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.

Generating narrative variation in interactive fiction

Abstract: A general method for the generation of natural language narrative is described. It allows the expression, or narrative discourse, to vary independently of the underlying events and existents that are the narrative's content. Specifically, this variation is accomplished in an interactive fiction (IF) system which replies to typed input by narrating what has happened in a simulated world. IF works have existed for about 30 years as forms of text-based computer simulation, instances of dialog systems, and examples of literary art. Theorists of narrative have carefully distinguished between the level of underlying content (corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer and user) since the mid-1960s, when the field of narratology began to develop, but IF systems have not yet made use of this distinction. The current project contributes new techniques for automatic narration by building on work done in computational linguistics, specifically natural language generation, and in narratology. First, types of narrative variation that are possible in IF are identified and formalized in a way that is suitable for a natural language generation system. An architecture for an IF system is then described and implemented; the result allows multiple works of interactive fiction to be realized and, using a general plan for narrating, allows them to be narrated in different ways during interaction. The system's ability to generate text is considered in a pilot evaluation. Plans for future work are also discussed. They include publicly released systems for IF development and narratology education, adding a planning capability that uses actors' individual perspectives, and adapting automatic narration to different sorts of interactive systems.

Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction

Abstract: This book explores the concepts of nationality and culture in the context of nineteenth-century Scottish fiction, through the writing of Walter Scott, James Hogg, R. L. Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant. It describes the relationship between speech writing as a foundation of the literary construction of a particular national identity, exploring how orality and literacy are figured in nineteenth-century preoccupations with the definition of 'culture'. It further examines the importance of romance revival in the ascendancy of the novel and the development of that genre across a century which saw the novel stripped of its female associations and accorded a masculine authority, touching on the sexualization of language in the discourse between women's narrative (oral) and men's narrative (written). The books importance for literary studies lies in the investigation of some of the consequences of deconstruction. It explores how the speech/writing opposition is open to the influence of social and material forces. Focusing on the writing of Scott, Hogg, Stevenson, and Oliphant, it looks at the conflicts in narratological experiments in Scottish writing, constructions of class and gender, the effects of popular literacy and the material condition of books as artefacts and commodities. This book is the first to offer a broad picture of the interaction of Scottish fiction and modern theoretical thinking, taking its roots from a combination of deconstruction, narrative theory, the history of orality, linguistics and psychoanalysis.

The uses of narratology in social and policy studies

Abstract: This article suggests possible multiple uses of narratology in social and policy studies. It starts with a brief history of the narrative turn in social sciences. The structure of the remainder of the text follows the trajectory of a research project. First there is a suggestion that researchers may learn from narratologists how to monitor the construction of narratives in the field of social practice, how to look for narratives in documents, and how to encourage narratives when conducting interviews. Then I look at how narratologists can teach social scientists various techniques of close reading, useful in analyzing field material. There follows an examination of the multiple models of writing that narratology and literature have on offer. The article ends with a reflection on the difference between the genres of literary and scholarly writing.

Textual 'You' and Double Deixis in Edna O'Brien's 'A Pagan Place.' (Second-Person Narrative)

Abstract: 1. DISCOURSE MODELS AND THE ONTOLOGY OF YOUBruce Morrissette, in his groundbreaking investigation of "Narrative 'You' in Contemporary Literature," opens his analysis by citing the Sartrean dictum "that every novelistic technique implies a metaphysical attitude on the part of the author" (1). Arguably, the same proposition applies, at one remove, to the various descriptions put forth by Morrissette himself and by other later students of second-person narration.(1) That said, we need further specification of the metaphysics--more precisely, the ontology--of narrative you in both fictional and critico-theoretical contexts. At issue, more precisely still, is the ontological status of the entity or entities to which we ascribe certain properties when, in constructing a discourse model corresponding to some emergent (portion of a) narrative text, we come upon the lexical item you in that textual domain (cf. Webber, "Structure" 11O-11).A principled account of the discourse functions of the second-person pronoun in narrative contexts can help us specify, in turn, the structure and ontology of the entities invoked by textual you, yielding new tools for the poetics of second-person fiction. To this end, I propose to examine Edna O'Brien's 1970 novel A Pagan Place in light of linguistic theories of (person) deixis, those theories having emerged historically from more broadly pragmatic theories concerning the situatedness of utterances in contexts. By sketching the forms and functions of textual you in O'Brien's novel--a narrative told entirely in the second person and anchored in the world of a (nameless) preadolescent girl coming of age in rural Ireland during World War II--we can at the same time work towards an enriched poetics of second-person narratives. My hypothesis is that in second-person fictions like O'Brien's, the deictic force of textual you helps decenter what Marie-Laure Ryan would term the modal structure of the narrative universes built up by those fictions (Ryan 109-23; cf. Pavel 43-113). Narrative you produces an ontological hesitation between the virtual and the actual by constantly repositioning readers, to a fundamentally indeterminate degree, within the emergent spatiotemporal parameters of one or more alternative possible worlds. As I shall go on to argue (sec. 3 and 4.5), such fictional play both illuminates and is illuminated by recent reconceptions of deixis itself: notably, the theories about participant roles and frames and about culturally saturated deictic fields developed by William Hanks in his book Referential Practice. If, therefore, second-person fictions like A Pagan Place engage in what Brian McHale would describe as the quintessentially postmodernist foregrounding of ontological issues (3-40; but contrast Herman, "Modernism"), my chief concern here is with the nature of the conceptual tools required to account for that foregrounding. The requisite tools, arguably, pertain to a narratology after structuralism: that is, a postclassical, though not necessarily a poststructuralist, narratology.Along with an introductory survey of some of the effects of textual you in A Pagan Place, I offer below (sec. 2.1 and 2.2) a brief synopsis of existing narratological-accounts of you in second-person narratives like O'Brien's. Subtending these accounts are two broad types of discourse models, distinguishable in terms of the modes and degrees of virtuality or actuality they assign to entities referenced by you. At the very least, the ontological axioms at the basis of the two kinds of models warrant closer consideration than has been devoted to them up to now. Note that by "discourse models," in this connection, I mean those emergent, dynamic interpretive frames which producers (tellers, writers) and receivers (listeners, readers) of narrative discourse collaboratively construct and that Deborah Schiffrin describes in more general terms thus: "both users and analysts of language build models which are based on a patterned integration of units from different levels of analysis. …