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, 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 any written narrative. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.
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).
Robert E. Scholes was an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction.
Dr. K. Ayyappa Paniker, sometimes spelt "Ayyappa Panicker", was a Malayalam poet, literary critic, and an academic and a scholar in modern and post-modern literary theories as well as ancient Indian aesthetics and literary traditions. He was one of the pioneers of modernism in Malayalam poetry, where his seminal works like Kurukshethram (1960), is considered a turning point in Malayalam poetry. Many of Ayyappa Paniker's poems and his several essays were an important influence on later generations of Malayalam writers.
Monika Fludernik, a native Austrian, is professor of English literature and culture at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany.
Brian G. McHale is a US academic and literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly relating to postmodernism and narrative theory. He is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at Ohio State University. His area of expertise is Twentieth-Century British and American Literature.
James Phelan is an American writer, literary scholar, and Distinguished University Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (2016) and has been granted an honorary Ph.D degree from Aarhus University in Denmark (2013). In 2021, Phelan received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. The citation for the Award reads in part,"Phelan has influenced generations of narrative theorists and literary scholars, as he has provided a powerful model for thinking about the purposes of literature and reasons and methods to engage with it. In so doing, he has transformed and energized the interdisciplinary field of narrative studies." The recording of the Award ceremony from the May 2021 ISSN Conference can be found at the Society's website.
Lubomír Doležel was a Czech literary theorist and one of the founders of the so-called fictional worlds theory.
Comics studies is an academic field that focuses on comics and sequential art. Although comics and graphic novels have been generally dismissed as less relevant pop culture texts, scholars in fields such as semiotics, aesthetics, sociology, composition studies and cultural studies are now re-considering comics and graphic novels as complex texts deserving of serious scholarly study.
Jakob Lothe is a Norwegian literary scholar and Professor of English literature at the University of Oslo.
Robyn R. Warhol is an American literary scholar, associated in particular with feminist narrative theory, of which she is considered one of the originators. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Warhol received her BA in English from Pomona College in 1977 and her PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1982, where she studied with Thomas Moser, George Dekker, and Ian Watt.
Srinivas Aravamudan was an Indian-born American academic. He was a professor of English, Literature, and Romance Studies at Duke University, where he also served as dean of the humanities. He was widely recognized for his work on eighteenth-century British and French literature and postcolonial literature and theory. His publications included books and articles on novels, slavery, abolition, secularism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, climate change, and the anthropocene.
Maria Gertrudis "Mieke" Bal is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she also was Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
Gerald J. Prince is an American academic and literary theoretician. He is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also affiliated with department of Linguistics and the Program in Comparative Literature, and with the Annenberg School for Communication.
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.
Josephine Donovan is an American scholar of comparative literature who is a professor emerita of English in the Department of English at the University of Maine, Orono. Her research and expertise has covered feminist theory, feminist criticism, animal ethics, and both early modern and American literature with a special focus on American writer Sarah Orne Jewett and the local colorists. She recently extended her study of local color literature to the European tradition. Along with Marti Kheel, Carol J. Adams, and others, Donovan introduced ecofeminist care theory, rooted in cultural feminism, to the field of animal ethics. Her published corpus includes ten books, five edited books, over fifty articles, and seven short stories.
Kamila Tuszyńska – PhD in humanities, a narratologist, researcher in media studies and comics theoretician.
Paul Dawson is an Australian writer of poetry and fiction and a scholar in the fields of narrative theory and the study of creative writing. He is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in the School of the Arts and Media. He teaches creative Writing, literary theory, North American Literature, and British and Irish Literature.
The narrative theory of equilibrium was proposed by Bulgarian narratologist Tzvetan Todorov in 1971. Todorov delineated this theory in an essay entitled The Two Principles of Narrative. The essay claims that all narratives contain the same five formal elements: equilibrium, disruption, recognition, resolution, and new equilibrium.
Narrative is an academic journal published by the Ohio State University that focuses on narratology. It is the official journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Narrative is published triannually in January, May, and October.
