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.

Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition

Abstract: Although scholars have extensively studied the affinities between Henry Field's novels and modern genres, they have paid little attention to his use of the classical tradition in developing his narrative theory and practice. This book rectifies this desideratum in Fielding scholarship by considering his use of classical literature in his novels, periodical essays, and miscellaneous writings.

The Chief Concern of Medicine: The Integration of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices

Abstract: Unlike any existing studies of the medical humanities, "The Chief Concern of Medicine" brings to the examination of medical practices a thorough---and clearly articulated---exposition of the nature of narrative. The book builds on the work of linguistics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory and examines numerous literary works and narrative "vignettes" of medical problems, situations, and encounters. Throughout, the book presents usable expositions of the ways storytelling organizes itself to allow physicians and other healthcare workers (and even patients themselves) to be more attentive to and self-conscious about the information---the "narrative knowledge"---of the patient's story.

Five Theses for Interactive Digital Narrative

Abstract: The field of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) can look back at more than 25 years of research. Considerable technical advances exist alongside open questions that still need full attention. With the discussion of five crucial aspects - narrative analysis, interoperability between different implementations, sustainability of digital artifacts, author-centered view, and user-focused perspective - the paper starts a conversation on successful methods and future goals in the research field.

Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot

Abstract: HAT FOLLOWS is intended primarily as a discourse on plot, // a concept which has mostly gone unhonored in modern criticism, no doubt because it appears to belong to the popular, even the commercial side of literature. "Reading for the plot," we were taught, is a low form of activity. Long caught in valuations set by a criticism conceived for the lyric, the study of narrative has more recently found its way back to a quasi-Aristotelian view of the logical priority of plot in narrative forms. In the wake of Russian Formalism, French "narratology" has made us sensitive to the functional logic of actions, to the workings of sequence and transformation in the constitution of recognizable narrative units, to the presence of codes of narration that demand decoding in consecutive, irreversible order.' Plot as I understand it, however, suggests a focus somewhat more specific than the questions of structure, discourse, and narrativity addressed by most narratology. We may want to conceive of plot less as a structure than as a structuring operation, used, or made necessary, by those meanings that develop only through sequence and succession: an interpretative operation specific to narrative signification. The word plot, any dictionary tells us, covers a range of meanings, from the bounded piece of land, through the ground plan of a building, the chart or map, the outline of a literary work, to the sense (separately derived from the French complot) of the scheme or secret machination, to the accomplishment of some purpose, usually illegal. All these meanings, I think, usefully cohere in our common sense of plot: it is not only the outline of a narrative, demarcating its boundaries, it also suggests its intention of meaning, the direction of its scheme or machination for accomplishing a purpose. Plots have not only design, but intentionality as well. Some narratives clearly give us a sense of "plottedness" in higher degree than others. Our identification of this sense of plottedness may provide a more concrete and analyzable way into the question of plots than an abstract definition of the subject, and a way that necessarily finds its focus in the readership of plot, in the reader's recogni-

Social Minds in Fiction and Criticism

Abstract: It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. --Oscar Wilde In Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, the villain, Blandois, arrives one evening at a French inn. As he walks in, the narrator remarks, "there had been that momentary interruption of the talk about the stove, and that temporary inattention to and distraction from one another, which is usually inseparable in such a company from the arrival of a stranger" (167-68). Later in the same novel, Mr. Meagles admits to Arthur Clennam, "we do, in families, magnify our troubles and make mountains of our molehills in a way that is calculated to be rather trying to people who look on--to mere outsiders" (370). Mr. Meagles also explains, "there is one of those odd impressions in my house, which do mysteriously get into houses sometimes, which nobody seems to have picked up in a distinct form from anybody, and yet which everybody seems to have got hold of loosely from somebody and let go again, that she [Miss Wade] lives, or was living [near Park Lane]" (373). These three statements are examples of the workings of social minds in the novel. They become visible through an externalist perspective on narrative fiction. Specifically, they describe intermental thought, which is joint, group, shared, or collective thought, as opposed to intramental, or private, individual thought. (Some theoretical background on these concepts is given in a later section of this essay.) The minds of the group of people in the inn share a sense of intrusion. And, as the narrator points out, this shared sense of discomfort at the arrival of a stranger is common in such situations. Mr. Meagles makes a general point about how families typically behave (making mountains out of molehills) that is also true of his family. Mr. Meagles, again, describes the intermental functioning of his family (a shared knowledge of Miss Wade's whereabouts but with no knowledge of how this information was acquired) and points out that this sort of thought is typical of families. In all three cases, minds are working in the same way, and the thought being described here is, to some extent, collective. There is one important difference between the remark about the French inn and the two statements about the Meagles family. The first is a description of a social mind by a heterodiegetic (or third-person) narrator. The other, a claim by an individual character, Mr. Meagles, about the group mind of which he is a part. The relationship between intra- and intermental activity, between social minds and individual minds, between the internalist and the externalist perspectives, is a complex and fascinating one. It is central to narrative fiction, and it is the subject of this essay. My purpose is to put statements such as those discussed above at the heart of narrative theory. Fictional social minds are not of marginal interest; they are central to our understanding of fictional storyworlds. This is because real social minds are central to our understanding of, and ability to operate in, the actual world. My thesis is that social minds are possible because much of our thought is visible, which is why Oscar Wilde said that "it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances" and that "the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." It is a cliche of literary studies that, whereas novels can give us direct access to the minds of characters, by contrast, in reality, we can never really know what other people are thinking. This is the sort of thing that sounds true while it is being said within that context, but, in other contexts, can sound like complete nonsense. To believe it requires a considerable degree of cognitive dissonance in order to contradict the weight of evidence of our everyday experience. All of us, every day, know for a lot of the time what other people are thinking. This is especially true of our loved ones, close friends, family, and work colleagues. …