Handbook of Narratology

Volume 1

De Gruyter Handbook
Handbook of Narratology
2nd edition, fully revised and expanded

Edited by
Peter Hühn · Jan Christoph Meister
John Pier · Wolf Schmid

Volume 1

De Gruyter
 ISBN 978-3-11-031634-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-031646-9
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038207-5

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쑔 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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 Table of Contents

Volume 1

Preface ....................................................................................... XI

Author ........................................................................................ 1
Jörg Schönert

Autobiography ........................................................................... 14
Helga Schwalm

Character .................................................................................... 30
Fotis Jannidis

Cognitive Narratology ............................................................... 46

David Herman

Coherence .................................................................................. 65
Michael Toolan

Computational Narratology ....................................................... 84

Inderjeet Mani

Conversational Narration – Oral Narration ............................... 93

Monika Fludernik

Corporate Storytelling ............................................................... 105

Birgitte Norlyk, Marianne Wolff Lundholt &
Per Krogh Hansen

Diachronic Narratology
(The Example of Ancient Greek Narrative) ............................... 115
Irene J. F. de Jong

Dialogism ................................................................................... 123

David Shepherd
VI Table of Contents

Diegesis – Mimesis .................................................................... 129

Stephen Halliwell

Dreaming and Narration ............................................................ 138

Richard Walsh

Experientiality ........................................................................... 149

Marco Caracciolo

Event and Eventfulness .............................................................. 159

Peter Hühn

Fictional vs. Factual Narration .................................................. 179

Jean-Marie Schaeffer

Focalization ............................................................................... 197

Burkhard Niederhoff

Gender and Narrative ................................................................. 206

Susan S. Lanser

Heteroglossia ............................................................................. 219

Valerij Tjupa

Historiographic Narration .......................................................... 227

Daniel Fulda

Identity and Narration ................................................................ 241

Michael Bamberg

Ideology and Narrative Fiction .................................................. 253

Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

Illusion (Aesthetic) .................................................................... 270

Werner Wolf

Implied Author ........................................................................... 288

Wolf Schmid

Implied Reader ........................................................................... 301

Wolf Schmid
 Table of Contents VII

Mediacy and Narrative Mediation ............................................. 310

Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik

Metalepsis .................................................................................. 326

John Pier

Metanarration and Metafiction .................................................. 344

Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning

Multiperspectivity ...................................................................... 353

Marcus Hartner

Narratee ...................................................................................... 364

Wolf Schmid

Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse .............................. 371

Greta Olson

Narration in Film ....................................................................... 384

Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

Narration in Medicine ................................................................ 406

Rishi Goyal

Narration in Poetry and Drama .................................................. 419

Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

Narration in Religious Discourse

(The Example of Christianity) ................................................... 435
Sönke Finnern

Narration in Various Disciplines ............................................... 447

Norbert Meuter

Narration in Various Media ....................................................... 468

Marie-Laure Ryan
VIII Table of Contents

Volume 2

Narrative Acquisition in Education Research and Didactics ..... 489

Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

Narrative Constitution ............................................................... 507

Michael Scheffel

Narrative Empathy ..................................................................... 521

Suzanne Keen

Narrative Ethics ......................................................................... 531

James Phelan

Narrative Levels ......................................................................... 547

John Pier

Narrative Strategies ................................................................... 564

Valerij Tjupa

Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse ............................................ 575

Stefan Iversen

Narrativity .................................................................................. 587

H. Porter Abbott

Narrativity of Computer Games ................................................ 608

Britta Neizel

Narratology ................................................................................ 623

Jan Christoph Meister

Narrator ...................................................................................... 646

Uri Margolin

Non-temporal Linking in Narration ........................................... 667

Wolf Schmid

Performativity ............................................................................ 677

Ute Berns
 Table of Contents IX

Perspective – Point of View ...................................................... 692

Burkhard Niederhoff

Plot ............................................................................................. 706

Karin Kukkonen

Poetic or Ornamental Prose ....................................................... 720

Wolf Schmid

Possible Worlds ......................................................................... 726

Marie-Laure Ryan

Reader ........................................................................................ 743

Gerald Prince

Schemata .................................................................................... 756

Catherine Emmott & Marc Alexander

Sequentiality .............................................................................. 765

Herbert Grabes

Simultaneity in Narrative ........................................................... 777

Uri Margolin

Skaz ........................................................................................... 787

Wolf Schmid

Space .......................................................................................... 796

Marie-Laure Ryan

Speech Representation ............................................................... 812

Brian McHale

Story Generator Algorithms ...................................................... 825

Pablo Gervás

Tellability ................................................................................... 836

Raphaël Baroni

Telling vs. Showing ................................................................... 846

Tobias Klauk & Tilmann Köppe
X Table of Contents

Text Types ................................................................................. 854

Matthias Aumüller

Time ........................................................................................... 868

Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

Unnatural Narrative ................................................................... 887

Jan Alber

Unreliability ............................................................................... 896

Dan Shen

Index .......................................................................................... 911

 Preface

Over the last few decades, the field of narrative studies has been vastly
expanded by a wide spectrum of innovations in the philologies and oth-
er disciplines including linguistics, history, theology, art history, psy-
chology, media studies, medicine, law, education and more, and it has
also seen a growing number of attempts to survey, order, and summa-
rize the results of such studies in collections of essays, encyclopedias,
companions, dictionaries, etc.
Against this background, the present Handbook of Narratology, now
published in a considerably expanded second edition, offers a new type
of systematic and comprehensive in-depth overview of recent and older
research, taking account of the role played by the various disciplinary
and national traditions in narrative studies. The 67 entries present inter-
national research devoted to the key terms, categories, and concepts of
narratology in the form of full-length original articles structured in a
parallel manner: each entry starts with a concise definition (1) followed
by a more detailed explication of the term in question (2) and then pro-
ceeds, in its main part, to provide a differentiated description and criti-
cal discussion of the various approaches, positions, and controversies in
their historical development (3), concluding with topics for further re-
search (4) and a select bibliography (5). Where relevant, all entries are
cross-referenced. They vary in length in accordance with the complexi-
ty of the respective concepts.
The entries devoted to the central categories and dimensions of nar-
ratology testify to the advanced state of narratological theory and to a
high level of terminological and analytical precision. Such is not yet the
case of topics dealt with in entries applying narratological concepts to
disciplines and fields of study beyond literature. The authors of these
articles thus seek to stake out the current state of nascent narrative re-
search in these fields in a heuristic and explorative way, pointing to
relevant features and issues rather than attempting to resolve basic
questions. Nevertheless, these entries are of a particular interest and
value, for they demonstrate the pervasiveness of narration in human
culture and point to the fruitfulness of narratology for the description
and analysis of narration in its prolific forms.
XII Preface

The Handbook of Narratology was first published by Walter de

Gruyter in 2009 and was subsequently made available as an open-
access Living Handbook of Narratology on the Internet. The original 32
articles of the first edition have been updated and 35 new articles have
been added, first in the online version and now in the second print edi-
tion.
This handbook grew out of the work of the Narratology Research
Group at Hamburg University (2001−2007) and the Interdisciplinary
Center for Narratology (founded in 2007).
We wish to thank Wilhelm Schernus for his expert subediting of the
individual articles.

Hamburg and Paris Peter Hühn

July 2014 Jan Christoph Meister
John Pier
Wolf Schmid
 Author
Jörg Schönert

1 Definition

The author (real or empirical) can be defined in a narrow sense as the

intellectual creator of a text written for communicative purposes. In
written texts in particular, the real author is distinguished from the me-
diating instances internal to the text (cf. 2.1; Schmid → Implied Au-
thor, Schmid → Implied Reader; further Alber & Fludernik → Mediacy
and Narrative Mediation). Beyond linguistically created works, the
term author is also used for works in other media such as music and the
visual arts as well as for comics, photography, film, radio and television
programs, and computer games.
A broader understanding of the term author is used in the following
contexts, among others: as conveyor of action in a socio-cultural con-
text (cf. 2.3); in the sense of specific cultural-historically relevant con-
ceptions of authorship; as a unifying instance in the interrelation of
works (œuvre); as a reference for classification in terms of epoch and
canon; and as an important point of reference for the meanings ascribed
to works through which the recipient can determine the author’s inten-
tion and/or author-related contexts relevant to understanding a work (cf.
2.2).

2 Explication

During the 20th century, a broad spectrum of how the author is under-
stood was developed in scholarly circles: for framing concrete contexts
(e.g. “producer of cultural goods”); for abstract author functions (e.g.
causa efficiens); for concepts of the author relevant for understanding
such as the implied author (Schmid → Implied Author). Unlike the
dominant tendencies in the intensive discussions conducted since 1990
on the status and understanding of the author, this analysis will focus
on the author’s narratological relevance.
2 Jörg Schönert

2.1 Communicative Instances in Narrative Representations

As in other domains, it holds for narratological analysis that the real

author is held responsible for the communicative intention and form of
a narratively organized work (on the roles of the author in literary
communication, see Okopień-Sławińska [1971] 1975; Fieguth 1975). In
the case of narrative fictions, it has proved useful to assume that media-
cy is transferred to text-internal instances (“voice”) including the narra-
tor (Margolin → Narrator) to various degrees of explicitness and, pos-
sibly, characters (Jannidis → Character) in the storyworld. To these
there correspond addressee instances such as the narratee (Schmid →
Narratee; further Prince → Reader) or figured addressees, respectively.
The arrangements of autofiction (within literary autobiography, e.g.)
constitute a special case.

2.2 Authorship and Reception of the Work

Authorship is to be seen as a status attributed to a work with culturally

differing author constructs bound up with authorial self-reflection and
self-presentation in a spectrum ranging from self-assurance to skepti-
cism as to the validity and scope of claims to authorship. In the sphere
of (fictional) literature, constructs such as the author as vates, poeta
doctus, creative genius or “writer” can be found. Independent of such
typologizing expressions, particular author constructs also hold good
for the reception of works in specific periods (e.g. the image of Milton
during the Romantic period). These types of construction can refer to
the totality of an author’s work (cf. œuvre author or career author—
Booth 1977: 11) or to representative individual works.
Since the 18th century, there has been a culturally significant need
to fall back on the author for interpretative processes and value judg-
ments of an artistic work based on the creative act, authenticity, indi-
viduality, originality, unity of the work and its depth of meaning. From
this perspective, the definition of “authoralism” in Benedetti’s sense
([1999] 2995: 8–12) is based on the experience that in the modern era it
is “impossible for a work of art to exist except as a product of an au-
thor” (10)—as “being authored” (74–78). A culturally (and legally) im-
portant result of this is that the authenticity of a work is attested with
reference to the real author as its originator, which is significant, for
instance, in the editing of texts (cf. Bohnenkamp 2002).
An author-related reception focuses on the intention, attributed to
the author, to convey a particular understanding of his work. In this
sense, the work can also be seen as an expression of the author’s per-
 Author 3

sonality (including his feelings, opinions, knowledge and values). In

particular, differing conceptions of author and authorship determine,
alongside the concerns of historiographic, classificatory and editorial
practices, ascription of meaning to literary texts within scholarly (cf.
Spoerhase 2007) and non-scholarly circles as a result of biographical
reference to the author, e.g., or with reference to the author’s intention,
reconstructed in a largely hermeneutic manner. In practical criticism,
inclusion of the author as a category for textual interpretation is accept-
ed (cf. Jannidis et al., eds. 1999: 22–24), this approach often being
adopted in the “author-critical” problematics of literary theory and
methodology (Jannidis 2000: 8; Winko 2002).
An alternative concept is marked by the term “author function”: the
author as an individual person is held to be external to his work—as is
maintained by Foucault, for example—so that in the reception of the
work, he can be ignored as a reference point for the ascription of mean-
ing. In a way that varies historically and culturally, the author is inte-
grated into (discursively ordered) functional contexts, such as proprie-
tary or legal concerns, or into classifications of cultural communication.
The resulting author functions are thus not to be related to concrete in-
dividuals, but rather assigned, for example, to discourses or to intertex-
tual constellations.

2.3 Author as a Social Role

Creatorship gives rise to certain consequences in a social context such

as legal implications regarding a claim to intellectual property (copy-
right) or the author’s legal responsibility for the effects of his work.
These and other aspects (e.g. origin, education, patronage, market and
media dependency, author-publisher relationships, royalties and honors,
author groups and interest groups) are the concerns of the social history
of the author, broken down into subsections such as the history of pro-
ducers and distributors (cf. Jäger 1992; Haynes 2005; Parr 2008).

2.3.1 Collaborative as well as Anonymous, Pseudonymous

and Fictitious Authorship

Author collectives (with at least two partners) can be found in various

combinations of media (cf. Detering ed. 2002: 258–309; for belles let-
tres, cf. Plachta ed. 2001, for artistic collaborations, cf. Bacharach &
Tollefsen 2010). During Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, e.g., texts
were produced, over and above those created by an author through tran-
scriptions, additions, commentaries and compilations which were at-
4 Jörg Schönert

tributable to more than one author. Since the late 18th century, popular
prose fiction has often been written by anonymous or pseudonymous
groups of authors and highbrow literature by authors in cooperation,
usually declared. New possibilities have arisen thanks to electronically
stored, collectively produced hypertexts published on CD-ROM and/or
online (cf. Landow ed. 1994; Simanowski 2001; Ryan 2006; Hartling
2009). Collective authorship specific to the medium is the rule in musi-
cal theater, cinema (cf. Kamp 1996) and television.
Numerous historical and cultural variants can be found for anony-
mous, pseudonymous and fictitious authorship (cf. Schaff 2002); until
well into the 20th century, these practices were often resorted to in lit-
erary publications by women authors.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

The following (European) overview focuses on the author as the creator

of literary texts, and in particular of narrative fiction.
Since Antiquity, terminological ambiguity in the concept of author
and competing concepts of author and authorship have been apparent
(cf. Burke ed. 1995; Jannidis et al., eds. 1999: 4–11), as witnessed, e.g.,
in the variously defined conceptions of the heteronomy and autonomy
of the author. The underlying tendency from Antiquity to the modern
era can be described as a shift from an instrumental-performative un-
derstanding of authorship to personalization characterized by creative
individuality (cf. Wetzel 2000: 480).
Author as a neutral term alongside scriptor/writer first began to
dominate after the end of the 18th century in the context of an econom-
ic and legal situation specific to the period and as a neutralizing claim
set up to counter the emphatic understanding of “poet.” The word “au-
thor” has developed into an umbrella term and now denotes all forms of
creatorship for a work in the context of public communication.

3.1 Antiquity

Author in the literal sense is of Roman origin (auctor), and has no

Greek equivalent. However, Plato had already devised for poetic
productivity the concept of a speech guided by “enthusiasm” (literally
“possessed by God”), to which the later model of the poet pleading for
(divine) inspiration as well as the poeta vates can be assigned. Along-
side the dominant idea of the production of poetic works by means of
inspiration, a further author model was formulated in the poietes
 Author 5

(“maker”; Lat. poeta faber) favored in Aristotle’s Poetics: poetic works

are created out of techne, i.e. craftsmanship and technical skill (Lat.
ars) (cf. Kleinschmidt 1998: 14–34).
New ways of conceiving of the production of poetic works arose as
a result of the complex of meanings surrounding the term auctor in the
ancient Roman legal system: an auctor is the bearer of auctoritas (cf.
Heinze 1925) who enjoys particular rights and/or who can transfer (and
thus authorize) these rights in order to promote something or achieve
some goal. This “authority” was founded on, and confirmed by, the
special knowledge available to the auctor. In this respect, the author
model of the poeta faber was upgraded to the poeta eruditus or poeta
doctus.

3.2 Middle Ages

Use of the Latin term auctor (Eng. author; Ital. autore; Fr. auteur;
Span. autor; Ger. Autor) was extended to cover the creatorship of fac-
tual and fictional texts. In general, it was only from the late 15th centu-
ry onwards that scholars and occasionally poets were referred to as auc-
tores, a practice that continued up to the early decades of the 18th cen-
tury. Viewed from a cultural-historical perspective, the classical model
of the poeta vates was re-interpreted as an extension into the sphere of
knowledge of the promises and teachings of Christianity so that where
this commitment was supplemented by poetological knowledge, the
result was to link up the author model with the poeta doctus.
In contrast to scientific texts, literary texts in the broader sense (as in
epics or in the Minnesang) were often handed down without the creator
being named, so that individual or collective anonymity prevailed. Lit-
tle distinction was made between the creators, copyists, editors, com-
mentators and compilers of texts in favor of “original” creatorship in
need of protection (cf. Minnis 1984), with far more emphasis being
placed on group identity: e.g.—depending on the type of text—in the
imitatio veterum (supported by the canon that provided a model) or—
when mediacy-oriented—in the case of collective manuscripts.

3.3 Early Modern Period

With the invention of the printing press, a public sphere based on writ-
ten language was established for which, both in the dominant scholarly
literature and in the diversified sphere of belles lettres, the individuality
of the author as well as the authenticity of the single work and reliable
copies (guaranteed by printing) gained progressively in importance. In
6 Jörg Schönert

literature, the author model of the poeta eruditus and the poeta doctus
dominated starting from the time of Humanism. For these texts, “inter-
pretation” was not the appropriate form of analysis, but “commentary,”
relating the text to previous sources backed up with “authority” (cf.
Scholz 1999: 347–350). Also revived was the model of the poet moved
by inspiration, sometimes in the sense of an alter deus (cf. Scholz
1999). Initially, creatorship remained legally undefined. It was not until
the turn of the 18th century that the first contractual arrangements be-
tween publishers and authors were devised concerning royalties, etc.

3.4 Early 18th Century until the Mid-20th Century

As a result of varying national cultural developments in Europe, the

author developed into a legal instance in the course of the 18th century,
acquiring material entitlements vis-à-vis publishers, requiring protec-
tion against unauthorized reprints and plagiarism, and bearing personal
responsibility for the content of his publications (e.g. Bosse 1981; Hes-
se 1991; Jaszi & Woodmansee eds. 1994). With the development of the
objective conditions linked to creating factual and fictional texts for
market-led public communication, the term author became a value-free
collective name to which professional designations such as writer
(Skribent, Schriftsteller, écrivain, etc.) as well as evaluative classifica-
tions such as poet/Dichter could be assigned. A broad spectrum of pat-
terns of individual and collective authorship developed (cf. Haynes
2005: 302–310) for the social roles that arose from these concrete au-
thor models, and they were often accompanied by the authors’ reflec-
tions on their self-perception (cf. Selbmann 1994).
Additional criteria for artistic production regarding creativity and
originality (genius) became important for the understanding of the au-
thor as poet/Dichter from the final third of the 18th century onwards.
Thus, the author could be defined legally, materially and intellectually
(cf. Haynes 2005: 310–313). In emphatic formulations such as “art as
religion,” the life experiences, conceptions of style and work of the
(godlike) poet were bound together into a whole and endowed with a
special aura (cf. Bénichou [1973] 1999). In this process, narrative prose
was enhanced with a literary status in the course of the 18th century and
was put on an equal footing with the “classical” genres of drama, epic,
and verse as a poetic art.
New facets of the concept of author emerged from scholarly en-
gagement with works of the poetic art, their theory and history which
got underway after 1820 (cf. Jannidis et al., eds. 1999: 9–11). The au-
thor together with the story of his life and work became a reference
 Author 7

point for expert textual analysis (biographical criticism), scholarly edi-

tions, literary- historical (re)constructions and evaluations for establish-
ing the canon with practical cultural consequences, particularly for edu-
cation and teaching. Toward the end of the 19th century, methodologi-
cal debates emerged which, in different ways, fell back on the author as
an interpretative norm for ascribing meaning, above all in the scholarly
handling of texts. In this process, plausibility was legitimized in a varie-
ty of ways on the basis for example of: (a) the author’s ascertainable
intention (cf. Hirsch 1967); (b) extensions of the intentional aspect
through a critique of psychoanalytical or ideological assumptions to
meanings of literary texts beyond the author’s intention: “to understand
the author better than he understood himself” (Strube 1999); (c) the
author-oriented selection of relevant contexts.
Approaches to ascribing meaning to texts in scholarly circles were
developed in competition with these concepts from the early 20th cen-
tury onwards, based on the assumption that all information relevant to
meaning could be drawn from the text in question alone (cf. close read-
ing, New Criticism, werkimmanente Interpretation, explication de texte,
formalist, structuralist and text-semiotic approaches). In support of such
approaches, criticism remained wary of the “intentional fallacy” (cf.
Wimsatt & Beardsley [1946] 1954), emphasizing the irrelevance of the
real author’s intention for scholarly interpretation.
It was in this context that categorial distinctions between the real au-
thor and speaker instances internal to the text (cf. narrator, lyrical I),
advocated since the beginning of the 20th century (cf. Friedemann
[1910] 1965; Susman 1910) and accepted in the 1950s, gained in im-
portance. As a textual instance located above other instances and differ-
entiated from the real author (also as a reference point for text imma-
nent interpretations of works), the “implied author” was brought into
the discussion by Booth in [1961] 1983 even though, in the following
decades, it was often called into question as “not absolutely necessary”
(cf. Kindt & Müller 2006); complementary to the “implied author” is
the “implied reader.”

3.5 Since the Mid-20th Century

In this phase, both author-centric and author-critical approaches to tex-

tual interpretation have been further clarified in scholarly debates on
literary theory, and the resulting competition between them was intensi-
fied. Hence, the intentio operis or the intentio lectoris (Eco 1990), e.g.,
was placed in opposition to the interpretative norm of the intentio auc-
toris. For ascribing meaning to a text put at a remove from the author’s
8 Jörg Schönert

creative process as a result of publication, decisive emphasis is placed

on the activity of the “implied reader” constructed during the reading
process, or the real reader. This position is taken up in various ways in
the concepts developed by empirical literary criticism (cf. Schmidt
1982) and by cognitive narratology (Herman → Cognitive Narratolo-
gy).
The concept of écriture automatique, developed by the French Sur-
realists during the 1920s, was then added to the critique of the assump-
tion that a work is authentic and autonomous, the author being under-
stood merely as the executing instance (cf. Barthes [1968] 1977) of the
autonomously productive literary language. In a further step, the
boundaries of the author-oriented work were cancelled out in intertex-
tual constellations (cf. Kristeva [1969] 1980) and in “discourse” (cf.
Foucault [1969] 1979), and the author function superseded the person
of the author (author as “intertextual construction,” as “discourse func-
tion”): with a Nietzschean gesture, Barthes and Foucault announced the
“death of the author” (cf. Burke ed. 1995). The debate on the curtailed
potency of authorship was carried on through the concepts of poststruc-
turalism and the New Philology. The broader the medial spectrum for
communication with text and with representations analogous to text
grew during the second half of the 20th century, the greater the interest
in the contribution of the material conditions of production and com-
munication to the ascription of meaning became: authorship is now of-
ten conceived of as arrangement, montage, bricolage and remix (Wetzel
2000: 486, 491–492). Complex constructions of authorship are assigned
to cinematic works (cf. Chatman 1990), while specific author concepts
for the theory and reception of the products of the so-called new media,
such as in hypertexts and cybertexts, are still being disputed (cf. Winko
1999).
In contrast to these positions, a multi-faceted debate, extending be-
yond the methodological problems of textual interpretation, got under-
way in around 1990 in which restitution of various aspects of the author
was advocated (e.g. Biriotti & Miller eds. 1993; Jaszi & Woodmansee
eds. 1994; Couturier 1995; Ingold & Wunderlich eds. 1992; Jannidis et
al., eds. 1999; Detering ed. 2002). The debate took place with reference
to the problematic relevance of origin, biography and types of experi-
ence to the processes of writing and forms of expression in concepts of
gender studies (e.g. Walker 1990; Hahn 1991; Lanser 1992; Haynes
2005: 299–302) and those of postcolonial studies. Interest in the cir-
cumstances of authorial creativity and its scholarly investigation has
intensified (cf. Ingold 1992); and still unabated is the commitment, de-
veloped since the 1920s by the sociology of literature and, since the
 Author 9

1970s, by the social history of literature as well as by cultural material-

ism, to investigation of the social role of the author and of the social
institutions and processes that affect his work (cf. Wolf 2002: 395–399;
Haynes 2005: 291). From the perspective of cultural history authorship
has been conceptualized as “cultural performance” within a “cultural
topography,” in connection with social contexts, technological devel-
opments, medial configurations “and other cultural developments” (cf.
Berensmeyer et al. 2012). Entering an “overlapping area of biopoetics,
pragma-linguistics, and cognitive poetics” (cf. Eibl 2013: 207) Eibl ar-
gues that the development of interpersonal communication (and ulti-
mately also of meaning construction through literary narration) has
brought about the basic assumption and social practice of ascribing
what is communicated to an originator: in fictional texts this role is tak-
en by the narrator’s voice initiating and guiding the reader’s imagina-
tion and understanding (cf. Eibl 2013: 229).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Questions to be pursued from a narratological perspective concern pri-

marily the interpretation of literary texts (cf. Jannidis 2000): is the as-
cription of meaning with reference to aspects of the real author theoret-
ically legitimate and fruitful practically speaking? Which of the six em-
pirically determined author-oriented interpretative strategies proposed
by Winko (2002) are absolutely necessary, and to what extent can they
be hierarchically ordered? At the same time, are references to the real
author conceivable other than in the orientation of ascribed meanings
toward the author’s intention, such as the author-oriented selection of
relevant contexts for textual interpretation? Must reference to the au-
thor’s intention represent an alternative to the implied author, or can
author’s intention and implied author complement one another in the
ascription of meaning (cf. Kindt & Müller 2006)? Should reference to
the real and/or implied author in any way constrain the randomness of
meaning/significances ascribed through reader activity? In the ascrip-
tion of meaning to texts, which characteristic relations can be identified
for the reader’s construction of the real author, the implied author and
the narrative instance (cf. narrator)? Is the implied author a meaningful
analytical category only for literary texts, or also for journalistic and
historiographical texts?

(Translated by Alexander Starritt)

10 Jörg Schönert

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

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 Author 11

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Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart. Darmstadt: WBG.
12 Jörg Schönert

Simanowski, Roberto (2001). “Autorschaften in digitalen Medien. Eine Einführung.”

Text & Kritik, No. 152, 3–21.
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Strecker & Schröder.
Walker, Cheryl (1990). “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author.” Critical Inquiry
16, 551–571.
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griffe. Stuttgart: Metzler, vol. 1, 480–544.
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Winko, Simone (1999). “Lost in hypertext? Autorkonzepte und neue Medien.” F. Jan-
nidis et al. (eds.). Rückkehr des Autors. Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Be-
griffs. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 511–533.
– (2002). “Autor-Funktionen. Zur argumentativen Verwendung von Autorkonzep-
ten in der gegenwärtigen literaturwissenschaftlichen Interpretationspraxis.” H.
Detering (ed.). Autorschaft. Positionen und Revisionen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 334–
354.
Wolf, Norbert Christian (2002). “Wieviele Leben hat der Autor? Zur Wiederkehr des
empirischen Autor- und des Werkbegriffs in der neueren Literaturtheorie.” H.
Detering (ed.). Autorschaft. Positionen und Revisionen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 390–
405.

5.2 Further Reading

“Der Autor” (1981). Special Issue of LiLi: Zeitschrift für Linguistik und Literaturwis-
senschaft 11, No. 42.
Andersen, Elizabeth et al., eds. (1998). Autor und Autorschaft im Mittelalter. Tübingen:
Niemeyer.
Bennet, Andrew (2005). The Author. London: Routledge.
Burke, Seán (1992). The Death and Return of the Author. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Chartier, Roger ([1992] 1994). “Figures of the Author.” R. Chartier. The Order of
Books. Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and
Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford: Stanford UP, 25–60.
Cramer, Thomas (1986). “‘Solus creator est deus.’ Der Autor auf dem Weg zum Schöp-
fertum.” Daphnis 15, 261–276.
Dorleijn, Gillis J. et.al., eds. (2010). Authorship Revisited. Conceptions of Authorship
Around 1900 and 2000. Leuven: Peeters.
Frank, Susi et al., eds. (2001). Mystifikation—Autorschaft—Original. Tübingen: Narr.
Genette, Gérard ([1987] 1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
 Author 13

Gölz, Christine (2009). “Autortheorien des slavischen Funktionalismus.” W. Schmid

(ed.). Slavische Erzähltheorie. Russische und tschechische Ansätze. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 187–237.
Haug, Walter & Burghart Wachinger, eds. (1991). Autorentypen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson & Robyn Warhol
(2012).“Authors, Narrators, Narration.” D. Herman et al. Narrative Theory. Core
Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 207–229.
Hoffmann, Torsten & Daniela Langer (2007). “Autor.” Th. Anz (ed.). Handbuch Lite-
raturwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Metzler, vol. 1, 131–170.
Holmes, David I. (1994). “Authorship Attribution.” Computer and the Humanities 28,
87–106.
Howard, Rebecca Moore (1999). Standing in the Shadows of Giants. Plagiarists, Au-
thors, Collaborators. Stanford: Ablex Publ.
Ingold, Felix Philipp & Werner Wunderlich, eds. (1995). Der Autor im Dialog. Beiträ-
ge zu Autorität und Autorschaft. St. Gallen: UVK.
Irwin, William, ed. (2002). The Death and Resurrection of the Author. Westport:
Greenwood P.
Kamouf, Peggy (1988). Signature Pieces. On the Institution of Authorship. Ithaca:
Cornell UP.
Lamarque, Peter (1990). “The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy.” The Brit-
ish Journal of Aesthetics 30, 319–331.
Moers, Ellen (1985). Literary Women. New York: Oxford UP.
Nelles, William (1993). “Historical and Implied Authors and Readers.” Comparative
Literature 45, 22–46.
Nesbit, Molly (1987). “What Was An Author?” Yale French Studies No. 73, 229–257.
Peschel-Rentsch, Dietmar (1991). Gott, Autor, ich. Skizzen zur Genese von Autorbe-
wußtsein und Erzählerfigur im Mittelalter. Erlangen: Palm & Enke.
Rose, Mark (1993). Authors and Owners. The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge: Har-
vard UP.
Sherman, Brad & Alain Strowel, eds. (1994). Of Authors and Origins. Essays on Copy-
right Law. Oxford: Clarendon P.
Simion, Eugen (1996). The Return of the Author. Evanston: Northwestern UP.
Stecker, Robert (1987). “Apparent, Implied and Postulated Authors.” Philosophy and
Literature 11, 258–271.
Sussloff, Catherine (1997). The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Uidhir, Christy Mag (2011) : “Minimal Authorship (of Sorts).” Philosophical Studies
154, 373–387.
Viala, Alain (1985). Naissance de l’écrivain. Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge
classique. Paris: Minuit.
Vogel, Martin (1978). “Deutsche Urheber- und Verlagsrechtsgeschichte zwischen 1450
und 1850.” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 19, Sp. 1–190.
Woodmansee, Martha (1994). The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History
of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia UP.
 Autobiography
Helga Schwalm

1 Definition

Notoriously difficult to define, autobiography in the broader sense of

the word is used almost synonymously with “life writing” and denotes
all modes and genres of telling one’s own life. More specifically, auto-
biography as a literary genre signifies a retrospective narrative that un-
dertakes to tell the author’s own life, or a substantial part of it, seeking
(at least in its classic version) to reconstruct his/her personal develop-
ment within a given historical, social and cultural framework. While
autobiography on the one hand claims to be non-fictional (factual) in that
it proposes to tell the story of a ‘real’ person, it is inevitably constructive,
or imaginative, in nature and as a form of textual ‘self-fashioning’ ulti-
mately resists a clear distinction from its fictional relatives (autofiction,
autobiographical novel), leaving the generic borderlines blurred.

2 Explication

Emerging from the European Enlightenment, with precursors in anti-

quity, autobiography in its ‘classic’ shape is characterized by auto-
diegetic, i.e. 1st-person subsequent narration told from the point of
view of the present. Comprehensive and continuous retrospection,
based on memory, makes up its governing structural and semantic prin-
ciple. Oscillating between the struggle for truthfulness and creativity,
between oblivion, concealment, hypocrisy, self-deception and self-
conscious fictionalizing, autobiography renders a story of personality
formation, a Bildungsgeschichte. As such, it was epitomized by Rous-
seau ([1782–89] 1957); Goethe ([1808–31] 1932) and continued
throughout the 19th century and beyond (Chateaubriand [1848/50]
2002; Mill [1873]1989, with examples of autobiographical fiction in
Moritz ([1785–86] 2006), Dickens ([1850] 2008), Keller ([1854–55]
1981; a second, autodiegetic version [1879–80] 1985) and Proust
([1913–27] 1988). While frequently disclaiming to follow generic
 Autobiography 15

norms, its hallmark is a focus on psychological introspection and a

sense of historicity, frequently implying, in the instance of a writer’s
autobiography, a close link between the author’s life and literary work.
Although 1st-person narrative continues to be the dominant form in
autobiography, there are examples of autobiographical writing told in
the 3rd person (e.g. Stein 1933; Wolf 1976), in epistolary form (e.g.
Plato’s Seventh Letter ca. 353 B.C. [1966]) and in verse (Wordsworth
[1799, 1805, 1850] 1979). However, with its ‘grand narrative’ of identi-
ty, the classic 1st-person form of autobiography has continued to pro-
vide the generic model around which new autobiographical forms of
writing and new conceptions of autobiographical selves have taken
shape. At the heart of its narrative logic lies the duality of the autobio-
graphical person, divided into ‘narrating I’ and ‘narrated I’, marking the
distance between the experiencing and the narrating subject. Whereas
the ‘narrated I’ features as the protagonist, the ‘narrating I’, i.e. the 1st-
person narrator, ultimately personifies the agent of focalization, the
overall position from which the story is rendered, although the autobio-
graphical narrator may temporarily step back to adopt an earlier per-
spective. A pseudo-static present point of narration as the ultimate end
of autobiographical writing is thus implied, rendering the trajectory of
autobiographical narrative circular, as it were: the present is both the
end and the condition of its narration. However, this apparent circulari-
ty is frequently destabilized by the dynamics of the narrative present, as
the autobiographer continues to live while composing his/her narrative,
thus leaving the perspective open to change unless the position of ‘qua-
si death’ is adopted, as in Hume’s notoriously stoic presentation of
himself as a person of the past (Hume 1778). At the other end of the
spectrum of self-positionings as autobiographical narrator, Wordsworth
testifies to the impossibility of autobiographical closure in his verse
autobiography ([1799, 1805, 1850] 1979). Again and again, he rewrites
the same time span of his life. As his life continues to progress, his sub-
ject—the “growth of a poet’s mind” ([1850, subtitle] 1979)—per-
petually appears to him in a new light, requiring continual revision even
though the ‘duration’ (the time span covered) in fact remains the same,
thus reflecting the instability of the autobiographical subject as narrator.
Accordingly, the later narrative versions bear the mark of the different
stages of writing. The narrative present, then, can only ever be a tempo-
rary point of view, affording an “interim balance” (de Bruyn [1992]
1994) at best, leaving the final vantage point an autobiographical illu-
sion.
With its dual structural core, the autobiographical 1st-person pro-
noun may be said to reflect the precarious intersections and balances of
16 Helga Schwalm

the “idem” and “ipse” dimensions of personal identity pertaining to

spatio-temporal sameness and selfhood as agency (Ricœur 1991). In
alternative theoretical terms, it may be related to “three identity dilem-
mas”: “sameness […] across time,” being “unique” in the face of others;
and “agency” (Bamberg 2011: 6–8; Bamberg → Identity and Narration).
In a more radical, deconstructive twist of theorizing autobiographical
narrative in relation to the issue of identity, the 1st-person dualism inher-
ent in autobiography appears as a ‘writing the self’ by another, as a mode
of “ghostwriting” (Volkening 2006: 7).
Beyond this pivotal feature of 1st-person duality, further facets of
the 1st-person pronoun of autobiography come into play. Behind the
narrator, the empirical writing subject, the “Real” or “Historical I” is
located, not always in tune with the ‘narrating’ and ‘experiencing I’s’,
but considered the ‘real author’ and the external subject of reference.
The concept of the “ideological I” suggested by Smith and Watson
(eds. 2001) is a more precarious one. It is conceived as an abstract cate-
gory which, unlike its narrative siblings, is not manifest on the textual
level, but in ‘covert operation’ only. According to Smith and Watson, it
signifies “the concept of personhood culturally available to the narrator
when he tells the story” (eds. 2001: 59–61) and thus reflects the social
(and intertextual) embedding of any autobiographical narrative. Recon-
sidered from the viewpoint of social sciences and cognitive narratology
alike, the ‘ideological I’ derives from culturally available generic and
institutional genres, structures and institutions of self-representation.
Depending on the diverse (inter-)disciplinary approaches to the social
nature of the autobiographical self, these are variously termed “master
narrative,” “patterns of emplotment,” “schema,” “frame,” cognitive
“script” (e.g. Neumann et al., eds., 2008), or even “biography genera-
tor” (Biographiegeneratoren, Hahn 1987: 12). What ties this heteroge-
neous terminology together is the basic assumption that only through an
engagement with such socially/culturally prefigured models, their rein-
scription, can individuals represent themselves as subjects.
The social dimension of autobiography also comes into play on an
intratextual level in so far as any act of autobiographical communica-
tion addresses another—explicitly so in terms of constructing a nar-
ratee, who may be part of the self, a “Nobody,” an individual person,
the public, or God as supreme Judge.
At the same time, autobiography stages the self in relation to others
on the level of narrative. Apart from personal models or important fig-
ures in one’s life story, autobiographies may be centred on a relation-
ship of self and other to an extent that effectively erases the boundaries
between auto- and heterobiography (e.g. Gosse [1907] 2004; Steedman
 Autobiography 17

1987). In such cases, the (auto)biographical “routing of a self known

through its relational others” is openly displayed, undermining the
model “of life narrative as a bounded story of the unique, individuated
narrating subject” (Smith & Watson eds. 2001: 67). With its several
dimensions of social ‘relatedness’, then, autobiographical writing is
never an autonomous act of self-reflection, as sociological theorists of
(auto-)biography have long argued (e.g. Kohli 1981: 505–516). From a
sociological angle, it may be considered a form of social action making
sense of personal experience in terms of general relevance (Sloterdijk
1978: 21). Autobiographical patterns of relevance are culturally speci-
fic, diverse and subject to historical change, as the history of autobio-
graphy with its multitude of forms and writing practices demonstrates.

3 History

3.1 Autobiography in Historical Perspective

Whereas its origins ultimately date back to antiquity (Roesler 2005),

with Augustine’s Confessions ([398–398] 1961) as a prominent ancient
landmark, the history of autobiography as a (factual) literary genre and
critical term is a much shorter one. In German, the term Selbstbio-
graphie first featured in the collective volume Selbstbiographien
berühmter Männer (1796) [Self-Biographies by Famous Men], its edi-
tor Seybold claiming Herder as source. Jean Paul called his unfinished
and unpublished autobiography Selberlebensbeschreibung [‘description
of one’s life by oneself’] ([1818–19] 1987: 16). In English, D’Israeli
spoke of “self-biography” in 1796 (95–110), while his critic Taylor
suggested “auto-biography” (Nussbaum 1989: 1). These neologisms
reflect a concern with a mode of writing only just considered to be a
distinct species of (factual) literature at the time; not until the mid-18th
century did autobiography separate from historiography as well as from
a general notion of biography. The latter, variously coined ‘life’,
‘memoir’ or ‘history’, had not distinguished between what Johnson
then seminally parted as “telling his own story” as opposed to “recount-
ing the life of another” ([1750] 1969 and [1759] 1963).
The emergence of autobiography as a literary genre and critical term
thus coincides with what has frequently been called the emergence of
the modern subject around 1800. It evolved as a genre of non-fictional,
yet ‘constructed’ autodiegetic narration wherein a self-reflective subject
enquires into his/her identity and its developmental trajectory. The au-
tobiographer looks back to tell the story of his/her life from the begin-
18 Helga Schwalm

ning to the present, tracing the story of its own making—in Nietzsche’s
words, “How One Bec[ame] What One Is” ([1908] 1992). As it tends to
focus on the autobiographical subject as singular individual, auto-
biography in the modern sense is thus marked by the secularization and
the “temporalization (Historisierung) of experience” (Burke 2011: 13).
In contrast, pre-modern spiritual autobiography, which followed the
tradition of Augustine’s Confessions and continued well into the 19th
century, constructed its subject as exemplum, i.e. as a typical story to
be learnt from. Little emphasis was put on life-world particularities
(although these tended to acquire their own popular dynamics as in
crime confessions). Dividing life into clear-cut phases centred round the
moment of conversion, the spiritual autobiographer tells the story of
self-renunciation and surrenders to providence and grace (e.g. Bunyan
[1666] 1962). Its narrative becomes possible only after the key experi-
ence of conversion, yielding up a ‘new self’. Accordingly, Augustine
commented on his former self with great detachment: “But this was the
man I was” ([387–398] 1961: 105). While on the level of story, then,
the division in spiritual autobiographies is one of ‘before’ and ‘after’,
the level of narrative being ruled by the perspective of ‘after’ almost
exclusively: only after and governed by the experience of conversion to
Christian belief can the story be told at all. The moment of anagnōrisis
and narrative present do not coincide.
The narrative mode of modern autobiography as a literary genre,
firmly linked to the notion of the individual, evolved to some extent by
propelling the moment of self-recognition towards the narrative pre-
sent: only at the end of one’s story can it be unfurled from the begin-
ning as a singular life course, staging the autobiographer as subject. The
secular self accounts for itself as autonomous agent, (ideally) in charge
of itself. This is the narrative logic of autobiography in its ‘classic
shape’ that also informed the autobiographical novel. By 1800, the task
of autobiography was to represent a unique individual, as claimed by
Rousseau for himself: “I am not made like any of those I have seen; I
venture to believe that I am not like any of those who are in existence”
([1782] 1957: 1). Most prominently, Goethe explicitly writes of himself
as a singular individual embedded in and interacting with the specific
constellations of his time ([1808–31] 1932). Autobiography thus focus-
es on the life of a singular individual within its specific historical con-
text, retracing the “genetic personality development founded in the
awareness of a complex interplay between I-and-my-world” (Weintraub
1982: 13). In this sense, it may be seen to represent the “full conver-
gence of all the factors constituting this modern view of the self” (XV).
 Autobiography 19

Its central figure is that of a Romantic self-constitution, grounded in

memory.
As memory informs autobiography, self-consciously reflected upon
since Augustine (Book XX, Confessions), the boundaries between fact
and fiction are inevitably straddled, as Goethe’s title Dichtung und
Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) ([1808–31] 1932) aptly suggests. In the
face of the inevitable subjectivity (or fallibility) of autobiographical
recollection, the creative dimension of memory, and thus autobiog-
raphy’s quality as verbal/aesthetic fabrication, has come to the fore. In
this respect, the history of autobiography as a literary genre is closely
interrelated with corresponding forms of autofiction/the autobiograph-
ical novel, with no clear dividing lines, even though autobiographical
fiction tends to leave “signposts” of its fictionality to be picked up by
the reader (Cohn 1999). In any case, autobiography’s temporal linearity
and narrative coherence has frequently proved prone to deliberate an-
achronisms and disruptions—programmatically so in Nabokov (1966).
Indeed, by the early 20th century there was an increasing scepticism
about the possibility of a cohesive self emerging through auto-
biographical memory. Modernist writers experimented with fragmenta-
tion, subverting chronology and splitting the subject (Woolf 1985, pub-
lished posthumously; Stein 1933), foregrounding visual and scenic
/topographical components, highlighting the role of language (Sartre
[1964] 2002), conflating auto- and heterobiography or transforming
lives into fiction (e.g. Proust [1913–27] 1988).

