A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.
Metalepsis is a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase from figurative speech is used in a new context.
Diegesis is a style of fiction storytelling in which a participating narrator offers an on-site, often interior, view of the scene to the reader, viewer, or listener by subjectively describing the actions and, in some cases, thoughts, of one or more characters. Diegetic events are those experienced by both the characters within a piece and the audience, while non-diegetic elements of a story make up the "fourth wall" separating the characters from the audience. Diegesis in music describes a character's ability to hear the music presented for the audience, in the context of musical theatre or film scoring.
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author, content, or form of the work.
In literature, film, and other such arts, an unreliable narrator is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators, arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially within the context of film and television, but sometimes also in literature.
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories, presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
Wayne Clayson Booth was an American literary critic and rhetorician. He was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature and the College at the University of Chicago. His work followed largely from the Chicago school of literary criticism.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. The term is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).
Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and with figures such as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.
In literary interpretation, paratext is material that surrounds a published main text supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or its interpretation by the public. Paratext is most often associated with books, as they typically include a cover, title, front matter, back matter footnotes, and many other materials not crafted by the author. Other editorial decisions can also fall into the category of paratext, such as the formatting or typography. Because of their close association with the text, it may seem that authors should be given the final say about paratextual materials, but often that is not the case.
Free indirect speech is the literary technique of writing a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator. It is a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech. The technique is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.
In narratology, focalisation is the perspective through which a narrative is presented, as opposed to an omniscient narrator. Coined by French narrative theorist Gérard Genette, his definition distinguishes between internal focalisation (first-person) and external focalisation, with zero focalisation representing an omnisicent narrator. Homodiegetic narrators exist in the same storyworld as the characters exist in, whereas heterodiegetic narrators are not a part of that storyworld. The term 'focalisation' refers to how information is restricted in storytelling.
James Phelan is an American writer and literary scholar of narratology. He is a third-generation Neo-Aristotelian literary critic of the Chicago School whose work builds on and refines the work of Wayne C. Booth, with a focus on the rhetorical aspects of narrative. He is Distinguished University Professor of English at the Ohio State University.
In narratology, fabula refers to the chronological sequence of events within the world of a narrative and syuzhet equates to the sequence of events as they are presented to the reader. Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky originated the terminology as part of the Russian Formalism movement in the early 20th century. Narratologists have described fabula as "the raw material of a story", and syuzhet as "the way a story is organized".
Seymour Chatman was an American film and literary critic and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dorrit Cohn was an Austrian-born scholar of German and Comparative Literature whose work centered on the formal analysis of narrative fiction.
A narrative network is a system that represents complex event sequences or characters’ interactions as depicted by a narrative text. Network science methodology offers an alternative way of analysing the patterns of relationships, composition and activities of events and actors studied in their own context. Network theory can contribute to the understanding of the structural properties of a text and the data contained in it. The meaning of the individual and the community in a narrative is conditional on their position in a system of social relationships reported by the author. Hence, a central problem when dealing with narratives is framing and organising the author's perspective of individual and collective connections to understand better the role of both the witness and its testimony as reflected by the text. However, the category of narrative network is in its formative, initial phase and as a consequence it is hard to view as a stable and defined notion in linguistics, and beyond sociology.
Hypertext, in semiotics, is a text which alludes to, derives from, or relates to an earlier work or hypotext.
Teckyoung Kwon is a literary critic, translator and professor in English literature at the School of English, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, ecology, American and British fiction, narrative theory, neuro-humanities, Korean literature and Dao.
The Novel: An Introduction is a general introduction to narratology, written by Christoph Bode, Full Professor and Chair of Modern English Literature in the Department of English and American Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The first edition of Der Roman was published 2005 at A. Francke Verlag in German; in 2011, the second revised and extended German edition followed, as well as the English translation.
