Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods used when immediate comprehension fails and includes the art of understanding and communication.
In fiction, a character is a person or other being in a narrative. The character may be entirely fictional or based on a real-life person, in which case the distinction of a "fictional" versus "real" character may be made. Derived from the ancient Greek word χαρακτήρ, the English word dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of "a part played by an actor" developed. Character, particularly when enacted by an actor in the theatre or cinema, involves "the illusion of being a human person". In literature, characters guide readers through their stories, helping them to understand plots and ponder themes. Since the end of the 18th century, the phrase "in character" has been used to describe an effective impersonation by an actor. Since the 19th century, the art of creating characters, as practiced by actors or writers, has been called characterisation.
A narrative, story or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, still or moving images, or any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. Along with argumentation, description, and exposition, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which the narrator communicates directly to the reader.
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 that presents an interior view of a world in which:
- Details about the world itself and the experiences of its characters are revealed explicitly through narrative.
- The story is told or recounted, as opposed to shown or enacted.
- There is a presumed detachment from the story of both the speaker and the audience.
The fantastic is a subgenre of literary works characterized by the ambiguous presentation of seemingly supernatural forces.
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. Narration is a required element of all written stories, with the function of conveying the story in its entirety. However, narration is merely 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. 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. It 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).
Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience's interpretation of the text. Intertextuality is the relation between texts that are inflicted by means of quotations and allusion. Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody. Intertextuality is a literary device that creates an 'interrelationship between texts' and generates related understanding in separate works. These references are made to influence the reader and add layers of depth to a text, based on the readers' prior knowledge and understanding. The structure of intertextuality in turn depends on the structure of influence. Intertextuality is a literary discourse strategy utilised by writers in novels, poetry, theatre and even in non-written texts. Examples of intertextuality are an author's borrowing and transformation of a prior text, and a reader's referencing of one text in reading another.
Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.
Paratext is a concept in literary interpretation. The main text of published authors is often surrounded by other material supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers, which is known as the paratext. 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. One example of controversy surrounding paratext is the case of the 2009 young adult novel Liar, which was initially published with an image of a white girl on the cover, although the narrator of the story was identified in the text as black.
Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech; it is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.
Focalisation is a term coined by the French narrative theorist Gérard Genette. It refers to the perspective through which a narrative is presented. Genette focuses on the interplay between three forms of focalization and the distinction between heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narrators. Homodiegetic narrators exist in the same storyworld as the characters exist in, whereas heterodiegetic narrators are not a part of that storyworld. The term 'focalization' refers to how information is restricted in storytelling. Genette distinguishes between internal focalization, external focalization, and zero focalization. Internal focalization means that the narrative focuses on thoughts and emotions while external focalization focuses solely on characters' actions, behavior, the setting etc. Zero focalization is seen when the narrator is omniscient in the sense that it is not restricted.
Seymour Chatman was an American film and literary critic and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dorrit Cohn was a 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 in order 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.
Alludes, derives from, or relates to an earlier work or hypotext. For example, James Joyce's Ulysses could be regarded as one of the many hypertexts deriving from Homer's Odyssey; Angela Carter's "The Tiger's Bride" can be considered a hypertext which relates to an earlier work, or hypotext, the original fairy-story Beauty and the Beast. Hypertexts may take a variety of forms including imitation, parody, and pastiche.
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.