3.2 Critical Paradigms in Historical Perspective

From its critical beginnings, then, autobiography has been inextricably

linked to the critical history of subjectivity. In his monumental study of
1907, Misch explicitly surveyed the history of autobiography as a re-
flection of the trajectory of forms of subjective consciousness ([1907]
1950: 4). He thus acknowledged the historical specificity of forms of
autobiographical self-reflection. With his concept of autobiography as
“a special genre in literature” and at the same time “an original inter-
pretation of experience” (3–4), Misch aligned with the hermeneutics of
Dilthey, who considered autobiography the supreme form of the “un-
derstanding of life.” Such understanding involves selection as the auto-
biographical self takes from the infinite moments of experience those
elements that, in retrospect, appear relevant with respect to the entire
life course. The past is endowed with meaning in the light of the pre-
sent. Understanding, according to Dilthey, also involves fitting the in-
dividual parts into a whole, ascribing interconnection and causality
20 Helga Schwalm

([1910] 2002: 221–222). Autobiography thus constructs an individual

life course as a coherent, meaningful whole. Even if autobiography’s
aspect of re-living experience, of rendering incidents as they were expe-
rienced at the time, is taken into account, the superior ‘interpreting’
position of the narrative present remains paramount, turning past events
into a meaningful plot, making sense (Sinn) of contingency.
Hermeneutics continued to dominate the theory of autobiography,
lagging behind its poetic practices. Gusdorf defined autobiography as
“a kind of apologetics or theodicy of the individual being” (1980: 39),
yet shifted the emphasis somewhat by prioritizing its literary over its
historical function. Anglo-American theories of autobiography similar-
ly tended to focus on such a poetical norm of autobiography as a liter-
ary work devoted to “inner truth” (Pascal 1960), with Rousseau’s
/Goethe’s autobiography as the recognizable generic model. “Any auto-
biography that resembles modern autobiographies in structure and con-
tent is the modern kind of autobiography”; these are “works like those
that modern readers instinctively expect to find when they see Autobi-
ography, My Life, or Memoirs printed across the back of a volume”
(Shumaker 1954: 5). Whether hermeneutics- or New Criticism-inspired,
the history of autobiography as “art” (Niggl 1988: 6) is seen to culmi-
nate around 1800, while its more immediate forerunners are often lo-
cated in the Renaissance or earlier (e.g. Petrarch [1326] 2005; Cellini
[1558–66] 1995). With regard to the primary role of the autobiographer
as subject of his work, Starobinski argued that his/her singularity was
articulated by way of idiosyncratic style (1970, [1970] 1983).
Only in the wake of the various social, cultural and linguistic turns
of literary and cultural theory since the 1970s did autobiography lose
this normative frame. Relying on Freud and Riesman, Neumann estab-
lished a social psychology-based typology of autobiographical forms.
Aligning different modes of narrative with different conceptions of
identity, he distinguished between the external orientation of res gestae
and memoir, representing the individual as social type, on the one hand,
as opposed to autobiography with its focus on memory and identity
(1970: esp. 25), on the other hand. Only autobiography aims at personal
identity whereas the memoir is concerned with affirming the autobio-
grapher’s place in the world.
More recent research has elaborated on the issue of autobiographical
narrative and identity in psychological terms (Bruner 1993) as well as
from interdisciplinary angles, probing the inevitability of narrative as
constitutive of personal identity (e.g. Eakin 2008) in the wake of “the
twin crisis of identity and narrative in the twentieth century” (Klepper
2013: 2) and exploring forms of non-linearity, intermediality or life
 Autobiography 21

writing in the new media (Dünne & Moser 2008). The field of life writ-
ing as narratives of self—or of various forms of self—has thus become
significantly broader, transcending the classic model of autobiograph-
ical identity qua coherent retrospective narrative. Yet whatever its theo-
retical remodelling and practical rewritings, even if frequently subvert-
ed in practice, the close nexus between narrative, self/identity, and the
genre/practice of autobiography continues to be considered paramount.
The underlying assumption concerning autobiography is that of a close,
even inextricable connection between narrative and identity, with auto-
biography the prime generic site of enactment. Moreover, life narrative
has even been promoted in modernity to a “general cultural pattern of
knowledge” (Braun & Stiegler eds. 2012: 13). (While these approaches
tend to address autobiographical writing practices claiming to be or
considered non-fictional, their relevance extends to autofictional
forms.)
Next to narrative and identity, the role of memory in (autobiograph-
ical) self-constructions has been addressed (Olney 1998), in particular
adopting cognitivist (e.g. Erll et al., eds. 2003) and psychoanalytical
(Pietzcker 2005) angles as well as elaborating the neurobiological
foundations of autobiographical memory (Markowitsch & Welzer
2005). From the perspective of ‘natural’ narratology, the experiential
aspect of autobiography, its dimension of re-living and reconstructing
experience, has been emphasized (Löschnigg 2010: 259).
With memory being both a constitutive faculty and a creative liabil-
ity, the nature of the autobiographical subject has also been revised in
terms of psychoanalytical, (socio-) psychological or even deconstruc-
tive categories (e.g. Holdenried 1991; Volkening 2006). ‘Classic auto-
biography’ has turned out to be a limited historical phenomenon whose
foundations and principles have been increasingly challenged and sub-
verted with respect to poetic practice, poetological reflection and genre
theory alike. Even within a less radical theoretical frame, chronological
linearity, retrospective narrative closure and coherence as mandatory
generic markers have been disqualified, or at least re-conceptualized as
structural tools (e.g. Kronsbein 1984). Autobiography’s generic scope
now includes such forms as the diary/journal as “serial autobiography”
(Fothergill 1974: 152), the “Literary Self-Portrait” as a more heteroge-
neous and complex literary type (Beaujour [1980] 1991) and the essay
(e.g. Hof & Rohr eds. 2008). While autobiography has thus gained in
formal and thematic diversity, autobiographical identity appears a tran-
sitory phenomenon at best. In its most radical deconstructive twist, au-
tobiography is reconceptionalized as a rhetorical figure—“prosopo-
peia”—that ultimately produces “the illusion of reference” (de Man
22 Helga Schwalm

1984: 81). De Man thus challenges the very foundations of autobio-

graphy in that it is said to create its subject by means of rhetorical lan-
guage rather than represent the subject. Autobiography operates in
complicity with metaphysical notions of self-consciousness, intention-
ality and language as a means of representation.
Whereas de Man’s deconstruction of autobiography turned out to be
of little lasting impact, Lejeune’s theory of the “autobiographical pact”
has proven seminal. It rethinks autobiography as an institutionalized
communicative act where author and reader enter into a particular ‘con-
tract’—the “autobiographical pact”—sealed by the triple reference of
the same proper name. “Autobiography (narrative recounting the life of
the author) supposes that there is identity of name between the author
(such as s/he figures, by name, on the cover), the narrator of the story
and the character who is being talked about” ([1987] 1988: 12; see Ge-
nette [1991] 1993). The author’s proper name refers to a singular auto-
biographical identity, identifying author, narrator and protagonist as
one, and thus ensures the reading as autobiography. “The autobiograph-
ical pact is the affirmation in the text of this identity, referring back in
the final analysis to the name of the author on the cover” (14). The tag-
ging of the generic status operates by way of paratextual pronounce-
ments or by identity of names; in contrast, nominal differentiation or
content clues might point to fiction as worked out by Cohn (1999).
While Lejeune’s approach reduces the issue of fiction vs non-fiction
to a simple matter of pragmatics, he acknowledges its own historical
limitations set by the “author function” (Foucault [1969] 1979) along
with its inextricable ties to the middle-class subject. As an ideal type,
Lejeune’s autobiographical pact depends on the emergence of the mod-
ern author in the long 18th century as proprietor of his or her own text,
guaranteed by modern copyright and marked by the title page/the im-
print. In this sense, the history of modern autobiography as literary gen-
re is closely connected to the history of authorship and the modern sub-
ject and vice versa, much as the scholarship on autobiography has
emerged contemporaneously with the emergence of the modern author
(Schönert → Author).
In various ways, then, autobiography has proved prone to be to
“slip[ping] away altogether,” failing to be identifiable by “its own
proper form, terminology, and observances” (Olney ed. 1980: 4). Some
critics have even pondered the “end of autobiography” (e.g. Finck
1999: 11). With critical hindsight, the classic paradigm of autobio-
graphy, with its tenets of coherence, circular closure, interiority, etc., is
exposed as a historically limited, gendered and socially exclusive phe-
 Autobiography 23

nomenon (and certainly one that erases any clear dividing line between
factual and fictional self-writings).
As its classic markers were rendered historically obsolete or ideo-
logically suspicious (Nussbaum 1989), the pivotal role of class
(Sloterdijk 1978), and especially gender, as intersectional identity
markers within specific historical contexts came to be highlighted,
opening innovative critical perspectives on strategies of subject for-
mation in ‘canonical’ texts as well as broadening the field of autobiog-
raphy studies. While ‘gender sensitive’ studies initially sought to recon-
struct a specific female canon, they addressed the issue of a distinct
female voice of/in autobiography as more “multidimensional, frag-
mented” (Jelinek ed. 1986: viii), or subsequently undertook to explore
autobiographical selves in terms of discursive self-positionings instead
(Nussbaum 1989; Finck 1999: esp. 291–293), tying in with discourse
analytical redefinitions of autobiography as a discursive regime of (self-
) discipline and regulation that evolved out of changes in communica-
tion media and technologies of memory during the 17th and 18th centu-
ries (Schneider 1986). Subsequently, issues of publication, canonization
and the historical nexus of gender and (autobiographical) genre became
subjects of investigation, bringing into view historical notions of gender
and the specific conditions and practices of communication within their
generic and pragmatic contexts (e.g. Hof & Rohr eds. 2008). The histo-
ry of autobiography has come to be more diverse and multi-facetted:
thus alternative ‘horizontal’ modes of self, where identity is based on
its contextual embedding by way of diarial modes, have come to the
fore. With respect to texts by 17th-century autobiographers, the notion
of “heterologous subjectivity”—self-writing via writing about another
or others—has been suggested (Kormann 2004: 5–6).
If gender studies exposed autobiography’s individualist self as a
phenomenon of male self-fashioning, postcolonial theory further chal-
lenged its universal validity. While autobiography was long considered
an exclusively Western genre, postcolonial approaches to autobio-
graphy/ life writing have significantly expanded the corpus of autobio-
graphical writings and provided a perspective which is critical of both
the eurocentrism of autobiography genre theory and the concepts of
selfhood in operation (e.g. Lionett 1991). In this context, too, the ques-
tion has arisen as to how autobiography is possible for those who have
no voice of their own, who cannot speak for themselves (see Spivak’s
‘subaltern’). Such ‘Writing ordinary lives’, usually aiming at collective
identities, poses specific problems: sociological, ethical and even aes-
thetic (see Pandian 2008).
24 Helga Schwalm

Following the spatial turn, the concept of ‘eco-autobiography’ also

carries potentially wider theoretical significance. By “mapping the self”
(Regard ed. 2003), eco-biography designates a specific mode of autobi-
ography that constructs a “relationship between the natural setting and
the self,” often aiming at “discover[ing] ‘a new self in nature’” (Perret-
en 2003), with Wordsworth or Thoreau ([1854] 1948) as frequently
cited paradigms. Phrased in less Romantic terms, it locates life courses
and self-representations in specific places. In a wider sense, eco- or
topographical autobiographies undertake to place the autobiographical
subject in terms of spatial or topographical figurations, bringing into
play space/topography as a pivotal moment of biographical identity and
thus potentially disturbing autobiography’s anchorage in time. In any
case, the prioritizing of space over time seems to question, if not to re-
verse, the dominance of temporality in autobiography and beyond since
1800.
Whatever the markers of difference and semantic foci explored, the
notion of autobiography has shifted from literary genre to a broad range
of cultural practices that draw on and incorporate a multitude of textual
modes and genres. By 2001, Smith and Watson (eds. 2001) were able to
list fifty-two “Genres of Life Narrative” by combining formal and
semantic features. Among them are narratives of migration, immigra-
tion or exile, narratives engaging with ethnic identity and community,
prison narratives, illness, trauma and coming-out narratives as much as
celebrity memoirs, graphic life writing and forms of Internet self-
presentation. These multiple forms and practices produce, or allow crit-
ics to freshly address, new ‘subject formations’ within specific histori-
cal and cultural localities. Finally, scholars have engaged with the role
of aesthetic practices that “turn ‘life itself’ into a work of art,” develop-
ing “zoegraphy as a radically post-anthropocentric approach to life nar-
rative” (van den Hengel 2012: 1), part of a larger attempt to explore
auto/biographical figures in relation to concepts of “posthumanism.”

4 Related Terms

Whereas autobiography, as a term almost synonymous with life writing,

signifies a broad range of ‘practices of writing the self’ including pre-
modern forms and epistolary or diarial modes, ‘classic’ autobiography
hinges upon the notion of the formation of individual identity by means
of narrative. With its historical, psychological and philosophical dimen-
sions, it differs from related forms such as memoirs and res gestae.
Memoirs locate a self in the world, suggesting a certain belonging to, or
 Autobiography 25

contemporaneity with, and being in tune with the world (Neumann

1970). However, all these forms imply a certain claim to non-
fictionality which, to a certain degree only, sets them off from autobio-
graphical fiction/the autobiographical novel, with highly blurred
boundaries and intense generic interaction (Müller 1976; Löschnigg
2006).
Biography is used today both as a term synonymous with “life writ-
ing” (hence the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
1978ff.) as well as denoting heterobiography, i.e. the narrative of the
life of another. (The term “life writing“ also includes heterobiography.)
While in narratological terms experimental forms of autobiography may
collapse the conventional 1st- vs 3rd-person boundary (§ 2), viewing
the self as other, heterobiography has generated its own distinct poetics
and theory, extending from an agenda of resemblance as “the impossi-
ble horizon of biography” (“In biography, it is resemblance that must
ground identity”; Lejeune [1987] 1988: 24) to specific considerations
of modes of representing the biographical subject, of biographical un-
derstanding, or knowledge, and the ethics of heterobiography (Eakin
ed. 2004; Phelan → Narrative Ethics).

5 Topics for Further Investigation

The intersections of hetero- and autobiography remain to be further ex-

plored. Significantly, ‘natural’ narratology’s theorizing of vicarious
narration and the evolution of FID (Fludernik 1996) makes the limits of
non-fictional heterodiegetic narration discernible: in its conventional
form and refraining from speculative empathy, it must ultimately fail to
render “experientiality” or resort to fiction, while autobiography’s ex-
periential dimension invites further investigation (Löschnigg 2010).
Additional study of the experimental interactions of life writing with no
clear dividing lines between auto- and hetero-biography might yield
results with interdisciplinary repercussions.
Finally, the field of self-representation and life writing in the new
media calls for more research from an interdisciplinary angle.
26 Helga Schwalm

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 Autobiography 29

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6.3 Further Reading

Jolly, Margaretta, ed. (2001). Encyclopaedia of Life Writing. London: Fitzroy Dear-
born.
Schwalm, Helga (2014). “Autobiography/Autofiction.” M. Wagner-Egelhaaf (ed.).
Handbook Autobiography/Autofiction. Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming.
Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina (2000). Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Metzler.
 Character
Fotis Jannidis

1 Definition

Character is a text- or media-based figure in a storyworld, usually hu-

man or human-like.

2 Explication

The term “character” is used to refer to participants in storyworlds cre-

ated by various media (Ryan → Narration in Various Media) in contrast
to “persons” as individuals in the real world. The status of characters is
a matter of long-standing debate: can characters be treated solely as an
effect created by recurrent elements in the discourse (Weinsheimer
1979), or are they to be seen as entities created by words but distin-
guishable from them and calling for knowledge about human beings
(3.1)? Answering the latter question involves determining what kinds of
knowledge are required, but also to what extent such knowledge is em-
ployed in understanding characters. Three forms of knowledge in par-
ticular are relevant for the narratological analysis of character: (a) the
basic type, which provides a very fundamental structure for those enti-
ties which are seen as sentient beings; (b) character models or types
such as the femme fatale or the hard-boiled detective; (c) encyclopedic
knowledge of human beings underlying inferences which contribute to
the process of characterization, i.e. a store of information ranging from
everyday knowledge to genre-specific competence. Most theoretical
approaches to character seek to circumscribe reliance on real-world
knowledge in some way and treat characters as entities in a storyworld
subject to specific rules (3.2). One important line of thought in the anti-
realistic treatment of character is the functional view. In this perspec-
tive, first established by Aristotle, characters are subordinate to or de-
termined by the narrative action; in the 20th century, there have been
attempts to describe characters in terms of a deep structure based on
their roles in the plot common to all narratives (3.3).
 Character 31

At the discourse level, the presentation of characters shares many

features with the presentation of other kinds of fictional entities. How-
ever, because of the importance of character in telling stories, these fea-
tures have been discussed mainly in terms of character presentation.
Among these features are the naming of characters, studied from the
perspective of the function and meaning of names, and other ways of
referring to characters, which contribute to the overall structural coher-
ence of the text (3.4). Equally if not more important, however, is the
process of ascribing properties to names which results in agents having
these properties in the storyworld, a process known as characterization.
Characterization may be direct, as when a trait is ascribed explicitly to a
character, or indirect, when it is the result of inferences drawn from the
text based partly on world knowledge and especially the different forms
of character knowledge mentioned above. The term “characterization”
can be used to refer to the ascription of a property to a character, but
also for the overall process and result of attributing traits to a given
character. The process of characterization can have different forms: e.g.
a character is attributed specific traits at the beginning of a narrative,
but other traits are subsequently added that may not conform to the
original characterization, such subverting the first conception of this
character (3.5).
Viewing characters as entities of a storyworld does not imply that
they are self-contained. On the contrary, the storyworld is constructed
during the process of narrative communication, and characters thus
form a part of the signifying structures which motivate and determine
the narrative communication. Characters also play a role in thematic,
symbolic or other constellations of the text and of the storyworld (3.6).
For most readers, characters are one of the most important aspects of
a narrative. How readers relate to a character is a matter of empirical
analysis, but it is important to bear in mind that the way the text pre-
sents a character is highly influential on the relation between character
and reader. Three factors in particular are relevant in this regard: (a) the
transfer of perspective; (b) the reader’s affective predisposition toward
the character―itself influenced by: (i) the character’s emotions, wheth-
er explicitly described or implicitly conveyed; (ii) the reader’s reaction
to her mental simulation of the character’s position; (iii) the expression
of emotions in the presentation―and (c) evaluation of characters in the
text (3.7).
There has always been a need to categorize characters in order to fa-
cilitate description and analysis. However, most proposals seem to be
either too complex or theoretically unsatisfying, so that Forster’s classi-
fication into flat vs. round characters continues to be widely used (3.8).
32 Fotis Jannidis

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Until recently, there was nothing like a coherent field of research for
the concept of character, but only a loose set of notions related to it
touching on such issues as the ontological status of characters, the kind
of knowledge necessary to understand characters, the relation between
character and action, the naming of characters, characterization as pro-
cess and result, the relation of the reader to a character centering around
the notions of identification and empathy, etc. (Keen → Narrative Em-
pathy). The situation has changed over the past ten or fifteen years
thanks to a series of monographs on character by Culpeper (2001), Eder
(2008), Jannidis (2004), Koch (1992), Palmer (2004), and Schneider
(2001), all of which are indebted to the ground- breaking work done by
Margolin in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of these studies draw on the
cognitive sciences and their models of text processing and perception of
persons (Herman → Cognitive Narratology). However, even though
there is now a consensus on some aspects of character in narrative,
many other aspects continue to be treated disparately.

3.1 People or Words

Characters have long been regarded as fictive people. To understand

characters, readers tend to resort to their knowledge about real people.
In this framework, an anthropological, biological or psychological theo-
ry of persons can also be used in character analysis, as in Freud’s anal-
ysis of Hamlet where he claims “I have here translated into conscious-
ness what had to remain unconscious in the mind of the hero” (Freud
[1900] 1950: 164).
Another school of thought pictured character as mere words or a
paradigm of traits described by words. A well-known example of this
approach is Barthes’s S/Z ([1970] 1974) in which one of the codes,
“voices,” substitutes for person, understood as the web of semes at-
tached to a proper name. In this view, a character is not to be taken for
anything like a person, yet on closer examination these semes corre-
spond to traditional character traits. Although he differs from Barthes in
many regards, Lotman ([1970] 1977), in a similar vein, describes char-
acter as a sum of all binary oppositions to the other characters in a text
which, together, constitute a paradigm. A character thus forms part of a
constellation of characters who either share a set of common traits (par-
allels) or represent opposing traits (contrasts).
This was not the first attack against a mimetic understanding of
character during the last century, a comparable approach to character
 Character 33

having already been advocated by the New Criticism. Wellek and War-
ren (1949) claimed that a character consists only of the words by which
it is described or into whose mouth they are put by the author. Knights
([1933] 1973) had earlier ridiculed the tendency in British criticism to
treat character presentations like the representations of people with the
question “How many Children had Lady Macbeth?” Despite this criti-
cism, the reduction of characters to words was not convincing, for it
posed many practical problems in literary criticism and also seemed to
some critics unsatisfactory for theoretical reasons. Hochman (1985), for
example, defended the idea of character as human-like against structur-
alist and post-structuralist conceptions with moral and aesthetic argu-
ments.
Given this situation, the series of essays by Margolin, by combining
elements of structuralism, reception theory and the theory of fictional
worlds, proved to be a breakthrough. For Margolin (1983), characters
are first and foremost elements of the constructed narrative world:
“character,” he claims, “is a general semiotic element, independent of
any particular verbal expression and ontologically different from it” (7).
He further points out that characters can have various modes of exist-
ence in storyworlds: they can be factual, counterfactual, hypothetical,
conditional, or purely subjective (1995: 375). Also taken up are ques-
tions such as how characters come into existence and what constitutes
their identity (Bamberg → Identity and Narration), especially in story-
worlds as a transtextual concept.
Philosophers, especially those with roots in analytical philosophy,
have discussed the special ontological status of character under the la-
bel of incompleteness of characters. Unlike persons who exist in the
real world and are complete, we can speak meaningfully only about
those aspects of characters which have been described in the text or
which are implied by it. Consequently, descriptions of characters have
gaps, and often the missing information cannot be inferred from the
given information. In contrast to the description of real persons in
which a gap may appear even though it is assumed that the person is
complete, characters have gaps if the description does not supply the
necessary information (Eaton 1976; Crittenden 1982; Lamarque 2003).
Even though there is currently a broad consensus that character can
best be described as an entity forming part of the storyworld, the onto-
logical status of this world and its entities remains unclear. Narratologi-
cal theory presently offers three approaches to addressing this problem:
(a) drawing on the theory of possible worlds, the storyworld is seen as
an independent realm created by the text (Margolin 1990); (b) from the
perspective of cognitive theories of the reading process, character is
34 Fotis Jannidis

seen as a mental model created by an empirical reader (Schneider

2001); (c) from the perspective of the neo-hermeneutical theory of lit-
erary communication, the text is an intentional object and character is a
mental model created by an hypothetical historical model reader. This
approach incorporates a number of insights into text processing, but
focuses on the text (Jannidis 2004). The main differences between these
approaches lie in how the presentation of character is described and in
the use of principles borrowed from the cognitive sciences.

3.2 Character Knowledge

Even some of those who have claimed that character is a paradigm of

traits assume that there exists a cultural code making it possible to per-
ceive these traits as a meaningful whole (Lotman [1970] 1977), or Ge-
stalt. This code is also resorted to in the perception of people in every-
day life such that there is an interaction between the formation of
(narrative) characters and the perception of people not only because the
perception of people determines how plausible a character is, but also
because the way characters are presented in narratives can may change
the way people are perceived. At the same time, this cultural code con-
tains information that is not applied to people but only to characters,
especially stock characters and genre-based character types. Even so,
the notion of a cultural code is probably too vague, since it encom-
passes different aspects or levels which should be distinguished: the
basis type; character models; character schemas.
The concept of basis type adopts recent insights from developmental
psychology. From early on, humans distinguish between objects and
sentient beings. They apply to the perception of the latter a theory of
mind which ascribes to them mental states such as intentions, wishes,
and beliefs. Once an entity in the storyworld is identified as a character,
this framework is applied to that entity, the basis type thus providing
the basic outline of a character: there is an invisible “inside” which is
the source of all intentions, wishes, etc., and a visible “outside” which
can be perceived. All aspects of a basis type can be negated for a spe-
cific character, but either this is done explicitly or it results from genre
conventions (Jannidis 2004: 185–195; Zunshine 2006: 22–27). On an-
other, more concrete level, knowledge about time- and culture-specific
types contributes to the perception of characters. Some are “stock char-
acters” such as the rich miser, the femme fatale, or the mad scientist,
while others draw upon general habitus knowledge in a society like the
formal and laborious accountant, the old-maid teacher or the 19th-
century laborer (Frevert & Haupt ed. 2004). Such figures serve as char-
 Character 35

acter models. Character models are often associated with standardized

“character constellations” such as cuckold, wife, and lover. In popular
culture, characterization frequently depends on character models, and
the creative variation of these models is highly appreciated, while in
high culture there is a strong tendency to avoid character models (3.8;
Lotman [1970] 1977: 239–260).
It is important to note that basis type and character models do not
exhaust the relevant knowledge forms for characters. In many instances
of character description, encyclopedic knowledge—from both the real
world and fictional worlds—comes into play, combining two or more
items of character- (or person-)related information (e.g. “too much al-
cohol makes people drunk” or “vampires can be killed by a wooden
stake driven into their heart”). In many cases, texts offer the reader only
a fragment of information, prompting the reader to fill in the missing
parts based on the appropriate knowledge. In text analysis, this kind of
character encyclopedia is relevant more often than the other two, and
differences in the interpretation of characters are frequently based on
the fact that different entries from the character encyclopedia are resort-
ed to.

3.3 Character and Action

One of the oldest theoretical statements on character reflects on the re-

lation of character and action: “for tragedy is not a representation of
men but of a piece of action […]. Moreover, you could not have a trag-
edy without action, but you can have one without character-study” (Ar-
istotle [1927] 1932: 1450a). What Aristotle said in relation to tragedy
became the origin of a school of thought which claims that in order to
understand a character in a fictional text, one need only to analyze its
role in the action. This approach was put on a new foundation by Propp
([1928] 1984) in a ground-breaking corpus study of the Russian
folktale. In analyzing a hundred Russian fairy tales, he constructed a
sequence of 31 functions which he attributed to seven areas of action or
types of character: opponent; donor; helper; princess and her father;
dispatcher; hero; false hero. Greimas ([1966] 1983) generalized this
approach with his actant model in which all narrative characters are
regarded as expressions of an underlying narrative grammar composed
of six actants ordered into pairs: the hero (also sujet) and his search for
an object; the sender and the receiver; the hero’s helper and the oppo-
nent. Each actant is not necessarily realized in one single character,
since one character may perform more than one role, and one role may
be distributed among several characters. Schank’s concept of story
36 Fotis Jannidis

skeletons also starts from the idea that stories have an underlying struc-
ture, but in his model there are many such structures and therefore
many different roles for actors, e.g. the story of a divorce using the sto-
ry skeleton “betrayal” with the two actors: the betrayer and the betrayed
(Schank 1995: chap. 6).
Campbell ([1949] 1990) described in an influential work what he
called, using a term coined by James Joyce, the “monomyth,” which is
an abstraction of numerous mythological and religious stories marking
the stages of the hero’s way: separation/departure; the trials and victo-
ries of initiation; return and reintegration into society (Campbell [1949]
1990: 36). According to Campbell, who bases his argument on Freud’s
and especially on Jung’s form of psychoanalysis, the monomyth is uni-
versal and can be found in stories, myths, and legends all over the
world. In contrast to these generalized model-oriented approaches, tra-
ditional approaches tend to employ a genre- and period-specific vocab-
ulary for action roles such as confidant and intriguer in traditional dra-
ma, or villain, sidekick, and henchman in the popular media of the 20th
century.
Most of the common labels for character in use refer to the role a
character has in action. “Protagonist,” in use since Greek antiquity, re-
fers to the main character of a narrative or a play, and “antagonist” to
its main opponent. In contrast to these neutral labels, the term “hero”
refers to a positive figure, usually in some kind of representative story.
In modern high-culture narratives, there is more often an anti-hero or
no single protagonist at all, but a constellation of characters (Tröhler
2007).

3.4 Referring to Characters

Referring to characters in texts occurs with the use of proper names,

definite descriptions and personal pronouns (Margolin 1995: 374). In
addition to these direct references, indirect evocations can be found: the
untagged rendering of direct speech, the description of actions (e.g. “a
hand grabbed”) or use of the passive voice (“the window was opened”).
The role of names in interpreting characters has been treated repeatedly,
resulting in different ways of classifying name usage (e.g. Lamping
1983; Birus 1987).
Narratives can be viewed as a succession of scenes or situative
frames, only one of which is active at any given moment. An active
situative frame may contain numerous characters, but only some of
them will be focused on by being explicitly referred to in the corre-
sponding stretch of text. The first active frame in which a character oc-
 Character 37

curs and is explicitly referred to constitutes its “introduction.” After

being introduced, a character may drop out of sight, not be referred to
for several succeeding active frames, and then reappear. In general,
whenever a character is encountered in an active frame, it is to be de-
termined whether this is its first occurrence or whether it has already
been introduced in an earlier active frame and is reappearing at a par-
ticular point. Determining that a character in the current active scene
has already appeared in an earlier one is termed “identification.” A dis-
tinction is to be made between normal, false, impeded, and deferred
identifications. A “false identification” occurs when a previously men-
tioned character is identified but it then becomes clear later that some
other character was in fact being referred to. An “impeded identifica-
tion” does not refer unequivocally to any specific character, and a clear
reference to the character or characters is never given in the text, while
in the case of “deferred identification” the reader is ultimately able to
establish the identity of an equivocally presented character. Deferred
identification can further be broken down into an overt form in which
the reader knows that he is kept in the dark and a covert form (Jannidis
2004: chap. 4 & 6, based on Emmott 1997).

3.5 Characterization

Characterization can be described as ascribing information to an agent

in the text so as to provide a character in the storyworld with a certain
property or properties, a process often referred to as ascribing a proper-
ty to a character. In the 19th century, critics spoke of the difference be-
tween direct and indirect characterization and of the preference of con-
temporary writers and readers for the latter (Scherer [1888] 1977: 156–
157). Until recently, characterization was understood as the text ascrib-
ing psychological or social traits to a character (e.g. Chatman 1978),
but in fact texts ascribe all manner of properties to characters, including
physiological and locative (space-time location) properties. Yet some
textually explicit ascriptions of properties to a character may turn out to
be invalid, as when this information is attributable to an unreliable nar-
rator or to a fellow-character (Margolin → Narrator). Moreover, a tex-
tual ascription may turn out to be hypothetical or purely subjective.
There are also texts and styles of writing (e.g. the psychological novel)
which tend to avoid any explicit statements of characterization. The
crucial issue in the process of characterization is thus what information,
especially of a psychological nature, a reader is able to associate with
any character as a member of the storyworld and where this information
comes from. There are at least three sources of such information: (a)
38 Fotis Jannidis

textually explicit ascription of properties to a character; (b) inferences

that can be drawn from textual cues (e.g. “she smiled nervously”); (c)
inferences based on information which is not associated with the char-
acter by the text itself but through reference to historically and cultural-
ly variable real-world conventions (e.g. the appearance of a room re-
veals something about the person living there or the weather expresses
the feelings of the protagonist). A systematic description of such infer-
ences employed in characterization is given by Margolin (1983). Infer-
ences can be understood in terms of abductions (Keller 1998: chap. 9,
based on Peirce), so that the fundamental role of character models and
of the character encyclopedia becomes obvious: the information de-
rived from them is not included in the text, but is presupposed to a
greater or lesser degree by it.
Another key problem concerns the limits and underlying rules of
such inferences when they are applied to fictional beings. Ryan (1980),
noting that readers tend to assume that a storyworld resembles the real
world unless explicitly stated otherwise, adopts the philosopher David
Lewis’s “principle of minimal departure.” In a thorough criticism of
this and similar hypotheses, Walton points out that this would make an
infinite number of inferences possible, and he comes to the conclusion:
“There is no particular reason why anyone’s beliefs about the real
world should come into play. As far as implications are concerned,
simple conventions to the effect that whenever such and such is fiction-
al, so and so is as well, serve nicely […]” (Walton 1990: 166). This ap-
proach, in turn, increases the number of conventions without necessity
and without providing any convincing argument as to how readers go
about accessing these conventions, aside from drawing on their real-
world knowledge, despite the fact that many conventions apply only to
fictional worlds. Even so, this does not invalidate Walton’s criticism,
which can probably be refuted only by including another element: the
fact that characters are part of storyworlds which are not self-contained,
but communicated. Readers’ assumptions about what is relevant in the
process of communication determine the scope and validity of infer-
ences (Sperber & Wilson [1986] 1995).
The presentation of characters is a dynamic process, just as is the
construction of characters in the reader’s mind. A powerful model for
describing the psychological or cognitive dynamics coming into play
here, based on the “top-down” and “bottom-up” processes observed
during empirical studies on reading comprehension, has been proposed
by Schneider (2001) building on concepts developed by Gerrig & All-
britton (1990). A top-down process occurs in the application of a cate-
gory to a character, integrating the information given by the text into
 Character 39

this category, while a bottom-up process results from the text infor-
mation integrating a character into a type or building up an individual-
ized representation. At the beginning of a character presentation, textual
cues may trigger various types of categorization: social types (“the
teacher,” “the widow”); literary types (the hero in a Bildungsroman);
text-specific types (characters that do not change throughout the story).
In contrast to the top-down processing that takes place in these forms of
categorization is bottom-up processing. This occurs when the reader is
unable to integrate the given information into an existing category, re-
sulting in personalization of the character (Prince → Reader). Personal-
ized characters can also be members of a category, but this is not the
focus of their description. Reading a text involves building up either
categorized or personalized characters, but information subsequently
encountered in the text may change their status and possibly decatego-
rize or depersonalize those characters.

3.6 Character and Meaning

Characters can be seen as entities in a storyworld. However, this should

not be understood to mean that characters are self-contained. On the
contrary: they are at the same time devices in the communication of
meaning and serve purposes other than the communication of the facts
of the storyworld as well. This matter was discussed above in the rela-
tion between character and action. In many forms of narrative, howev-
er, action is not the organizing principle, but a theme or an idea, and the
characters in these texts are determined by that theme or idea. An ex-
treme example is personification, i.e. the representation of an abstract
principle such as freedom or justice as a character, as found in allegori-
cal literature. Another example is certain dialogue novels, where the
characters’ role is to propound philosophical ideas. On the other hand,
even the most life-like characters in a realistic novel can often also be
described in light of their place in a thematic progression. Thus, Phelan
(1987) has proposed to describe character as participation in a mimetic
sphere (due to the character’s traits), a thematic sphere (as a representa-
tive of an idea or of a class of people), and a synthetic sphere (the mate-
rial out of which the character is made). In his heuristic of film charac-
ters, Eder (2007, 2008) adopts a similar breakdown, but adds a fourth
dimension relating to communication between the film and the audi-
ence: (a) the character as an artifact (how is it made?); (b) the character
as a fictional being (what features describe the character?); (c) the char-
acter as a symbol (what meaning is communicated through the charac-
ter?); and (d) the character as a symptom (why is the character as it is
40 Fotis Jannidis

and what is the effect?). The difference between characters as part of

storyworlds and the meaning of character cannot be aligned with the
difference between (narratological) description and interpretation be-
cause elements of a character or the description of a character are often
motivated by their role in thematic, symbolic, aesthetic and other net-
works.

3.7 Relation of the Reader to the Character

Characters may induce strong feelings in readers, a fact often discussed

under the label “identification.” Identification is a psychological pro-
cess and as such lies outside of the scope of narrative analysis. On the
other hand, it is widely recognized that to some extent identification
results from and is controlled by various textual cues and devices. A
first problem is the concept of identification itself, since it involves a
variety of aspects: sympathy with a character who is similar to the read-
er; empathy for a character who is in a particular situation; attraction to
a character who is a role model for the reader. To date, there is no
means of integrating all of these factors into a satisfactory theory of
identification. There are older, mostly outdated models of identifica-
tion, based on Freud or Lacan, and newer models, some of which are
based on empirical studies (e.g. Oatley & Gholamain 1997), while oth-
ers seek to integrate empirical findings and media analysis (e.g. Eder
2008, part VII). Another problem is historical variation: much literature
before 1800 aims more at creating an attitude of admiration for the pro-
tagonist than it does at immersing the reader in the situation of the
character (Jauss 1974; Schön 1999).
Provisionally, the problem of identification with the character in
narrative can be broken down into the following three aspects: (a)
“transfer of perspective” works on different levels: perception (the
reader “experiences” the sensory input of a character); intention (the
reader is made aware of a character’s goals); beliefs (the reader is intro-
duced into the character’s worldview). In narrative texts, such transfer
occurs in part through the devices of focalization (Niederhoff → Focal-
ization) and speech representation (McHale → Speech Representation);
(b) the “affective relation” to the character is a complex phenomenon
resulting from various factors. First is the information gleaned from the
text bearing on the character’s emotions projected against the backdrop
of general, historical, and cultural schemas applicable to particular situ-
ations and the emotions “appropriate” for these situations. Second is
mental simulation of the depicted events, which creates an empathetic
reaction involving the reader’s disposition to respond to the emotion
 Character 41

experienced by the character (a display of sadness creates pity), but

may also activate similar emotions (a display of sadness generates a
similar feeling in the reader). To what extent such simulations actually
occur has been discussed extensively: proponents see support for their
position in the discovery of mirror neurons (Lauer 2007), while oppo-
nents point out that this aspect plays a limited role if any at all (e.g.
Mellmann [2006], who models the reader’s response on the basis of
evolutionary psychology). Such responsive dispositions may be social-
ly induced, but they may also exist in other forms, such as sadistic or
voyeuristic arousal. In any case, reaction to simulated events is not con-
strained to characters, but includes events of all types. These reactions
to events not directly related to characters can be used to “externalize”
the character’s affects (e.g. a description of a storm which reflects the
agitated state of mind of the protagonist watching the storm). The third
factor in the affective relation is the expressive use of language or the
presentation of emotions in texts using phonetic, rhythmic, metrical,
syntactical, lexical, figurative, rhetorical, and narrative devices includ-
ing free indirect discourse and similar strategies (Winko 2003); (c)
“evaluation of characters” is based on historically and culturally varia-
ble measures of value. Evaluation can be explicit thanks to the use of
evaluative vocabulary, or implicit due to behavior that implies evalua-
tion according common social standards. This includes implicit com-
parison between the reader or spectator and the protagonist, already
described by Aristotle. An evaluative stance toward a character creates
such emotional responses as admiration, sympathy or repulsion, at the
same time coloring the reader’s affective relation to the character.

