A Narratolgical Analysis of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” (original) (raw)

A narratological analysis of O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief

Narratological Analysis of The Ransom of O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief", 2020

The studies within the frame of classical narratology have remarkably contributed to the field of narrative analysis. The significance of the present study is to raise awareness of constructive elements of a narrative using classical narrative analysis. This study aims at investigating character, time and space in O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief", using the narratological terminologies in the analysis. Considering the current situation of narratology as a method of analysis that involves many approaches towards a high number of aspects in a narrative, the study focuses on the essential constructive elements of the story and point of view. The employs the theoretical terminologies offered by classical narratologists. Findings in the study fall into two ca tegories: Narration and narratorial position of the narrator, and formative elements of the story. These categories present three essential formative components, (a) Characters and characterization, (b) space, and (c) time. The data gathered from the findings indicated that O. Henry's achievement might lean on the prevalence of a reliable narrator using discourse time more for the narration of incidents between the characters than that of others in specific types of space with humoristic style as well as situational and verbal irony. This study allows for critical implications both on the readers who wish to understand O. Henry better and on the researchers calling for an increase in the number of narrative studies.

Narratology as a narrative philosophy

Context and Reflection: Philosophy of the World and Human Being, 2012

The article is dedicated to the phenomenon of narratology as one of the important modern schools of cross-disciplinary character. Having denoted one of the sides of anthropological turn in philosophical studies of the 20th century, narratology is a relative of semiotics, literary studies, mythocritisism, and linguistics. The author thinks that narratology as a general aesthetic discipline is appealed for sorting out the relations between eventful ranges of narrative and narrating, for investigating not only the character of the phenomenon but also its communicative characteristics. The main concept of narratology as a branch of philosophical knowledge is the confirmation of the narrative as a prototype of the epistemological matrix. The current state of narratology makes it possible to talk about formation of a science where the distinctive feature of its cognition object is the presence of the two eventful ranges – referential and discursive. The author considers the history of the science, detaches the periods of literary and humanitarian understanding and perception of narratology as the analysis methodology. The author also considers narrative in the context of rhetorical approach, in the case of eventfulness, chronotopical line-up and focalization.

Baroni R. & F. Revaz (dir.) (2016), Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, coll. « Theory and Interpretation of Narrative ».

“Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology coheres very strongly as a series of explorations of current research from various perspectives on what narrative theory can tell us about sequence—mostly sequence of discourse, though occasionally sequence of story. People who do narrative theory and who teach narrative theory will want to read this book.”—David Richter, CUNY Graduate School Since Aristotle, there has been an assumption that narrative is a representation of actions or sequences of events, that this representation aims to elicit emotions, and that well-formed narratives constitute a whole, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The nature, role, and relative importance of constituent notions like “sequence of events” and “plot” have been discussed repeatedly and, as a result, have become rather slippery. While recent developments in contemporary narrative theory, such as unnatural, transmedial, cognitive, and functionalist narratology, shed new light on these notions, Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology goes beyond specific approaches to narrative, illuminating sequence and plot in all the diversity of their manifestations, forms, and functions. This volume, edited by Raphaël Baroni and Françoise Revaz, includes contributions from some of the most influential scholars in narrative studies: Alain Boillat, Peter Hühn, Emma Kafalenos, Franco Passalacqua, James Phelan, Federico Pianzola, John Pier, Gerald Prince, Brian Richardson, Marie-Laure Ryan, Eyal Segal, and Michael Toolan. Essays range in focus from musical narrativity and rhetorical narrative theory to comic strips and re-examinations of classical and postclassical narratology. All of the essays contribute fresh understandings of foundational concepts in the field of narratology.

SOME NARRATOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON HISTORY AND LITERATURE

2021

In the field of narratology, this paper promotes some reflections on the interface between history and literature. Based on theoretical premises from philosophy of history and literary theory, two basic and divergent views are approached: one that comprehends historical narratives in a positivist-scientist way: as authentic reproduction of historical events and therefore distinct from literary narratives for being fictional (COHN, LAMARQUE, OLSEN, GINZBURG, among others). The other view identifies similarities (narrator, plot, space, time, figures of speech and rhetoric, etc.) between the two narrative realms, defending a relativist (postmodernist) position regarding the (im)possibility to emulate reality through language (CERTEAU, VEYNE, WHITE, HUTCHEON, among others). This essay concludes that there are both certain subjectivity into historical narratives and some historical extraction into literary narratives, thus, it turns literary works with historical content into an important historical knowledge source.

Introduction to 'Narratology'

Narratology, 1996

'Narratology: An Introduction' provides an introduction and overview of Narratology, a rapidly growing field in the humanities. Literary narratologists have provided many key concepts and analytical tools which are widely used in the interdisciplinary analysis of such narrative features as plot, point of view, speech presentation, ideological perspective and interpretation. The introduction explains the central concepts of narratology, their historical development, and draws together contemporary trends from many different disciplines into common focus. It offers a compendium of the development of narratology from classical poetics to the present.