Tópicos Especiais (EGA 10094): Theories of Narrative (original) (raw)

Fundamental problems of theories of narrative. From narrative forms to textual structures: the relationship between history, narrative and narration. The narrative structures: function, action, and narration; the structural principles of myth and narrative forms. The temporal structure of narratives: order, duration, and frequency; the links between understanding and expressing time in narrative forms. The modes of narrative: mimesis and diegesis. The problem of narrative voices: discourse, enunciation, point of view, focalization. Narrative and reality: the crossings between history and fiction. Pragmatic approaches to narrative studies: the active dimension of reception of narrative texts; paradigms of narrative tension (suspense, curiosity, surprise). The different semiotic materials of narrative discourse. Prologue: There is a considerable importance attached to systematic studies of narrative communication in the culture of modern media culture-which is proportional to the misapprehension of its manifestation in our field of study. Firstly, in several theses, books, and articles circulating in spheres of communication research, there are constant references to notions such as "narrative", "narrativity", "narration", but mentioned in such a degree of generality that enables a thought about the precise meaning of these conceptual employments. In that sense, narrative is a keyword articulating issues that are specific to several discursive practices in media universes (thus related to variables that make up the problem of enunciation as an aspect of communicational texts): merged in such a fashion are two topic orders of inquiry that narrative theories had clearly delineated as " narrativity, on one side, and "discourse", on the other. Another general instance of reference to narrative universes is one in which " fabulatory " or " fictional " dimensions of certain processes and products of our field of studies are intuitively assimilated to the very concept of narrative: in these cases, to think of the idea that the " historical " meaning of these practices is defined as a nucleus of narrations (where confusion here occurs between concepts of "narrative" and " history "). We might continue enumerating similar cases indefinitely, but the diagnosis should be clear by now: in most speeches of theories and research in communication studies, the reference to narrative is merely pretextual, at least as regards to conceptual clarity animating theories of narrative: the extensive theoretical corpus of narratology is an item of considerable disdain from media theories – being such a conceptual good something coming from literary studies, epistemology of history, or philosophy of language. Disciplines that had reflected on narrative forms, their internal structures and functioning, the epistemic orders assumed for its actualization in the reader's/beholder's experience, their relationships with mental and historical structures of understanding eventfulness, its diversified manifestations in objects, modes and means, the extent of their genres rules, all these specific aspects of a study of narratives were dissolved in most of its evocation in the name of merely " historical/contextual or discursive/ideological meanings of practices, processes and products of media universes. In this sense, we must recover the centre of a rigorous reflection on the conceptual/ phenomenal status of narrativity and its importance for theories of communication, in a context where understanding these phenomena necessarily passes through the recognition of the legitimacy of a communicational question: what, after all, is narrating something?