3.8 Categories of Character

The most widely known proposal on how to categorize character is still

Forster’s opposition between flat and round characters: “Flat characters
[...] are constructed round a single idea or quality” ([1927] 1985: 67)
while round characters are “more highly organized” (75) and “are capa-
ble of surprising in a convincing way” (78). Critics have long accepted
this categorization as plausible, relating it to the way real people are
perceived. However, the criteria Forster based it on are vague, especial-
ly the notion of development to explain the impression of a round char-
acter (e.g. Scholes et al. [1966] 2006: chap. 5). A significant problem in
this discussion results from the fact that all we know about a specific
character is based on what can be learned from a text or another medi-
um. Therefore, it is often not easy to distinguish between the character
and the way it is presented, as can be seen, for example, with Rimmon-
42 Fotis Jannidis

Kenan, who proposes three dimensions to categorize characters: “com-

plexity, development, penetration into the ‘inner life’” ([1983] 2002:
41), thus mixing aspects of the character as an entity of the storyworld
with those of its presentation. Similarly, Hochman (1985) proposes
eight dimensions as a basis of categorization without distinguishing
between these two aspects. To name but three of them: stylization—
naturalism; complexity—simplicity; dynamism—stati-cism. One of the
earliest attempts to distinguish clearly between these aspects in catego-
rizing characters comes from Fishelov (1990), who combines the oppo-
sition between presentation and storyworld with the distinction between
flat and round characters. Another problematic aspect of this approach
is the fact that it is almost always combined with an evaluative stance
valorizing the complex and devaluating the simple regardless of the
requirements of different genres (as Forster already deplored), or depre-
cating those genres.
Stereotypes are often regarded as the prototypical flat character.
With Dyer (1993), however, a distinction can be drawn between the
social type and the stereotype. Social types are known because they
belong to a society with which the reader is familiar, while stereotypes
are ready-made images of the unknown. In fiction they differ, accord-
ing to Dyer, to the extent that social types can appear in almost any
kind of plot, while stereotypes carry with them an implicit narrative.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

All of the aspects outlined above deserve further investigation, but three
problems are of particular interest in the current state of research. (a)
Recent decades have seen a growing interest in the social construction
of identities—national identities, gender identities, etc. Analysis of
character presentation and formation plays an important part in any in-
terpretation interested in identity construction in literature, but up to
now those engaged in identity analysis have neglected narratological
research on character; at the same time, narrative analysis has mostly
ignored the historical case studies carried out on identity construction
by specialists of cultural studies. (b) Evaluation in literary texts has
been and is still a neglected field of research. There are many ways a
text can influence or predetermine the evaluative stance of the reader,
and much systematic and historical work in this area remains to be
done. (c) The question of how a reader relates to a character can only be
answered by an interdisciplinary research bringing together textual
analysis and the cognitive sciences.
 Character 43

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aristotle ([1927] 1932). Aristotle in 23 Volumes. Vol. 23: The Poetics. Tr. W. H. Fyfe.
London: Heinemann.
Barthes, Roland ([1970] 1974). S/Z. New York: Hill & Wang.
Birus, Hendrik (1987). “Vorschlag zu einer Typologie literarischer Namen.” LiLi:
Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 17, No. 67, 38–51.
Campbell, Joseph ([1949] 1990). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Harper
& Row.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). “Existents.” S. Chatman. Story and Discourse: Narrative
Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 96–145.
Crittenden, Charles (1982). “Fictional Characters and Logical Completeness.” Poetics
11, 331–344.
Culpeper, Jonathan (2001). Language and Characterisation. People in Plays and other
Texts. Harlow: Longman.
Dyer, Richard (1993). “The Role of Stereotypes.” R. Dyer. The Matter of Images: Es-
says on Representations. New York: Routledge, 11–18.
Eaton, Marcia M. (1976). “On Being a Character.” The British Journal of Aesthetics
16, 24–31.
Eder, Jens (2007). “Filmfiguren: Rezeption und Analyse.” T. Schick & T. Ebbrecht
(eds.). Emotion―Empathie―Figur: Spiel-Formen der Filmwahrnehmung. Ber-
lin: Vistas, 131–150.
– (2008). Die Figur im Film. Grundlage der Figurenanalyse. Marburg: Schüren.
Emmott, Catherine (1997). Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Ox-
ford: Clarendon P.
Fishelov, David (1990). “Types of Character, Characteristics of Types.” Style 24, 422–
439.
Forster, Edward M. ([1927] 1985). Aspects of the Novel. San Diego: Harcourt.
Freud, Sigmund ([1900] 1950). The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: The Modern
Library.
Frevert, Ute & Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, ed. (2004). Der Mensch des 19. Jahrhunderts.
Essen: Magnus.
Gerrig, Richard J. & David W. Allbritton (1990). “The Construction of Literary Char-
acter: A View from Cognitive Psychology.” Style 24, 380–391.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien ([1966] 1983). Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method.
Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Hochman, Baruch (1985). Character in Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Jannidis, Fotis (2004). Figur und Person. Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratologie.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Jauss, Hans Robert (1974). “Levels of Identification of Hero and Audience.” New Lit-
erary History 5, 283–317.
Keller, Rudi (1998). A Theory of Linguistic Signs. Oxford: Oxford UP.
44 Fotis Jannidis

Knights, Lionel C. ([1933] 1973). How many Children had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in
the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism. New York: Haskell House.
Koch, Thomas (1992). Literarische Menschendarstellung: Studien zu ihrer Theorie und
Praxis. Tübingen: Stauffenberg.
Lamarque, Peter (2003). “How to Create a Fictional Character.” B. Gaut & P. Linving-
ston (eds.). The Creation of Art. New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 33–51.
Lamping, Dieter (1983). Der Name in der Erzählung. Zur Poetik des Personennamens.
Bonn: Bouvier.
Lauer, Gerhard (2007). “Spiegelneuronen: Über den Grund des Wohlgefallens an der
Nachahmung.” K. Eibl et al. (eds.). Im Rücken der Kulturen. Paderborn: Mentis,
137–163.
Lotman, Jurij M. ([1970] 1977). “The Composition of the Verbal Work of Art.” Ju.
Lotman. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 239–50.
Margolin, Uri (1983). “Characterisation in Narrative: Some Theoretical Prolegomena.”
Neophilologus 67, 1–14.
– (1990). “Individuals in Narrative Worlds: An Ontological Perspective.” Poetics
Today 11, 843–871.
– (1995). “Characters in Literary Narrative: Representation and Signification.”
Semiotica 106, 373–392.
Mellmann, Katja (2006). Emotionalisierung. Von der Nebenstundenpoesie zum Buch
als Freund: Eine emotionspsychologische Analyse der Literatur der Aufklärungs-
epoche. Paderborn: Mentis.
Oatley, Keith & Mitra Gholamain (1997). “Emotions and Identification: Connections
between Readers and Fiction.” M. Hjort & S. Laver (eds.). Emotion and the Arts.
New York: Oxford UP, 263–281.
Palmer, Alan (2004). Fictional Minds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Phelan, James (1987). “Character, Progression, and the Mimetic-Didactic Distinction.”
Modern Philology 84, 282–299.
Propp, Vladimir ([1928] 1984). Theory and History of Folklore. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Routledge.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1980). “Fiction, Non-Factuals, and Minimal Departure.” Poetics 8,
403–422.
Schank, Roger C. (1995). Tell me a Story. Narrative and Intelligence. Evanston:
Northwestern UP.
Scherer, Wilhelm ([1888] 1977). Poetik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, dtv.
Schneider, Ralf (2001). “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dy-
namics of Mental-Model Construction.” Style 35, 607–639.
Schön, Erich (1999). “Geschichte des Lesens.” B. Franzmann et al. (eds.). Handbuch
Lesen. München: Saur, 1–85.
Scholes, Robert et al. ([1966] 2006). The Nature of Narrative. Revised and Expanded
Edition. New York: Oxford UP.
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson ([1986] 1995). Relevance: Communication and Cogni-
tion. Oxford: Blackwell.
 Character 45

Tröhler, Margrit (2007). Offene Welten ohne Helden. Plurale Figurenkonstellationen

im Film. Marburg: Schüren.
Walton, Kendall (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of Representa-
tional Arts. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Weinsheimer, Joel (1979). “Theory of Character: Emma.” Poetics Today 1, 185–211.
Wellek, René & Austin Warren (1949). Theory of Literature. London: J. Cape.
Winko, Simone (2003). Kodierte Gefühle: Zu einer Poetik der Emotionen in lyrischen
und poetologischen Texten um 1900. Berlin: Schmidt.
Zunshine, Lisa (2006). Why We Read Fiction. Theory of Mind and the Novel. Colum-
bus: Ohio State UP.

5.2 Further Reading

Jouve, Vincent (1992). L’effet-personnage dans le roman. Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France.
Knapp, John V., ed. (1990). “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literary Character.” Spe-
cial Issue of Style 24.3.
Margolin, Uri (1992). “Fictional Individuals and their Counterparts.” J. Andrew (ed.).
Poetics of the Text: Essays to celebrate 20 Years of the Neo-Formalist Circle.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 43–56.
– (2007). “Character.” D. Hermann (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Narrative.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 66–79.
 Cognitive Narratology
David Herman

1 Definition

Approaches to narrative study that fall under the heading of cognitive

narratology share a focus on the mental states, capacities, and disposi-
tions that provide grounds for—or, conversely, are grounded in—
narrative experiences. This definition highlights two broad questions as
centrally relevant for research on the nexus of narrative and mind: (1)
How do stories across media interlock with interpreters’ mental states
and processes, thus giving rise to narrative experiences?; (2) How (to
what extent, in what specific ways) does narrative scaffold efforts to
make sense of experience itself? The first question bears on stories
viewed as a target of interpretation; it concerns ways in which inter-
preters use various kinds of semiotic affordances to engage with narra-
tive worlds (or “storyworlds”). The second question concerns how nar-
rative constitutes a resource for interpretation, providing a basis for
understanding and characterizing the intentions, goals, emotions, and
conduct of self and other. Thus, research on the mind-narrative nexus
encompasses not only how stories can be used to build worlds but also
how such acts of narrative worldmaking are themselves mind-enabling
and mind-extending.

2 Explication

Still an emergent trend within the broader domain of narratology, re-

search on the mind-narrative nexus encompasses multiple methods of
analysis and diverse corpora. Relevant corpora include fictional and
nonfictional print narratives; computer-mediated narratives such as in-
teractive fictions, e-mail novels, and blogs; comics and graphic novels;
cinematic narratives; storytelling in face-to-face interaction; and other
instantiations of the narrative text type. By the same token, theorists
working in this area have adapted descriptive and explanatory tools
from a variety of fields—in part because of the cross-disciplinary na-
ture of research on the mind-brain itself. Source disciplines include, in
addition to narratology, linguistics, semiotics, computer science, phi-
losophy, psychology, and other domains. Making matters still more
complicated, narrative scholars working on issues that fall within this
 Cognitive Narratology 47

area do not necessarily identify their work as cognitive-narratological,

and might even resist being aligned with this rubric.
It should therefore not be surprising that, given the range of artifacts
and media falling under its purview, the many disciplines it involves,
and the multiplicity of projects relevant for if not directly associated
with it, research at the intersection of narrative theory and the sciences
of mind at present constitutes more a set of loosely confederated heuris-
tic schemes than a global framework for inquiry. Nonetheless, a number
of key concerns cut across the various approaches to the mind-narrative
nexus; these concerns can be linked to the two broad lines of inquiry
mentioned above, i.e. (1) research on narrative as a target of interpreta-
tion and (2) scholarship on stories as a resource for sense making. On
the one hand, what mental states and processes support narrative under-
standing, allowing readers, viewers, or listeners to navigate storyworlds
to the extent required for their purposes in engaging with a given narra-
tive (Herman 2013a: chaps. 1, 3)? How do they use medium-specific
cues to build on the basis of the discourse an interpretation of what
happened when, or in what order; a broader temporal and spatial envi-
ronment for those events, as well as an inventory of the characters in-
volved; and a working model of what it was like for these characters to
experience the more or less disruptive or non-canonical events that con-
stitute a core feature of narrative representations (Herman 2009: chap.
5)? On the other hand, insofar as narrative constitutes a way of structur-
ing and understanding situations and events, still other questions sug-
gest themselves for researchers working in this area. To what domains
are stories especially suited as instruments of mind (Herman 2013a:
chaps. 2, 6)? Is it the case that, unlike other such instruments (stress
equations, deductive arguments, graphs and scatterplots, etc.), narrative
is tailor-made for gauging the felt quality of lived experiences (Fluder-
nik 1996; Herman 2009: chap. 6; 2013a: chaps. 2, 7)?
Arguably, questions such as these could not have been formulated,
let alone addressed, within classical frameworks for narrative study (but
cf. Barthes [1966] 1977 and Culler 1975 for early anticipations). The
mind-narrative nexus can thus be thought of as a problem space that
opened up when earlier, structuralist models were brought into dialogue
with disciplines falling under the umbrella field of the cognitive scienc-
es.
48 David Herman

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 A Partial Genealogy of the Term “Cognitive Narratology”

The field of inquiry that has come to be called cognitive narratology

can be characterized as a subdomain within “postclassical” narratology
(Herman 1999; Alber & Fludernik 2010). At issue are frameworks for
narrative study that incorporate the ideas of classical, structuralist nar-
ratologists but supplement their work with concepts and methods that
were unavailable to story analysts such as Barthes, Genette, Greimas,
and Todorov during the heyday of the structuralist revolution. In the
case of scholarship exploring the nexus of narrative and mind, analysts
have worked to enrich the original stock of structuralist concepts with
research on human intelligence either ignored by or inaccessible to the
classical narratologists; they have thus built new foundations for the
study of basic and general principles of mind vis-à-vis various dimen-
sions of narrative structure, as well as the various uses to which stories
can be put.
That said, the term “cognitive narratology” itself carries connota-
tions that it might be better to avoid by using other descriptors for this
area of inquiry. In particular, it is important to avoid any conflation of
research on the mind-narrative nexus with what some scholars have
characterized as “cognitivism,” or the view that the mind can be re-
duced to disembodied mental representations that are disattached from
particular environments for acting and interacting (Noë 2004, 2009;
Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991; Thompson 2007). As argued in
Herman et al. (2012) and Herman (2013a), a focus on the way the mind
works with and through stories need not entail a cognitivist separation
between mental representations and the social and material environ-
ments that help shape—indeed, partly constitute—the mind itself. In-
stead, research on storytelling and the mind can investigate how a cul-
ture’s narrative practices are geared on to humans’ always-situated
mental states, capacities, and proclivities.
However it is conceptualized and defined, the term cognitive narra-
tology has been in use for only about fifteen years. As Eder (2003: 283
n.10) notes, the term appears to have been first used by Jahn (1997).
Yet the questions and concerns encompassed by the term can be traced
back to earlier research. In the domain of literary studies, and in parallel
with a broader turn toward issues of reception and reader response (Iser
[1972] 1974; Jauß [1977] 1982; Tompkins ed. 1980), studies by Stern-
berg (1978) and Perry (1979) highlighted processing strategies (e.g. the
“primacy” and “recency” effects) that arise from the situation of a given
 Cognitive Narratology 49

event vis-à-vis the two temporal continua of story and discourse, or

fabula and sujet. Events that happen early in story-time can be encoun-
tered late in discourse-time, or vice versa, producing different reading
experiences from those set into play when there is greater isomorphism
between the time of the told and the time of the telling. A still earlier
precedent in this connection is Ingarden’s ([1931] 1973) account of lit-
erary texts as heteronomous vs. autonomous objects, i.e. as schematic
structures the concretization of whose meaning potential requires the
cognitive activity of readers.
Meanwhile, in the fields of cognitive psychology and Artificial In-
telligence (AI) research, analysts began developing their own hypothe-
ses about cognitive structures underlying the production and under-
standing of narrative. Psychologists such as Mandler (1984) postulated
the existence of cognitively based story grammars or narrative rule sys-
tems. Such grammars were cast as formal representations of the cogni-
tive mechanisms used to parse stories into sets of units (e.g. settings and
episodes) and principles for sequencing and embedding those units (cf.
Herman 2002: 10–13). Roughly contemporaneously with the advent of
story grammars, research in AI also began to focus on the cognitive
basis for creating and understanding stories. Schank and Abelson’s
(1977) foundational work explored how stereotypical knowledge re-
duces the complexity and duration of many processing tasks, including
the interpretation of narrative. Indeed, the concepts of script and frame,
or types of knowledge representations that allow an expected sequence
of events or an activity setting to be stored in the memory (cf. Bartlett
[1932] 1995; Goffman 1974), suggested how people are able to build
up complex interpretations of stories on the basis of very few textual or
discourse cues. Although subsequent research on knowledge represen-
tations suggests its limits as well as its possibilities (Sternberg 2003
provides a critical review), this early work shaped research on storytell-
ing and the mind from the start, informing the study of how particular
features of narrative discourse enable particular kinds of processing
strategies.
Thus, theorists have explored how experiential repertoires, stored in
the form of scripts, enable interpreters of stories to “fill in the blanks”
and assume that if a narrator mentions a masked character running out
of a bank with a satchel of money, then that character has in all likeli-
hood robbed the bank in question. For his part, Palmer (2004) discusses
how readers’ world-knowledge allows them to build inferences about
fictional minds by bringing such knowledge to bear on various textual
indicators, including thought reports, speech representations, and de-
scriptions of behaviors that span the continuum linking mental with
50 David Herman

physical actions. Other analysts have explored how literary narratives,

by presenting atypical, norm-challenging, or physically impossible fic-
tional scenarios, intermix processes of script recruitment, disruption,
and refreshment (Alber 2009; Herman 2002: 85–113; Stockwell 2002:
75–89).
Jahn (1997) and Emmott (1997) likewise employ the frame concept
but in effect shift the focus from issues of semantic memory to issues of
episodic memory. Jahn’s (1997) foundational essay draws on Minsky’s
(1975) account of frames (among other relevant research) to redescribe
from a cognitive perspective key aspects of Stanzel’s ([1979] 1984)
theory of narrative. In Jahn’s proposal, higher-order knowledge repre-
sentations or frames enable interpreters of stories to disambiguate pro-
nominal references, decide whether a given sentence serves a descrip-
tive or a thought-reporting function (e.g. depending on context, “the
train was late” might either be a thought mulled over by a character or
part of the narrator’s own account of the narrated world), and, more
generally, adopt a top-down as well as a bottom-up approach to narra-
tive processing. A frame guides interpretation until such time as textual
affordances allow for a modification or substitution of that frame. In a
similar vein, drawing on ideas from cognitive psychology, psycholin-
guistics, and text-processing research, Emmott investigates how what
she calls contexts, or spatiotemporal nodes inhabited by configurations
of individuals and entities, constrain pronoun interpretation. Infor-
mation about contexts attaches itself to mental representations that
Emmott terms “contextual frames.” An action performed by (or on) a
given configuration of participants is necessarily indexed to a particular
context and must be viewed within that context, even if the context is
never fully reactivated (after its initial mention) linguistically. For ex-
ample, if a character in a short story begins walking along a wooded
path, then even if elements of the setting are not mentioned again, read-
ers can assume that subsequent actions performed by the character con-
tinue to take place in that same locale—until such time as linguistic
signals facilitate a frame-switch (e.g. “Several days later […]”).
To extrapolate: although some of the work just described post-dates
the period at issue, a cluster of publications appearing in the 1990s add-
ed impetus to the “cognitive turn” in narrative studies that had been
prepared for by research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s and herald-
ed by Turner (1991) in a book subtitled “The Study of English in the
Age of Cognitive Science.” Fludernik’s richly synthetic account of nat-
ural narratology, appearing in 1996, integrates ideas from literary narra-
tology, the history of English language and literature, research on natu-
ral-language narratives told in face-to-face communication, and
 Cognitive Narratology 51

cognitive linguistics to isolate “experientiality,” or the felt, subjective

awareness of an experiencing mind, as a core property of narrativity.
Turner’s (1996) own extrapolation from cognitive-linguistic models of
metaphor to account for human intelligence in terms of parabolic pro-
jections, or the mapping of source stories onto target stories to make
sense of the world, was also published in 1996. The year before, the
influential volume Deixis in Narrative had appeared (Duchan et al., eds.
1995); contributions to this volume characterize narrative comprehen-
sion in terms of deictic shifts, whereby interpreters shift from the spati-
otemporal coordinates of the here-and-now to various cognitive van-
tage-points they are able to take up because of textual signals
distributed in narrative discourse (see also Werth 1999). In addition,
although the studies just mentioned fall within the first broad strand of
inquiry into the mind-narrative nexus—i.e. the strand concerned with
stories viewed as a target of interpretation—during the same period re-
searchers in fields such as sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and so-
cial psychology were building on the insights of Labov (1972) to con-
tribute to the second broad strand of inquiry, investigating how
narrative constitutes a resource for sense making across a variety of
communicative settings and activity types (Bamberg ed. 1997; Bruner
1991; Linde 1993; Ochs et al. 1992).
This spate of publications helps explain why the inaugural 2000 is-
sue of the online journal Image & Narrative focused on cognitive narra-
tology. It also helps account for the organization, just after the turn of
the century, of a number of edited volumes, special journal issues, and
conferences exploring intersections among cognition, literature, and
culture as well as approaches to the mind-narrative nexus in particular
(e.g. Abbott ed. 2001; Richardson & Steen eds. 2002; Herman ed.
2003; Richardson & Spolsky eds. 2004). At the same time, theorists
formulated pertinent objections to (or at least reservations about) what
Richardson and Steen termed a “cognitive revolution” in the study of
literature and culture (Jackson 2005; Sternberg 2003). Specifically,
scholars who remained skeptical about cognitive approaches to litera-
ture and culture in general, and about research on narrative and mind
specifically, questioned the degree to which work of this kind repre-
sents true cross-disciplinary or rather “transdisciplinary” conver-
gence—as opposed to the selective and sometimes haphazard borrow-
ing of ideas and methods tailored to problem domains in other areas of
study (see section 4 below).
52 David Herman

3.2 Focal Areas for Research

Approaches to narrative and mind continue to emerge, evolve, and

cross-pollinate, and it is difficult to predict which of these approaches
will be the most generative going forward, let alone what impact they
will ultimately have on the broader field of narratology. Spanning re-
search on narrative viewed as a target of interpretation as well as schol-
arship on stories taken as an instrument of mind, relevant studies in-
clude:

(a) inquiry into the range of mental states and processes that sup-
port inferences about the ontological make-up, spatiotemporal
profile, and character inventory of a storyworld, and also about
the degree to which a given text or representation can be assimi-
lated to the category “narrative”—i.e. assigned at least some
degree of narrativity—in the first place (Doležel 1998; Fluder-
nik 1996; Gerrig 1993; Herman 2002, 2009, 2013a; Hogan
2003b: 115–139; Jahn 1997; Ryan 1991, 2001; Sanford &
Emmott 2013);
(b) cognitively inflected accounts of narrative perspective or focali-
zation in fictional and nonfictional texts (van Peer & Chatman
eds. 2001; Dancygier 2011: 87–116; Grishakova 2002; Jahn
1996, 1999; Herman 2013a: chap. 4);
(c) attempts to formulate what Eder (2003) terms “cognitive recep-
tion theories,” including research on the effects of narrative
suspense, curiosity, and surprise (Gerrig 1993; Keating 2013;
Perry 1979; Sternberg 1978, 1990, 1992) as well as studies of
specific storytelling strategies that can foster, amplify, or inhibit
empathetic responses by interpreters (Keen 2007);
(d) empirical studies that, relying on techniques ranging from the
measuring of reading times to methods of corpus analysis to the
elicitation of diagrams of storyworlds, seek to establish demon-
strable correlations between what Bortolussi and Dixon (2003)
term “text features” and “text effects” (Emmott, Sanford & Al-
exander 2013; Sanford & Emmott 2013; Gerrig 1993; Ryan
2003; Herman 2005; Salway & Herman 2011);
(e) transmedial studies suggesting that narrative functions as a cog-
nitive “macroframe” enabling interpreters to identify stories or
story-like elements across any number of semiotic media—
literary, pictorial, musical, etc. (Gardner & Herman 2011; Her-
man 2004, 2013a: chap. 3; Ranta 2013; Ryan ed. 2004; Ryan &
Thon eds. 2014; Wolf 2003);
 Cognitive Narratology 53

(f) research on characters and methods of characterization in fic-

tional as well as nonfictional narratives; this work includes
studies of specific techniques used by storytellers to figure forth
their characters’ mental lives and also studies of how interpret-
ers’ encounters with such individuals-in-storyworlds shape and
are shaped by broader understandings of persons (Cohn 1978;
Eder et al., eds. 2010; Fludernik 2003; Herman 2011a, 2013a:
chap. 5; Herman ed. 2011; Jannidis 2004, 2009; Palmer 2004,
2010; Schneider 2001; Zunshine 2006);
(g) relatedly, research on narrative vis-à-vis folk-psychological rea-
soning, or the everyday heuristics that people use to make sense
of their own and others’ conduct; at issue is how stories provide
a means for evaluating the conduct of self and other, as well as
the folk-psychological abilities bound up with narrative com-
prehension (Butte 2004; Herman 2010, 2011a, 2013a: chaps. 2,
8; Hutto 2008).
(h) studies of emotions and emotion discourse in narrative contexts;
relevant work includes inquiry into the way emotional respons-
es undergird the telling and interpretation of stories (Burke
2011; Hogan 2003a, 2011; Miall 2011; Oatley 2012) and also
research on how narratives at once reflect and help shape “emo-
tionologies,” or systems of emotion terms and concepts de-
ployed by participants in discourse to ascribe emotions to them-
selves as well as their cohorts (Herman 2010, 2013a).
(i) research drawing inspiration from developments in the theory of
evolution and also evolutionary psychology, including Easter-
lin’s (2012) hypothesis that “narrative thinking arose [...] be-
cause it facilitated interpretation of events in the environment
and consequently promoted functional action” (47) and Boyd’s
(2009) argument that narrative fiction and other forms of make-
believe link up with an evolved human predisposition to engage
in play (177–187, 192–193; see also Abbott 2000; Austin 2010:
17–40; Dissanayake 2001; Mellmann 2010);
(j) work exploring how narratives about counterfactual scenarios
support efforts to negotiate experience (Dannenberg 2008;
Doležel 1999: 265–267; 2010: 101–126; Herman 2013a: chap.
8);
(k) studies of the structure and uses of autobiographical accounts
vis-à-vis memory processes and their potential disruption by
dementia or other debilitating diseases or injuries (Brockmeier
& Carbaugh eds. 2001; Damasio 1999; Eakin 2008; Medved &
Brockmeier 2010; Hydén 2010); and
54 David Herman

(l) research on narrative engagements with nonhuman phenome-

nology, or the way stories across media can be used to model
what it might be like for nonhuman animals to encounter the
world—and thereby reshape humans’ own modes of encounter
(Herman 2011b, 2013c; Irvine 2013; Nelles 2001).

The following subsections hone in on focal areas (a) and (f) to highlight
some of the strategies for inquiry that have been developed by analysts
exploring the mind-narrative nexus.

3.2.1 Narrative Ways of Worldmaking

Using semiotic affordances to construct and imaginatively inhabit sto-

ryworlds is a fundamental aspect of interpreting narratives—and also a
precondition for leveraging narratives to construe what’s going on in
wider environments for sense making. Work on deictic shift theory
(Duchan et al., eds. 1995), contextual frame theory (Emmott 1997),
text-world theory (Werth 1999), possible-worlds theory (Doležel 1998;
Pavel 1986; Ronen 1994; Ryan 1991), and the fiction/nonfiction dis-
tinction (Cohn 1999) helps illuminate the mental processes underlying
narrative ways of worldmaking. This work suggests how interpreting
narratives entails mapping discourse cues onto storyworlds more or less
analogous to contexts in which that mapping process takes place.
What is more, reconsidered from a perspective that foregrounds is-
sues of worldmaking, earlier narratological scholarship can be read
anew, providing further insight into the mental states, capacities, and
dispositions underlying the (re)construction of narrative worlds. Ge-
nette’s ([1972] 1980) influential account of time in narrative, for exam-
ple, can be motivated as a heuristic framework for studying the WHEN
component of world creation. Thus Genette's concept of narrative order
suggests how a narrative world is “thickened” by forays backward and
forward in time, raising questions about the processing strategies trig-
gered by such temporal agglutination (cf. Abbott [2002] 2008: 163–65;
Sternberg 1978, 1990, 1992).
The approach to narrative worldmaking outlined in Herman et al.
(2012) and Herman (2013a, 2013b) focuses on the way specific dis-
course patterns enable narrative experiences; suggesting how ideas
from psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, and related areas of research
can be integrated with scholarship on stories to characterize processes
of narrative understanding, the approach starts with the hypothesis that
engaging with stories entails mapping textual cues onto the WHEN,
WHAT, WHERE, WHO, HOW, and WHY dimensions of mentally
 Cognitive Narratology 55

configured worlds. By using textual affordances to specify or “fill out”

these dimensions in more or less detail, interpreters can frame provi-
sional answers to questions such as the following—to the extent re-
quired by their purposes in engaging with a given text:

i. How does the time frame of events in the storyworld relate to

that of the narrational or world-creating act?
ii. Where did/will/might narrated events happen relative to the
place of narration—and for that matter, relative to the interpret-
er’s current situation?
iii. How exactly is the domain of narrated events spatially config-
ured, and what sorts of changes take place in the configuration
of that domain over time?
iv. During a given moment of the unfolding action, what are the
focal (foregrounded) constituents or inhabitants of the narrated
domain—as opposed to the peripheral (backgrounded) constitu-
ents?
v. Whose vantage point on situations, objects, and events in the
narrated world shapes the presentation of that world at a given
moment?
vi. In what domains of the storyworld do actions supervene on be-
haviors, such that it becomes relevant to ask, not just what
cause produced what effect, but also who did (or tried to do)
what, through what means, and for what reason?

The interplay among the dimensions at issue—the specific pattern of

responses created by the way an interpreter frames answers to these
sorts of questions when engaging with a narrative—accounts for the
structure as well as the functions and overall impact of the storyworld
at issue. Hence, whereas the questions just listed concern what kind of
world is being evoked by the act of telling, those questions connect up,
in turn, with further questions about how a given narrative is situated in
its broader discourse environment—questions concerning why or with
what purposes that act of telling is being performed at all. To reiterate,
stories do not merely evoke a world, and thereby constitute a target of
interpretation; they also afford resources for sense making by interven-
ing in a field of discourses, a range of representational strategies, a con-
stellation of ways of seeing—and sometimes a set of competing narra-
tives, as in a courtroom trial, a political campaign, or a family dispute
(see Abbott [2002] 2008: 175–192).
56 David Herman

3.2.2 Characters and Categorization Processes

Many analysts have laid groundwork for an exploration of characters

(and techniques of characterization) vis-à-vis the broader categorization
processes by means of which people structure and comprehend ele-
ments of experience. Barthes ([1970] 1974) suggested that, in conjunc-
tion with four other “codes for reading,” a semic code governs the pro-
cess by which story recipients identify and interpret characters and their
attributes, enabling semantic features of the text (e.g. lists of character
attributes or descriptions of the places they inhabit) to be categorized as
information relevant for understanding individuals-in-narrative-worlds,
fictional and otherwise. Taking inspiration from Barthes, Chatman
(1978) described characters as paradigms of traits. According to this
analysis, a character is a “vertical assemblage of [a set of traits, or more
or less enduring qualities or dispositions] intersecting the syntagmatic
chain of events that comprise the plot” (127). Chatman thus explores
how interpreters rely on their knowledge of culturally and historically
variable trait-codes to map textual cues onto individuals-in-storyworlds
(123–126; cf. Culler 1975: 236–237). These repertoires of trait-names
derive from a variety of sources, including specialized domains such as
psychoanalysis, jurisprudence, and literary history (she was neurotic;
he acted with malice aforethought; he had the fiery temperament of a
Heathcliff) as well as the broader domain of folk psychology (he’s not a
resentful person; she couldn’t let well enough alone).
More recent work by theorists such as Eder, Jannidis and Schneider
(Eder et al. 2010), Gerrig (2010), Jannidis (2004, 2009), and Schneider
(2001) likewise stresses the way understandings of persons arising from
social norms, from specific narrative texts, or from embodied interac-
tions with others structure and mediate encounters with characters in
stories—indeed, make them recognizable as such (cf. Margolin 2007:
78–79). In his account of how “understanding literary characters re-
quires [...] attributing dispositions and motivations to them [and] form-
ing expectations about what they will do next and why, and, of course,
reacting emotionally to them,” Schneider (2001) argues that “all this
happens through a complex interaction of what the text says about the
characters and of what the reader knows about the world in general,
specifically about people and, yet more specifically, about ‘people’ in
literature” (608). On the textual side, Schneider identifies several
sources of characterizing information: “(1) descriptions/ presentations
of a character’s traits, verbal and nonverbal behavior, outer appearance,
physiognomy and body language made by the narrator, character him-
self/herself, or other characters; (2) the presentation of character’s con-
 Cognitive Narratology 57

sciousness and mind-style; (3) inferred character traits mapped meto-

nymically from the presentation of fictional space to the character”
(2001: 611; see also Gorman 2010: 171–173; Jannidis 2004: 195–237;
Jannidis 2009: 21–23). On the interpretation side, story recipients bring
to bear on this information prior knowledge about categories or types of
individuals—categories derived from social, literary, and also text-
specific knowledge (Schneider 2001: 617–627). Hence, one’s assump-
tions about members of different social classes or holders of various
occupations, about protagonists or villains across narrative genres, and
about characters previously encountered in a particular text will medi-
ate one’s engagement with the demeanor, conduct, and typical settings
of the intelligent agents featured in any given narrative.
But the interplay between characterizing information and categoriza-
tion processes is more complicated than the previous paragraph would
suggest. Interpreters bring to bear on characters not only socially
grounded, literature-based, and text-specific categories of individuals,
but also the more fundamental concept of person itself—that is, ways of
engaging with persons that emerge over the course of ontogenetic de-
velopment and that continue to support practices of embodied interac-
tion later in life (Herman 2013a: chap. 2; cf. Jannidis 2004: 195–237;
Trevarthen 1993). In turn, some narratives (e.g. Djuna Barnes’
Nightwood or Neill Blomkamp’s District 9) are purposely designed to
cut against the grain of available person-oriented models, thereby hold-
ing those models up for conscious scrutiny and inviting a reconsidera-
tion of their scope and limits. In such contexts, the process of making
sense of a narrative begins to overlap with that of using stories to make
sense of the world, since interpreting the text entails reassessing what
entities belong in the category of person and, by extension, the relation-
ship between persons and nonpersons. In other words, some narratives
invite interpreters to probe the nature and boundaries of the person con-
cept itself by suggesting more or less extensive parallels between mem-
bers of the category of persons and beings that have been excluded
from that category; by underscoring the phenomenological richness of
nonhuman experiences and showing how they too emerge from intelli-
gent agents’ interactions with their surrounding environments; or by
portraying literally hybridized beings who combine the traits of persons
and nonpersons and thus cross over a boundary that can then be recast
as both historically and culturally variable (Herman 2013a: chap. 5).
58 David Herman

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Since important contributions and refinements continue to be made to

the focal areas for research listed in section 3.2, all of these areas also
constitute, in effect, topics for further investigation. In addition, several
other, overarching issues warrant further consideration when it comes
to study of the mind-narrative nexus.
A first key issue is how best to foster genuine dialogue or interaction
between scholarship on narrative and the sciences of mind—as opposed
to a unidirectional borrowing, by narrative scholars, of ideas from the
cognitive sciences. To this end, Herman (2013a) proposes a “transdis-
ciplinary” approach to studying stories vis-à-vis the cognitive sciences.
The argument is that the mind-narrative relationship cannot be exhaust-
ively characterized by the arts and humanities, by the social sciences, or
by the natural sciences taken alone; hence genuine dialogue and ex-
change across these fields of endeavor, rather than unidirectional bor-
rowing from a particular field that thereby becomes dominant, will be
required to address how mental states, capacities, and dispositions pro-
vide grounds for or, conversely, are grounded in narrative experiences.
Instead of there being any subordination of humanistic vocabularies and
methods to those of the social or natural sciences, or vice versa, in a
transdisciplinary approach different frameworks for inquiry will con-
verge on various dimensions of the mind-narrative nexus.
A second key question is how to take into account the relationship
between theory and corpus—that is, the way one’s understanding of the
mind-narrative nexus will be shaped by the kinds of narrative practices
one considers. How might the choice of stories from different periods,
genres, or cultural traditions affect the way theorists characterize the
mental states and processes associated with narrative experiences? And
how do issues of medium-specificity come into play in this same con-
nection?
A third important issue is the difference this area of research might
make when it comes to interpreting particular stories. The structuralists
claimed that, just as the Saussurean linguist studies the system of lan-
guage (langue) rather than the individual messages made possible and
intelligible by that system (parole), narratologists should study how
narrative in general means, rather than what particular narratives mean.
In the years since structuralism, however, convergent research devel-
opments across fields such as ethnography, sociolinguistics, and narra-
tive analysis itself have revealed the importance of studying how peo-
ple deploy various sorts of symbol systems to refer to, and constitute,
aspects of their experience. Thus, although Saussure emphasized code
 Cognitive Narratology 59

over message, a key question for future inquiry is how a focus on the
mind-narrative nexus might illuminate the structure and functions of
situated storytelling acts. Multiple issues are at stake in this connection,
including the way in which story designs allow for tentative, defeasible
ascriptions of authorial intention—ascriptions to story creators of the
reasons for acting that (probabilistically) account for why a given text
has the structure it does (Herman et al. 2012; Herman 2013a: chap. 1).

5 Bibliography

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60 David Herman

Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
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 Cognitive Narratology 61

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62 David Herman

Hutto, Daniel D. (2008). Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of

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 Cognitive Narratology 63

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64 David Herman

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bus: Ohio State UP.

5.2 Further Reading

Aldama, Frederick Luis, ed. (2010). Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts.
Austin: U of Texas P.
Bernaerts, Lars, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck, eds. (2013). Stories and
Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Bruner, Jerome (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Eder, Jens et al., eds. (2010). Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imagi-
nary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Hutto, Daniel D., ed. (2007). Narrative and Understanding Persons. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP.
Jaén, Isabel & Julien J. Simon, eds. (2012). Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes
and New Directions. Austin: U of Texas P.
Jahn, Manfred (2005). “Cognitive Narratology.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 67–71.
Zunshine, Lisa, ed. (2010). Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore, ML:
Johns Hopkins UP.
 Coherence
Michael Toolan

1 Definition

As a technical term, as distinct from its use in cultural activities to de-

note a range of qualities deemed desirable (e.g. clarity, orderliness, rea-
sonableness, logicality, “making sense,” and even persuasiveness), co-
herence has tended to be regarded as a textlinguistic (TL) notion. From
its everyday senses, textlinguistic coherence has inherited some defin-
ing criteria, in particular the assumption that it denotes those qualities
in the structure and design of a text that prompt language users to judge
that “everything fits,” that the identified textual parts all contribute to a
whole, which is communicationally effective. But there has always
been a tension in the linguistic analysis of coherence, rooted in the
recognition that TL “rules” for textual coherence (e.g. rules of anapho-
ra, norms of paragraphing and paragraph structure) are inevitably gen-
eral and therefore insensitive to the unique contextual pressures of the
particular text, on the one hand, while on the other, judgments of coher-
ence are very much based on what addressees assess as relevant and
informative in the unique discoursal circumstances of the individual
text. This tension is often summarized as a distinction between (purely
linguistic) cohesion and (contextualized) coherence: the former is nei-
ther necessary nor sufficient for the latter, even if it is normally a main
contributory feature (de Beaugrande & Dressler 1981; Giora 1985). In
broad terms, it is now widely recognized that coherence is ultimately a
pragmatically-determined quality, requiring close attention to the spe-
cific sense made of the text in the cultural context. This might suggest
that determining coherence is a simple matter of applying common
sense in context; but narratives often go beyond common sense, that
transcending being crucial to their importance and tellability, so that
narratological studies of coherence suggest common sense is not a suf-
ficient guide.
66 Michael Toolan

2 Explication

Although it is not usually foremost among the interests of narratolo-

gists, coherence is implicitly regarded as an important feature of narra-
tive. All formalist, structuralist, or psycholingistic modelings of story
and discourse that propose any kind of morphology or grammar (those
of Propp, Barthes, Genette, Greimas, Mandler & Johnson 1977, Thorn-
dyke 1977, Stein & Glenn 1979, to name only a selection) can be
viewed as including elements regarded as essential to narrative coher-
ence. For TL, it is often convenient to identify particular main subtypes
of coherence, such as temporal, causal, and thematic coherence as well
as topic-maintenance and -furtherance. Because of general expectations
of unity, continuity and perseveration in story topic, coherent narrative
seems to involve a healthy amount of repetition and near repetition
(repetition with alteration), including forms of lexical repetition and
semantic recurrence. Thus Chatman (1978: 30–31) mentions the as-
sumption of perseveration of identity with respect to naming of charac-
ters (Jannidis → Character) as a kind of coherence automatically relied
on in narratives: if there is a sequence of mentions of Peter falling ill,
later dying, later being buried, it is assumed these refer to one and the
same Peter. Some sense of the continuity of existents—hence of as-
sumed co-reference where there are multiple mentions of a single
name—is the norm. On the other hand, abundance of quasi-repetitive
language seems to be the cohesive corollary—in extended texts such as
literary narratives—of the coherence requirement of unified connected-
ness. However, no simple standard of topic or thematic unity and conti-
nuity will apply generally. In actuality, in narratives as in other forms
of discourse, the norm is for there to be multiple topics, complexly re-
lated to each other, so that the local absence of maintenance of topic A
by no means creates incoherence (where topic B or C is being devel-
oped).
Perhaps more than anything else, narratological studies of coherence
highlight the insufficiency of a “common sense” approach to the issue.
It is perfectly true that stories that defy normal expectations about time,
intention, goal, causality, or closure may fail to elicit interest and be
judged incoherent or incomplete by some readers; but these departures
from the norm, singly or jointly, do not invariably lead to incoherence.
Similarly, narratologists recognize that a story that begins at the
chronological end, then jumps to the chronological beginning, moves
forward two years from that point, and then moves backward one
month, and so on may be difficult to follow. Difficulties of reader-
processing caused by achronological narration, or under-explained
 Coherence 67

shifts in setting or character, even when extreme, do not invariably

amount to incoherence, either. And, as McAdams (2006: 113) reminds
us, norms concerning narrative coherence can vary considerably from
one society or culture to the next; these expectations are also dependent
on period and genre (cf. Jauss [1977] 1982 on “horizons of expecta-
tion” and Culler 1975 on “naturalization”).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

A history of the concept of narrative coherence must begin with men-

tion of Aristotle’s Poetics, which insists on completeness of plot with a
beginning, a middle, and an end, unity of incident, the episode as cen-
tral to tragedy, and structure by means of complication followed by un-
raveling or denouement: “the muthos must imitate a single, unified and
complete sequence of action. Its incidents must be organised in such a
way that if any is removed or has its position changed, the whole is dis-
located and disjointed. If something can be added or taken away with-
out any obvious effect, it is not intrinsic to the whole” (1416a 31–34).
Other major landmarks in Western discourse on coherence in narrative
or drama include promotion of the “three unities” in 17th-century neo-
classicism (and put into practice in the plays of Corneille and Racine);
Aristotle was invoked, but prescriptively, demanding unity of time,
place, and action. In other dramatic traditions, however, such restrictive
requirements were freely ignored (e.g. Shakespeare). In the modern
period, Poe’s ([1846] 1982) poetics of composition, with its advocacy
of brevity, hidden craft, and unity of effect, can be mentioned with ref-
erence to narrative coherence, as can Propp’s ([1928] 1968) morpho-
logical modeling of the folktale, Lämmert’s (1955) “forms of narrative
construction,” Stanzel’s ([1955] 1971, [1979] 1984) narrative situa-
tions, several of the articles in the landmark volume 8 (1966) of the re-
view Communications, Prince’s (1973) narrative grammar, van Dijk’s
treatment of text grammars (1972), and some work by Todorov ([1971]
1977, [1978] 1980) as well as his foundational narrative grammar of the
Decameron (1969).

