this article, what seems to have been two central tenets in contemporary psychoanalytic narrative theory are challenged. The one—propounded by Roy Schafer—is that the goal of psychoanalytic work is to furnish the analysand with an alternative narrative. The other—propounded by Donald Spence—is that any story will do, if only it is coherent, consistent, persuasive and encompasses the known “facts”. Basing his critique of the mentioned standpoints on an intersubjective understanding of psychoanalytic work and a concept of interpreting inspired by the existential hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger, the author discusses the nature of the analytic dialogue and the role of transference together with the ethical basis of truth in the analytic project. Finally, it is indicated that there is a limit to analytic working-through, where the analysand's narrative activity must come to a halt and room be left for a resolve, where the analysand may undergo a fundamental transformation.