Episode structures in literary narratives (original) (raw)

On Growth and Form of Narrative Structures

Morphogenesis and Individuation, 2015

Narrative is firstly a formal organization, but it is a form that interprets the events giving them meaning. Starting from a reinterpretation of the classical Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp, we can now note how narrative form and cultural meanings interact with each other. Thus, we remove the “formal” dimension from its traditional segregation to a universe of insubstantial non-things, returning it to the arena of human strategic action and social practices. We may conceive a story as a route performed by a subject on a social and categorical map: so, a narrative configuration is essentially a set of dynamic relations, lying between a procedural and a systemic dimension. We find the basis of everything in the fundamental Saussurean view that interrupts the ordinary separation between “things” and “relations”: identity, meaning, and structure are the effects of systemic relations. In this light, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers us the most elaborate picture of narrative systems, where textual objects are seen as secondary outcomes of transformational tensions: every text is by nature a remake; it exists only through other texts. The most radical feature of this original perspective is indisputably the adoption of the theoretical model expounded by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in his famous book on the morphogenesis of zoological species, On Growth and Form. Textual theory emerges greatly innovated, linked to a view of cultures as systemic networks of connected texts. And this applies also to products of our culture, as the concluding examples (the Alien film saga and Puccini’s Bohème) should positively illustrate.

Chapter 7 On Growth and Form of Narrative Structures

2014

Narrativity and Textuality in the Study of Stories

2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative/Open Access Series in Informatics , 2013

This paper seeks to investigate some of the defining elements of narrative. The underlying assumption of my discussion is that the terms “narrative” and “story” do not refer to clearly defined, self-enclosed genres. Rather, they are part of a spectrum which embraces all forms of texts. Similarly, narratives and stories are not independent discourses but rather are an integral part of virtually all forms of discourse, be it day-to-day conversation or more specialized discourses. In order to analyze the relationship between narratives and other modes of discourse, we introduce the concept of narrativity. Narrativity refers to a collection of textual attributes. All texts exist along a continuum of greater or lesser narrativity, depending on the number and prominence of the narrative attributes they contain. When we refer to a text as a story, we mean that it contains a critical mass of narrativity. Most theorists of narrative have defined narrativity purely in terms of “dynamism”–that is, the extent to which a text portrays transition and change. To this I have added the quality of “specificity”. Specificity refers to the extent to which a text focuses on a particular time or place, a unique event, or individual people and objects. Many if not most texts contain a certain degree of narrativity. We established, however, that in order to be considered a story the text must present a sequence of at least two interrelated events that occurred once and only once in the past. In other words, a story must have a certain degree of dynamism in that it portrays the transition from at least one event to another. It must also have specificity at least to the degree that the text narrates events that happened at a fixed time in the past. This theoretical framework allows us to chart the relationship between different types of texts within a single discourse. It also gives us a vocabulary for discussing different parts of more complex narratives which often contain elements of varying narrativity. The paper then goes on to discuss the concept of narrative structure, arguing that narrative structure is not an inherent attribute of narrative texts but a framework that the reader imposes on the text in order to make it intelligible in terms of other narratives. The structure which the reader abstracts from a given narrative will be heavily dependent on the context of the narrative with in a wider discourse.

Introduction to the Levels of Analysis of the Narrative Text (Narrative Theory, 0)

'Narrative Theory' is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. This preliminary section provides an introduction to the notion of level of analysis in narrative, and examines a number of theories bearing on the structure of the fabula (Aristotle, Tomashevsky, Bal) and of the story (Genette), with attention to the dimensions of time, distance, perspective, and to the discursive agency of the narrator.

Is There a Context-Free Way of Understanding Texts? The Case of Structuralist Narratology

Journal of Literary Theory (Special Issue on Context) 8:1, 2014

This paper investigates the question of whether it is possible to talk about aspects of the meaning of literary texts in a context-free manner. Its starting point is a detected discrepancy between the assumption that some (not purely formal or quantitative) approaches to literature operate in a context-independent manner, and the thought that processes of understanding are necessarily interpretive and/or context-dependent. The exemplary field of investigation is (structuralist) narratology, which is often said to be a »context-free« approach to literature.

Categorical organization in the narrative discourse: A semantic analysis of Il conformista

Journal of Pragmatics, 1996

We propose a systematic application of psychological findings to film interpretation. We claim that the cinematic discourse whose narrative schema is difficult to retrieve can be viewed as organized along the principles that govern taxonomies. Our case study is II Conformista (The Conformist), a film by Bemardo . In our view, this film exemplifies discourses which are best understood as a series of homologous units of signification rather than as a series of causes and effects (i.e., a story).

What holds a narrative together? The linguistic encoding of episode boundaries

IPrA Papers in Pragmatics, 1990

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of episode boundaries in narratives produced from a 24-page picture book by German and English speakers. We investigate the development of form/function relationships involved in the discursive organization of narratives, attempting to bring together research traditions that typically consider the linguistic structuring and the conceptualization of narratives as two separate domains. Focussing in our analysis on the linguistic realization of discourse boundaries, we integrate a qualitative and quantitative approach to the exploration of (1) the relationship between the existence and commonality (“availability”) of particular markers (e.g., aspect) in a given language and the structure that narratives take, and (2) the developmental patterns in the use of several formal devices for serving discourse (i.e., narrative) functions. Episode boundaries were identified with an “importance” judgment task. These ratings were used guiding the analyses ...

Episode structures in literary narratives (original) (raw)

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