3.1 Coherence in Textlinguistic Studies

Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) study of cohesion in English is often cited

as a pioneering enquiry into the key resources in a language for under-
pinning textual coherence, indeed for the creation of genuine text. They
look chiefly at inter-sentential grammatical mechanisms (e.g. means of
68 Michael Toolan

co-reference via personal and indefinite pronouns, projecting of relat-

edness via retrievable ellipsis, use of sense-conveying sentential con-
junctions), and they also comment, less systematically, on how texts
display coherence by elaborate means of lexical collocation and associ-
ation. Despite a generally enthusiastic welcome for their work, linguists
were quick to emphasize that cohesion seemed neither necessary nor
sufficient for textual coherence (particularly in the case of short, deeply
situationally-embedded “texts”). More importantly, Halliday and Ha-
san, like other grammarians, do not fully address the specific demands
of cohesion and coherence of narrative. De Beaugrande and Dressler
(1981) remains an important and still influential overview of text struc-
ture which delineates seven standards of “textuality”: (a) cohesion (mu-
tually connected elements of the surface text); (b) coherence (the con-
figuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text); (c)
intentionality (instrumentalizing of cohesion and coherence according
to the producer’s intention); (d) acceptability (use or relevance of the
cohesive and coherent text to the receiver); (e) informativity (degree to
which the occurrences of the text are (un)expected or (un)known); (f)
situationality (relevance of a text to a situation); (g) intertextuality (pre-
supposed knowledge of one or more previous texts).
There are many exemplifications, in the linguistic and discourse
analytic literature, of discourse deemed to have cohesion without co-
herence, or the reverse. One of the better known comes in Brown and
Yule (1983), where the doorbell rings at the apartment of a couple, A
and B. A says to B: “There’s the doorbell.” B replies: “I’m in the bath.”
Here, the total absence of textual cohesive links between the two utter-
ances does not prevent B’s response being entirely coherent. Brown &
Yule ascribe the coherence of the AB exchange above to assumed “se-
mantic relations” between the utterances, which relations must lean
heavily on familiar schemata or cultural “scripts.” Such mental chal-
lenges seem quite slight, however, by comparison with the challenges
to sense-making posed by contemporary fictional narration and dia-
logue by writers like DeLillo (e.g. in Underworld) and Mamet (e.g. the
opening of his play Oleanna, in which just one half, highly elliptical, of
a lengthy telephone conversation is accessible to the playgoer or read-
er). And these texts in turn are considerably more accessible, coher-
ence-minded, than many narrative poems published during the last
hundred years.
Innumerable linguists have grappled over the years with the topic of
discourse coherence and its bases. One of the richer overviews remains
that of Brown and Yule (1983), which contains many observations ori-
ented to helping clarify what makes for discourse coherence (a more
 Coherence 69

recent introductory text, also containing valuable discussion of coher-

ence, is Georgakopoulou and Goutsos [1997] 2004). Brown and Yule
emphasize the inherent contextualization that accompanies any verbal
text and the role of normal expectations, shaping memories of past ver-
bal material and the initial efforts at interpreting newly-encountered
language.
The sections of Halliday and Hasan (1976) devoted to lexis can be
seen as an early attempt to systematize Firth’s collocational textlinguis-
tic thesis; also relevant is the work of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975).
Firthian collocational ideas have recently been elaborated in a different
direction in Hoey’s theory of lexical priming (2005), which argues that
for a large number of texts conforming to one genre or another, lan-
guage users are primed to expect certain patterns of word-choice, ap-
pearing at certain points (and not others) in the sentence, in the para-
graph, and in the discourse structure. But as already indicated, linguistic
form is not always necessary to achieve coherence: “part of discourse
competence involves an ability to discover discourse coherence where
it is not evident in the surface lexical or propositional cohesion”
(Stubbs 1983: 179).
Citing the doting parents of babbling infants as simply an extreme
example of “interpretive charity,” Brown and Yule (1983) emphasise
the human bias in favor of assuming a coherent message amenable to
coherent interpretation. Addressees “naturally” attribute relevance and
coherence to any text or discourse until evidence to the contrary is
overwhelming. Echoing Grice (1975), they argue that a rational as-
sumption of relevance has shaped any speaker’s (or writer’s) contribu-
tion. Where an utterance’s relevance, orderliness, informativeness and
truthfulness is not obvious, a search for their covert presence is war-
ranted. A corollary of this is that a speaker or writer can be assumed to
be continuing to speak or write of the same spatiotemporal setting and
the same characters, unless a change is explicitly signaled. Most fun-
damentally, humans “naturally assume coherence, and interpret the text
in the light of that assumption. They assume, that is, that the principles
of analogy [things will tend to be as they were before: MT] and local
interpretation [if there is a change, assume it is minimal: MT] constrain
the experience” (Brown & Yule 1983: 66–67). For such reasons, Yaron
has argued that analysts should calibrate texts in terms of their display-
ing “high or low degrees of explicit coherence. Differentiating thus
would make it possible to include among coherent texts those that the
reader has imbued with implicit connections” (Yaron 2008: 139). As
Bublitz (1999: 2) recognizes in his somewhat negatively-phrased defi-
70 Michael Toolan

nition, coherence is “a cognitive category that depends on the language

user’s interpretation and is not an invariant property of discourse.”
We should not overstate the contrast between those who study co-
herence as a linguistic property of texts and those who focus on the dis-
course reception and the addressee’s attributing of coherence to a text,
guided by cultural norms, cognitive scripts and schemata. There is often
no fundamental opposition between the two approaches, but rather a
division of labor and of disciplinary interest; some contributions at-
tempt to combine TL and cognitive or receptionist concerns (e.g. cer-
tain approaches to narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity), Emmott 1997 on
comprehension, Toolan 2009 on narrative progression). Ultimately,
very much the same point can be made regarding coherence in narra-
tives and narration as is made concerning narratological accounts of
events and eventfulness (Hühn → Event and Eventfulness). In the lat-
ter, the point is made that many accounts are vulnerable to the criticism
that they appeal largely to textual structure, whereas ultimately cultural
norms and expectations cannot be excluded from the calculation of
eventfulness (see Hühn 2008). Similarly, an entirely text-immanent
treatment (or grammar) of narrative coherence seems only locally pos-
sible, relative to particular genres or culture-specific types of narrative,
rather than universally valid. And even here, like any grammar, the
norms are susceptible to variation and change. Thus anything approxi-
mating a grammar of narrative coherence will sooner or later fail, by
virtue of its insensitivity to context. Lesser and Milroy (1993) make this
point concerning discourse coherence generally: notwithstanding cer-
tain kinds of familiar scripts and stereotyped situations, top-down mod-
els which attempt to extend syntactic analytic methods, by postulating a
set of rules by reference to which discourses can be judged ill-formed
or coherent, have tended to fail. Discourse and discourse coherence is
so often a joint production, influenced by context and assumed back-
ground knowledge, that decontextualized standards for the specifying
of coherence are unsatisfactory.
For all the above reasons, we must conclude that coherence and full
interpretation of a text often requires that we have access to more than
the text alone. As Georgakopoulou and Goutsos ([1997] 2004: 16) note,
we often need to know “who the text-producer is, what the intended
audience is, what the time and place of text-production and reception
are […] and the purpose or function of the text in the speech communi-
ty in which it has been created.” One of the challenges and interests of
much literary narration, however, lies in the radical under-specification
or unreliability of answers to many of these questions. Literary narra-
tives give rise to much-debated uncertainty concerning “who speaks?”
 Coherence 71

in particular stories or passages, where and when events are reported to

have taken place (in which storyworld?), and for what purpose; much
of this is dependent on genre and text-type conventions and their cul-
tural and historical variation.

3.2 Degrees of Coherence

There are degrees of TL cohesion, and more importantly, according to

addressee judgments, degrees of coherence, ranging from the minimal
to the maximal. Additionally, broad user assumptions about the sub-
type of text involved help to guide or constrain coherence norms and
expectations. In the case of narratives, such generic norms include the
presence of story or plot, of an inter-related event sequence, of focus on
one or a few characters undergoing change, and of a situation of stabil-
ity developing a disequilibrium following which a renewed but altered
equilibrium emerges (closure).
As implied above, there are arguably minimal and maximal notions
of coherence, as this concept has been developed and applied in linguis-
tics generally and narrative studies in particular. Minimal or basic co-
herence is that property attributed to sequences of utterances or sen-
tences, in a particular context of speaking or writing, which prompts
participants or observers to judge that the full sequence “makes sense,”
fits together, and forms a (spoken or written) text. The implied contrast
is with randomly assembled phrases or sentences or utterances having
no discernible sense of connection between them, being merely the
parts from which various (different) texts might be assembled. Any text
is coherent or projects coherence if it is interpretable as parts compris-
ing an effective or useable whole. The more particular interest here is in
what constitutes a whole narrative text (as distinct from a text of no
particular kind). An immediate complication, in the creation or design-
ing for coherence in texts generally, and perhaps especially in narra-
tives, is the elliptical, the implied, the unsaid but inferable or adducible
(such that a text has a covert wholeness). Prototype theory (Rosch
1978; Bortolussi & Dixon 2003) has been shown to be relevant to pro-
jections of narrative coherence; typification as an interpretive resource
is very important in Stanzel [1955] 1971; and many approaches to in-
ferability and its putative steps or degrees have been proposed: see
Ingarden ([1931] 1873) on reading as the creation of coherence; cf. also
Schmid (2003) on narrativity and eventfulness.
A maximal notion of coherence is invoked where analysts demand
that all the segments of a text (however that segmentation is imposed:
e.g. sentence by sentence, or shot by shot or scene by scene in film, or
72 Michael Toolan

in some other way) fit together in multiple respects, to the point that
every segment is deemed an indispensable part of the whole. But such
an absolute standard is neither usual nor even optimal. Longer or more
complex narratives where every segment fits and is indispensable for
coherence seem rare. In a novel or film of normal length, absence or
presence of a few sentences or of a few shots—provided they are se-
mantically congruent with adjacent material—rarely causes significant
damage to the work’s perceived coherence; this would accord with
general linguistic principles of acceptable ellipsis and redundancy: not
everything needs to be “spelled out” in communication (interpreters can
tolerate reasonable gaps), but iterative statement is also often acceptable.
It may be that coherence is analogous to the main load-bearing
structure of a house, by contrast with various walls and materials whose
present or absence has little or no effect on the robustness of the main
building. By that reasoning, where the wall between the lounge and the
study is non-load-bearing, one might be inclined to say that “on coher-
ence grounds” it does not matter whether the wall is present or is re-
moved. And yet one might immediately make the rejoinder that, on the
contrary, a study without a wall sealing it off from the noisy lounge, the
site of informal sociality, is no longer a fully coherent or coherently-
functional study. So the limits and scope of coherence, in buildings and
in texts, is by no means a settled question.

3.3 Coherence in Psychological Studies

In the psychological literature relating to narrative representations, co-

herence is viewed as established by means of a collaboration of the text
(spoken or written) and the receiving mind of the listener or reader. But
the reader’s mental contribution is judged essential, so that coherence is
in effect “a mental entity” (Gernsbacher & Givón 1995: vii). A text is
deemed coherent if it is judged intelligible, with “no required material
or information missing.” Immediately a clarification is needed, howev-
er: by “missing” here is meant “total absence from the text” without
reasonable possibility of retrieval by means of ellipsis-detection, infer-
ence, attention to relevant context and background knowledge, or simi-
lar textually-facilitated means. So the key contrast here, with respect to
coherence, is between contextually retrievable relevant information,
and contextually unretrievable relevant information: the more there ap-
pears to be of the latter, the less coherent the narrative will be. But there
seems to be no possibility of a fully autonomous and generalizable set
of prescriptions as to what will count as relevant but unretrievable in
any particular case, even if addressee attention to prototypical narrative
 Coherence 73

patterns, genres, sub-genres, scripts, and cognitive frames can help to

delimit the problem space.
Narrative coherence is often regarded as the representation (or the
possibility of producing a representation) of the narrative under scruti-
ny as conforming to a “grammar” for the presentation, in licensed se-
quence, of a series of related events and states. But under a second def-
inition it is the representation (or possibility of representation, by the
reader/listener) of particular relations between the segments of a narra-
tive: e.g. seeing one segment as a consequence following a reported
cause, a further segment as an emotional response to a reported conse-
quence, and so on. Much psycholinguistic work on narrative is devoted
to exploring the kinds and richness of inferencing that readers make in
the course of interpreting stories (cf. Emmott 1997; Emmott et al. 2006;
Gerrig 1993; Goldman et al., eds. 1999).

3.4 Creating a Storyworld

A more contemporary narratological approach to coherence might be

derived from the cognitivist idea that for full understanding and experi-
encing of a narrative, the interpreter must reconstruct a storyworld
(Ryan 1991; Gerrig 1993; Herman 2002, 2009) or mental model, a rich
projection of the entire, developing situation in which events, characters
and their variously motivated actions are embedded. Where such recon-
struction or imagining is thwarted (e.g. by narratorial or character-
derived vagueness, unreliability, inconsistency, or even self-
contradiction), then the sense of coherence is undermined. In these re-
spects, character is perhaps the most striking domain in which coher-
ence within the storyworld normally needs to be protected by the au-
thor: recent work on characterization and narrative comprehension
(Margolin 1983, 1990; Culpeper 2001; Emmott 1997; Werth 1999;
Schneider 2001) has done much to chart how interpreters draw on a
text’s characterizations, in interaction with the given or assumed back-
ground and non-specific real-world knowledge, to understand and eval-
uate characters.
Also relevant here is the cognitive narratological idea of a narrative
storyworld (Herman 2002, 2009). But even the assumption of co-
reference among uses of a proper name can be overridden, as in Faulk-
ner’s The Sound and the Fury, where there are two quite distinct
Quentins (uncle and niece). As Chatman implies, much of this inferenc-
ing is basic interpretation; it may be that narrative coherence is threat-
ened or damaged where “basic inferencing” of this kind cannot easily
or obviously apply. Beyond consistency of naming, each character will
74 Michael Toolan

be expected to be physically, emotionally and mentally self-con-

sistent—within reasonable or narrated limits. Thus a character at the
close of a novel may not be quite the same person disclosed, many
years earlier in the storyworld, at the novel’s opening; but the changes
that are apparent are congruent with the experiences also narrated, and
the ambient conditions within the storyworld (if those conditions are
fantastical or magical realist ones, where a dead character can return to
life in some other form, then coherence may well be maintained). In
short, the criteria of coherence may change with genre, epoch, and cul-
ture.

3.5 The Pragmatics of Coherence: Cooperativeness and Relevance

Despite the steady advance in the descriptions of narrative coherence

from TL, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics, it is to pragmatics
that many narrative analysts look for a general account of coherence,
and to the seminal ideas of Grice in particular. Grice (1975) propounds
the idea that participants in a conversation are predisposed to cooperate,
making their contributions—all other things being equal—suitably
truthful, informative, relevant, and orderly; and, knowing this, one par-
ty to a conversation is entitled and can be expected to derive what Grice
called “conversational implicatures” where another’s contribution
seems intentionally to diverge from reasonable truthfulness, informa-
tivity, relevance, and orderliness. What Grice applied to idealized con-
versational meaning, others have extended with due qualifications and
adjustments to other uses of language, including literature (e.g. Pratt
1977; Watts 1981) and narrative (Bhaya Nair 2002; Bortolussi & Dixon
2003). On a par with Gricean conversational implicature is the notion
of narrative implicature: the reader of a narrative assumes the general
cooperativeness of the teller, and draws on powers of inferencing to fill
out the sense of the information conveyed by the teller where these
seems calculatedly incomplete or indirect. Following Grice, but moving
in a more explicitly cognitivist direction, Sperber and Wilson ([1986]
1995), and some attempts have been made to develop a specifically rel-
evance-theoretical account of narrative implicature (Walsh 2007).
If a coherent narrative is one in which there are sufficient overt or
covert clues for the reader to see links, understand the text as a totality
(i.e. the double logic of narration—a telling here and now of a unified
sequence of events that happened then and there—is felt to be sus-
tained), see a point and a tellability (Baroni → Tellability), then an in-
coherent narrative is one in which such clues seem to be insufficient.
And since coherence (like conversation cooperativeness) is such a
 Coherence 75

strong norm, its absence in turn may give rise to strong reactions of
frustration, annoyance, rejection of the text as “unnatural,” absurd, or
valueless (irrelevant in the Sperber and Wilson sense, of yielding little
or no benefits for the interpretive relevance-calculating efforts invest-
ed).

3.6 Narrativity, Tellability, and Coherence

Is narrative coherence essentially a matter of narrativity, substantially

overlapping with the latter, such that a text that is judged high in narra-
tivity will by the same token be high in coherence? Everything depends
on how these terms are understood, and as one authoritative introduc-
tion states, discussions of narrativity can soon become “a tangled web”
of differently emphasized elements (Abbott [2002] 2008: 25). For
some, the focus is primarily on plot or event-progression, the sense of a
narrative arc; others emphasize the creation of a storyworld; different
again is Fludernik’s emphasis on narrativity as “mediated experientiali-
ty,” sourced in oral storytelling (for a recent overview of discussions of
narrativity, see Prince 1999; for a thought-provoking rebuttal of narra-
tology’s over-determining of progression, point, closure, etc., see
Tammi 2005). Elsewhere, Fludernik treats narrativity as the quality of
narrativehood that a reader can impose on a text by reading it as a nar-
rative, calling that process narrativization (Fludernik 1996: 34). Abbott
(Abbott → Narrativity) discusses narrativity under four headings, and
by implication four at least partly distinct aspects: as inherent or exten-
sional; as scalar or intensional (perhaps the most widely-adopted con-
ception); as varying according to narrative type or genre; and as a mode
among modes. Mention should also be made of Pier and García Landa
eds. (2008). The several understandings of narrativity on offer never-
theless suggest that it is a property of texts that is of a different order
from coherence; texts can be high or low in coherence independently of
their being high or low in narrativity.
Generic and cultural narrative norms concerning tellability, narrativ-
ity, event and eventfulness, and the nature of the narrator or implied
author are crucial in the shaping of reception (on which the work of Iser
[1976] 1978 was seminal). Norms of narrativity and narrative compre-
hension are discussed (in addition to the authors cited above) by Kindt
and Müller 2003; Culler 1975; Alber 2005; Emmott 1997. All the fore-
going concepts are in part ways of addressing the issue of coherence in
narrative, and all point to the difficulty of teasing apart what can be
called the intensional and the extensional aspects of narrative coher-
ence, or of making a distinction between what it consists in and how it
76 Michael Toolan

is produced. Regarding the latter, reference can be made to patterns of

grammatical and lexical cohesion at the level of récit or discours, and
to the normal expectation of multiple connections in the projected sto-
ryworld and in the sequence of incidents (chiefly at the level of his-
toire); similarly, continuity in the schemata (frames or scripts) activated
on the discours level and in the references to the context, is usual. But it
remains controversial to claim that they are essential.

3.7 Challenges to Coherence

One form of challenge to coherence is, significantly, almost a design

feature of modern literary narratives: free indirect discourse. Being “un-
speakable” sentences, radically divided or indeterminate between two
deictic centers of utterance or footing, free indirect discourse text is
inherently problematic on first encounter. No less challenging is meta-
phor. Where metaphor is intended but fails to be detected by the reader
or listener, the perception of coherence will be put to the test; on the
other hand, a reader’s ability to interpret superficially unconnected enti-
ties or processes as metaphorical can enable the recognition of coher-
ence. Besides metaphor, milder threats to coherence include hyperbole,
litotes, irony, sarcasm, and metalepsis (Pier → Metalepsis). Lying and
misrepresentation often constitute an attempted counter-coherence, per-
haps a coherence that seems more compelling or rewarding than the
truth (cf. Iago’s wicked storytelling to Othello), so perhaps need not be
covered here as a threatening of coherence, but a manipulation of it.
Different again, and much more troubling for the reader/addressee, is
the narration which is or is suspected of being unreliable. With unrelia-
ble narration, the reader is able to reconstruct two or more coherent ver-
sions of events and their motivation. But by their very nature, each co-
herent version implies the false coherence of the others. Another kind
of challenge to perceptible coherence can come in a narrative centered
upon the unfamiliar equipment and discourse of some specialist field or
activity (neurosurgery, fly fishing, electronic engineering), to the point
that the average addressee has only limited understanding of “what is
going on.”
One of the most basic of all challenges concerns continuity of topic:
the sense that whatever a narrative is judged to be “about,” it is consist-
ently about that person or situation, without digressions or irrelevances.
But typically, literary narratives are sufficiently multidimensional that,
at any transition point, a multiplicity of relevant discoursal continua-
tions can reasonably be made and so must be chosen from. Flouting of
the simplest topic-continuity and -progression does not invariably lead
 Coherence 77

to incoherence (cf. Tristram Shandy as an early novelistic testing of

topic and narrativity expectations). Lack of inferrable topic-atten-
tiveness, in subsequent narration, may be grounds for suspecting inco-
herence, but not conclusive grounds if, subsequently, some more global
or macro-textual perspective can “repair” the textual situation by seeing
a macro-thematic relevance among the seemingly unrelated material.
What is the opposite of coherence, the greatest challenge to narrative
coherence? It is common to cite “texts” comprising randomly concate-
nated sentences, with perhaps equally random sequencing of uncon-
nected words within those sentences, as exemplifying incoherence. By
no reasonable means can the reader detect any covert sense in or behind
the text; no hidden chain of unfolding events can be found. But another
kind of coherence-challenge is presented by the narrative in which con-
tinuities of character, time, place, and event-chain are accompanied by
“senseless” tragedy or comedy: the hero abruptly kills his lover without
a shred of motivation or justification; or the wealthy main character is
suddenly and inexplicably showered with untold wealth. These are such
challenges to narrative expectation and norms of causation as to desta-
bilize coherence-patterns concerning content, rather than form. What
are at issue here are not forms of irrationality or immorality (there need
be no lack of coherence—and plenty of interest and tellability—in nar-
ratives driven by these), but seemingly purely random unplanned, un-
plotted sequencing of events leading to an “unfitting” outcome. In such
narratives containing absurd or “senseless” tragic or comic reversal,
there is no prima facie incoherence, so they are often shunned on
grounds of tellability and verisimilitude (even though we know that
“inexplicable” tragedy or comedy are not uncommon in the real world).
One means of further exploring coherence and its apparent absence
is by trying to pinpoint the source of “incoherence” (where alleged) in
notorious cases, such as Kafka’s Metamorphosis or the films of David
Lynch (e.g. Mulholland Drive), or e. e. cummings’s poem “anyone
lived in a pretty how town” (Cummings 1991). This nine-stanza poem,
despite its interpretive challenges to the reader, is widely felt to tell a
coherent narrative about a generic young couple, anyone and no-one,
and indeed the poem was adapted into a short film by George Lucas.
But there are textual characteristics which at first seem to militate
against narrative coherence, such as the listing and chanting, and a gen-
eral uncertainty as to “what happens.” Despite various textual markers
and cues which seem not to guarantee particularity of agentive existents
(characters) or a clear sequence from opening lack to attempted final
completion, skilled readers find enough here to impose just such a nar-
rativity frame on the text, and thus to naturalize it as adequate and tell-
78 Michael Toolan

able narrative. The naturalizing interpretive procedure is essentially

probabilistic: given the kinds of genre-reflective clues in the poem, sto-
ry or film under scrutiny, including particularity and continuity of set-
tings, characters, events, and perceptibility of change of state, the whole
is judged to make more sense when treated as a narrative than if not.
Whatever the mode in which a narrative appears, more local coherence
or processing challenges can be presented where the teller has opted for
extensive narrative ellipsis, cutting, or gaps. Striking the most satisfac-
tory balance between what is explicitly told or shown and what is left
unsaid or unshown but to be inferred is as much an art as a science, and
again will vary with audience, culture, and narrative literacy.
A different kind of challenge is presented by the following brief nar-
rative: The lone ranger rode off into the sunset and jumped on his
horse. This sentence is used in the pragmatics literature to exemplify
the conventional sequential implicature of “and” (over and above its
atemporal conjoining function, as in “eggs and bacon” or “buy and
sell”). But if we judge the report to be narratively incoherent, on the
grounds that the ranger must have jumped on his horse before riding off
into the sunset, then this highlights the special coherence demands al-
ways created by the “double-logic” of narration (built on a sequence of
events which are potentially reportable via a different sequence of tex-
tual or filmic segments). Because the narrative discourse, whatever its
anachronies and shifts of voice or viewpoint, is ultimately matched to a
projected (imagined) prior event-sequence story, it cannot radically
misrepresent that story without risking incoherence.

3.8 Perceived Coherence

Coherence must be not merely local (i.e. appropriate anaphoric or cohe-

sive links between sentences), but global (appropriate relevance of most
if not all sentences to an overarching theme or purpose; cf. Reinhart
1980; Kintsch & van Dijk 1978; Goldman et al., eds. 1999). However,
one must be guarded about assuming that continuity alone (however
defined) is what differentiates a text from “a random sequence of sen-
tences (a non-text)” (Charolles & Ehrlich 1991: 254). A large body of
poetry with greater or lesser degrees of narrativity (and not just post-
modern poetry) challenges our canons of continuity without being dis-
missable as non-text or incoherent. And as a rule of thumb, we can pos-
tulate that where some form of more global coherence is detectable, this
will override or displace local discontinuities or incoherences. Further-
more, human language-users can be remarkably resourceful in making
sense (global coherence) even where none is immediately apparent, e.g.
 Coherence 79

by means of re-contextualizing or interpreting selected items or events

metaphorically (a literary theoretical term for such processes is “natu-
ralization”; cf. Culler 1975: 134–160; equally relevant is Fludernik’s
1996 conception of “narrativization”).
Like beauty, coherence seems finally to be perceptual, in the eye or
mind of the beholder. We preferentially look for “just one thing” to be
narrated, in all necessary detail, and “completely.” This may involve a
shifting of attention among numerous different things (characters, plac-
es, times, etc.), provided they can eventually be seen to interrelate. By
contrast, a seemingly unmotivated and unpredictable shifting of atten-
tion through a multiplicity of things is usually rejected as producing
narrative incoherence. If at the ideational core of most narratives some
kind of lack or problem is introduced, and an attempted resolution or
completion of that lack or problem is then reported, then forms of nar-
rative that are judged to move far from this core will tend to be seen as
less than fully coherent. Narrative’s emphasis on a unifiable lack and its
attempted resolution means that there is a natural place here for the Ar-
istotelian unities of time, place, and action, as further standard measures
of coherence (to be departed from where this is justified).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

What may have escaped notice is the borrowing of the more particular
notion of “narrative coherence,” which is now frequently invoked in
(inter alia) theories and practices of psychiatry (Fiese ed. 2001), human
psychology (McAdams 2006), psychotherapy (e.g. Linde 1993; Roberts
& Holmes eds. 1999), and work with high-functioning autistic or learn-
ing-disabled children and adults (e.g. Diehl et al. 2006).
Some of the most interesting use of the notion of coherence in narra-
tive studies has focused on the macrothematic and the largest long-term
consequences of a series of events. For example, life-story analyses
often focus on the coherence within those stories (Linde 1993; Ochs &
Capps 2001) in the course of understanding experiences which are
problematic or painful: coherence is integral to the therapeutic or iden-
tity-affirming work undertaken (e.g. illness narratives: Hawkins 1993).
And analysts of narratives who are most interested in the ideological,
political or ecological positions depicted in life stories and many other
public narratives evaluate their consistency and fairness by reference to
coherence.
80 Michael Toolan

5 Bibliography

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Bortolussi, Marisa & Peter Dixon (2003). Psychonarratology: Foundations for the
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Charolles, Marc & Marie-France Ehrlich (1991). “Aspects of Textual Continuity: Lin-
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Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Culler, Jonathan (1975). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study
of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Culpeper, Jonathan (2001). Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and other
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de Beaugrande, Robert & Wolfgang U. Dressler (1981). Introduction to Text Linguis-
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Dijk, Teun A. van (1972). Some Aspects of Text Grammars. The Hague: Mouton.
Diehl, Joshua et al. (2006). “Story recall and narrative coherence of high-functioning
children with autism spectrum disorders.” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology
34, 87–102.
Emmott, Catherine (1997). Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Ox-
ford: Oxford UP.
– et al. (2006). “Capturing the attention of readers? Stylistic and psychological
perspectives on the use and effect of text fragmentation in narratives.” Journal of
Literary Semantics 35, 1–30.
Fiese, Barbara, ed. (2001). The Stories That Families Tell: Narrative Coherence, Nar-
rative Interaction and Relationship Beliefs. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra & Dionysis Goutsos ([1997] 2004). Discourse Analysis:
An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Gernsbacher, Morton Ann & Talmy Givón (1995). Coherence in Spontaneous Text.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
 Coherence 81

Gerrig, Richard J. (1993). Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activ-

ities of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP.
Giora, Rachel (1985). “Notes Towards a Theory of Text Coherence.” Poetics Today 6,
699–715.
Goldman, Susan R. et al., eds. (1999). Narrative Comprehension, Causality, and Co-
herence: Essays in Honor of Tom Trabasso. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Grice, Herbert Paul (1975). “Logic and Conversation.” P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (eds.).
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Halliday, Michael A. K. & Ruqaiya Hasan (1976). Cohesion in English. London:
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Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
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– (2009). Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hoey, Michael (2005). Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. Lon-
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of Minnesota P.
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terpretation.” T. Kindt & H.-H. Müller (eds.). What Is Narratology? Questions
and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: de Gruyter, 205–219.
Kintsch, Walter & Teun A. van Dijk (1978). “Toward a Model of Text Comprehension
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Lämmert, Eberhard (1955). Bauformen des Erzählens. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Lesser, Ruth & Lesley Milroy (1993). Linguistics and Aphasia: Psycholinguistic and
Pragmatic Aspects of Intervention. London: Longman.
Linde, Charlotte (1993). Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford
UP.
Mandler, Jean & Nancy Johnson (1977). “Remembrance of things parsed: Story struc-
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Neophilologus 67, 1–14.
– (1990). “Individuals in Narrative Worlds: An Ontological Perspective.” Poetics
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McAdams, Dan P. (2006). “The Problem of Narrative Coherence.” Journal of Con-
structivist Psychology 19, 109–125.
Ochs, Eleanor & Lisa Capps (2001). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday
Storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
82 Michael Toolan

Pier, John & José Ángel García Landa (eds) (2008). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de
Gruyter.
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les and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 889–907.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1977). Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Prince, Gerald (1973). A Grammar of Stories: An Introduction. The Hague: Mouton.
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schreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Boundaries: Narratology
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Propp, Vladimir ([1928] 1968). Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: U of Texas P.
Reinhart, Tanya (1980). “Conditions for Text Coherence.” Poetics Today 1.1, 161–180.
Roberts, Glenn & Jeremy Holmes, eds. (1999). Healing Stories: Narrative in Psychia-
try and Psychotherapy. New York: Oxford UP.
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Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 27–48.
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ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Schmid, Wolf (2003). “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” T. Kindt & H.-H. Müller (eds.).
What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 17–33.
Schneider, Ralf (2001). “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dy-
namics of Mental-Model Construction.” Style 35, 607–640.
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tion. Oxford: Blackwell.
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mentary school children.” R. D. Freedle (ed.). Advances in Discourse Processes:
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Stubbs, Michael (1983). Discourse Analysis: the Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural
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Tammi, Pekka (2005). “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’).” Partial Answers 4, 19–
40.
Thorndyke, Perry W. (1977). “Cognitive structures in comprehension and memory of
narrative discourse.” Cognitive Psychology 9, 77–110.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1969). Grammaire du “Décaméron.” The Hague: Mouton.
– ([1971] 1977). The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– ([1978] 1990). Genres in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Toolan, Michael (2009). Narrative Progression in the Short Story: a corpus stylistic
approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Walsh, Richard (2007). The Rhetoric of Fictionality. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
 Coherence 83

Watts, Richard J. (1981). The Pragmalinguistic Analysis of Narrative Texts. Tübingen:

Narr.
Werth, Paul (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Lon-
don: Longman.
Yaron, Iris (2008). “What is a ‘Difficult Poem’? Towards a Definition.” Journal of
Literary Semantics 37, 129–150.

5.2 Further Reading

Bordwell, David (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P.

– (2006). The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berke-
ley: U of California P.
Brown, Gillian (1995). Speakers, Listeners and Communication. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP.
Bublitz, Wolfram et al., eds. (1999). Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse: How
to Create it and How to Describe It. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Charolles, Michel et al. (1986). Research in Text Connexity and Text Coherence: A
Survey. Hamburg: Buske.
Chafe, Wallace, ed. (1980). The Pear Stories. Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic As-
pects of Narrative Production. Norwood: Ablex.
Herman, David (2005). “Events and Event Types.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 151–152.
Hühn, Peter (2005). “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry.” E. Müller-
Zettelmann & M. Rubik (eds.). Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 147–172.
Richardson, Brian, ed. (2008). Narrative Beginnings. Theories and Practices. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Sternberg, Meir (1993). Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
– (2001). “How Narrativity Makes a Difference.” Narrative 9, 115–122.
Trabasso, Tom et al. (1984). “Causal cohesion and story coherence.” H. Mandl et al.
(eds.). Learning and Comprehension of Text. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 83–111.
Viehoff, Reinhold (1988). “Preliminary Remarks to ‘Coherence’ in Understanding
Poems.” J. Petöfi & T. Olivi (eds.). From Verbal Constitution to Symbolic Mean-
ing. Hamburg: Buske, 397–414.
Vorderer, Paul et al., eds. (1996). Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses,
and Empirical Explorations. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
 Computational Narratology
Inderjeet Mani

1 Definition

Computational narratology is the study of narrative from the point of

view of computation and information processing. It focuses on the algo-
rithmic processes involved in creating and interpreting narratives, mod-
eling narrative structure in terms of formal, computable representations.
Its scope includes the approaches to storytelling in artificial intelligence
systems and computer (and video) games, the automatic interpretation
and generation of stories, and the exploration and testing of literary hy-
potheses through mining of narrative structure from corpora.
The use of the term ‘Computational Narratology’ covers several
senses: (i) a ‘humanities narratology’ sense, used in Meister (2003) to
designate a methodological instrument in the construction of narrato-
logical theories, from the standpoint of automatically extending narrato-
logical models to larger bodies of text, providing empirical testing of
their predictions in actual corpora, and precise and consistent explica-
tion of concepts; (ii) a ‘cognitive computing’ sense, used as a title for a
course (Goguen 2004) covering artefacts such as narrative texts, video
games, and computational artworks, and integrating insights from se-
miotics, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Fox Harrell has char-
acterized it further, as providing “techniques from computer science to
provide a language to describe cognitive insights and to implement nar-
rative effects of the type analyzed in discourse narratology” (Harrell
2007: 7); (iii) a ‘computational implementation of narratology’ sense
(cf. Cavazza & Pizzi [2006] and many others), referring to the importa-
tion of constructs from humanities narratology for implementation in
computer systems that carry out storytelling, along the lines of compu-
tational linguistics, where formalisms from linguistic theories are im-
plemented in systems.
 Computational Narratology 85

2 Explication

As “a humanities discipline dedicated to the study of the logic, princi-

ples, and practices of narrative representation” (Meister 2011; Meister
→ Narratology), narratology has a natural and substantial overlap with
the (scientific and engineering) disciplines involved in the development
of artificial intelligence systems aiming for human-like narrative behav-
ior, as well as the (engineering and aesthetic) practices involved in the
design of intelligent computer-based interfaces and game environments
for interacting with narratives. In the course of developing such sys-
tems, researchers have mapped narratological constructs to computa-
tional ones and elucidated interactions among them, formulating (some-
times implicitly) theoretical and empirical approaches to narrative.
Computational narratology has also been strongly influenced by lin-
guistic theories.
Computational narratology is a fast-evolving field, motivated in part
by the surge in popular interest in interactive games and entertainment
and their promise of offering engaging narratives with life-like charac-
ters. The pervasiveness of computer technology and digital media in
everyday life and cultural activity has substantially raised expectations
about their future involvement. The advent of the new millennium has
accordingly seen a spate of books, journal articles and conferences on
topics related to this subject.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Influences from Humanities Narratology

Research in computational narratology has absorbed and instantiated

approaches from humanities narratology that specify formal and/or log-
ical structure. The narratological differentiation of fabula versus sujet
(Šklovskij [1917] 1965; Tomaševskij [1925] 1971) has provided a scaf-
folding for much of the computational narratology work in story gener-
ation, where the fabula is usually implemented—as in Genette ([1972]
1980)—as the events of the entire narrative in chronological and causal
order prior to any verbalization thereof, and where the sujet is the final
generated output. Here events (Hühn → Event and Eventfulness), like
other narratological constructs, are given a precise and specific compu-
tational representation, involving their participants, places and times,
and in some cases their causes and effects. Focusing on fabula, algo-
rithms to generate story have incorporated the narrative functions of
86 Inderjeet Mani

Propp ([1928] 1968), e.g., Grasbon and Braun (2001); Peinado and
Gervás (2006) as well as those of Bremond (1970), e.g., Schäfer et al.
(2004); Cavazza and Charles (2005). More coarse-grained accounts of
the roles of characters in plot (Jannidis → Character), such as the narra-
tive arc of Freytag (1900) and the heroic quest of Campbell ([1949]
1990), have also inspired the design of many interactive narrative sys-
tems (Mateas & Stern 2005; Gervás et al. 2006). In relation to the sujet,
text information extraction systems (Mani et al. 2006; Mani 2010a)
have been able to infer Genette’s ([1972] 1980) temporal orderings
(Scheffel, Weixler & Werner → Time) by having the computer learn
from annotated corpora, while sentence generators such as Montfort
(2011) have used rules that can express any of Genette’s orderings with
a felicitous use of narrative voice, tense, and aspect.

3.2 Influences from Linguistics

Constructs which have emerged from linguistics, such as story gram-

mars, (e.g., Rumelhart 1980), have been widely elaborated and applied
in computational narratology, as in Bringsjord and Ferrucci (2000) and
Lang (2003). These notions, along with others arising independently
out of AI, such as scripts (Schank & Abelson 1977), have also (despite
their computational brittleness) influenced humanities narratology
(Emmott & Alexander → Schemata and Herman → Cognitive Narra-
tology). The contributions of corpus linguistics to narratology are also
well-recognized (Salway & Herman 2008), and in recent years, more
advanced text mining techniques have allowed for large-scale empirical
tests of literary hypotheses. For example, Elson et al. (2010) have been
able to automatically extract conversational social networks from the
dialogues between characters in 19th-century novels, disproving a
claim by the literary critic Moretti (1999) that urban novels reflect the
looser ties of city life, resulting in more characters sharing fewer con-
versations.

3.3 Computational Elaborations of Narratological Concepts

Computational narratology has also developed its own accounts of key

narratological concepts. An example is the fine-grained notion of plot
based on plot units (Lehnert 1981), which is derived, much as in
Bremond’s account, from a representation of events that involves char-
acterizing the motivations behind the actions of characters as well as
their emotional outcomes. While systems use such models of plot in
story generation, the inferential challenges involved in imputing mo-
 Computational Narratology 87

tives to characters in narrative understanding are substantial enough to

limit the ability of systems to fully extract a plot representation. How-
ever, Goyal et al. (2010) have developed, based on a corpus, a text un-
derstanding system that can infer characters’ emotions (or affect states)
associated with events, identifying which outcomes are beneficial,
harmful, or neutral for particular characters. More nuanced models of
characters’ emotions have also been explored. For example, the interac-
tive storytelling system of Pizzi (2011) is driven by plans that exploit
an inventory of characters’ feelings listed in Flaubert’s preliminary
studies for Madame Bovary; such a framework allows for a variety of
sentiment-driven interactive retellings of the novel. Another interesting
reformulation of a narratological construct is that of suspense. Cheong
(2007) generates stories judged to be suspenseful by modeling the
reader’s reasoning about limitations and conflicts involving a protago-
nist’s goals (Prince → Reader), based on narratological insights from
Gerrig and Bernado (1994).
For computational accounts to be made more relevant to humanities
narratology, two issues need to be confronted: (a) the challenge of in-
terdisciplinary communication across substantial methodological di-
vides, especially given the shift in interest of post-classical narratology
away from the precise analyses that characterized its structuralist phase;
(b) the fact that computational representations and techniques for story
generation are not general enough to concoct anything other than very
short, relatively simple stories (such as fairy tales), let alone epics or
novels (Gervás et al. 2006). The availability of multimillion-word nar-
rative corpora and advanced machine learning algorithms used for
training computational approaches can partially alleviate this problem,
though annotating narratological information can be expensive.

4 Trends in the Field

The search for generic computational methods that could be used across
narratives focused attention in the 1970s on planning formalisms. The
spotlight has remained there ever since, although the planning tech-
niques have evolved to accommodate ever-wider narratological con-
cerns. In planning terms, to understand a story requires inferring, based
on the Aristotelian notion of mythos, the causes of the events in the sto-
ry and the goals of the characters involved—in effect, reconstructing
from the sentences in the sujet a plan that corresponds to a causal chain
of events (or operators) that can transform the initial state of the story-
world into the final state. The inferred events in the chain can include
88 Inderjeet Mani

mental states and actions that may or may not be explicitly mentioned
in the sujet. Story understanding systems (e.g. Wilensky 1978) never
got very far, since (i) inferring characters’ goals involves a large search
space and the inferences may need to be revised during processing and
(ii) humans use a great deal of knowledge to interpret even simple sto-
ries. Given Forster’s exemplifying sentence “The king died and the
queen died of grief,” a child has no difficulty figuring out why the
queen was upset, but imparting a body of such commonsense know-
ledge to a computer is difficult; (iii) aspects of language that are hard to
formalize but that are important for story interpretation, such as humor,
irony, and subtle lexical associations, have by and large eluded compu-
tational approaches.
However, planning of fabulae for story generation, where the author
can limit the system considerably, has proved more viable (Gervás →
Story Generator Algorithms).
In recent years, interactive narrative has been the major driver in the
field, promising new varieties of aesthetic experience, aided by game
engines and vivid animations. One of the challenges here (Mateas &
Stern 2005) is retaining authorial control over the plot while granting
some freedom to the user (who may act as an animated protagonist) in
shaping the evolution of the narrative. Empowering the user can lead to
aesthetically unsatisfying outcomes, but restricting her through con-
straints from the plot can limit engagement. The need for generation of
text snippets and dialogue rather than full stories (Fludernik → Conver-
sational Narration – Oral Narration) to accompany storyworld anima-
tions has also spurred a trend of increased use of text generation based
on templates that map non-linguistic input directly to the linguistic out-
put form, sacrificing linguistic generalization for rapid prototyping.
Overall, key issues include the modeling of narrative progression and
the invention of suitable metrics for aesthetic satisfaction (Mani 2010a,
2010b).

5 Topics for Further Investigation

(1) As a hybrid of game and narrative that spans multiple media, inter-
active narrative represents a new and evolving genre. What novel con-
structs from computational narratology are applicable here, and which
old ones need refinement? (2) The computer-assisted annotation of
large-scale corpora with narratological information bearing on time,
place, plot, character, emotion, point-of-view, narrative embedding,
metalepsis, etc. is feasible when carried out as collaborative projects. In
 Computational Narratology 89

this respect the “crowd-sourcing” of narratological markup aims to

serve human readers by providing more comprehensive narratological
descriptions of narratives across an entire corpus, while at the same
time facilitating computer-based research into their narratological pat-
terns (cf. Meister 2012). Assuming that such efforts can advance com-
putational narratology and also test more foundational theories, which
models should be elaborated for corpus-level annotation efforts by the
community? (3) How should an empirical theory of aesthetic response
be formulated, and can this be exploited computationally?

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Bremond, Claude (1970). “Morphology of the French Folktale.” Semiotica 2, 347–375.

Bringsjord, Selmer & David A. Ferrucci (2000). Artificial Intelligence and Literary
Creativity: Inside the Mind of BRUTUS, a Storytelling Machine. Mahwah: Law-
rence Erlbaum.
Campbell, Joseph ([1949] 1990). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Harper
& Row.
– & F. Charles (2005). “Dialogue Generation in Character-based Interactive Story-
telling.” AAAI First Annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Enter-
tainment Conference, Marina del Rey, California [1] (http://www.scm.tees.ac.uk-
/f.charles/publications/conferences/2005/AIIDE05CavazzaM.pdf).
– & D. Pizzi (2006). “Narratology for Interactive Storytelling: A Critical Introduc-
tion.” S. Gobel et al. (eds.), Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and
Entertainment. Third International Conference. Lecture Notes in Computer Sci-
ence, 4326. Berlin: Springer.
Cheong, Y. G. (2007). A Computational Model of Narrative Generation for Suspense.
PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Elson, David K. et al. (2010). “Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction.”
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL’2010), 138–147.
Freytag, Gustav (1900). Freytag’s Technique of the drama : an exposition of dramatic
composition and art. Transl. by Elias J. MacEwan. Chicago: Scott, Foresman.
Gerrig, R. & D. Bernardo (1994) Readers as problem-solvers in the experience of sus-
pense. Poetics 22, 459–472.
Gervás, Pablo et al. (2006). “Narrative Models: Narratology Meets Artificial Intelli-
gence.” Proceedings of the LREC-06 workshop Toward Computational Models of
Literary Analysis, Genoa, Italy.
90 Inderjeet Mani

Goguen, Joseph (2004). CSE 87C Winter 2004 Freshman Seminar on Computational
Narratology. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of
California, San Diego [2] (http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/courses/87w04/).
Goyal, Amit et al. (2010). “Automatically Producing Plot Unit Representations for
Narrative Text.” Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in
Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’2010), 77–86 [3] (http://www.aclweb-
.org/anthology-new/D/D10/D10-1008.pdf).
Grasbon, D. & N. Braun (2001). “A Morphological Approach to Interactive Storytell-
ing.” Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, CAST
'01, Living in Mixed Realities, Sankt Augustin, Germany, 337–340 [4]
(http://netzspannung.org/version1/extensions/cast01- proceedings/pdf/by_name-
/Grasbon.pdf).
Harrell, D. A. (2007). Theory and Technology for Computational Narrative. PhD The-
sis, Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, University of Cali-
fornia, San Diego.
Lang, R. (2003). “A Declarative Model for Simple Narratives.” M. Mateas & P. Sen-
gers (eds.), Narrative Intelligence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lehnert, W. G. (1981). “Plot Units: A Narrative Summarization Strategy.” W. G.
Lehnert & M. H. Ringle (eds.), Strategies for Natural Language Processing.
Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Mani, Inderjeet (2010a). The Imagined Moment. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
– (2010b). “Predicting Reader Response in Narrative.” 3rd Workshop on Intelligent
Narrative Technologies. Foundations of Digital Games Conference, Monterey,
CA, June 18, 2010.
– et al. (2006). “Machine Learning of Temporal Relations.” Proceedings of the
44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney,
Australia, 753–760.
Mateas, M. & A. Stern (2005). “Structuring Content in the Facade Interactive Drama
Architecture.” Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital En-
tertainment (AIIDE 2005), Marina del Rey.
Meister, Jan Christoph (2003). Computing Action. A Narratological Approach. Berlin:
de Gruyter.
– (2012). “Crowd sourcing “true meaning”. A collaborative markup approach to
textual interpretation.” W. McCarty & M. Deegan (eds.), Festschrift for Harold
Short. Surrey: Ashgate Publishers.
Montfort, Nick (2011). “Curveship's Automatic Narrative Variation.” Proceedings of
the 6th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG
'11), 211–18, Bordeaux, France.
Moretti, Franco (1999). Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso.
Peinado, Federico & Pablo Gervás (2006). “Evaluation of Automatic Generation of
Basic Stories.” New Generation Computing 24, 289–302.
Pizzi, D. (2011). Emotional Planning for Character-based Interactive Storytelling. PhD
Thesis, School of Computing, Teesside University, Middlesbrough.
Propp, Vladimir ([1928] 1968, 1988). Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd edn. Austin: U
of Texas P.
 Computational Narratology 91

Rumelhart, David E. (1980). “On Evaluating Story Grammars.” Cognitive Science 4,

313–316.
Salway, Andrew & David Herman (2008). “Digitized Corpora as Theory-Building
Resource: New Foundations for Narrative Inquiry.” R. Page & B. Thomas (eds.),
New Narratives: Theory and Practice. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Schäfer, L. et al. (2004). “Storynet: An Educational Game for Social Skills.” S. Göbel
et al. (eds.), Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment,
Second International Conference, TIDSE 2004, LNCS 3105. Berlin: Springer,
148–157.
Schank, Roger C. & Robert P. Abelson (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understand-
ing: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Šklovskij, Viktor B. (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1917] 1965). “Art as a Technique.” L. T.
Lemon & M. J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 3–24.
Tomaševskij, Boris (Tomashevsky) ([1925] 1971). A Theory of Literature. Letchworth:
Bradda Books.
Wilensky, Robert W. (1978). “Understanding Goal-based Stories.” Yale University
Computer Science Research Report.

6.2 Further Reading

Callaway, Charles (2000). Narrative Prose Generation. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department

of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina.
Correira, A. (1980). “Computing Story Trees.” American Journal of Computational
Linguistics 6.3–4, 135–149.
Cullingford, R. E. (1978). “Script application: Computer understanding of newspaper
stories.” Research Report 116. Computer Science Department, Yale University.
DeJong, G. F. (1982). “An Overview of the FRUMP System. W. G. Lehnert & M. H.
Ringle (eds.), Strategies for Natural Language Processing. Hillsdale: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 149–176.
Elson, David K. (2012). “Dramabank: Annotating agency in narrative discourse.” Pro-
ceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation (LREC 2012).
Finlayson, Mark A. (2009). “Deriving narrative morphologies via analogical story
merging.” B. Kokinov et al. (eds.), New Frontiers in Analogy Research. Sofia:
NBU P.
Hobbs, Jerry (1990). Literature and Cognition. Lecture Notes, Number 21, Center for the
Study of Language and Information, Stanford, California. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Kazantseva , Anna & Stan Szpakowicz (2010). “Summarizing Short Stories.” Compu-
tational Linguistics 36.1, 71–109.
Lebowitz, M. (1985). “Story-telling as planning and learning.” Poetics 14: 483–502.
Lehnert, Wendy et al. (1983). “Boris—an experiment in in-depth understanding of
narratives.” Artificial Intelligence 20, 15–62.
Löwe, Benedikt (2010). “Comparing formal frameworks of narrative structures.” Com-
putational Models of Narrative: Papers from the 2010 AAAI Fall Symposium,
Menlo Park, California.
92 Inderjeet Mani

Mani, Inderjeet (2013). Computational Modeling of Narrative. San Rafael: Morgan &
Claypool.
Mateas, M. (2000). “A Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Interactive Drama”. Working Notes
of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Enter-
tainment. Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press.
Meehan, James R. (1977). The Metanovel: writing stories on computer. PhD Thesis,
Department of Computer Science, Yale University.
Mueller, Erik T. (2002). “Story understanding.” N. Lynn (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cogni-
tive Science 4, 238–246. London: Nature Publishing Group.
– (2004). “Understanding script-based stories using commonsense reasoning.”
Cognitive Systems Research 5.4, 307–340.
Pérez y Pérez, R. & M. Sharples (2004). “Three Computer-Based Models of Storytell-
ing: BRUTUS, MINSTREL and MEXICA.” Knowledge-Based Systems 17.1, 15–
29.
Reed, Aaron (2010). Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. Independence: Course
Technology PTR.
Riedl, Mark O. & R. Michael Young (2010). “Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and
Character.” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 39, 217–268.
Turner, Scott R. (1994). The Creative Process: A Computer Model for Storytelling and
Creativity. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.

6.3 Web Resources

[AAAI Symposia http://www.aaai.org/Press/Reports/reports.php]

[Computational Linguistics for Literature http://sites.google.com/site/clfl2012/]
[ICIDS — Interactive Storytelling http://www.icids.org/]
[Intelligent Narrative Technologies http://www.aaai.org/Library/Workshops/ws11-
18.php]
[Computational Models of Narrative http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/ws13/]
 Conversational Narration – Oral Narration
Monika Fludernik

1 Definition

“Oral narrative” is a term that covers a number of different types of

storytelling: spontaneous conversational narrative (“natural narrative”);
institutionalized oral narrative in an oral culture context; oral bardic
poetry; simulations of orality in written texts by means of narrative
strategies such as pseudo-orality or skaz. For narratology, oral narrative
has been important at two different stages of the discipline. In Russian
formalism (especially in the work of Propp) and during the 1960s (es-
pecially in the work of Bremond and Greimas) fairytales, which had
their basis in orally transmitted storytelling, were used to analyze the
deep structure of narrative and to discover functions of plot elements
and typical actant structures (Jannidis → Character). More recently,
Herman, Fludernik and others, inspired by discourse analysis, have
concentrated on conversational storytelling both as an interesting type
of narrative in and by itself and as a prototype of all narration. This
work has additionally had a close affinity with cognitive studies (Her-
man → Cognitive Narratology). Institutionalized oral narrative as in the
Homeric epics focuses on both the deep and the surface structure of
narrative, analyzing plot-related motifs and the repetition of epitheta
and formulae on the discourse level. The technique of pseudo-orality,
finally, is a secondary phenomenon. It refers to the evocation of charac-
ters’ mode of utterance (especially in terms of dialect and colloquiality)
in the written representation of speech.

2 Explication

The basic prototype of oral narrative is spontaneous conversational nar-

rative. This covers narratives produced in face-to-face exchanges in a
variety of contexts such as storytelling sequences at dinner parties, brief
narratives interspersed in telephone conversations or in doctor/patient
and lawyer/client exchanges. In the wake of Labov and Waletzky
94 Monika Fludernik

(1967) “natural narrative” has become the established term for this type
of oral narration. In German, the Alltagserzählung (e.g. Ehlich ed.
1980) is current, emphasizing the fact that conversational narrative oc-
curs in the framework of everyday interaction. Spontaneous (or unsolic-
ited) conversational narrative must be distinguished from solicited nar-
ratives told to interviewers. In the corpus of the Survey of English
Usage (London), now the London-Lund Corpus, mealtime conversa-
tions, telephone conversations, etc. were taped in which narratives
spontaneously occurred without solicitation or elicitation by the re-
searcher. By contrast, in Labov’s (1972) study, the material comes from
solicited narratives in which interviewers asked African-American
youths to tell stories about specific personal experiences. The same
method was adopted for more extended acts of storytelling in Terkel
([1984] 1990). Unsolicited conversational storytelling takes place in
very diverse circumstances, but it is also present in much informal ex-
change on the telephone, in social gatherings, etc. In the latter case, sto-
ry sequences may emerge in which the conversation develops into a
series of narratives (one joke after the other, one story after the other
about one’s worst experience with doctors, etc.). Spontaneously occur-
ring natural narrative has received extensive analysis in the linguistic
sub-disciplines of discourse analysis and conversation analysis. (See
Brown & Yule 1983; Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998; Jaworski & Coupland
eds. 1999; Johnstone [2002] 2008 for the former, and Atkinson & Her-
itage eds. 1984; Psathas 1995; Schegloff 2007 for the latter.)
The second and third prototypes of oral narration characterize insti-
tutionalized storytelling in an oral culture context. On the one hand, this
includes oral poetry, on the other, traditional and not necessarily poetic
(i.e. verse-form) storytelling. Based partly on the work of Lord (1960)
and Parry (ed. 1971), Ong (1982), Foley (1990, 1995) and others have
studied the emergence of traditional epic poetry and noted extensive
similarities in structure and style between Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey and
the oral epics of the Balkans (guslar poetry). Much of this research fo-
cuses on the complexity of epic poetry and on how oral production
manages to create and sustain it with the help of formulaic elements. In
addition, Parry’s insights into the Homeric epics and Lord’s analyses of
contemporary guslar poetry raise questions regarding transformation
from the oral to the written poetic tradition.
In addition to the tradition of oral poetry, where long epics in verse
are performed, there are cultures in which narratives are presented by a
storyteller to an audience that interacts with the narrator while the story
is being told, serving as a kind of chorus or speaker of refrains. Such
oral narratives can be found in various parts of the world, e.g. in Cana-
 Conversational Narration – Oral Narration 95

da (Tedlock 1983), in African countries, and in India. In contrast to

spontaneous conversational storytelling, this type of storytelling has an
appointed bard who is a practiced performer; nor is it framed by an on-
going conversation between a small number of interlocutors in which
stories are longer turns in verbal exchange. Even so, oral poetry and
oral storytelling in traditional cultural contexts do have a frame: the
institutional frame which gives the storyteller his exclusive “turn” as
performer, providing for audience/bard interaction in ritualized re-
sponses.
It could be argued that anecdotes, exempla, parables and similar
short narrative forms introduced into sermons, speeches or lectures con-
stitute an intermediate type of oral narration. In these contexts, narra-
tives are inserted into ongoing oral discourse (as in spontaneous con-
versational narratives), but with one dominant speaker (as in oral
poetry) rather than a framing conversational exchange.
The fourth type of oral narrative is “pseudo-oral discourse” (fin-
gierte Mündlichkeit; cf. Goetsch 1985). Although, literally, the evoca-
tion of orality in literary narrative has nothing to do with actual conver-
sational storytelling, this phenomenon is widespread in literary texts
and therefore of crucial importance to the narratologist. Pseudo-orality
occurs in two forms in literary (and sometimes in non-literary) narra-
tives: the representation of dialect or foreign speech in written dialogue
and the evocation of an oral narrator persona, as in the skaz (Ėjxenbaum
1918). As pointed out by Leech and Short (1981: 167–170), the tran-
scription of oral speech in literary dialogue aims not at a phonologically
precise rendering of dialect, but at accentuating typical dialect features.
By orthographic means, authors thus seek to highlight the differences
between standard written language and dialectal forms. Pseudo-orality
should be distinguished from cases of an actual linguistic oral substrate
as in the transposing of oral narrative into written (frequently verse)
discourse. The question to what extent oral features in vernacular medi-
eval texts are traces of an oral origin (as in oral poetry) or intentional
superadded markers of oral delivery on the lines of skaz, hence signs of
pseudo-orality, has been discussed controversially (Chinca & Young
2005; Vitz et al. 2005; Reichl 2012).
In addition to narratives that evoke linguistic alterity by stressing
stereotypical features, there are narratives that give prominence to a
pseudo-oral narrative voice, a teller figure whose style suggests that the
discourse has been uttered rather than written down. Such evocation of
orality in narrative report can be based on the combination of several
techniques. In English literature, it requires the avoidance of literate
vocabulary and complex syntax. Thus, pseudo-oral narrators, such as
96 Monika Fludernik

Holden in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, are often garrulous,

repetitive, contradictory and illogical; they keep interrupting them-
selves and tend to address a fictive listener or audience familiarly; they
seem to have an intimate rapport with the fictional world, to which they
apparently belong, and also do not shy away from expressing their feel-
ings and views emphatically, thus setting themselves off from the typi-
cal authorial narrators of literary texts—aloof, bland, reliable, neutral.
Russian skaz (cf. Ėjxenbaum [1918] 1975; Vinogradov [1925] 1980;
Schmid 2005: 156–176) often falls under this category of the pseudo-
oral, but at times undermines the mimetic quality of the represented
discourse by having a naïve peasant narrator resort to inappropriately
elevated (stylized) diction, e.g. the register of the legal or administrative
elite. It must be noted that the evocation of orality in literary texts is
just that: an evocation or stylization produced by highlighting the most
striking features of oral language. What counts for narrative purposes is
not a faithful copy of the “original” utterance in all its linguistic detail,
but the effect of deviation from the norm through quaintness, informali-
ty, intimacy, lack of education, cultural difference, class ascription. The
simplifications and exaggerations of the linguistic features of orality
and/or register therefore serve the purpose of facilitating identification,
stereotyping, “local color,” or effet de réel. The technique is also used
to characterize the narrator persona, just as dialect in the dialogue of
19th-century fiction tends to underline class difference, lack of educa-
tion or idiosyncrasy (cf. Dickens, Scott or Trollope).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Returning to the first category, spontaneous conversational narratives, a

closer look will be taken at research results in discourse analysis and
conversation analysis before going on to discuss their relevance for pre-
sent-day narratology.

3.1 Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis

Discourse analysis developed as a sub-discipline of pragmatics, i.e.

language in use (Levinson 1983). More immediately, it derives from
the work of sociologists, in particular Sacks (1992). Sacks began by
analyzing telephone exchanges at a call center and then went on to es-
tablish the basic rules of conversation, notably (in narrative sequences)
“turn-taking,” “adjacency pairs,” “overlap,” “repair” and “abstracts.”
His initial research (in 1972) was followed by a landmark contribution
 Conversational Narration – Oral Narration 97

(Sacks et al. 1974) which concentrated on turn-taking. It was found that

conversations are structured by turns taken and held by each speaker. In
narratives, speakers are allowed longer turns, provided the interlocutors
are alerted to the speaker’s intention to delve into a story. In ordinary
conversation, turns often come in adjacency pairs, particularly at the
beginning of exchanges: greeting/greeting; question/answer; re-
quest/agreement or compliance; command/compliance; identifica-
tion/recognition (telephone); etc. Interlocutors frequently interrupt each
other and overlap (B starts to speak while A is completing his/her turn),
but they also proceed in fits and starts and may start their sentences
over (repair): e.g. “I wanted… (pause) I was wondering… (pause)
could you tell me when flight LS 03 comes in?” These frame conditions
have a significant impact on how narratives are produced in spontane-
ous conversational narrative.
Discourse analysis has also been heavily influenced by Labov
(1972) and his school of discourse study, which remains fundamental to
the study of conversational narrative. Labov collected narratives elicit-
ed in interviews with young African-American males, and from this
material he developed a model of the structure of natural narrative.
Labov and Waletzky (1967) propose a model of episodic narrative con-
sisting of a basic structure: abstract; orientation; narrative clauses (in-
sert clauses of delayed orientation and evaluation); result; coda. Ab-
stract and coda provide a link with the conversational frame, while the
orientation section introduces characters and setting. The authors also
introduced the terms “point” and “reportability” or “tellability”: to be
effective, narratives must be “newsworthy” (reportable) and have a
“point” (demonstrate something). These features play a crucial role in
Fludernik’s definition of experientiality, which consists in the dialectic
of tellability and point (1996: 26–30; Baroni → Tellability).
Discourse analysis since Sacks and Labov has developed in great
strides. Many fruitful insights into natural narrative and oral exchange
have been gained by Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, Schiffrin, Chafe, Tan-
nen, Quasthoff, etc. Besides focusing on the structure and syntactic and
lexical peculiarities of natural narrative, this research has moved into
elucidating the psychological and cultural functions of conversational
storytelling (Bamberg ed. 1997; Ochs & Capps 2001), the construction
of identity (Lucius-Hoene & Deppermann 2004), and questions of gen-
der (Tannen 1990) as well as the aesthetic effects of using quoted
speech or thought (Schiffrin 1981).
Conversational exchanges, including narratives, come not in sen-
tences but in discourse units (Chafe calls them “idea” or “intonation
units”) which are set apart by pauses and the completion of frames
98 Monika Fludernik

(Ono & Thompson 1995). To keep an audience’s interest, natural narra-

tive is often repetitious and interlaced with verbatim dialogue by the
participants in the events and even quotations from their thoughts, thus
fictionalizing and dramatizing stories in ways that are reminiscent of
novels or short stories (Tannen 1984, 1989; Fludernik 1993: 398–433).
Conversational narratives also employ narrative and non-narrative “dis-
course markers” (Schiffrin 1987), namely particles (mostly adverbs)
placed in conjunct or adjunct position of a clause but whose “meaning”
remains vague. They serve primarily macro-structural discourse func-
tions such as initiation of a new topic, return from a side remark to the
main topic, capturing the interlocutors’ attention, etc. Specifically nar-
rative discourse markers shift between the on-plot and the off-plot lev-
els of conversational narratives, and they also mark the key points of
narrative episodes (Fludernik 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1996).
More recently, conversation analysis has been established as a still
more refined research discipline for examining conversational ex-
change. According to Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998), discourse analysis
describes the systematic, rule-governed features of natural narrative,
whereas conversation analysis is concerned with the performative and
interactive aspects of conversational exchange. In particular, conversa-
tion analysis studies the online production of utterances and the unfa-
miliar shape of oral syntax (Atkinson & Heritage eds. 1984; Longacre
[1983] 1996; Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998; Schegloff 2007). However,
few conversation analysts deal with narrative, Quasthoff and Becker
(eds. 2005) being an exception.
Another sub-discipline, having more literary credentials, is critical
discourse analysis (Hodge & Kress [1979] 1993; Fairclough 1995;
Carter 1997; Wodak & Meyer 2001; Blommaert 2005), which studies
how discourses generate, transmit and perpetuate ideologies and inter-
pellate readers. Two handbooks of discourse analysis also discuss some
aspects of critical discourse analysis (van Dijk ed. 1997; Schiffrin et al.,
eds. 2001).

3.2 Oral Poetry and Narratology

Analyses of oral poetry have concentrated on two questions: formulai-

city and motifs. The formulaic repertoire of the epic was found to em-
ploy recurring epitheta for common objects and heroes such as “the
crafty Ulysses.” Whole verse lines are repeated nearly verbatim in order
to facilitate oral composition and delivery. The oral epic is also charac-
terized by a recurrence of typical motifs such as greeting between host
and guest, raising of the cup, embarkation, burial of the fallen hero.
 Conversational Narration – Oral Narration 99

More narratologically relevant are discussions of narrative episodes

based on Bremond (1973), revealing the affinity between the structure
of the epic and that of the fairy tale (cf. Wittig 1978). However, due to
narratology’s concentration on the novel and on prose fiction, there has
been little narratological analysis of epic verse narrative in English
studies. However, scholars in classics have contributed immensely to
the narratological study of ancient Greek and Latin narrative, including
the verse epic. (See especially de Jong 2001, 2004; Grethlein &
Rengakos 2009).

3.3 Relevance of Conversational Narrative for Narratology

While classical narratology, in the foundational work of Propp ([1928]

1968) and Bremond (1973), analyzed short forms of narrative (the fair-
ytale), the emphasis fell on event sequences rather than on the oral de-
livery of such tales (in the absence of tape recordings, written transcrip-
tions were used). Narratological models such as those of Genette and
Stanzel shifted their interest to the discourse level of narratives but
were primarily concerned with the novel, largely disregarding narra-
tives prior to the 18th century and all forms of oral narration. Between
the complexity and sophistication of the novel and seemingly unstruc-
tured, syntactically misformed conversational narratives, a wide gap
was perceived, felt to be unbridgeable.
However, in the 1970s discourse analysts increasingly undertook re-
search into the structure of conversational narratives, analyzing them in
their own right. In addition to studies by Labov, Tannen, Johnstone and
Chafe for English, major work was carried out for German (Ehlich ed.
1980; Quasthoff 1980; Quasthoff & Becker eds. 2005; Brinker & Sager
[1989] 2006) and French (Gülich 1970; Mondada ed. 1995; Kerbrat-
Orecchioni 1996, 2001). In the field of narratology, two researchers
have drawn inspiration from conversational narrative as a major source
of their own work.
Herman (1997, 1999) pleads for the relevance of natural narratives
for postclassical narratology. Taking a cue from Young (1999), who
examines the performative nature of spontaneous conversational narra-
tive and the creation and maintenance of self in patient/doctor exchang-
es, Herman proposes a model of conversational storytelling treated as
an interactive process in which the borders between ongoing conversa-
tion and story are marked. He underlines the “jointly referential and
evaluating function” (1999: 231) of modal expressions and repetitions
in conversational narratives and emphasizes their “interactional
achievement.” Based on a cognitive model in which producers of sto-
100 Monika Fludernik

ries and their listeners rely on cognitive action schemata and inferences
drawn from the events related or from information provided by the nar-
rator, Herman presents narratives (in his example: elicited ghost stories)
as relying on “a process of negotiation between storytellers and their
interlocutors” (239). His ultimate aim is to examine narrative compe-
tence in conversational narrative.
Fludernik moved into the study of conversational narrative through
the problem of the historical present tense. She developed a model of
episodic narrative structure (a modification of Labov) in which the his-
torical present tense can occur at key points in a narrative episode
(1991, 1992a), serving a highlighting function (in modification of
Wolfson 1982). Fludernik (1996) went on to define conversational sto-
rytelling as a prototype of narrative tout court. She maintains that con-
versational narrative is basically about experientiality and that this is
also true of the fictional narrative of novels and short stories (53–91),
therefore providing a bridge between oral and written forms of narra-
tive on the basis of narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity) and the purpose
of storytelling (point and tellability). She further demonstrates that sub-
strata of the oral pattern of narrative episodes can be traced in English
medieval and early modern texts (92–128). In the history of English
literature, the formal structure of the novel, which looks so very differ-
ent from that of conversational narratives, developed slowly out of its
oral roots in episodic narrative.
Over the past forty years, massive material has become available to
discourse analysts. Much of it was gathered in medical or therapeutic
contexts (cf. Bamberg ed. 1997), but oral history has also produced ex-
tensive records (Perks & Thomson eds. [1990] 2006). One sophisticated
model of conversational storytelling is provided by Lucius-Hoene and
Deppermann (2004), describing conversational narrative as a process of
ego construction, presentation of self, and negotiation of identities. In
focusing on these performative issues, the authors come strikingly close
to the kind of analysis of literary narratives undertaken by literary crit-
ics (Bamberg → Identity and Narration).

4 Topics for Further Research

Now that so much conversational narrative is available in transcript,

there is ample opportunity for narratological analysis of this material.
The handling of dialogue and thought processes in conversational nar-
ratives, the management of time schemata, deictic shifts, the question of
whether the concept of focalization (Niederhoff → Focalization) should
 Conversational Narration – Oral Narration 101

be used in the analysis of conversational narratives—these topics and

more could well come into the scope of extensive research. Particularly
with the narrative turn at the end of the 20th century, such an emphasis
on naturally occurring stories could provide an increasing awareness of
the affinity between natural narrative and more literary and elaborated
forms of storytelling.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Atkinson, John Maxwell & John Heritage, eds. (1984). Structures of Social Action:
Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Bamberg, Michael, ed. (1997). Oral Versions of Personal Experience. Three Decades
of Narrative Analysis. Special Issue of Journal of Narrative and Life History 7.
Blommaert, Jan (2005). Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Bremond, Claude (1973). Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil.
Brinker, Klaus & Sven F. Sager ([1989] 2006). Linguistische Gesprächsanalyse. Ber-
lin: Schmidt.
Brown, Gillian & George Yule (1983). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Carter, Ronald (1997). Investigating English Discourse. London: Routledge.
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104 Monika Fludernik

Young, Katherine (1999). “Narratives of Indeterminacy: Breaking the Medical Body

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bus: Ohio State UP, 197–217.

5.2 Further Reading

Norrick, Neal R. (2000). Conversational Narrative. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Polanyi, Livia (1985). Telling the American Story: A Structural and Cultural Analysis
of Conversational Storytelling. Norwood: Ablex.
Renkema, Jan (2004). Introduction to Discourse Studies. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Ten Have, Paul (1999). Doing Conversation Analysis. A Practical Guide. Thousand
Oaks: Sage.
Vitz, Evelyn Birge (1999). Orality and Performance in Early French Romance. Cam-
bridge: Brewer.
Zumthor, Paul ([1983] 1990). Oral Poetry. An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minne-
sota P.
 Corporate Storytelling
Birgitte Norlyk, Marianne Wolff Lundholt & Per Krogh Hansen

1 Definition

Corporate storytelling designates private and public companies’ and

organizations’ strategic utilization of stories and storytelling (in the
broad sense of man’s ability to tell and understand narratives) to create
coherence and progression concerning the companies’ or organizations’
brand, identity and development. The term ‘story’ does not follow the
traditional narratological definition of a story (as proceeding from the
paradigmatic story/discourse distinction of narratology) when applied
in the field of corporate storytelling. This reflects the general looseness
of the application of narratological terms commonly used in the story-
telling context. In general, the specific narratological terminology is in
this context rather applied as a set of tools to reach a more value-based
approach to the sensemaking of organizations and their stakeholders.

2 Explication

The concept of corporate storytelling belongs to the somewhat amor-

phous field within business communication called “corporate commu-
nication.” The idea is that the organization is a “body” (a corpus) which
needs to coordinate its parts and movements to function and develop
correctly. Corporate communication is therefore characterized by ac-
tivities involved in managing and orchestrating all internal and external
communication and by the attempt to control or influence corporate
‘stakeholders’. In business communication and management ‘stake-
holders’ is understood as all those (individuals, groups, organizations or
systems) who affects or can be affected by the organization’s actions,
i.e. individuals, groups or organizations with an interest in the activities
of the organization: shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Green Peace or Doc-
tors without Borders, local communities, the media, etc. (Friedman &
Miles 2006; Cornelissen 2004).
106 Birgitte Norlyk, Marianne Wolf Lundholt & Per Krogh Hansen

Seen from a narratological point of view, stakeholders cannot be

considered as mere ‘actors’ (that is characters taking up actantial posi-
tions) in the story of the organization. They are also co-narrators and
narratees, so that the clear-cut (and often abstract) categories and con-
cepts of narratology pertain only to a limited extent to studying and
working with corporate storytelling. For this reason, the concept
‘stakeholders’ is adopted to mediate between the pragmatic aspect and
the communicative aspect of this special storytelling situation.
By conceptualizing producers and recipients of the corporate narra-
tive as ‘stakeholders’, we acknowledge the fact that they produce and
process corporate narratives against the backdrop of their individual,
pragmatic and extra-narrative interests.
In a strategic business context, storytelling is understood as the con-
scious attempt to produce, promote or change a story. Thus, within the
framework of corporate communication, narratives or narrative ele-
ments are used to establish and maintain the organizational brand, im-
age, culture and identity of various groups of internal and external
stakeholders. New media are often used to facilitate mutual dialogue
between the organization and its stakeholders. Stories or fragments of
stories related in corporate blogs and Facebook groups help the organi-
zation gain an understanding of how the different stakeholders perceive
the organizational identity and brand. In a communicative context, sto-
rytelling enables organizations to establish dialogical relationships with
multiple stakeholders. For organizations, the overall strategic purpose is
to use and control stories inside and outside the organization in order to
establish long-lasting, value-based relationships with different groups
of stakeholders in order to strengthen the corporate brand and differen-
tiate the organization from its competitors.
An essential challenge of corporate communication concerns man-
agement’s ability to control all aspects of storytelling in a diverse and
complex context of multiple stakeholders. Formal storytelling (e.g.
founder stories and stories of corporate heroes that serve as role models
for the socialization of current and future employees) lies within the
realm of management control and is therefore subordinate to a pragmat-
ic function. Founder stories can be compared with Medieval exempla
and with the religious stories of the lives of the saints.
Other types of stories, however, are beyond managerial control: in-
formal stories or counter-stories told by employees or other stakehold-
ers such as the media, NGOs or investors may challenge formal stories
of front-stage activities, as was the case when Foxconn (a manufacturer
for e.g. Apple) admitted to finding underage interns as young as 14
working at one of its factories in China (Putnam et al. 2005; Mumby &
 Corporate Storytelling 107

Clair 1997; Deetz & Mumby 1990). This did not correspond with Ap-
ple’s commitment to ensuring that the working conditions in their sup-
ply chain were “safe, [that] workers are treated with respect and digni-
ty, and [that] manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible”
(Apple.com). As in this case, informal stories and their discourse may
reflect negatively on the corporate image and identity, especially if the
formal stories are not authentic in their presentation of corporate culture
and corporate patterns of meanings (Martin 2002).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Once marginalized as a way of distinguishing between fact and fiction,

the term ‘storytelling’ has developed into an academic tool applied in a
broad range of scientific disciplines throughout the later part of the 20th
century. With MacIntyre’s (1981) claim that man is a “storytelling ani-
mal” and Fisher’s (1984) characterization of man as ‘homo narrans’,
storytelling, by the end of the 20th century, came to be considered an
omnipresent meaning-making concept applied in a broad range of nar-
rative processes (journalism, personal identity, movies, etc.). It was in
this historic turn towards stories as a conscious sensemaking tool that
corporate storytelling was born. Dutch management and communica-
tion scholar van Riel established himself in the 1990s as a frontrunner
in the development of corporate communication by stressing the im-
portance of stories and value-based stakeholder communication. With
the term “common starting point” (CSP), van Riel laid a strong founda-
tion for further development of corporate storytelling based on a com-
mon denominator (what he initially referred to as “accent”) for internal
and external communication in organizations. “Accent” refers to a
common platform—or what could be referred to as a common story-
line—that must remain intact in order to achieve well-balanced com-
munication.
The strategic importance of corporate storytelling was stressed at the
turn of the millennium in two influential works by Denning (2001,
2005). Denning establishes the concept of business narratives as ‘sto-
ries with a small s’ in contrast to ‘stories with a capital S’, as represent-
ed in established literary genres such as epics, novels and short stories.
108 Birgitte Norlyk, Marianne Wolf Lundholt & Per Krogh Hansen

3.1 First Wave of Theories of Corporate Communication:

Controlling Communication

Taking its starting point around the turn of the millennium, the first
wave of theories on corporate communication focused on the im-
portance of managerial control and responsibility in the orchestration of
all communication activities within the organization (van Riel 1995;
Cornelissen 2004). During this period, communication was seen as be-
ing too important to be left to the communication department alone.
Visual and non-verbal statements such as logos, product designs, col-
ors, artifacts, dress codes as well as verbal manifestations including
press releases, slogans, mission and vision statements, Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR) activities, blogs, etc. were all regarded as mani-
festations of a corporate story of uniqueness, culture, identity and
brand. Hence, corporate communication and corporate brand must
clearly and coherently communicate to all stakeholders “who we are
and what we stand for” (Hatch & Schultz 2000: 15). From a business
perspective, long-term survival depends on the creation of a strong cor-
porate brand and a unique corporate identity that help differentiate the
organization from its competitors by establishing permanent value-
based relationships with stakeholders. The strategic focus on the im-
portance of building long-lasting relationships with stakeholders is re-
flected in the increasing focus on ‘corporate reputation’ as opposed to
‘corporate image.’ Corporate reputation refers to stakeholders’ long-
term relationship with the corporation or organization, whereas corpo-
rate image refers to a short-term and less stable relationship at a given
moment of time (Cornelissen 2004). The five pillars of successful cor-
porate reputation rely on a stable and coherent communication of cor-
porate visibility, distinction, authenticity, transparency and consistency
in the total sum of corporate activities (Fombrun & van Riel 2004).
Communication scholar Cornelissen operates with the following,
much quoted, definition of corporate communication: “Corporate com-
munication is a management function that offers a framework and vo-
cabulary for the effective coordination of all means of communication
with the overall purpose of establishing and maintaining favourable
reputations with stakeholder groups upon which the organization is de-
pendent” (2004: 23). The same point is made by van Riel, who defines
corporate communication as “an instrument of management” (1995: 26)
whose overall purpose is to create and maintain a favorable basis for
relationships with all stakeholder groups. In the context of building re-
lationships with corporate stakeholders, storytelling performs an im-
portant strategic role as a pathos-based sensemaking tool, as pointed out
 Corporate Storytelling 109

by Denning: “Storytelling is natural and easy. Stories help us under-

stand complexity. Stories can enhance or change perceptions. Stories
are easy to remember […] they bypass normal defense mechanisms and
engage our feelings” (2001: 9).

3.2 Second Wave of Corporate Communication:

The Contradictional Corpus

From roughly 2010, the term “corporate” increasingly refers to a holis-

tic understanding of the organization as one coherent and coordinated
body (corpus). The body metaphor implies the additional existence of a
corporate voice which is the total net effect of all the ways a company
communicates organizational values and purpose to its stakeholders
(e.g. Deutsche Telekom’s Guiding Principles (2013): “Customer delight
drives our actions, Respect and integrity guide our behavior, Team to-
gether—Team apart, Best place to perform and grow, I am T—Count
on me”).
The corporate voice helps present the organization as a unified and
integrated whole to groups of multiple stakeholders. However, the sec-
ond wave of research on corporate communication challenges the as-
sumption of unity and questions whether or not it is indeed “possible
and desirable for an organization to communicate as one whole” (Chris-
tensen et al. 2008: vii) and to speak with one voice. The second wave of
corporate communication thus introduces the concept of multiple voices
in postmodern organizations and the concept of antenarratives. Accord-
ing to Boje, “stories are antenarratives when told without the proper
plot sequence and mediated coherence preferred in narrative theory”
(2001: 3). Within the framework of the second wave of corporate com-
munication, the fragmented nature of antenarratives represents a narra-
tive action of creating preliminary, prospective sensemaking at both
individual and organizational levels before antenarratives eventually
develop into complete and recognizable narratives. In an increasingly
complex and fragmented context of globalization and diversity, con-
temporary organizations face multiple audiences with different interests
and different patterns of interpretation. This requires organizations to
embrace a broader cosmopolitan approach which is able to include con-
tradictions and plurality (Beck 2006) while also remaining open to local
meanings and a view of leadership based on “a set of rich and varied
basic images or metaphors” (Alvesson & Spicer eds. 2011: 30). Conse-
quently, communication scholars increasingly challenge the rigid no-
tion of one organization, one body and one voice and call for a reinter-
pretation of the body metaphor to encompass the concept of a more
110 Birgitte Norlyk, Marianne Wolf Lundholt & Per Krogh Hansen

“fluid corporate body capable of flowing and easily changing shape”

(Christensen et al. 2008: 221). As modern corporations operate in ever-
changing dynamic environments, the challenge of corporate communi-
cation lies in the ability to navigate consistently between the opposing
forces of unity and diversity while maintaining credibility and authen-
ticity across groups of multiple audiences. In this fluid and chaotic con-
text, storytelling offers a unique possibility for establishing a common
framework of multiple interpretations. The Telekom example quoted
above urges customers, working teams and individual employees to
take part in a unifying narrative of mutual interests and shared purpose:
“I am T—Count on me.”

3.3 Key Concepts in Corporate Communication: Culture and Brand

The amorphous concept of corporate communication has been aptly

described as a “corporate umbrella” (Schulz & Kitchen 2004), since it
encompasses a large number of activities such as the establishment,
maintenance and communication of corporate values and uniqueness to
various groups of stakeholders. Acknowledging that the corporate um-
brella covers a large number of relevant organizational activities, the
following discussion highlights the key concepts of culture, brand and
leadership that implicitly contribute to the concrete realization of corpo-
rate communication.
Research and studies on the importance of culture in organizations
got under way during the 1980s, represented by the works especially of
Deal and Kennedy (1982), Peters and Waterman (1982) and Schein
([1985] 1992). These works studied the influence of organizational sto-
ries and their hero figures as well as organizational rites, rituals and
artifacts. These early studies of organizational culture were based on a
functionalist understanding of culture as instrumental and operational.
Culture was considered a management tool, and thus culture was seen
as something to be manipulated, constructed and controlled by man-
agement.
This normative approach to cultures was subsequently challenged by
more complex and dynamic views of organizational culture. The func-
tionalist understanding of culture as something the organization “has” is
complemented by an understanding of organizational culture based on
what the organization “is” or “does” (Cheney et al. [2004] 2011). The
descriptive approaches to culture advocate a view of culture as a social
construct and argue for the need of a pluralistic view of culture which
encompasses ambiguity and fragmentation. Attention is drawn to the
existence of organizational subcultures based on professional subcul-
 Corporate Storytelling 111

tures or subcultures of resistance, for example (Martin 1992, 2002). The

complexity of organizational culture further entails different patterns of
interpretations as well as individual sensemaking of organizational life
and values (Weick 1995). In the descriptive approach to culture, frag-
mentation and ambiguity challenge the functionalist concept of a single
integrated and unifying organizational culture mirroring discussion in
corporate communication of one body and one voice as essential for
developing and maintaining a strong corporate brand. Expressed in
terms of narrative: the descriptive approach opens up room for counter-
stories and accepts a higher degree of fragmentation and disparity of the
organization’s overall narrative. The corporation’s narratives are less
focused on making sure that ‘the left hand’ of the organizational body
knows what ‘the right hand’ is doing than it is on telling the stakehold-
ers about what the left and right hand are doing respectively, and why it
both adds value to the organization and is in the stakeholders’ interest.
The corporate brand reflects a development in marketing in which
the need to brand the physical and concrete product has been supersed-
ed by a realization of the need to brand the corporation behind the
product. Consumers and other potential stakeholders no longer see
themselves as mere passive receivers of rational messages of prices and
products. While product branding represented the first step in theories
on branding, the strategic focus of branding in corporate communica-
tion is primarily concerned with branding the corporation together with
its culture, image and values—and no longer the physical product
(Aaker 1996; Gobé 2001; Hatch & Schulz 2003).

3.4 Mind and Market

In recent years, especially with the increasing and uncontrollable influ-

ence of social media such as interactions in virtual communities and
networks like weblogs and Facebook, the concept of corporate branding
has been taken one step further. The former attention toward conquer-
ing market shares has been transformed into the important, long-term
strategic focus of corporate communication: conquering the minds of
corporate stakeholders, thus placing ‘mind shares’ first and market
shares later (Olins 2003). Google is an example of a company that
managed to conquer mind shares, as for a long time the first brand peo-
ple thought of when they needed to search on the Internet was Google.
Relationship branding or network branding become increasingly im-
portant in corporate communication as consumers and other potential
stakeholders demand the added value of emotional bonds and immate-
rial value memberships in which personal and corporate personalities
112 Birgitte Norlyk, Marianne Wolf Lundholt & Per Krogh Hansen

synergize into a common story of higher purposes and moral branding

(Hatch & Schulz 2008; Wattanasuwan 2005).
Stories of moral branding and stories of corporations and stakehold-
ers with a higher ethical purpose reflect “a new dimension” in corporate
communication (Morsing 2002: 40). In their recent branding campaign,
“Solutions Ready—For the challenge of climate change,” the industrial
company Danfoss exemplifies how its product solutions can help its
customers save energy (e.g. “1 million tons of CO² are saved every year
through the Danfoss Turbocor compressor”). In this case, Danfoss ap-
plies moral branding to assume the role of ‘helper’ in an actantial sense,
which corresponds with their overall purpose to provide solutions for
Climate & Energy. In Danfoss’ internal communication, stories are cen-
tered on employees taking up the role of heroes developing energy-
efficient products, increasing market shares, etc. Stories of corporations
and their noble quest for a better world provide excellent potential for
consumer and stakeholder identification and ultimate self-realization
which have proven vital in customers’ choices of products and in a
company’s ability to attract future employees. We find these stories, or
fragments of them, on corporate websites and reports on corporate CSR
activities as well as in mission and vision statements, job advertise-
ments, blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter dialogues, etc.
The view of storytelling as a tool for management has come to in-
clude a recognition of storytelling as a framework for establishing val-
ue-based and emotional bonds with stakeholders on a long-term basis.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the use of narratological

concepts and models in the framework of business communication is
characterized by a certain pragmatic looseness. Consequently, an obvi-
ous topic for further investigation would be to identify how specifically
narratological concepts such as narrator, protagonist and focalization
can be applied in corporate storytelling and whether they should be re-
conceptualized. This would bring out what is narratologically interest-
ing and unique about the application of narration in the practice-
oriented context of corporate communication.
(a) Corporate storytelling in social media and viral marketing. (b)
The use and function of fiction and fictionality (Schaeffer → Fictional
vs. Factual Narration) in corporate communication.
 Corporate Storytelling 113

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aaker, David A. (1996). Building Strong Brands. London: Simon & Schuster.
Alvesson, Mats & André Spicer, eds. (2011). Metaphors We Lead By – Understanding
Leadership in the Real World. London/New York: Routledge.
Beck, Ulrik (2006). Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boje, David M. (2001). Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication
Research. London: Sage.
Cheney, George et al. ([2004] 2011). Organizational Communication in an Age of
Globalization. Chicago: Waveland Press.
Christensen, Lars Th. et al. (2008). Corporate Communications: Convention, Complex-
ity, and Critique. London: Sage.
Cornelissen, Joep (2004). Corporate Communications: Theory and Practice. London:
Sage.
Deal, Terrence & Alan Kennedy (1982). Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of
Corporate Life. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Deetz, Stan & Dennis Mumby (1990). “Power, discourse and the workplace: Reclaim-
ing the critical tradition.” Communication Yearbook 13, 18–48.
Denning, Stephen (2001). The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in
Knowledge Era Organizations. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
– (2005). The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of
Business Narrative. San Francisco: Wiley and Sons.
Deutsche Telekom’s Guiding Principles (2013). http://www.telekom.com/company/at-
a-glance/corporate-values/81682
Fisher, Walter R. (1984). “Narration as Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of
Public Moral Argument.” Communication Monographs 51, 1–22.
Fombrun, Charles & Cees van Riel (2004). Fame and Fortune: How Successful Com-
panies Build Reputations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Friedman, Andrew L. & Samantha Miles (2006). Stakeholders: Theory and Practice.
Oxford. Oxford UP.
Gobé, Marc (2001). Emotional branding: The new paradigm for connecting brands to
people. New York: Allworth Press.
Hatch, Mary Jo & Maiken Schultz (2000). “Scaling the Tower of Babel: Relational
Differences between Identity, Image and Culture in Organizations.” M. Schulz et
al. (eds.). The Expressive Organization: Linking Identity, Reputation and the
Corporate Brand. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1–11.
– (2003). “Bringing the Corporation into Corporate Branding.” European Journal
of Marketing 37 (7/8), 1041–1064.
– (2008). Taking Brand Initiative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: U
of Notre Dame P.
Martin, Joanne (1992). Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives. New York:
Oxford UP.
114 Birgitte Norlyk, Marianne Wolf Lundholt & Per Krogh Hansen

– (2002). Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Morsing, Mette (2002). “Corporate branding basics.” Design DK. The Danish Design
Centre Journal 1, 33–44.
Mumby, Dennis & R. P. Clair (1997). “Organizational discourse.” T. A. van Dijk (ed.).
Discourse as Social Interaction. London: Sage, 181–205.
Olins, Wally (2003). Wally Olins on Brand. London: Thames & Hudson.
Peters, Thomas & Robert Waterman (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from
America’s Best-Run Companies. New York: Harper & Row.
Putnam, Linda et al. (2005). “Discourse and Resistance. Targets, Practices, and Conse-
quences.” Management Communication Quarterly 19.1, 5–18.
Riel, Cees van (1995). Principles of Corporate Communication. London: Prentice Hall.
Schein, Edgar H. ([1985] 1992). Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francis-
co: Jossey-Bass.
Schulz, Don E. & Philip J. Kitchen (2004). “Managing the Changes in Corporate
Branding and Communication: Closing and Reopening the Corporate Umbrella.”
Corporate Communication Review 6.4, 347–366.
Wattanasuwan, Kritsadarat (2005). “The self and symbolic consumption.” Journal of
American Academy of Business 6, 179–184.
Weick, Karl (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

5.2 Further Reading

Mumby, Dennis (1987). “The Political Function of Narrative in Organizations.” Com-

munication Monographs 56, 113–127.
– & Cynthia Stohl (1991). “Power and discourse in organization studies: absence
and the dialectic of control.” Discourse and Society 2.3, 313–332.
Rentz, Kathy (1992). “The Value of Narrative in Business Writing.” Journal of Busi-
ness and Technical Writing 6.2, 293–315.
Salmon, Christian ([2007] 2010). Storytelling: The Bewitching of the Modern Mind.
New York: Verso.
 Diachronic Narratology
(The Example of Ancient Greek Narrative)
Irene J. F. de Jong

1 Definition

Diachronic narratology means the description and analysis of the histo-

ry of the forms and functions of narrative devices within a given (period
of a) literature.

2 Explication

An explicit plea for the diachronization of narratology was launched by

Fludernik (2003), although before her others, e.g. Pavel (1996), had in
actual practice combined literary history and structuralist analysis. With
this term, Fludernik does not mean the historiography of narratology
itself, i.e. the history of the development of theoretical concepts, but the
history of the actual use made by authors of narrative devices. What is
the history of the first-person novel, of narratorial comments, of audi-
ence-address, of the locus amoenus, etc.? Some narrative devices have
long been identified and studied, such as mimesis, the Muse, or open-
ings, but narratology has brought together, systematised, and much ex-
panded the number of narrative devices found employed by authors in
narrative texts, and thereby opened the way to the study of their use
over time.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 From Synchronic to Diachronic Narratology

Classical narratology, a product of formalism and structuralism, almost

is by definition synchronically rather than diachronically oriented. Its
interest is the narrator in the text rather than the historical author pro-
ducing that text, the narratees rather than flesh-and-blood readers, and
the common signifying structures of narratives across time and space.
Thus early narratology could perhaps be called ‘achronic’ rather than
synchronic: it explicitly tried to elide extra-textual time and historical
116 Irene J. F. de Jong

context in order to find the common ground of all narratives and get
away from the traditional biographical fashion of literary criticism. As a
result, there was for a long time, as Fludernik (2003: 331) noted, “com-
paratively little interest on a theoretical level in the history of narrative
forms and functions.”
Of course, there always have been narratological studies with histor-
ical dimensions. We may think here of Booth ([1961]1983), which
deals with the shift from overt to covert narrators in the 19th century;
Romberg (1962), which discusses first-person novels from different
countries and ages; or Scholes and Kellogg ([1968] 2006), which in-
cludes historical studies on point of view, plot, and character in Euro-
pean narrative from antiquity onwards. And of course, before the ad-
vent and spread of narratology, classic historical studies on aspects of
narrative were written e.g. by Auerbach ([1946] 2003), who deals with
the representation of reality in European narrative, or Curtius ([1948]
1953), who traces the continuity of a.o. narrative devices like the Muse
from Classical Latin via Medieval Latin into modern European litera-
tures.
But what put diachrony more emphatically on the agenda in the
1990s were, according to Fludernik (2003: 332), feminist narratology,
the application of narratology to historical texts, and research into the
origins of the novel. As an example of diachronic narratology, she dis-
cusses the handling of scene shifts in a corpus of some fifty texts of
British literature between the late medieval period and the early 20th
century. In her conclusion she notes that “the scene shift was ideally
suited to demonstrate that formal analysis needs to be complemented by
a functional approach [...] a function can be superseded and its former
expressions still used for new purposes” (344).
At about the same time that Fludernik was launching the idea of dia-
chronic narratology, de Jong started—independently—editing a history
of ancient Greek narrative. The need for such a history arises from the
fact that while there are many histories of Greek drama, historiography,
rhetoric, or literary criticism, “the history of ancient Greek narrative is
as yet untold” (de Jong et al. eds., 2004: xi).
This history appears in a series of volumes entitled “Studies in an-
cient Greek narrative” (SAGN). The historical approach offers, for the
first time, a major example of diachronic narratology in that it traces the
history of various narrative devices for one literature in its entirety. In
the case of ancient Greek literature, this covers a time span of twelve
centuries (800 BC to 400 AD). So far, three volumes have appeared: on
narrators, narratees, and narratives (de Jong et al. eds., 2004), on time
(de Jong & Nünlist ed. 2007), and on space (de Jong ed. 2012). A
 Diachronic Narratology 117

fourth volume, on characterization, is currently in progress. The narra-

tive devices discussed include overt versus covert narrators or narratees,
primary versus secondary narrators and narratees, second-person narra-
tion, embedded narratives, analepsis and prolepsis, singulative, iterative
and scenic narration, retardation, acceleration, setting versus frame,
focalised space, description and ekphrasis, the thematic, symbolic, and
psychological functions of space. The series is aimed at a larger reader-
ship than the community of classicists, and thus all passages are dis-
cussed in translation.

3.2 A History of Ancient Greek Narrative as an

Example of Diachronic Narratology

3.2.1 Defining Ancient Greek Narrative

When writing a history of narrative devices, the first question to answer

is what actually constitutes a narrative in the literature under discussion.
For SAGN, the following texts of ancient Greek literature have been
included: purely narrative genres (epic, novel); what could be called
applied narrative genres (historiography, biography, philosophy); narra-
tives embedded in non-narrative genres (the mythological parts of lyric,
hymn, and pastoral; the prologue and messenger-speeches of drama; the
narrationes of oratory); and what Genette ([1972 ] 1980: 236–237)
called pseudo-diegetic narratives, i.e. narratives with a suppressed narrator.
He used this term in explicit reference to Plato’s philosophical dialogue
Theaetetus 143 c, where the narrator says that he avoids the tag “and he
said.” In addition to Plato’s dialogues, we can think of the so-called mi-
metic Idyls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, poems that consist
entirely of dialogue but that belong to genres that also have instances with
a narrative frame and a narrator.
To modern eyes, this corpus may seem both broad and restricted. It
is broad in that it includes philosophy and historiography, text-types
which nowadays are not necessarily in narrative form and would not
normally be included in a literary history. However, it should be borne
in mind that philosophy in antiquity usually takes the form of narrated
dialogues. As for ancient historiography, this was invariably in narra-
tive form due to the fact that the genre’s pedigree traces back to epic
(cf. Strasburger 1972). It confirms Genette’s ([1991] 1993) and Cohn’s
(1999) contention that historiography falls within the domain of narra-
tology. At the same time, it contradicts Cohn’s call for a separate histo-
riographic narratology: in antiquity the same devices are found in semi-
historical epic, historiography, and in the fictional novel.
118 Irene J. F. de Jong

The SAGN corpus is restricted in that only narratives embedded in

lyric and drama are included. Recently, some narratologists have ar-
gued that drama and lyric as a whole should be considered forms of
narrative (see e.g. Jahn 2001; Hühn & Kiefer 2005; Hühn & Sommer
→ Narration in Poetry and Drama). In SAGN, however, the presence of
a narrator is taken as the defining element of a narrative.

3.2.2 Form and Function of Narrative Devices

One of the central research questions of diachronic narratology is that

of the relationship between form and function: how does one and the
same device acquire ever new functions, depending on the exigencies
of a genre, the predilections of an author, the theme of the narrative, or
the taste of an age?
Since the greater part of ancient Greek narrative deals with the same
mythological stories time and again, a beginning in medias res works
differently in such a narrative whose content is largely known to the
narratees (e.g. the Odyssey) than it does in a purely fictional text like
Heliodorus’ Aethiopica. Anticipating the death of a hero may have a
tone which is tragic (Iliad: Patroclus), moralistic (Odyssey: the suitors)
or revengeful (Herodotus’ Histories). Drawing in the past in the form of
external analepses may have a purely informative function (Homer:
Iliad) or it may serve ideological purposes, the past being inserted for
comparative reasons (Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War or Plutarch’s
Biographies). The anachronical order in which many mythological sto-
ries are told in Greek literature (a narrator starts in the present, returns
step by step to the past and then proceeds in chronological order back
to the present) began as an oral device in Homer but was put to highly
sophisticated use by Pindar and Sophocles in their lyric narratives.
Greek literature has a long history of charging details of spatial setting
with (ever-changing) semantic significance: thus when Plato for once
situates one of his philosophical dialogues outside the city of Athens in
the countryside (the Phaedrus), this setting has all the characteristics of
a locus amoenus (trees, water, shade, a breeze); such a décor is typical-
ly the place for love-making, but is now refunctionalised to become the
setting for a philosophical talk about love.

3.2.3 Genres and Development

In ancient Greek narrative the use of narrative devices is not genre-

bound: historians use epic devices, tragedians use historiographical de-
vices, orators use tragic devices, and so on. This phenomenon can per-
 Diachronic Narratology 119

haps be explained as the result of genres being only loosely defined in

ancient Greek literature (see e.g. Depew & Obbink eds. 2000), but it
also indicates the tendency of narrative devices to be universal. What
can change, of course, is the function a device acquires in a given genre
(see previous section).
The history of ancient Greek narrative makes clear that literature
need not necessarily develop in an evolutionary sense, i.e. in the form
of a primitive origin slowly evolving towards ever more sophistication
and complexity. Greek literature starts with a ‘big bang’, namely the
Homeric epics with their incredibly rich and subtle exploitation of the
potential of narrative, and ends with often rather simplistic novels. A
caveat here is that for us, Homer’s texts are the first in ancient Greek
literature, but that they were in fact preceded by innumerable oral pre-
decessors whose texts have not come down to us, so that Homer was
not really the first. There is also the intriguing issue of the indebtedness
of early Greek literature to Near Eastern literature (see e.g. West 1997;
Haubold 2013). But even taking these two observations into account, it
is noteworthy that the text which is the fountainhead of all ancient (and
much later European) narrative comes so early in history.

3.2.4 Narratology and (Oral) Poetry

Narratology has developed primarily in connection with the novel and

hence with prose narrative. In classics, however, narratological studies
took poetry, especially epic poetry, into account from an early stage
onwards (e.g. Fusillo 1985; de Jong [1987] 2004, 2001; Richardson
1990). Poets such as Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius of Rhodes, Callima-
chus, Pindar, Bacchylides, the three tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, the comedian Aristophanes, and Theocritus all form a vital
part of the history of Greek narrative art. Indeed, it was a poet, Homer,
who developed most of the classical narrative toolkit: the Muses, the in
medias res technique, prolepsis and analepsis, embedded focalization,
or the tale within the tale. Later prose authors took over and carried on
with what was originally developed by this poet. The differences be-
tween poetic and prose narrative seem to lie more at the level of stylis-
tics: poetry uses more epithets, metaphors, similes, etc.
When dealing with orality, narratology has focused on fairytales
(mostly in written transcription) or on conversational narration (Fluder-
nik: → Conversational Narration – Oral Narration). Once again, the
Homeric epics, be they oral texts or texts still very close to oral tradi-
tions (on this much debated issue, see e.g. the overview in Amodio
2005), provided rich material for narratology. For instance, the repeti-
120 Irene J. F. de Jong

tion of words, lines, and scenes, a hallmark of oral poetry, can be well
understood and appreciated in Homer when analysed in terms of the
narratological category of rhythm (de Jong 1991). This oral text has
exercised a tremendous influence on all later, written literature, and the
unbroken continuum of orality is a telling harbinger for the principle of
intermediality in narrative. Whereas narratologists, dealing mainly with
modern literature, look for intermediality in the new media of our pre-
sent age (e.g. Ryan ed. 2004; Ryan → Narration in Various Media),
ancient Greek literature also provides much fascinating material in this
area. The Homeric epics were oral in that they were composed orally
and listened to, while many other texts were aural, i.e. written by their
author but listened to by their consumers rather than read: the lyrics of
Sappho and Pindar, the narratives of Greek drama, and the many
speeches of orators like Lysias or Demosthenes. Even when ancient
Greek narrative was written, it often still breathed a spirit of orality in
the form of ‘fingierte Mündlichkeit’, either because writing was
deemed suspect (in the time of the historian Herodotus) or because of
the strength of tradition (the extremely bookish epic narrator Apolloni-
us of Rhodes posing as a bard in order to resemble his venerated model
Homer).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

One of the areas calling for further reflection and investigation is how
exactly we are to evaluate the results of diachronic narratology. What
are we observing when we see different authors using the same narra-
tive device across time and space? Can we indeed draw up a history, or
should we be content with making a typological comparison? Can we
consider such correspondences a form of narratological intertextuality,
i.e. can we imagine author X consciously following the example of au-
thor Y, or should we rather think in terms of narrative universals, i.e.
assume that different authors may employ the same device inde-
pendently? Or should we allow for both possibilities?
The first option would seem to be a priori plausible in the literature
of ancient Greece where, as in Roman literature, imitatio and aemulatio
were key concepts, where all authors up until the Hellenistic era were
telling roughly the same mythological stories, and where its main ca-
nonical text, the Homeric epics, provided most of the narrative tricks of
the trade.
But what about diachronic narratology on a larger scale which
would discuss resemblances in narrative technique between neighbour-
 Diachronic Narratology 121

ing literatures (e.g. the Greek and Near Eastern literatures of 1600–700
BC) or succeeding literatures (such as classical, medieval, and modern
European literatures)? Can we still draw historical lines here and, if so,
how should we imagine this to have worked in practice? Do authors
pick up their narrative devices from other texts, or are they somehow
present in a culture in the form of memes? Some first tentative thoughts
on these matters are developed in de Jong (2014 a and b).

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Amodio, Mark C., ed. (2005). New Directions in Oral Theory. Tempe: Arizona Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Auerbach, Erich ([1946] 2003). Mimesis, the Representation of Reality in Western Lit-
erature. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Booth, Wayne ([1961]1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago UP.
Cohn, Dorrit (1999). The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Curtius, Ernst R. ([1948] 1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
Princeton: Princeton UP.
Depew, Mary & Dirk Obbink, eds. (2000). Matrices of Genre. Authors, Canons, and
Society. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Fludernik, Monika (2003). “The Diachonization of Narratology.” Narrative 11, 331–348.
Fusillo, Massimo (1985). Il tempo delle Argonautiche. Un analisi del racconto in Apol-
lonio Rodio. Roma: Edizioni dell’Ateneo.
Genette, Gérard ([1972]1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– ([1991] 1993). Fiction & Diction. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Haubold, Johannes (2013). Greece and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP.
Hühn, Peter & Jens Kiefer (2005). The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies
in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Jahn, Manfred (2001). “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratolo-
gy of Drama.” New Literary History 32, 659–679.
Jong, Irene J. F. de ([1987] 2004). Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation of the
Story in the Iliad. London: Duckworth.
– (1991). “Narratology and Oral Poetry: The Case of Homer.” Poetics Today 12, 405–
423.
– (2001).  Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
– (2014 a). “After Auerbach. Ancient Greek Literature as Test Case of European
Literary Historiography.” European Review 22, 116–128.
– (2014 b). “The Anonymous Traveller in European Literature: a Greek Meme?” D.
Cairns & R. Scodel (eds.). Defining Greek Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
314–333.
122 Irene J. F. de Jong

– et al., eds. (2004). Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Litera-
ture. Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative 1. Leiden: Brill.
– & René Nünlist, eds. (2007). Time in Ancient Greek Literature. Studies in Ancient
Greek Narrative 2. Leiden: Brill.
– ed. (2012). Space in Ancient Greek Literature. Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative 3.
Leiden: Brill.
Pavel, Thomas (1996). L’art d’éloignement. Essai sur l’imagination classique. Paris:
Gallimard.
Richardson, Scott (1990). The Homeric Narrator. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP.
Romberg, Bertil (1962). Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel.
Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. (2004). Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytell-
ing. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Scholes, Robert & Robert Kellogg ([1968] 2006). The Nature of Narrative. Fortieth Anni-
versary Edition. New York: Oxford UP.
Strasburger, Herman (1972). “Homer und die Geschichtsschreibung.” Studien zur Alten
Geschichte, Bd ii. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1057–1097.
West, Martin L. (1997). The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek
Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Oxford UP.

5.2 Further Reading

Fusillo, Massimo (1991). Naissance du roman. Paris: Seuil.

Grethlein, Jonas (2006). Das Geschichtsbild der Ilias. Eine Untersuchung aus phäno-
menologischer und narratologischer Perspektive. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht.
– & Antonios Rengakos, eds. (2009). Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of
Narrative Form in Ancient Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Lowe, Nick J. (2000). The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP.
Wheeler, Stephen M. (1999). A Discourse of Wonders: Audiences and Performances in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.
Winkler, Jack J. (1985). Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ The
Golden Ass. Berkeley: U of California P.
 Dialogism
David Shepherd

1 Definition

The term “dialogism” is most commonly used to denote the quality of

an instance of discourse that explicitly acknowledges that it is defined
by its relationship to other instances, both past, to which it responds,
and future, whose response it anticipates. The positive connotations of
dialogism are often reinforced by a contrast with “monologism,” denot-
ing the refusal of discourse to acknowledge its relational constitution
and its misrecognition of itself as independent and unquestionably au-
thoritative.

2 Explication

Dialogism is overwhelmingly associated in accounts of literary theory

in general, and of narratology in particular (e.g. Prince [1987] 2003:
19–20; Phelan 2005; Williams 2005), with the work of the Russian
thinker Baxtin and the Baxtin Circle. Although Baxtin first used the
words dialogizm and dialogičnost’ (literally “dialogicality” or “dialogi-
cal quality”) in his [1929] 2000 study of Dostoevskij, the locus classi-
cus of his understanding of dialogism is found in his [1934/35] 1981
essay “Slovo v romane,” translated as “Discourse in the Novel”:

Directed toward its object, a word enters a dialogically agitated and tense
environment of alien words, evaluations and accents, is woven into their
complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, inter-
sects with yet a third group: and all this may in an essential manner shape
the word, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its
expression and influence its entire stylistic profile. / The living utterance,
having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a so-
cially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of
living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around
the given object of the utterance; it cannot fail to become an active partici-
pant in social dialogue. Indeed, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a
124 David Shepherd

continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it—it does not approach the object

from the sidelines (Baxtin [1934/35] 1981: 276–277; translation modified).

This extended quotation brings together many of the principal fea-

tures—utterance, evaluation, accent, social dialogue—associated with
the Baxtinian account of dialogism; other terms from the essay that
have gained widespread currency as denotations of discourse encapsu-
lating social dialogue include “hybridized” and “double-voiced.” As the
title of the essay suggests, for Baxtin the most effective means of repre-
senting the inherently dialogic quality of discourse is the novel; in turn,
it is the polyphonic novel, exemplified most completely by the works of
Dostoevskij, that is the acme of the novelist’s “orchestration” of
raznorečie (usually translated as heteroglossia (Tjupa → Hetero-
glossia), the diversity of socially specific discourses; Baxtin [1929]
2000, [1963] 1984). Baxtin’s promotion of the novel relies to a large
extent on a contrast between prose as dialogic and epic and poetry as
monologic, an opposition that is clearly unsustainable if all discourse is
indeed inherently dialogic: monologic discourse (whether in poetry,
epic or in any other medium or genre) can, in Baxtin’s terms, only be
dialogic discourse that misrecognizes or misreads, wilfully or other-
wise, its own relationship to other discourse in order to present itself as
authoritative.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Not only is dialogism predominantly associated with Baxtin, but it has

become for many a convenient denotation of the whole tenor of his
work, shorthand for a theoretical position that, although refined and
rearticulated over the course of decades, remained in essence un-
changed, accounting for the Russian thinker’s originality. In large
measure, this over-simplification of Baxtin’s intellectual biography is a
consequence of his coming to prominence in the Soviet Union, after
decades of provincial obscurity, towards the end of his life, and indeed
in the years after his death, and therefore also of the circumstances in
which he became well known elsewhere. The collection The Dialogic
Imagination is symptomatic: its title, furnished by its translators (and
impossible to render convincingly in Russian), lends the dialogic a par-
ticular prominence and allure and exemplifies the translation’s anach-
ronistic alignment of Baxtin’s texts with the alien time and place of the
1980s theory boom, allowing them to appear to offer an unusually so-
phisticated, grounded and user-friendly version of positions associated
 Dialogism 125

with poststructuralism. The effect, perhaps unavoidable at the time, was

to mask the resonances of many of Baxtin’s texts (already obscured by
his Russian editors’ excision of a large number of his references) with
the philosophical and philological traditions with which they engaged.
Recent work has uncovered the extent to which Baxtin’s interest in the
novel was driven less by literary-critical concerns than by a philosophi-
cal agenda that draws on the work of a range of thinkers including
Bergson, Cassirer, Misch, Vossler, Lukács and Mixajlovskij, and that is
marked by simultaneous adherence to contradictory neo-Kantian and
Hegelian principles (Brandist 2002: esp. 120–132; Tihanov 2000). Fur-
thermore, the account of discourse that is part of this philosophical pro-
ject is likewise crucially dependent on the work of others. It was largely
thanks to Vološinov and Medvedev, until recently consistently misrep-
resented as mere acolytes of Baxtin, but now recognized as important
figures in their own right, whose own interests were in significant
measure shaped by their participation in the research programmes of the
academic institutions where they worked, that Baxtin underwent in the
late 1920s the “linguistic turn” (Hirschkop 2001) that allowed dialogue
and the dialogic to assume such importance in his works of the 1930s.
In particular, Vološinov’s account of discursive interaction (Vološinov
[1926] 1983, [1929] 1973), which drew on, inter alia, the work of the
linguist Jakubinskij ([1923] 1997), Brentanian psychology, Bühler’s
“organon model” of communication, Gestalt theory, and Cassirer’s Phi-
losophy of Symbolic Forms, was a precondition for the dialogic theory
of the utterance that usually but misleadingly bears Baxtin’s name.
Overall, it is essential to recognize that a number of key terms and con-
cepts for which Baxtin tends to be given the sole or principal credit are
in fact products and properties of the contexts in which he worked, and
of the traditions to which he was, both directly and indirectly, affiliated.
Perhaps the most notable instance, apart from dialogism itself, is the
concept that underpins it, heteroglossia, the word usually used (alt-
hough more accurate and appropriate would be “heterology”) to trans-
late the Russian term raznorečie that is often considered a Baxtinian
neologism, but that was in fact widely employed by contemporaneous
linguists (Zbinden 1999; Brandist 2003; Shepherd 2005).

3.1 Relevance for Narratology

If the account of dialogic discourse associated with Baxtin has proved

attractive, this may be because it enables detailed description of aspects
of fictional narrative such as point of view (Niederhoff → Perspective –
Point of View) and voice (McHale → Speech Representation) to be
126 David Shepherd

combined with reference to factors social and ideological, thereby of-

fering apparent cover against accusations of arid narratological neglect
of the referent. However, it has also been subject to misinterpretation as
a relativistic rather than relational model, a sustained plea that we
should always see all sides of an argument, or that “faced with a choice
of competing interpretations we must always choose both” (Booker &
Juraga 1995: 16). In large measure, the ease with which dialogism has
been appropriated as a tool for (not only) literary analysis, and the
blunting of this tool by casual use, are consequences of a failure to rec-
ognize and engage with the concept’s place in intellectual history, with
the philosophical and philological contexts in which dialogism denotes
not an identifiable quality of a narrative text, but a set of problems in
the study of human language, communication and cognition (Linell
1998).
The implication of all this would appear to be not so much that dial-
ogism is not relevant for narratology, but that there is a mismatch be-
tween the complexities of understanding dialogism in historical per-
spective on the one hand, and on the other narratology’s apparent
requirement for an instrument enabling more or less objective descrip-
tion and analysis of certain properties of narrative texts and their ef-
fects. But to assert this would be to disregard the prospect that theory
describable as “dialogic” does hold out of a sensitive and sophisticated
approach, firmly anchored in an account of the concrete institutions in
which fiction is produced and consumed, to questions of authorial, nar-
ratorial and readerly agency and interdependence—in Prince’s terms,
the “elaboration of an explicit, complete, and empirically grounded
model of narrative accounting for narrative competence (the ability to
produce narratives and to process texts as narratives) [that] ultimately
constitutes the most significant narratological endeavor” (2003: 12). It
would also be to disparage unduly the achievements and, especially,
potential of narratology, not least in what Nünning (2003) describes as
the “postclassical” phase in which it seeks to move beyond structuralist
typologization (Herman 1999).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The precise relationship between dialogism and other terms used to
denote modes of representing point of view (focalization, free indirect
discourse, polyphony, etc.; an excellent beginning to this investigation
is offered by Lock 2001). (b) The implications of the philosophical and
philological lineage of dialogism for the project of narratology (this is
 Dialogism 127

simply one expression of the broader question of the extent to which

literary/critical theory does or does not recognize its historical affilia-
tions). Is dialogism a solution to a (narratological) problem, or a con-
venient denotation of a set of complex (philosophical and linguistic)
problems in search of a solution?

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Baxtin, Mixail ([1929] 2000). Problemy tvorčestva Dostoevskogo. S. G. Bočarov & L.

S. Melixova (eds.). Sobranie sočinenij. Moskva: Russkie slovari, vol. 2, 5–175.
– (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1934/35] 1981). “Discourse in the Novel.” M. B. The Dia-
logic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas P, 259–422.
– ([1963] 1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Manchester: Manchester UP.
Booker, M. Keith & Dubravka Juraga (1995). Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian
Fiction: Carnival, Dialogism, and History. Westport: Greenwood P.
Brandist, Craig (2002). The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics. London:
Pluto P.
– (2003). “Bakhtine, la sociologie du langage et le roman.” P. Sériot (ed.). Le Dis-
cours sur la langue en URSS à l’époque stalinienne (épistémologie, philosophie,
idéologie). Lausanne: Presses Centrales de Lausanne, 59–83.
Herman, David (1999). “Introduction: Narratologies.” D. Herman (ed.). Narratologies:
New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1–30.
Hirschkop, Ken (2001). “Bakhtin’s Linguistic Turn.” Dialogism 5–6, 21–34.
Jakubinskij, Lev P. (Iakubinskii) ([1923] 1997). “On Dialogic Speech.” PMLA: Publi-
cations of the Modern Language Association of America 112, 249–256.
Linell, Per (1998). Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical
Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Lock, Charles (2001). “Double Voicing, Sharing Words: Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the
History of the Theory of Free Indirect Discourse.” J. Bruhn & J. Lundquist (eds.).
The Novelness of Bakhtin: Perspectives and Possibilities. Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum P, 71–87.
Nünning, Ansgar (2003). “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent De-
velopments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term.” T.
Kindt & H.-H. Müller (eds.). What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Re-
garding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: de Gruyter, 239–275.
Phelan, James (2005). “Rhetorical Approaches to Narrative.” D. Herman et al. (eds.).
Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 500–504.
Prince, Gerald ([1987] 2003). Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
– (2003). “Surveying Narratology.” T. Kindt & H.-H. Müller (eds.). What Is Narra-
tology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1–16.
128 David Shepherd

Shepherd, David (2005). “La Pensée de Bakhtine: dialogisme, décalage, discordance.”

K. Zbinden & I. Weber Henking (eds.). La Quadrature du Cercle Bakhtine: tra-
ductions, influences et remises en contexte. Lausanne: Centre de Traduction Lit-
téraire de Lausanne, 5–25.
Tihanov, Galin (2000). The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of
Their Time. Oxford: Clarendon P.
Vološinov, Valentin N. (Voloshinov) ([1926] 1983). “Discourse in Life and Discourse
in Poetry.” A. Shukman (ed.). Bakhtin School Papers. Oxford: RPT Publications,
1983, 5–30.
– (Voloshinov) ([1929] 1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cam-
bridge: Harvard UP.
Williams, Patrick (2005). “Dialogism.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclope-
dia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 104–105.
Zbinden, Karine (1999). “Traducing Bakhtin and Missing Heteroglossia.” Dialogism 2,
41–59.

5.2 Further Reading

Baxtin, Mixail (Bakhtin, Mikhail) (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Aus-
tin: U of Texas P.
Brandist, Craig (2004). “Voloshinov’s Dilemma: On the Philosophical Roots of the
Dialogic Theory of the Utterance.” C. Brandist et al. (eds.). The Bakhtin Circle:
In the Master ’s Absence. Manchester: Manchester UP, 97–124.
Cossutta, Frédéric (2003). “Dialogic Characteristics of Philosophical Discourse: The
Case of Plato’s Dialogues.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36, 48–76.
de Man, Paul (1983). “Dialogue and Dialogism.” Poetics Today 4, 99–107.
Hirschkop, Ken (1992). “Is Dialogism for Real?” Social Text 30, 102–113.
– (1986). “The Domestication of M. M. Bakhtin.” Essays in Poetics 11, 76–87.
– (1999). Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Holquist, Michael (2002). Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge.
Matejka, Ladislav (1996). “Deconstructing Bakhtin.” C.-A. Mihailescu & W.
Hamarneh (eds.). Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and
Poetics. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 257–266.
Morson, Gary Saul & Caryl Emerson (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics.
Stanford: Stanford UP.
Pechey, Graham (2007). Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World. London: Routledge.
Schmid, Wolf (1999). “Dialogizität in der narrativen Kommunikation.” I. Lunde (ed.).
Dialogue and Rhetoric.Communication Strategies in Russian Text and Theory.
Bergen: U of Bergen, 9–23; and Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for
Cultural Narratology 1 (2005). http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/s05_index.htm.
Todorov, Tzvetan ([1981] 1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Manches-
ter: Manchester UP.
 Diegesis – Mimesis
Stephen Halliwell

1 Definition

Diegesis (“narrative,” “narration”) and mimesis (“imitation,” “represen-

tation,” “enactment”) are a pair of Greek terms first brought together
for proto-narratological purposes in a passage from Plato’s Republic
(3.392c–398b). Contrary to what has become standard modern usage
(section 3 below), diegesis there denotes narrative in the wider generic
sense of discourse that communicates information keyed to a temporal
framework (events “past, present, or future,” Republic 392d). It is sub-
divided at the level of discursive style or presentation (lexis) into a tri-
partite typology: 1) haple diegesis, “plain” or “unmixed” diegesis, i.e.
narrative in the voice of the poet (or other authorial “storyteller,” muth-
ologos, 392d); 2) diegesis dia mimeseos, narrative “by means of mime-
sis,” i.e. direct speech (including drama, Republic 394b–c) in the voices
of individual characters in a story; and 3) diegesis di’ amphoteron, i.e.
compound narrative which combines or mixes both the previous two
types, as in Homeric epic, for example. From this Platonic beginning,
the terms have had a long and sometimes tangled history of usage, right
up to the present day, as a pair of critical categories.

2 Explication

The diegesis/mimesis complex is introduced by Socrates at Republic

392c ff. to help categorize different ways of presenting a story, espe-
cially in poetry. His aim is to sketch a basic psychology and ethics of
narrative. From Republic 2.376c ff. Socrates has been concerned with
the contribution of storytelling in general, poetry (the most powerful
medium of verbal narrative in Greek culture) in particular, to the educa-
tion of the “guardians” of the ideal city hypothesized in the dialogue.
From the outset (377b), he makes the important assumption that sto-
ries/narratives (muthoi, which signifies traditional “myths” but also art-
fully constructed stories more broadly) can embody and convey value-
130 Stephen Halliwell

laden beliefs about the world. It is clear, moreover, that before reaching
the typology of Book 3, Socrates treats authors of muthoi as globally
and supra-textually responsible for everything “said” in their works: he
thus criticizes Homer, without apparent discrimination, for passages in
the voice of both the poetic narrator and individual characters (e.g.
3.386b–387b).
The distinctions drawn at 392c ff. add a new, more technical layer of
analysis to the discussion of muthoi which has preceded. There is, for
sure, some continuity between the two main phases of the argument
(the analysis first of logos, “what is said,” and then lexis, “how it is
said”: 392c) in so far as even in the second phase Socrates thinks of
poets (or other author-narrators) as controlling and varying their use of
“voice”: hence, when characters speak (i.e. in “diegesis by means of
mimesis”), Socrates formulates this in terms of the poet speaking “as
(if)” the character (393a–c). However, on another level the second part
of the argument involves a major shift, precisely because Socrates’
main concern is now with the psychological complications of discursive
multiplicity. Without leaving behind his earlier, global model of autho-
rial responsibility, he pursues the idea that mimesis, whether in its own
uninterrupted form (i.e. as drama, 394b–c) or as one element in com-
pound diegesis, such as Homeric epic, entails a particularly intense and
therefore psychically dangerous mode of narrative imagination.
The fear of narrative which powerfully foregrounds various charac-
ters’ viewpoints is brought out especially clearly at the end of the anal-
ysis (397d–398b), where Socrates brands the “mimetic” poet as manip-
ulating a kind of multiple personality and creating works which induce
others (not least, performers of poetry) to introduce imagined multiplic-
ity into their own souls—something which threatens the “unity” of soul
that is foundational to the psychology and ethics of the entire Republic
(see esp. 443e: “becoming one person instead of many”).
The diegesis/mimesis terminology of Republic Book 3 is therefore
the vehicle of an embryonic narratology which posits connections be-
tween narrative form (including narrating person, voice and viewpoint)
and the psychology of both performer and (by extrapolation) audience.
On this account, different narrative forms are not simply technical al-
ternatives for the telling or presentation of stories; they have differential
expressive capacities to communicate the points of view and mental
processes of characters in a story. Notice that the basic distinction
drawn by Socrates could be said to be not so much between “telling”
and “showing” (Klauk & Köppe → Telling vs. Showing), in the stand-
ard (if problematic) modern opposition, as between two modes of “tell-
ing” (itself not a bad translation of Greek diegesis: see section 3 be-
 Diegesis – Mimesis 131

low): telling in the voice of an authorial narrator versus telling in the

voices of the agents. See esp. 393b: “it is diegesis both when the poet
delivers character-speeches and in the sections between these speeches”
(which underlines the fundamental point that mimesis is not opposed to,
but is one type of, diegesis). Nor is the problem Socrates has with mi-
mesis a matter of the quantity of information it conveys (contra Genette
[1972] 1980: 166); his rewriting of the first episode of the Iliad (393c–
394a) preserves much the same “information” as the Homeric text. The
problem, rather, with mimesis is what Socrates takes to be its seductive-
ly perspectival psychology and its consequent inducement to the mind
to step inside, and assimilate itself to, the character’s viewpoint. His
anxiety is about a particularly intense way of imagining what it is like
to be someone else.
We must now, however, add two important (and related) points. The
first is that the proto-narratology of this well-known Platonic text is
driven by normative, not purely descriptive, concerns. Socrates is not
attempting to explore questions of narrative or poetic technique for
their own sake, but to draw attention to what he sees as the vital impli-
cations of certain storytelling techniques for the larger ethical psychol-
ogy which he outlines in the Republic. The second point, usually over-
looked altogether by modern scholars, is that the typology presented by
Socrates is not only incomplete: it actually ignores a number of discur-
sive and narrative practices found in Plato’s own work. This applies
above all to types of narrators. Socrates operates exclusively with the
idea of the heterodiegetic, author-as-narrator type (which, ironically, is
never used by Plato himself: contrast the Socratic works of Xenophon)
and paradoxically ignores homo- and intra-diegetic narrators of the
kinds which do occur in Plato, including Socrates himself in the Repub-
lic! This cannot be explained away by Socrates’ focus on Homeric epic,
since it is equally true that he takes no account of complications
brought about by the role of a secondary narrator such as Odysseus in
Odyssey Books 9 through 12, where several levels of embedded narra-
tive come into play.
It is imperative, finally, to note that the formal diegesis/mimesis ty-
pology of Republic Book 3 is not itself repeated anywhere else in Pla-
to’s writings. It should not, therefore, be converted into a fixed Platonic
orthodoxy. On the rare occasions when similar distinctions are men-
tioned elsewhere, the terminology varies: at Theaetetus 143b–c, for ex-
ample, a contrast is drawn between diegesis as third-person narrative
and dialogos (with the verb dialegesthai) as the speech of characters.
Furthermore, mimesis is used in many Platonic passages, including Re-
132 Stephen Halliwell

public 2.373b (see below), in a broader sense of poetic/literary repre-

sentation which is not tied to direct character-speech.

3 History of the Terms

Diegesis is derived from a Greek verb diegeisthai, which means literal-

ly “to lead/guide through” and which came to mean “give an account
of,” “expound,” “explain,” and “narrate.” Together with the verb, the
noun diegesis itself became established in the 5th century BC as a
common term for acts of verbal narration. It could apply, for instance,
to the section(s) of a courtroom speech in which a litigant provided a
version of events relevant to the case: a reference in Plato’s Phaedrus,
266e, shows that diegesis was codified in this sense in some of the first
rhetorical handbooks (cf. Aristotle Rhetoric 1.1, 1354b18; 3.13,
1414a37–b15). It also seems that in the early forms of Greek linguistics
associated with thinkers such as Protagoras, diegesis was adopted as a
term for one of the basic modes or functions of discourse (cf. Aristotle
Poetics 19.1456b8–19, where diegesis might mean either “statement”
or “narration”). Such usage helps to explain why Plato chose diegesis to
denote the genus “narrative” in Republic Book 3.
The term mimesis has a more complex and less easily reconstructed
early history (Halliwell 2002: 15–22). Before Socrates employs it at
Republic 392d, he has already used the cognate noun mimetes (produc-
er/practitioner of mimesis) at Republic 2.373b for all those engaged in
visual arts, poetry, drama, and music (and seemingly more besides) in
the imaginary “city of luxury.” So mimesis there designates (artis-
tic/cultural) “representation” in a broader sense than in Book 3, and
indeed Book 10 of the Republic itself will return to that wider perspec-
tive (595c, “mimesis as a whole”). From around the late 6th century
BC, in fact, the vocabulary of mimesis had been applied in both wider
and narrower senses: in the former, to representation, depiction, expres-
sion in various media (visual and musical as well as poetic); in the lat-
ter, to “dramatic enactment” (cf. esp. Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae
156, where mimesis refers to the imaginative-cum-theatrical process of
creating/playing a dramatic role). The category of “diegesis by means
of mimesis” in Republic Book 3, therefore, does not depend on any-
thing like a comprehensive Platonic theory of mimesis.
Aristotle follows Plato Republic Book 3 in seeing a distinction be-
tween first- and third-person modes of storytelling as important to poet-
ics. He does not, however, follow either Plato’s precise terminology or
his ethico-psychological priorities. In the Poetics, Aristotle uses mime-
 Diegesis – Mimesis 133

sis as the master-concept of representational art-forms (this is arguably

in line with Book 10 rather than Book 3 of the Republic). He then cate-
gorizes different art-forms according to the media, objects, and
“modes” of representation. Where poetic mimesis is concerned, Aristo-
tle’s typology of modes—that is, of “how” the poet represents actions
and events (Poetics 3.1448a19–24)—is obscured by some knotty syn-
tax and textual corruption. Two main construals of the typology are
possible: 1) a binary distinction between (third-person) “narrative” and
fully dramatic representation (of the characters “all in action,” as he
puts it), with a further subdivision of narrative into (a) the Homeric
kind where the narrator’s voice is interrupted by passages of character-
speech (the author “becoming a different person,” as Aristotle puts it in
quasi-Platonic fashion, 3.1448a21–22; but cf. section 5 below) and (b)
continuous third-person narrative; or 2) an explicitly tripartite scheme
comprising the mixed Homeric mode of third-person narration alternat-
ing with direct character-speech; unbroken third- person narrative; and
fully dramatic representation.
The second of those interpretations aligns Aristotle with the tripar-
tite typology in Plato Republic Book 3, though Aristotle curiously does
not here use the terminology of diegesis at all (a fact obscured by e.g.
Genette 1969: 52) but denotes narrative by the verb apangellein, “to
relate/report” (cf. the noun apangelia at Poetics 5.1449b11, 6.1449b26–
27; Plato uses the same terms of both the author-narrator and the char-
acters, Republic 3.394c2, 396c7). In addition, as mentioned, he makes
mimesis, in a broader sense of representation, the genus of which the
narrative and dramatic modes are species. But the first interpretation, by
contrast, makes Aristotle insist on a fundamental distinction, of the kind
favored by some modern narratologists, between narrative and drama:
on this view, even though he knows that each mode can be used “in-
side” the other, he draws a sharp line between their status as frames of
representation in particular works. On either interpretation, however,
Aristotle strips his categories of the normative judgments made by Soc-
rates in the Republic. He shows no sign of taking dramatic representa-
tion to be intrinsically more powerful, or less psychologically “dis-
tanced,” than narrative; nor, accordingly, does he think that the one
raises greater ethical concerns than the other.
Aristotle’s position is complicated, however, by his later treatment
of epic poetry in Poetics Chapters 23 and 24. Here, in the first place, he
introduces the vocabulary of diegesis which he had not used earlier (for
the different case of Poetics 19.1456b8–19, see above). Epic is now
classed as diegesis (24.1459b26), where before it was apangelia, and
three times it is called “diegematic mimesis” (23.1459a17, 24.1459b33,
134 Stephen Halliwell

36). Moreover, he proceeds to single out Homer as the only epic poet
who understands that he should say very little “in his own per-
son/voice” and who accordingly builds his work around richly present-
ed characters; other epic poets, by contrast, engage only a little in mi-
mesis (1460a5–11). Aristotle clearly thinks of Homer as a strongly
dramatic poet (cf. the explicit praise of him as “dramatic” and as a pro-
to-dramatist at 4.1448b34–49a2). But the puzzle is that the present pas-
sage appears to treat plain third-person narrative, contrary to Chapter 3
and indeed to the preceding references to “diegematic mimesis,” as non-
mimetic (see e.g. Halliwell [1986] 1998: 126–127). It is as though Aris-
totle were momentarily slipping back into the terminology of Plato Re-
public 3.392c–398b. But the difficulties of that reading make it attrac-
tive to follow the alternative of taking Aristotle to be decrying the
tendency of epic poets other than Homer to include in their work many
self-referential remarks on themselves and their poetry. This would
leave intact the status of all epic narrative as, in Aristotle’s terms, mi-
metic, and would also emphasize a conception of the Homeric narrator
as an “impersonal” voice (see de Jong 2005).
After Aristotle, most ancient critics take a narratological line which
broadly follows the tripartite typology of Plato’s Republic Book 3, but
with a terminological adjustment: diegesis ceases to be a genus with
“plain diegesis” and “diegesis by means of mimesis” as its species and
instead is equated with “plain diegesis,” i.e. third-person narrative in a
narrator’s voice (as in Chapters 23 and 24 of Aristotle’s Poetics). The
resulting scheme distinguishes, then, between diegesis, mimesis and a
“mixed” mode which combines the first two. Somewhat ironically, giv-
en what was said in section 2 above about the discrepancies between
the typology in Republic Book 3 and Plato’s own practices as writer, a
diegesis/mimesis distinction came to be used in antiquity to classify the
discursive forms of the Platonic dialogues themselves. There was more
than one version, however, of such a classification. In Plutarch Moralia
711b–c, for instance, we find a bipartite scheme of “diegematic” (die-
gematikos, i.e. introduced/framed by third-person narrative) and “dra-
matic”: the Republic itself would be an example of the first kind, Crito
of the second. In Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Philosophers 3.50, on the
other hand, the classification is tripartite—”dramatic,” “diegematic,”
and mixed”—but without discussion of any of the ramifications of the
“mixed” form (see above). Proclus’ Commentary on the Republic 1.14–
15 (Kroll 1899–1901) also has a tripartite typology but with further and
more complex terminology: “dramatic/mimetic,” “non-mimetic” (also
aphegematikos, a term akin to diegematikos), “mixed.” (For these and
other variants of classification/terminology, see Haslam 1972: 20–21;
 Diegesis – Mimesis 135

Janko 1984: 126–133; Nünlist 2009: 94–115. On the tripartite schema

in Diomedes’ Ars grammatica, which proved especially influential in
the Middle Ages, cf. Curtius 1953: 440–441).
The distinctions of literary mode first drawn by Plato and Aristotle
were often picked up and adapted by Renaissance critics. Castelvetro,
for instance, in his commentary on the Poetics (1571), produced a criti-
cal analysis of Chapter 3 which allowed him to work towards the “unity
of time,” thought by him to be intrinsic to the dramatic mode (Bongior-
no ed. 1984: 27–35). Just one year later, in his treatise in defense of
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Jacopo Mazzoni combined the Poetics with
elements from Plato’s Sophist (the distinction between “phantastic” and
“eicastic” mimesis), as well as from the Republic, to produce his own
elaborate typology of narrative and dramatic forms of “imitation” (Gil-
bert ed. 1962: 361–364).
It was not, however, until the 20th century, with the development of
modern narratology, that the vocabulary of diegesis/mimesis was given
a new currency. That currency has brought with it some complications.
In the most widely adopted usage, Plato’s terminology has been simpli-
fied in such a way as to equate diegesis exclusively with third-person
narrative, whereas the Republic, as explained above, treats diegesis as
an overarching category which is then split into the two main types of
“plain” (or, in a sense, “single-voiced”) diegesis and “diegesis by
means of mimesis.” (Examples of this near-universal simplification are
Genette 1969: 50, [1972] 1980: 162–164, [1983] 1988: 18; Rimmon-
Kenan [1983] 2002: 107.) The theoretical consequence of this simplifi-
cation is to foist onto the Platonic argument, which might be said to be
concerned with different kinds of narrativity, a strict division between
modes conceived of as respectively narrative and non-narrative. (For
one discussion of this issue see Chatman 1990: 109–118.)
In addition, some modern theorists have converted diegesis into a
narratological category denoting the imagined story-universe as op-
posed to the discursive or textual constituents of a narration. The clos-
est we come to this distinction in ancient criticism is in Aristotle’s pair
of terms praxis, “action” qua events depicted, and muthos, the structur-
ing of depicted action into a dramatic/narrative representation (see esp.
Poetics 6.1450a3–5). In French, this other sense of diegesis is denoted
by “diégèse” (Genette [1972] 1980: 27, 280, [1983] 1988: 17–18),
while “diégésis” is reserved for the narrative mode contrasted with mi-
mesis. This further terminological splitting has led to a somewhat con-
fusing variation in the sense of the adjective “diegetic”/”diégétique,”
together with related compounds, in the hands of different theorists.
One reason for this state of affairs is the fact that the earliest modern
136 Stephen Halliwell

usage of French “diégèse” originates in film theory, where diegesis des-

ignates everything which constitutes or belongs to the world projected,
and not only visually, by a film (Metz [1971] 1974: 97–98; Pier [1986]
2009: 217–218).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Book 3 of Plato’s Republic apparently draws no distinction between

heterodiegetic narrators and the authors of the works in which those
narrators are found. Nünlist (2009: 132–133) claims that such a distinc-
tion was simply unknown in antiquity. Lattmann (2005: 39–40), how-
ever, attempts to locate a concept of the fictive narrator lurking in
Chapter 3 of Aristotle’s Poetics: this is Lattmann’s unorthodox inter-
pretation of the description of Homer as “becoming a different person”
(Poetics 3.1448a21–22; cf. section 3 above). More work would be justi-
fied on the pre-modern history of critical assumptions about the rela-
tionship between authors and narrators.
How far can a version of the diegesis/mimesis schema be applied
beyond literary art-forms? In Plato’s Republic Socrates appears at one
point, if rather mysteriously, to imply that all discourse involves dieget-
ic variations of “voice,” above all in the extent to which the mimesis of
direct speech is employed (397c). But he nowhere hints that his terms
of reference extend beyond the verbal. Aristotle, however, introduces
his typology of “modes” in Poetics Chapter 3 as part of a classification
of mimetic art in general: does he therefore believe that there are equiv-
alent modes in visual or musical art? He never provides the answer to
this question, but Berger (1994: 415–433) offers some independent re-
flections in this direction. More might be done to explore how far the
issues of diegesis/mimesis can be extrapolated/adapted from verbal to
other media.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Berger, Karol (1994). “Diegesis and Mimesis: The Poetic Modes and the Matter of
Artistic Presentation.” Journal of Musicology 12, 407–433.
Bongiorno, Andrew, ed. (1984). Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry. Binghamton: Medie-
val and Renaissance Texts and Studies.
 Diegesis – Mimesis 137

Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Film and
Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Genette, Gérard (1969). Figures II. Paris: Seuil.
– ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Oxford: Blackwell.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Gilbert, Allan H., ed. (1962). Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State
UP.
Halliwell, Stephen ([1986] 1998). Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Duckworth.
– (2002). The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Prince-
ton: Princeton UP.
Haslam, Michael (1972). “Plato, Sophron, and the Dramatic Dialogue.” Bulletin of the
Institute of Classical Studies 19, 17–38.
Janko, Richard (1984). Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II.
London: Duckworth.
Jong, Irene J. F. de (2005). “Aristotle on the Homeric Narrator.” Classical Quarterly
55, 616–621.
Kroll, Wilhelm (1899–1901). Procli Diadochi in Platonis Republicam Commentarii. 2
vols. Leipzig: Teubner.
Lattmann, Claas (2005). “Die Dichtungsklassifikation des Aristoteles.” Philologus 149,
28–51.
Metz, Christian ([1971] 1974). Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago:
Chicago UP.
Nünlist, René (2009). The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary
Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Pier, John ([1986] 2009). “Diegesis.” T. A. Sebeok et al. (eds.). Encyclopedic Diction-
ary of Semiotics. vol. 1. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 217–219.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Methuen.

5.2 Further Reading

Halliwell, Stephen (2009). “The Theory and Practice of Narrative in Plato.” J. Greth-
lein & A. Rengakos (eds.). Narratology and Interpretation: the Content of the
Form in Ancient Texts. Berlin: de Gruyter, 15–41.
Jong, Irene J. F. de (1987). Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation of the Story in
the Iliad. Amsterdam: Gruner, 1–14.
Kirby, John T. (1991). “Mimesis and Diegesis: Foundations of Aesthetic Theory in
Plato and Aristotle.” Helios 18, 113–128.
 Dreaming and Narration
Richard Walsh

1 Definition

Understanding what dreams are and interpreting what they mean has
been a preoccupation of diverse cultures for millennia. The close rela-
tion between dreams and narratives is apparent and manifests itself in
several ways: the use of dreams in literature; narrative reports of
dreams; and dreams themselves as narratives.
The exact nature of the relation is unclear, though. If dreams are a
form of hallucination, that is to say a delusory experience, where does
narration come into the picture? Only retrospectively, in the dream re-
port, or in memory? Or is the memory trace all there ever was of the
dream? On the other hand, if dreaming is, or can be, an instance of nar-
ration, multiple questions arise: how do we understand the agency of
narration in dreaming? What are the materials with which this narrating
activity engages? What principles of coherence and intelligibility in-
form such activity—how is narrative sense achieved? What constitutes
the medium of narration?

2 Explication

It is necessary to distinguish between the status of dreams as experienc-

es, and so objects of narrative report, and the status of dreaming as it-
self a kind of narration. In the former capacity, dreams have been im-
portant in many periods and cultures, and their fascination has much to
do with their characteristic resistance to the naturalized (but artificial)
logic of narrative vraisemblance (Culler 1975: 131–160). At the same
time, the suggestive power of dreams has been harnessed throughout
the history of art and literature as a mode of meaning in which the se-
miotic force of dream events is foregrounded. Indeed, there are dream
features that appear to be language-like or even predicated upon lan-
guage, such as dream puns (Kilroe 2000).
 Dreaming and Narration 139

Dream researchers tend nonetheless to maintain a distinction be-

tween the experiential dream and its signifying capacity, whether the
latter is confined to the dream report (Marozza 2005) or credited to the
memory of the dream, understood as the primary cognitive process in
which the dream experience is interpreted, thus acquiring meaning and
the status of text (Kilroe 2000). This “Cartesian theatre” model of
dream experience has been critiqued by Dennett (1981), for whom the
memory trace is all there ever was of the dream. The retrospective im-
plication of a “memory” is not intrinsic to this view, the main force of
which is to assert that the dream itself is no experience, but narrative.
Whose narrative, then, and with regard to what? The notion of the
dream as itself narrative appears to conflate perceptual consciousness of
the “facts” of the dream with reflective consciousness about the dream.
In the Freudian model, the dream gives expression to prior, uncon-
scious dream thoughts (Freud [1900] 1953). From a neurobiological
perspective, however, there is no further regression of meaning, be-
cause dreams arise from the activation of the forebrain by periodic neu-
ronal activity in the brain stem (Hobson & McCarley 1977). Such brain
activity during sleep may be random or part of some adaptive process
associated with that of sleep itself; the inception of dream mentation is
just a by-product in this account. All the remarkable coherence of
dreams is attributed to the mind’s subsequent cognitive efforts of syn-
thesis, drawing upon the narrative sense-making capacities of waking
life (Hobson 2002). Cognitive models of dreaming have more to say
about the functioning of such sense-making processes, however. They
too regard narrativizing as integral to the formation of dreams, but note
that this should not be taken for granted; our storytelling capabilities
develop in the course of childhood, and this development correlates
with the development of children’s dreams (Foulkes 1999). Narrative
logic, here, is not a given; instead, cognitive accounts foreground the
creativity of dreams—their status, that is, not just as narratives but as
fictions. Such approaches conceive the motive forces of dreaming as
continuous with those of waking thought, whether the emphasis falls
upon imaginative world-making (States 2003) or on the articulation of
emotion (Hartmann 2010b).
140 Richard Walsh

3 History of the Concept

3.1 Dreams across Cultures

In most cultures, the role of dreams has been spiritual or visionary. It is

possible to distinguish between conceptions of the dream as experien-
tial and the dream as meaningful (and therefore narrative); however, the
two views often co-exist, and even cultures for which dreams occur in a
real space (Ryan → Space) often regard them as a kind of thinking
(Kracke 1992). This anthropological perspective is borne out in classi-
cal and biblical sources: Homer makes reference to the Greek personifi-
cations of dreams, the Oneiroi, in the Iliad (2.1–35); but in the Odyssey
(19.560–569) he presents dreams as true or false narratives of future
events, in the image of the gates of horn and ivory (Howatson ed.
1989). In the Bible the most common form of dreams is discursive
(“God said to him in a dream”), but Jacob’s dream of the ladder (Gen.
28: 12) is a situated experience, if fraught with symbolism, and the ma-
jor biblical dreams tend to be of this type: those of Nebuchadnezzar
(Dan. 2) and Daniel (Dan. 7: 1–27) are obscurely portentous events in
need of interpretation, while the events of Joseph’s dreams (Gen. 37: 5–
10) are clearly legible for his brothers. Such fusions of experiential and
symbolic concepts of dreaming are less surprising than they may seem,
since it is only a materialist worldview (in which what exists simply is)
that enforces this dichotomy. From a religious perspective, reality itself
is charged with meaning, and dreams fit within the implied model of
experience as itself a discursive medium.

3.2 Dreams in Literature, Art and Film

Dreams have had a pervasive influence upon art and literature through-
out history, and upon film from the very beginnings of its emergence as a
narrative medium. Three examples will suffice here. The most prominent
literary manifestation of the influence of dreams is the tradition of dream
poetry in the Middle Ages following Le Roman de la Rose. Medieval
dream vision poetry was a self-consciously literary genre, notably in
Chaucer’s use of it, and in this respect dreams served as an inspirational
model for imaginative fictional narrative (Spearing 1976). But dreams
also functioned here as a motivational device for allegory, as in Piers
Plowman and Pearl. In the dream vision tradition, dreams are more than
a representational resource; they become a basis for understanding fic-
tional narrative—to the extent that The Divine Comedy, for example, is
read as a dream vision despite not being formally framed as a dream.
 Dreaming and Narration 141

Dreams feature very prominently in the earliest years of film—

especially as frame narratives—and not just as a topical psychological
preoccupation (Marinelli 2006), but as part of early filmmakers’ self-
conscious exploration and play with the affordances of the new medi-
um. There are plausible grounds for thinking that the cognitive experi-
ence of dreams was crucial to early cinema’s transition from a cinema
of visual attractions, founded upon the illusion of life, to a narrative
cinema with its own conventions of storytelling (Gunning 1990). The
influence of dreams may be discerned not only in foregrounded cine-
matic techniques such as montage, but also in early negotiations of the
grammar of editing within the scene, the continuity of which we have
now thoroughly naturalized. (Indeed, the question now may well be
whether the conventions of filmic narrative have in turn begun to influ-
ence the form of our dreams.)
A third example is Surrealism, which in part follows on in the histo-
ry of cinema (especially Buñuel), but is more broadly an encounter be-
tween dreams and the idea of art. The Surrealists’ interest in dreams
was caught up with their interest in the Freudian unconscious, but the
aesthetic concern behind both was the attempt to liberate the imagina-
tion from rationality. Dream logic appealed to Breton, Dali and others
as a key to narrative creativity, to the primacy of the play of thought
over social, moral and intellectual convention (Breton 1978).

3.3 Dream Interpretation

Such appropriations of the formal qualities of dreams in art and litera-

ture correspond to a very widespread assumption about dreams them-
selves: that they require or invite interpretation. This assumption also
cuts across any distinction between experiential and (framed) commu-
nicative models of dreaming, because it is a corollary of the recognition
that the dream is not empirical fact. It makes a representational medium
of the dreamer’s perceptual faculties, giving the dream the status of a
text (Kilroe 2000). This calls into question the narratological consensus
that equates mental representations with the non-discursive story level
of narrative. More specifically, dream narratives are fictions—if we
exclude possibilities such as literal foresight or a dream corresponding
directly to a memory. The latter possibility seems substantial, but clini-
cal evidence argues against it, even in the strong case of repetitive post-
traumatic dreams, which consistently manifest a creative element
(Hartmann 2010a). Dream interpretation, then, undertakes to motivate
this fictive narration. As most modern dream research discounts any
external communicant of the dream narrative (God, or some other kind
142 Richard Walsh

of spiritual inspiration), the narration must be understood as the dream-

er’s own, despite being typically characterized by novelty (to the
dreamer, as against the wholesale recall of prior cognitions in episodic
memory); by strangeness; and by the sense of a lack of control. Such a
view of dream narration is suggestive for our understanding of narrative
creativity in general.

3.4 Psychoanalysis

The Freudian unconscious offered a royal road to dream interpretation,

providing as it did for an expressive intentionality beyond the conscious
frame of reference of the dreaming dreamer. The dream itself is for
Freud a transformative articulation of prior unconscious dream thoughts
(Freud [1900] 1953). This process of articulation—the dream-work—is
a kind of negotiation between the unconscious and the constraints of,
on the one hand, the censorship of consciousness and, on the other
hand, the affordances of the perceptual medium of dreams (Freud
[1900] 1953: IV–V, chap. 6). Of the four dream-work mechanisms that
Freud identifies, two—condensation and displacement—bear mainly
upon the symbolic potency of the manifest dream and do not directly
bear upon its narrative form, although it should be noted that displace-
ment, taken under the rubric of metonymy, has been accorded a central
place in appropriations of the Freudian model to literary narrative (e.g.
Brooks 1984; for the structuralist heritage of this connection, see Jak-
obson & Halle 1971: 90–92, and Lacan 1977: 146–178). Freud’s other
two mechanisms—considerations of representability (the pressure of
vraisemblance and the constraints of particularity imposed by a percep-
tual medium) and, especially, secondary revision (the dreamer’s efforts
towards imposing global coherence and intelligibility upon the
dream)—have a close relation to the typically narrative form of dreams.
In this respect it is important to note that secondary revision, often in-
voked in relation to the narrative report of a dream, is for Freud a part
of the dream-work itself; its secondariness bears upon the relation be-
tween the manifest dream and the (primary) latent dream thoughts
(Freud [1900] 1953: V, 488–508).
The influence of literature upon Freud’s thinking is apparent here, as
throughout his writings, and there is a risk of circularity in reading
dreams according to literary protocols that may themselves owe much
to the influence of dreams. Freud’s account of narrative creativity in
dreaming, by invoking the agency of the unconscious, reinscribes in a
covert form the transmissive model of narrative intentionality that
dreams seem to problematize. For Jung, by contrast, the dream itself is
 Dreaming and Narration 143

a natural phenomenon in which consciousness attempts to find meaning

(Marozza 2005: 697–698; Jung 1928–30). This move dissociates a psy-
choanalytic perspective from the specific agency of the Freudian un-
conscious so unappealing to scientific accounts of dreaming, but it also
jettisons much of the suggestiveness, from a narratological point of
view, of the dream-work. The general drift of post-Freudian thought,
however, has been towards an emphasis upon the creative function of
the dream-work (Marozza 2005), and to that extent there is some con-
gruence between psychoanalytical and scientific approaches to dream-
ing.

3.5 Neurobiology

The neurobiological account of dreams, the “activation-synthesis”

model (Hobson & McCarley 1977), offers some answers to questions
about the physiological causes of dreams and helps to specify the neu-
rological conditions that define the characteristic qualities of dream
mentation, as distinct from thought in waking consciousness (Hobson
2002). In the activation-synthesis model, dreams arise in the first place
as a result of neuronal activity that occurs during REM and non-REM
sleep, and which probably has (like sleep itself) an adaptive function.
Such a function would relate to the ordering, updating and/or consoli-
dating of the brain’s memory systems, and only incidentally intrudes
into consciousness in the form of dream percepts (87–88). This is the
‘activation’ side of the model. The cognitive deficiencies of dream con-
sciousness relative to waking consciousness, combined with the mind’s
effort to impose coherence on initially chaotic perceptual images, result
in an elaborative process that constitutes the “synthesis” component of
the model, which Hobson conceives as a kind of confabulation (101) or,
more broadly, narrative creativity. The mind’s cognitive sense-making
efforts, in other words, are themselves progressively incorporated into
the ongoing dream, allowing the dream to give a novel and emotionally
significant coherence to its materials.

3.6 Cognitive Approaches

The focus of cognitive approaches to dreaming is this sense-making

effort in itself, without reference to either a Freudian unconscious or to
the neurobiological activation of dreaming. A cognitive perspective
clarifies the relation between narration and experience in dreaming by
distinguishing between volitional and non-volitional parts of dream
mentation in terms of receptive consciousness and associational pat-
144 Richard Walsh

terns; a double-mindedness, but not of the Cartesian homunculus varie-

ty (States 2000: 188). Such doubleness, combined with the perceptual
medium of dreaming, explains a characteristic feedback loop: “in the
dream state, owing to the peculiar simultaneity of thought and image,
the arousal of an expectation almost guarantees its arrival” (States
2003: 7). These special conditions granted, the emphasis of cognitive
accounts falls on the continuity between dreaming and waking thought,
rather than on its cognitive deficiencies (4); the bizarreness of dreams is
a reflection of the absence of the constraints upon thought characteristic
of waking imagination (States 2000).

3.7 Significance for Narratology

The foregoing has shown that narration is a relevant concept for dreams
and that dream research affords some provocative insights into the pro-
cess of narration, narrative sense and its connective logic, and the me-
dium of narration in a cognitive context. It remains to draw out some of
the implications for narratology that follow. Most obviously, dream
research problematizes conventional models of narrative creativity. The
standard communication model of narrative, or any model predicated
upon a view of narrative as the transmission of a prior conception, can-
not accommodate the case of dreams. The recursive process of elabora-
tion in dreams, on the other hand, is suggestive as a model for the gene-
sis of fictional narrative in general: it implies that narrative emerges
from the particularization of emotions (or ideological concerns, or val-
ues) and the representational elaboration of those interests. Unlike the
communication model, this account does not posit a pre-narrative
meaning which the act of narration communicates, but rather takes nar-
ration itself to be the generative principle for meaning it bears as narra-
tive. Such a model (call it the articulation model)—whether it under-
stands narrative as emerging through an evaluative feedback loop or
through a surrogate logic of representational particularization—accords
well with novelists’ own accounts of the process of narrative creativity,
which frequently emphasize a loss of originary creative control (Walsh
2007, chap. 7).
The equivalence of narrative content with the process of narration in
dreams also calls into question the standard distinction between story
and discourse, the “what” and the “how” of narrative (Chatman 1978);
dreams may just be taken to compromise the universal applicability of
that distinction, but must also call into question its adequacy to any
form of narrative. The view that our cognitive-perceptual faculties are
themselves the medium of narration in dreams disallows recent efforts
 Dreaming and Narration 145

to redeem the story-discourse distinction by claiming that story is con-

ceptual and discourse is material (Shen 2005). The cognitive-perceptual
medium of dreams also bears upon new media narratology and the rep-
resentational status of simulations and virtual worlds. The contrast be-
tween experiential and narrative views of dreaming applies equally well
in the context of a user’s interaction with a virtual environment: such an
interaction may construe the simulation as a context for (virtual) behav-
iour; or the user may understand the simulation as representational, so
that interaction with it is a semiotic activity. Only the latter involves
narrative creativity and hence, properly speaking, interactive narrative.
The relation between simulation and narrative, or between worlds
and narratives in general, illustrates the tension between systemic and
narrative modes of understanding. Here, too, the case of dreams is sig-
nificant. Dreaming involves a dynamic interaction “between linear and
non-linear thought processes” (States 2000: 190) in which the represen-
tational logic of narrative sense-making constrains and stimulates the
hyperconnective associational capacity of dream mentation. Dreams
test the limits of narrative cognition, not as a struggle between sense
and nonsense so much as between two incompatible kinds of sense—
one sequential, the other systemic. This is not a problem confined to
dreaming: temporal processes on all scales, across the range of disci-
plines, are generally better modelled in terms of the behaviour of com-
plex systems than the sequential logic of narrative (the case of evolu-
tion by natural selection is a representative example). Yet as the form of
our dreams also makes clear, narrative is not a mode of sense-making
that we can shed or outgrow; it is a non-negotiable part of our cognitive
heritage, and so it is only by being brought into relation with narrative
that systemic phenomena become intelligible and acquire human mean-
ing. A proper scepticism about narrative must therefore take the form of
self-reflexive lucidity rather than abstinence.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Two areas of ongoing research bear upon the relation between the expe-
rience and narration of dreams, in complementary respects; both would
benefit from the influence of a narratological perspective. The first is
research into sleep behaviour disorders, in which persistence of muscle
tone during REM sleep results in sporadic goal-oriented motor behav-
iour from the sleeping subject. For some researchers this disorder pre-
sents an opportunity to confirm the nature of the relation between REM
and dream content, on the hypothesis that the eye movements have an
146 Richard Walsh

experiential correlation with dream images (Leclair-Visonneau et al.

2010). The unexamined premise here appears to be a particularly literal
notion of a Cartesian theatre of images for the eyes to scan—a topic
that cries out for re-examination in terms of narrative cognition.
The second area of research is lucid dreaming, a topic with genuine
interest that has been compromised by association with unduly specula-
tive new age thinking. Dennett (1981) dismisses lucid dreams as recur-
sive effects within the memory trace (you dreamt that you realized that
you were dreaming), and States implicitly agrees, without subscribing
to the broader no-experience explanation, by understanding lucidity in
terms of an ontological distinction (dream world vs. real world) and
doubting the possibility of “an independent in-sleep discovery that
somehow rises above the curtain of sleep—during sleep” (States 2000:
189). There is lab-based research into lucid dreams that supports a dif-
ferent view, however, not only by cultivating experimental conditions
in which it becomes possible for the dreamer to signal awareness of
dreaming while still asleep, but also by intimating a more integrated
notion of dream lucidity as lying on a continuous scale with other de-
grees of the reflective consciousness inherent in all dreaming (LaBerge
& DeGracia 2000). Such an approach reaffirms the creativity of dream
representations, offering the possibility of new insights into the nature
of narrative fictionality and its affective power.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Breton, André (1978). What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Ed. F. Rosemont. New
York: Pathfinder.
Brooks, Peter (1984). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New
York: Knopf.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Culler, Jonathan (1975). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study
of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Dennett, Daniel (1981). “Are Dreams Experiences?” Brainstorms: Philosophical Es-
says on Mind and Psychology. Brighton: Harvester P, 129–148.
Foulkes, David (1999). Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness.
Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Freud, Sigmund ([1900] 1953). The Interpretation of Dreams. J. Strachey (trans.). The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols.
4 & 5. London: Hogarth P.
 Dreaming and Narration 147

Gunning, Tom (1990). “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the
Avant-Garde.” T. Elsaesser (ed.). Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Lon-
don: British Film Institute, 56–62.
Hartmann, Ernest (2010a). “The Dream Always Makes New Connections: The Dream
is a Creation, Not a Replay.” Sleep Medicine Clinics 5, 241–248.
– (2010b). “The Underlying Emotion and The Dream: Relating Dream Imagery to
the Dreamer’s Underlying Emotion Can Help Elucidate the Nature of Dreaming.”
International Review of Neurobiology 92, 197–214.
Hobson, J. Allan (2002). Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. Oxford:
Oxford UP.
– & Robert McCarley (1977). “The Brain as a Dream State Generator: an Activa-
tion- Synthesis Hypothesis.” American Journal of Psychiatry 134, 1335–1348.
Howatson, Margaret C., ed. (1989). The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.
2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Jakobson, Roman & Morris Halle (1971). Fundamentals of Language. 2nd ed. The
Hague: Mouton.
Jung, Carl G. (1928–30). Dream Analysis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kilroe, Patricia (2000). “The Dream as Text, the Dream as Narrative.” Dreaming 10.3,
125–137.
Kracke, Waud H. (1992). “Cultural Aspects of Dreaming.” International Institute for
Dream Research. http://www.dreamresearch.ca/pdf/cultural.pdf.
LaBerge, Stephen & Donald J. DeGracia (2000). “Varieties of Lucid Dreaming Experi-
ence.” R. G. Kunzendorf & B. Wallace (eds.). Individual Differences in Con-
scious Experience. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 269–307.
Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits. A Selection. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Tavistock.
Leclair-Visonneau, Laurène et al. (2010). “Do the Eyes Scan Dream Images During
Rapid Eye Movement Sleep? Evidence from the Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Be-
haviour Disorder Model.” Brain 133.6, 1737–1746.
Marinelli, Lydia (2006). “Screening Wish Theories: Dream Psychologies and Early
Cinema.” Science in Context 19.1, 87–110.
Marozza, Maria Ilena (2005). “When Does a Dream Begin to ‘Have Meaning’? Lin-
guistic Constraints and Significant Moments in the Construction of the Meaning
of a Dream.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 50, 693–705.
Shen, Dan (2005). “Story-Discourse Distinction.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. New York: Routledge, 566–568.
Spearing, Anthony C. (1976). Medieval Dream Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
States, Bert O. (2000). “Dream Bizarreness and Inner Thought.” Dreaming 10.4, 179–
192.
– (2003). “Dreams, Art and Virtual Worldmaking.” Dreaming 13.1, 3–12.
Walsh, Richard (2007). The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of
Fiction. Ohio State UP.
148 Richard Walsh

5.2 Further Reading

Brottman, Mikita (2008). “Some Thoughts on Dream Aesthetics.” Image [&] Narrative
23. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/timeandphotography/brottman.htm.
Cavallero, Corrado & David Foulkes, eds. (1993) Dreaming as Cognition. New York:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Hartmann, Ernest (2010). The Nature and Functions of Dreaming. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Hobson, J. Allan (1998). The Dreaming Brain: How the Brain Creates both the Sense
and Nonsense of Dreams. New York: Basic Books.
Jahn, Manfred (2003). “‘Awake! Open Your Eyes!’ The Cognitive Logic of External
and Internal Stories.” D. Herman (ed.). Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sci-
ences. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 195–213.
Kahn, David & J. Allan Hobson (1993). “Self-Organization Theory of Dreaming.”
Dreaming 10.3, 151–178.
States, Bert O. (1993). Dreaming and Storytelling. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP.
– (1994). “Authorship in Dreams and Fictions.” Dreaming 4, 237–253.
Walsh, Richard (2010). “Dreaming and Narrative Theory.” F. L. Aldama et al. (eds.).
Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts. Austin: U of Texas P, 141–157.
 Experientiality
Marco Caracciolo

1 Definition

The term “experientiality” was introduced by Fludernik (1996), where

it was defined as “the quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience”
(12). Experientiality refers to the ways in which narrative taps into
readers’ familiarity with experience through the activation of “natural”
cognitive parameters (see Fludernik 2003), and particularly the embod-
iment of cognitive faculties, the understanding of intentional action, the
perception of temporality, and the emotional evaluation of experience.
This cognitively grounded relation between human experience and hu-
man representations of experience is at the root of Fludernik’s defini-
tion of narrative: any text that foregrounds the above-mentioned param-
eters qualifies as narrative; any text that sidelines them (including
factual summaries and reports) possesses weak or zero narrativity be-
cause it “[cancels] the dynamics of experientiality” (Fludernik 1996:
28). Thus, for Fludernik, experientiality and narrativity (Abbott → Nar-
rativity) are interchangeable terms.
What remains unclear in Fludernik’s account is whether experienti-
ality should be considered an intrinsic (and textually identifiable) prop-
erty of narrative, or a psychological process triggered in the text-reader
interaction. Such definitional ambiguity explains why the concept of
experientiality has been used in significantly different ways in narrato-
logical discussions after Fludernik.

2 Explication

According to Fludernik, narrative’s experientiality consists in its impli-

cation or activation of a number of cognitive parameters, i.e. basic
structures of human engagement with the world that straddle the divide
between real-life experience and semiotic representations of experience.
We may group these parameters under the headings of embodiment,
intentionality, temporality, and evaluation. They are prototypically
150 Marco Caracciolo

found in “naturally occurring” (that is, conversational) narrative, where

a storyteller relates a past experience by conveying his or her own em-
bodied and emotional appraisal of temporally unfolding actions. Such a
“natural” narrative situation, where the experiencer and the storyteller
coincide, provides the groundwork for Fludernik’s narratological mo-
del.
Among her cognitive parameters, Fludernik places a premium on the
concept of embodiment, which, she argues, can subsume all other cate-
gories: it “evokes all the parameters of a real-life schema of existence
which always has to be situated in a specific time and space frame, and
the motivational and experiential aspects of human actionality likewise
relate to the knowledge about one’s physical presence in the world”
(Fludernik 1996: 30). Intentionality refers to the goal-directed nature of
human action whose understanding is implicit in readers’ engagement
with narrative (23). Finally, narrative draws on the dynamic patterning
of human temporality, which is always accompanied by emotional,
evaluative processes: “Experientiality includes this sense of moving
with time, of the now of experience, but this almost static level of tem-
poral experience is supplemented by more dynamic and evaluative fac-
tors” (29). These evaluations are depicted by Fludernik in terms of
emotional relevance: “All experience is therefore stored as emotionally
charged remembrance, and it is reproduced in narrative form because it
was memorable, funny, scary, or exciting” (29).
In the conversational storytelling studied by sociolinguist Labov
(1972), the evaluations that are intertwined with narrative patterns are
those of the speaker and storyteller. By contrast, in fictional narrative
such evaluations tend to convey the viewpoint of a character or protag-
onist, mirroring “her experience of events as they impinge on her situa-
tion or activities” (Fludernik 1996: 30). Hence, Fludernik’s model
grounds the narrativity (and experientiality) of fictional narrative in the
representation of characters’ experiences: “Narrativity can emerge from
the experiential portrayal of dynamic event sequences which are al-
ready configured emotively and evaluatively, but it can also consist in
the experiential depiction of human consciousness tout court” (30). In
this way, Fludernik uncouples narrativity from the criteria of temporal
progression and causal connectedness with which it is associated in
plot-based definitions of narrative: “In my model there can […] be nar-
ratives without plot, but there cannot be any narratives without a human
(anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort at some narrative level”
(13). The upshot of this view is that texts not traditionally considered
narrative (e.g., lyric poetry) are said to possess narrativity, whereas
purely factual accounts such as summaries or reports—which sideline
 Experientiality 151

embodiment, intentionality, and emotionally charged temporality—do

not qualify as stories, since they lack experientiality (see 28). Any text
that represents experience is, for Fludernik, a narrative text, even if it
does not map onto a clear-cut sequence of causally connected events
and actions.

3 History of the Concept and its Discussion

Experientiality is one of the key terms of postclassical narratology (see

Herman ed. 1999; Meister → Narratology), reflecting the considerable
influence exerted by Fludernik’s model on the recent history of this
field. However, scholars working in the wake of Fludernik’s “natural”
narratology have construed and utilized the concept of experientiality in
substantially different ways. Since Fludernik places a premium on the
narrative figuration of characters’ experiences, some narratologists have
equated experientiality with the textual representation of fictional con-
sciousnesses, one of the traditional areas of narratological investigation
(Hamburger [1957] 1973; Cohn 1978; Fludernik 1993). Margolin, for
example, writes that experientiality is the “representation of mental ac-
tivity” (2000: 604). Likewise, Palmer uses experientiality interchangea-
bly with “fictional mental functioning” (2004: 32). On the other hand,
Herman has defined experientiality (or the “consciousness factor,” in
his term) more globally as narrative’s capacity to “emulate through [its]
temporal and perspectival configuration the what-it’s-like dimension of
conscious awareness itself” (2009: 137–160). Caracciolo (2012) has
gone further in this direction, arguing that the experientiality of narra-
tive arises from the tension and interaction between a narrative text and
the past experiences of its recipients. All in all, after the publication of
Fludernik’s work, experientiality has been extended to cover the con-
tinuum between the textual representation of fictional (i.e., characters’)
experiences and the creation of “story-driven” experiences in narrative
audiences.
These semantic oscillations reveal a number of theoretical issues left
open by Fludernik’s treatment. Diengott (2010), in particular, has criti-
cized the expository blind spots and shortcomings of Fludernik’s mod-
el. Consider the definition provided by Fludernik: experientiality is “the
quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience.” Almost all of the
terms used in this phrase call for clarification and tie in with age-old
debates within narratology and literary theory.
Firstly, it may be wondered whether “the quasi-mimetic evocation
of real-life experience” is a necessary and/or a sufficient condition for
152 Marco Caracciolo

narrativity. Secondly, depending on the exact scope of the terms “quasi-

mimetic” and “real-life experience,” experientiality seems to occupy
different positions vis-à-vis the concept of mimesis. Thirdly, depending
on how we construe the term “evocation,” Fludernik’s definition seems
to hover between the textualist orientation of structuralist narratology
and the readerly orientation of postclassical, and specifically cognitive,
approaches (Herman → Cognitive Narratology). The textualist perspec-
tive is at the root of interpretations of experientiality (such as those by
Margolin and Palmer), focusing on the representation of characters’
experiences, while the reader-response perspective leads to interpreta-
tions focusing on recipients’ experiences (cf. Caracciolo 2012).

3.1 Experientiality and Narrativity

Fludernik’s “natural” narratology ties a tight knot between experiential-

ity and narrativity. As Fludernik writes, “narrativity […] centers on ex-
perientiality of an anthropomorphic nature” (1996: 26). However, start-
ing with Sternberg (2001: 122) and Alber (2002), scholars have
disputed Fludernik’s claim, arguing that experientiality cannot be
straightforwardly equated with narrativity (see Wolf 2003: 181; Ryan
2005: 4; Herman 2002: 168–169; 2009: 211). For instance, Alber
(2002: 68–70) points out that merging narrativity and experientiality
results in an overextension of the category “narrative”: lyric poetry can
be said to depict human consciousness (and therefore possesses experi-
entiality) even though its narrativity is usually quite weak. Indeed,
while all artistic artifacts are in some way related to human experience,
not all of them can be made sense of in narrative terms. The upshot is
that narrativity must be defined on other grounds than experientiality
alone.
Yet the fact that experientiality cannot be taken as a sufficient condi-
tion for narrativity does not mean that stories can be devoid of experi-
entiality. No matter how distant from the laws and conventions of what
we consider to be our real world, stories are always bound up with hu-
man experience: they speak to human concerns and help us negotiate
values that are part of our everyday reality. In other words, narrative is
deeply implicated in what has been variously called “the repertoire”
(Iser [1976] 1978) or “the experiential background” (Caracciolo 2012)
of recipients. We can therefore conclude that experientiality is a neces-
sary—but not sufficient—condition for narrativity. Hence, theorists
such as Wolf (2003) and Herman (2009) have included experientiality
among their “narratemes” or “basic elements of narrative” without
equating it with narrativity. Experientiality thus becomes only one of
 Experientiality 153

the factors that contribute to making a semiotic artifact intelligible in

narrative terms.

3.2 Experientiality and Mimesis

Fludernik’s definition of experientiality includes the term “quasi-

mimetic,” which should be understood in light of Fludernik’s own dis-
cussion of mimesis: “mimesis must not be identified as imitation but
needs to be treated as the artificial and illusionary projection of a semi-
otic structure which the reader recuperates in terms of a fictional reality.
This recuperation, since it is based on cognitive parameters gleaned
from real-world experience, inevitably results in an implicit though in-
complete homologization of the fictional and the real worlds” (1996:
35, original emphasis). To paraphrase Fludernik’s proposition: we
make sense of narrative texts by projecting their events and existents
onto a quasi-ontological domain, a storyworld or fictional world. Such
a simulative—and in this sense “mimetic” (see Oatley 1999)—process
draws heavily on basic cognitive and experiential parameters. However,
the storyworlds of fiction can deviate significantly from these parame-
ters: they can contain physically or even logically impossible states of
affairs such as the metamorphosis of a human being into an aquatic sal-
amander (in Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl,” 1956) or a disembodied
narrator inhabiting the body of another character (in Amis’s novel
Time’s Arrow, 1991). These narratives are now the object of so-called
“unnatural” narratology (Alber et al. 2010). Yet for all their bizarreness,
these stories maintain a connection with human experientiality via the
themes they address (see Alber 2009). Indeed, while the advocates of
unnatural narratology tend to drive a wedge between unnatural and nat-
ural approaches, Fludernik (2012) herself has pointed out how natural
and unnatural elements are, in literary mimesis, intrinsically bound up.
Experientiality as narrative’s mimetic relation with human experi-
ence should not be conceptualized as a one-way exchange in which nar-
rative can only draw on recipients’ familiarity with the real world
(Caracciolo 2012). Indeed, both conversational and fictional stories can
impact recipients’ interaction with reality by leaving a mark on their
values and attitudes. This phenomenon, known in social psychology as
“narrative persuasion” (Green & Brock 2000), shows that experientiali-
ty is a complex, dynamic relation in which real-world and story-driven
experiences become intertwined (cf. Fludernik’s “incomplete homolo-
gization of the fictional and the real worlds”). Thus, engaging with nar-
rative not only taps into recipients’ repertoire of past experiences (or
“experiential background”), but can also produce shifts and changes in
154 Marco Caracciolo

this repertoire. This double movement between storytelling and back-

ground is, according to Caracciolo (2012), constitutive of experientiali-
ty. Ricœur’s ([1984] 1985) tripartite theory of mimesis already gestured
towards this interaction between narrative and recipients’ past experi-
ences: by temporally organizing or “configuring” a series of events
(“mimesis 2”), narrative exploits recipients’ pre-understanding of the
world (“mimesis 1”) in a way that can restructure or “refigure” their
perception of reality (“mimesis 3”). From this hermeneutic perspective,
narrative experientiality is bound up with interpretation qua our basic
way of engaging with the physical, social, and cultural world. The
boundaries of human experience—and thus of what humans consider
possible or impossible, natural or “unnatural”—are constantly renegoti-
ated through a cultural, interpretive dynamic that is, at least in part,
driven by the experientiality of storytelling practices (see Bernaerts et
al. 2014).

3.3 Experientiality in an Interdisciplinary Context

Taken in its psychological sense, experientiality can be seen as narra-

tive’s capacity to give rise to experiential states and responses in recipi-
ents. Experientiality thus ties in with a larger movement within con-
temporary narratology—a movement that focuses on the psychological
processes underlying recipients’ engagement with stories. The investi-
gation of the experiential texture of storytelling can benefit from the
rising interest in experience itself within contemporary cognitive sci-
ence: traditional, AI-inspired cognitivism sidelined experience, concen-
trating instead on abstract, unconscious processes and their function in
shaping behavior (Chalmers 1996: 15). By contrast, embodied and situ-
ated approaches to cognition highlight the subject’s experiential history
of interaction with the environment (Varela et al. 1991; Lakoff & John-
son 1999). Psycholinguists have shown how this history plays a role in
discourse and narrative comprehension through the activation of memo-
ries of past experiences (or “experiential traces”; see Pecher & Zwaan
2005). In sum, the interdisciplinary convergence on experience as an
object of theoretical as well as empirical inquiry can help narratologists
come to grips with two dimensions of narrative experientiality, both of
them contained—in an inchoate form—in Fludernik’s discussion of
cognitive parameters: firstly, neo-phenomenological approaches within
the philosophy of mind (Gallagher & Zahavi 2008) can yield insight
into the temporal and emotional structure of story-driven experiences;
secondly, cognitive-psychological research can explain how cognitive-
 Experientiality 155

level (i.e., unconscious) mental processes interact with experiences

(Gerrig 2011).
While this interdisciplinary exchange with the cognitive sciences
can open up new avenues of investigation into narrative experientiality,
it also creates unprecedented challenges for narrative theory. As soon as
the emphasis shifts from the textual pole (experientiality as the repre-
sentation of characters’ experiences) to the readerly pole, any reference
to the text and its structures as autonomous and independently describ-
able objects becomes problematic: textual properties exist only as expe-
rienced by particular recipients; yet the story-driven experiences of
each recipient depend not only on the text but also on his or her own
experiential background (predispositions, interests, competencies, etc.).
As a result, the text-reader interaction becomes a “black box” where it
is difficult to disentangle the text from the (more or less shared) cogni-
tive make-up and presuppositions of the audience. It is likely that textu-
al properties are responsible for some aspects or structures of recipi-
ents’ experiences. However, characterizing these aspects or structures is
a daunting task, especially given the wide diversity of recipients’ re-
sponses to narrative (which reflects the diversity of their experiential
background). The empirical-phenomenological project launched by
literary scholar Miall and psychologist Kuiken (see, e.g. Kuiken et al.
2004) seems to pave the way for this investigation into the structures of
story-driven experiences.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

It is argued above that the concept of experientiality lends itself to two

interpretations: it can refer to the textual representation of experience,
but it also hints at the experiences undergone by the recipients of narra-
tive. We should be open to the possibility that studying narrative strate-
gies for representing characters’ experience and studying recipients’
story-driven experiences are essentially independent enterprises. But at
this stage it seems important to follow Fludernik in attempting to build
a synergy between the text-first and the recipient-first approach to ex-
perientiality. Hence, future research should concentrate on how specific
textual cues can modulate recipients’ experience of narrative. Empathy
for characters appears to be crucial to bridge the gap between the textu-
al and the readerly pole of experientiality. Although this phenomenon
has received increasing attention in recent years (Keen → Narrative
Empathy), we know relatively little about the textual strategies that can
encourage recipients to empathize with a character. Other relevant
156 Marco Caracciolo

questions include: how can narrative manipulate the experiential “feel”

of emotions? How can it create moods and other “existential feelings”
(Robinson 2005; Ratcliffe 2008)? What is the role of mental imagery in
the reading experience, and to what extent does it depend on textual
cues? How can stories produce a sense of presence in the storyworld
(“immersion”) and other bodily responses such as proprioception and
kinesthesia? Finally, how do all the experiential processes just men-
tioned influence recipients’ engagement with the thematic and interpre-
tive meanings of narrative?

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Alber, Jan (2002). “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology: Samuel

Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered.” Style 36, 54–75.
– (2009). “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them.” Storyworlds 1,
79–96.
– et al. (2010). “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic
Models.” Narrative 18, 113–136.
Bernaerts, Lars et al. (2014). “The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators.” Narrative
22, 68–93.
Caracciolo, Marco (2012). “Notes for A(nother) Theory of Experientiality.” Journal of
Literary Theory 6, 141–158.
Chalmers, David J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.
New York: Oxford UP.
Cohn, Dorrit (1978). Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Conscious-
ness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Diengott, Nilli (2010). “Fludernik’s Natural Narratological Model: A Reconsideration
and Pedagogical Implications.” Journal of Literary Semantics 39, 93–101.
Fludernik, Monika (1993). The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction:
The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London: Routledge.
– (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
– (2003). “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters.” D. Herman (ed.). Nar-
rative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 243–267.
– (2012). “How Natural Is ‘Unnatural Narratology’; or, What Is Unnatural about
Unnatural Narratology?” Narrative 20, 357–370.
Gallagher, Shaun & Dan Zahavi (2008). The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction
to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Abingdon: Routledge.
Gerrig, Richard J. (2011). “Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Readers’ Narra-
tive Experiences.” G. Olson (ed.). Current Trends in Narratology. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 37–60.
 Experientiality 157

Green, Melanie C. & Timothy C. Brock (2000). “The Role of Transportation in the
Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychol-
ogy 79, 701–721.
Hamburger, Käte ([1957] 1973). The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
– (2009). Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
– ed. (1999). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus:
Ohio State UP.
Iser, Wolfgang ([1976] 1978). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.
Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP.
Kuiken, Don et al. (2004). “Forms of Self-Implication in Literary Reading.” Poetics
Today 25, 171–203.
Labov, William (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Ver-
nacular. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind
and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Margolin, Uri (2000). “Telling in the Plural: From Grammar to Ideology.” Poetics To-
day 21, 591–619.
Oatley, Keith (1999). “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cogni-
tive and Emotional Simulation.” Review of General Psychology 3, 101–107.
Palmer, Alan (2004). Fictional Minds. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska P.
Pecher, Diane & Rolf A. Zwaan (2005). Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception
and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Ratcliffe, Matthew (2008). Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the
Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Ricœur, Paul ([1984] 1985). Time and Narrative. Vol. 2. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Robinson, Jenefer (2005). Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature,
Music, and Art. Oxford: Clarendon P.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2005). “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratolo-
gy.” J. Ch. Meister (ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Dis-
ciplinarity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–24.
Sternberg, Meir (2001). “How Narrativity Makes a Difference.” Narrative 9, 115–122.
Varela, Francisco J. et al. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience. Cambridge: MIT P.
Wolf, Werner (2003). “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualiza-
tion and its Applicability to the Visual Arts.” Word & Image 19, 180–197.

5.2 Further Reading

Caracciolo, Marco (2012). “Fictional Consciousnesses: A Reader’s Manual.” Style 46,

42–64.
Hurlburt, Russell T. & Eric Schwitzgebel (2007). Describing Inner Experience? Pro-
ponent Meets Skeptic. Cambridge: MIT P.
Oatley, Keith (2011). Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Malden:
Wiley.
158 Marco Caracciolo

Phelan, James (2007). Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetor-
ical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
 Event and Eventfulness
Peter Hühn

1 Definition

The term “event” refers to a change of state as one of the constitutive

features of narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity). We can distinguish be-
tween event I, a general type of event that has no special requirements,
and event II, a type of event that satisfies certain additional conditions.
A type I event is any change of state explicitly or implicitly represented
in a text. A change of state qualifies as a type II event if it is accredit-
ed—in an interpretive, context-dependent decision—with certain fea-
tures such as relevance, unexpectedness, and unusualness. The two
types of event correspond to broad and narrow definitions of narrativi-
ty, respectively: narration as the relation of changes of any kind and
narration as the representation of changes with certain qualities.

2 Explication

The concept of event has become prominent in recent work on narratol-

ogy. It is generally used to define narrativity in terms of the sequentiali-
ty inherent in the narrated story. This sequentiality involves changes of
state in the represented world and thus implies temporality, a constitu-
tive aspect of narration that distinguishes it from other forms of dis-
course such as description or argumentation.
The concept of event is used primarily in two contexts to define two
basic types of narration: a type of narration that can be described lin-
guistically and manifests itself in predicates that express changes (event
I), on the one hand, and an interpretation- and context-dependent type
of narration that implies changes of a special kind (event II), on the
other. Both categories are characterized by a change of state: the transi-
tion from one state (situation) to another, usually with reference to a
character (agent or patient) or a group of characters. The difference be-
tween event I and event II lies in the degree of specificity of change to
which they refer. Event I involves all kinds of change of state, whereas
160 Peter Hühn

event II concerns a special kind of change that meets certain additional

conditions in the sense, e.g., of being a decisive, unpredictable turn in
the narrated happenings, a deviation from the normal, expected course
of things, as is implied by event in everyday language. Whether these
additional conditions are met is a matter of interpretation. Event II is
therefore a hermeneutic category, unlike event I, which can largely be
described objectively.
In language, a type I event is expressed by the difference of predi-
cates (Prince [1987] 2003). A type II event, on the other hand, acquires
relevance only with reference to intradiegetic expectations and to a par-
ticular literary or cultural context. In other words, it is brought into be-
ing and related to its surroundings by an entity (character, narrator, or
reader) that comprehends and interprets the change of state involved.
Contextual reference of this kind can allow a type I event or a combina-
tion of type I events to be transformed into a type II event. Consider the
following examples. In and of itself, the sentence “Mary stepped onto
the ship” contains a type I event; only as a result of reference (via char-
acter, narrator, or reader) to a social context does it acquire special rele-
vance and thereby become a type II event in the sense of being a devia-
tion from what is normal and expected (e.g. emigration as a new
beginning). Next, take a historiographical narrative in which the French
Revolution is treated in the context of long-term socio-political devel-
opments in France. If the historian here describes the Revolution as a
type II event on the basis of the profound changes set in motion at the
time, we are dealing with the transformation not of a single type I
event, but of a multiplicity of type I events.
The two types of event imply different definitions of narrativity,
each with a different scope. The type I event is treated as a defining
feature inherent in every kind of narrative (e.g. Prince [1987] 2003;
Herman 2005); whereas the type II event is integral to a particular type
of narrative, contributing to its raison d’être, or tellability (Labov 1972;
Baroni → Tellability). These two basic types of narrativity can be con-
trasted (drawing on Lotman [1970] 1977) as plotless narration vs. nar-
ration that possesses plot, or as process narration vs. event-based narra-
tion. Type I events, largely objective and independent of interpretation,
have been studied primarily in linguistics (Frawley 1992), literary com-
puting (Meister 2003), and numerous stucturalist approaches (from the
Russian formalists to the French and American narratologists of the
1960s and 70s). The concept of type II event, on the other hand, has
been discussed above all in the context of Lotman’s idea of plot, in re-
search on everyday narratives (Labov 1972), in psychology (Bruner
1991), in literary theory, in historiography (Suter & Hettling 2001;
 Event and Eventfulness 161

Rathmann 2003), and also in anthropology (van Gennep 1960; Elsbree

1991).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 The Concept of Event in the Poetics of the Tragedy and the Novella

The earliest theoretical conceptualization of type II eventfulness specif-

ically refers to drama, and in particular to Aristotle’s Poetics, where
plot (in tragedy) is characterised by a decisive turning point (Halliwell
1987: chaps. X, XI, XIII). Aristotle distinguishes three types of change
which, singly or (ideally) combined, constitute a tragic plot: reversal
(peripeteia); recognition (anagnorisis); and suffering (pathos). While
peripeteia is to be understood as the formal designation of eventful
change, anagnorisis and pathos specify its concrete―i.e. cognitive and
existential―manifestations. The tragic hero thus undergoes a (primarily
negative) eventful change from prosperity to adversity, but also from
ignorance to knowledge.
As to narrative fiction proper, there is a close connection between
event II and the genesis and development of the novella as a genre, im-
plicitly with respect to plot structure, and explicitly, although rarely and
only at a late stage, with respect to poetological reflection. The relevant
authors include, above all, Boccaccio and Goethe. In Boccaccio’s
Decameron, the plot frequently involves the violation of a prohibition
or crossing a boundary imposed by moral norms (affirmation of sexual-
ity) or by the social order (flaunting of class differences), involving at
the same time a revolt against literary tradition (Pabst 1953: 1–7). The
power of natural desire, frequently assisted by chance, thus results in a
break with the established order, which is characteristic of an event
(Schlaffer 1993: 22–23). The obvious eventfulness of narratives, how-
ever, does not lie in the form of the author’s assertions (found, say, in
the introductory passages) but, rather, is hidden behind his apologetic
stance, aimed at playing down the disruption of norms by diverting at-
tention to the inferiority of the genre (with its orality, colloquial lan-
guage, conversational style, and strategy of providing entertainment;
Pabst 1953: 27–41, esp. 37). In contrast to cases of eventfulness, how-
ever, we also find novellas still aligned with the medieval exemplum
tradition, which lack unexpected turns. In this respect, the term “novel-
la” does not refer to genre but rather to what is new, but also to gossip
and current developments.
162 Peter Hühn

Eventfulness II is first mentioned explicitly as a defining feature of

Novelle by Goethe and the participants in the German Novelle debate
during the 19th century, although they refer only to certain aspects of
the question and then, only in a formulaic manner (Swales 1977: 16,
21–26; Aust [1990] 2006: 26–36). The most concise formulation is
found in Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann (29 January 1827):
“what is a Novelle if not an unheard-of occurrence [Begebenheit] that
has taken place.” These words stress both the exceptional nature of an
event and its special character of singularity and facticity (Perels 1998:
179–180, 181–189): in Goethe’s usage, Begebenheit means a disquiet-
ing, decisive turn that takes place in the public sphere or is significant
in constituting the individual subject (cf. “Begebenheit,” in Goethe
Wörterbuch 1989). This is also the sense in which the term is used in
the Conversations of German Refugees (Goethe [1795] 1960: 188).
In the 19th century, Tieck and Heyse stand out for making event the
defining property of the Novelle in their “turning point” and “falcon”
theories, respectively. Tieck describes the central feature of the novella
as the “turn in the story, that point at which it unexpectedly begins to
take an entirely new course” (1829, reprinted in Kunz ed. [1968] 1973:
53). Heyse highlights the anomalous, the unusual, as a defining feature
of the event, especially in his reference to the falcon (drawn from a
Boccaccio novella), stating that “the story, not the states, the event, not
the world-view reflected in it, are what matters here,”; “the ‘falcon’,”
he notes, [is] “the special quality that distinguishes this story from a
thousand others” (1871, reprinted in Kunz ed. [1968] 1973: 67–68; ori-
ginal emphasis).

3.2 The Concept of Event in the Context of Tellability

and the “Point of the Narrative”

As a theoretical concept, event II has played no more than a peripheral

role in narrative studies to date. Aspects of the phenomenon, however,
have been highlighted in other contexts and in the guise of a different
terminology. Discussions of “tellability” and of the “point of the narra-
tive” (Labov 1972: 366) are the main examples of these other theoreti-
cal frameworks, focusing on events as one of the reasons why stories
are narrated. An early approach to describing the noteworthiness of a
narrative was put forth by Labov (1972: 363–370) in his study of eve-
ryday narratives, where the term tellability was adopted. The term
“evaluation” (366–375) was used to describe the various ways the nar-
rator stresses the “point” of the narrative, its raison d’être. These in-
clude external evaluation (direct identification), embedding (of utter-
 Event and Eventfulness 163

ances of a character or the narrator in the narrated happenings), evalua-

tive action (in which case emotional involvement in the decisive action
is reported), and evaluation by suspension of the action (in which case
the central aspect is highlighted by interrupting the reported action).
Pratt (1977: 63–78) transfers Labov’s approach to literature and shows
that his categories apply to literary narrative texts as well; the tellability
of a literary narrative, she suggests, is also dependent on deviation from
what is normal and on the relevance of such deviation (132–151).
In contrast to Labov’s concentration on mediation techniques, Ryan
(1991: 148–166) develops a theory of tellability concerning the level of
the narrated happenings. Particularly relevant to eventfulness is her dis-
tinction between three types of progression in the narrated happenings
(155–156): (a) sudden switches in the plot, contrasts between the goals
and results of characters’ actions, and self-contradiction; (b) repetition
of narrative sequences (e.g. the three wishes or three attempts found in
fairy tales); and (c) elements of the narrated happenings that have mul-
tiple meanings (e.g. the marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta is a reward, a
case of incest, and also the fulfilment of a prophecy). In a second take,
Ryan defines tellability in terms of the complexity of the plot sequenc-
es, which she situates in an “underlying system of purely virtual em-
bedded narratives” (156), i.e. a network of realized and alternative, un-
realized (desired, rejected, imagined), courses of action. In this way, as
with event II, but without the term itself being used, the tellability of a
story is derived from the structure of its course of action and the com-
plexity of that structure. However, the equation of structural complexity
with tellability is problematic, since it tends to isolate textual structures
from (cultural, literary) contexts. As a result, the definitions involved
remain unspecific, for it is questionable whether complex texts are tell-
able simply because they are complex, and whether tellability is really
determined by the text alone.
A different approach to defining tellability turns to conventionalized
genres rather than individual stories in its study of the crucial points in
plot development. Here, tellability is examined in terms of structural
switches or contrasts. Kock (1978) provides an example of such an ap-
proach by drawing a direct link between the interest that genres such as
tragedy, the story of quest or trickery in the fairy tale, and the detective
novel arouse in the reader and the genre-specific plot structures of those
genres. Kock describes plot structures with reference to the concept of
the narrative trope. This enables him to point to aspects of narrated
happenings that have two functions thereby generating tension between
two levels (intention vs. outcome, appearances vs. reality, surface vs.
depth, etc.)—a tension that, moreover, serves as the central motivation
164 Peter Hühn

for reading. An example of such tension-producing dual functions is a

setback unwittingly brought about by the protagonist in a tragic or a
comic work through his own actions. Clearly this approach does identi-
fy crucial switches or changes in the genres in question, but it is none-
theless vulnerable to the criticism outlined above regarding any defini-
tion of eventfulness that is based purely on textual structure; both
cultural dependency and the relevance of text-internal norms are ig-
nored.

3.3 The Concept of Event in Historiographical Theory

The concept of event has a long, and changeable heritage in historiog-

raphy. As a historical category, event, was an accepted historiograph-
ical category, lacking any explicit definition until the turn of the 19th
century. From then onwards, however, it was subjected to increasing
theoretical reflection, first in France and later in Germany (Rathmann
2003: 3–11; Ricœur 1984: 96−111; Rüth 2005). This criticism, with a
concern for scientific accuracy, was directed at aspects of the historical
event that depend on interpretation: its singularity; its instantaneous
nature; and the involvement of the subject. Event-based history was
superseded by structural history and the history of ordinary life. Long-
term tendencies, processes, structures, collective mentalities, and supra-
individual patterns were now the object of attention. However, a renais-
sance of the event can be observed in recent historiography, one factor
at work here being the realization that events are an irrefutably relevant
aspect of historical processes. Historical changes do not take place
simply because of structural conditions; they are set in motion as un-
predictable and unique occurrences by individuals and individual ac-
tions (Rathmann 2003; Suter & Hettling 2001; see also the volumes
edited by these scholars).
The definition of eventfulness proposed in this context displays af-
finities with the narratological concept of the type II event (3.4 below).
Suter and Hettling (2001: 24–25) use three criteria to distinguish events
from simple happenings: (a) contemporaries must experience a se-
quence of actions as disquieting and breaking with expectations; (b) the
grounds on which the sequence of actions is considered surprising and
disquieting must be collective in nature—part, that is, of a social hori-
zon of expectations; and (c) the sequence of actions must result in
structural changes that are perceived and discursively processed by
those involved. Rathmann (2003: 12–14) argues that fulfilment of crite-
rion (c) alone, without criteria (a) and (b), is enough to constitute an
event if the change is presented and discursively mediated as a case of
 Event and Eventfulness 165

major upheaval. This definition seeks to connect structure and event,

long held to be incompatible with one another, as mutually dependent
categories.
The affinities with the narratological type II event lie in contextual
reference, the importance of deviation, the role of relevance, the need
for interpretation and perception, and the discursive foundations of the
event. Differences exist regarding the point of reference, however:
Suter and Hettling and Rathmann suggest primarily that reference be
made to the consciousness of contemporaries, whereas narratologists
distinguish various points of reference: a change can be eventful for
characters, the narrator, the abstract author, or the intended (or actual)
reader, but not necessarily for all of them. Equally, though, since inci-
dents may turn out to be eventful only in retrospect, the historian or a
later generation can be postulated as a possible frame of reference in the
case of historical events.

3.4 Concepts of Eventfulness in Cultural and Social Anthropology

A concept of eventful change, termed “passage,” “transition” or “trans-

formation” across an intermediate state or “threshold” (Latin “limen,”,
hence the term liminality for this in-between state), has also been de-
veloped in cultural and social anthropology. The concept is used to des-
ignate significant ritualized changes of status in the lives of individuals
or groups within tribal societies. Van Gennep ([1909] 1960) introduced
the term “rite of passage” to analyse such processes as betrothals, mar-
riages, funerals and—most typically—initiations from adolescence to
adulthood, which all, he argued, share a basic three-phase structure: “I
propose to call the rites of separation from a previous world preliminal
rites, those conducted during the transitional stage liminal (or thresh-
old) rites, and the ceremonies of incorporation into the new world post-
liminal rites” (21). Turner (1967, 1969) developed van Gennep’s con-
cept further in two directions: on the one hand, extending the
application to non-tribal, i.e. modern societies, and on the other, con-
centrating on the in-between stage of liminality to analysze the particu-
lar conditions prevailing during that period (such as erosion of the es-
tablished order, disorientation, possibility of new perspectives, etc.).
For the individuals involved and, seen from their perspective,
changes defined as rites of passage possess the features of a type II
event. But for a knowledgeable superior observer, these changes are
conventional and predictable, lacking the quality of unexpectedness and
deviation from a norm. This difference highlights the context-
dependence of type II events. As for their relevance to social life and
166 Peter Hühn

their reflection in literature, such rites are clearly prescribed in tradi-

tional, relatively stable and cyclical cultures, but much less so in mod-
ern societies.
Positing a structural homology between ritual and story, Elsbree
(1991) has applied van Gennep’s tripartite model to the analysis of lit-
erary narratives, using (contemporary) novels and (Victorian) poems as
examples. He argues that these narratives variously focus on the stage
of liminality, mostly an unwonted and unchosen liminality imposed on
the characters by social or political developments and characterized by
a painful dissolution of the normal and the familiar (18−20). “Liminali-
ty is the phase during which values are tested, issues are clarified,
choices begin to have consequences,” […] “the threshold between past
and future, […] the present tense of destinies in the making” (22). But
this model, though potentially suggestive of interesting parallels be-
tween ritualized transitions and eventful narrative turns, is as yet ap-
plied only in a loose and unspecific sense lacking terminological and
analytical precision.

3.5 Discussion of the Concept of Event in Literary Theory

Defining narrativity on the basis of the concept of event supersedes (in

most cases, earlier) attempts to capture the special quality of narration
by referring to the role of mediation (e.g. Friedemann [1910] 1965;
Stanzel [1955] 1971; Alber & Fludernik → Mediacy and Narrative
Mediation). Event-based approaches are supported by the following
insight: although representations in language or other media—e.g. nar-
ratives, but also descriptions and arguments—are always mediated, nar-
ration alone is set apart from other forms of discourse by the fact that
what is represented is marked by temporality (Sternberg 2001: 115;
Schmid 2003, 2005: 11–16). Accordingly, the representation of a
change (of state, of situation, of a form of behavior) that takes place in
time is frequently identified as constitutive of narration, as noted by
Ryan (1991: 124) in commenting on her “narrative as state-transition
diagram”: “the most widely accepted claim about the nature of narrative
is that it represents a chronologically ordered sequence of states and
events.” Similarly, Herman (2005: 151): “Events, conceived as time-
and place-specific transitions from some source state S […] to some
target state S’ […], are thus a prerequisite for narrative.” Approaches to
a definition that are based on changes in time can be divided into two
basic types (cf. “Explication” above): event I (general changes of any
kind) and event II (changes that meet further qualitative conditions).
 Event and Eventfulness 167

3.5.1 Event I

The approaches to defining narrativity based on event I are many and

varied. Numerous theorists define the minimal story or narrative or
identify event as a basic element of narration in terms of change of
state. This is the background against which Prince (1973: 31) describes
changes as causal-chronological sequences of three elements: “A mini-
mal story consists of three conjoined events: The first and third events
are stative, the second active. Furthermore, the third event is the inverse
of the first.” “Event” here refers to stative and dynamic states of affairs
(17). In a later take on the issue, in his programmatic definition of a
minimal story, Prince ([1987] 2003: 8; original emphasis) uses event to
mean a change: “event. a change of state manifested in discourse by a
process statement in the mode of Do or Happen.” Stempel (1973: 328–
330) defines the minimal narrative schema syntactically as a sequence
of sentential statements that meet the following conditions: the subjects
must have the same reference; it must be possible to contrast and corre-
late the predicates; and the predicates must be chronologically ordered.
The same idea of the event is put forward, on a higher level of abstrac-
tion, by Meister (2003: 116; original emphasis): “by an event we under-
stand the attribution of distinct properties to an identical event object
under a stable event focus” (the term “event focus” refers to the point of
reference for the change involved).
Todorov (1971: 39) defines change in time as a necessary compo-
nent of narration by referring to two principles of narrative: successive-
ness and transformation. By further distinguishing between different
kinds of transformation, he arrives at a typology of narrative organiza-
tion understood as involving different kinds of event: mythological,
gnoseological, and ideological transformations—changes, that is, in-
volving situation, cognition, or behavioral norms (40, 42). With respect
to the basic elements of the structure of narrative progression, Todorov
([1968] 1977: 111) proposes a three-stage configuration: initial equilib-
rium—destabilization—new equilibrium. Bremond ([1966] 1980: 387–
388) sets out a more flexible dynamic way of modeling change in
which alternatives are also considered. He puts forward the idea of a
three-part elementary sequence of events leading from the virtuality (of
a goal or an expectation), via the act of (non-)actualization, to manifest
(non-)realization, the attainment or non-attainment of the goal, with
amelioration or degradation as variants of change (390–392).
Ryan (1991: 127–147) uses a similar kind of sequential structure
with multiple stages to classify events with reference to the causes or
driving forces behind them, particularly in terms of the level of inten-
168 Peter Hühn

tionality involved. Actions are contrasted with happenings (changes

with and without human causation respectively) and moves with pas-
sive moves (plan-based action and lack of action, respectively, as con-
flict resolution). Ryan’s system also includes outcomes (the successes
or failures that result from actions) and plans (the planning of actions).
The study of linguistics has witnessed comparable efforts to draw up
predicate-based typologies of events or their components. Examples
include Frawley (1992: 182–195), who distinguishes between statives,
actives, inchoatives, and resultatives, and Vendler (1967), who distin-
guishes between activity, accomplishment, achievement, and state.
Drawing on Frawley and Vendler, Herman (2002: 27–51) refers to the
selection and linking of such event components in an attempt to define
individual narrative genres (e.g. the epic, newspaper articles, ghost sto-
ries) in terms of their event structures. The undertaking is not a con-
vincing success, for it seems likely that the specific type of eventfulness
associated with a genre can be identified only hermeneutically—in
terms, that is, of event II—rather than on a linguistic level. It is also
questionable whether the distinctive nature of a genre can be delineated
so clearly from that of other genres or be captured in simple, general
formulas of this kind.
All these different ways of conceptualizing event I have two features
in common. (a) If they define narrativity in terms of temporality, they
do so with reference to the presence of change on the level of the repre-
sented happenings. The necessity of linguistic mediation is highlighted
in the process, but in the vast majority of cases this implies reference to
changes in the narrated world alone, not to changes on the level of dis-
course (presentation). The proposals regarding sentence-based defini-
tions (Stempel 1973; Todorov [1968] 1977; Prince 1973, [1987] 2003)
are no different in this respect. In the terminology of Meister (2003:
107–108, 114–116), we are dealing with object events, which he distin-
guishes from discourse events, where the changes take place on the dis-
course level; the difference, though, concerns merely the recipient’s
acts of cognitive interpretation involving the events. At any rate, all
these definitions seek to achieve an objectivizing operationalization of
the definition of event on the basis of linguistic expressions without
considering the scope of reference to literary contexts and normative
social contexts as a source of meaning. The hermeneutic role of the
reader, that is to say, is excluded. (b) If different types of event are dis-
tinguished from one another, the aim is either to provide no more than a
qualitative classification of kinds of change or to distinguish between
different types of narrative on the basis of such a classification (which,
however, is inadequate as far as the dimension of meaning is con-
 Event and Eventfulness 169

cerned). It was recognized at an early date (Culler 1975: 205–207;

Chatman 1978: 92–95) that the crucial processes and aspects of mean-
ing in narrative texts cannot be grasped by means of categories, such as
these, that are formalized independently of interpretation and context.
Recently, Sternberg (2010) has put forward a comprehensive critique of
objectivist approaches to eventfulness.

3.5.2 Event II

Use of the concept of type II event in literary theory requires that a

change meets certain additional conditions. Such conditions have been
identified from various perspectives, which will now be reviewed not in
historical order but systematically, progressing from approaches con-
cerned with definition to ones involving methodology and analysis,
above all in the case of Lotman’s plot model, which has proved to be
particularly fruitful in practice.
In his discussion of the role of narration in structuring reality as part
of human existence, Bruner (1991) draws attention to all the central
dimensions of eventfulness involved in event II: the hermeneutic com-
ponent; the modality of deviation; the place of norms as a point of ref-
erence; and context sensitivity. With the idea of “hermeneutic compos-
ability” (7–11) he stresses the fact that stories do not exist in the world,
but depend for their existence on human consciousness to provide the
horizon against which they stand. He adopts the phrase “canonicity and
breach” (11–13) to describe how a precipitating event, resulting in a
break with expectations, i.e. a deviation from what is normal and from
routine scripts, is a necessary condition of tellability. Breaks of this
kind always involve norms (15–16). Finally, these features give rise to
the context sensitivity (16–18), making real-world narration “such a
viable instrument for cultural negotiation” (17).
In order to distinguish event II from event I, Schmid (2003, 2005:
20–27) introduces additional criteria that a change of state must fulfil in
order to qualify as an event in this narrower sense. First, facticity and
resultativity are specified as necessary conditions. Eventfulness, that is
to say, requires that a change actually take place (rather than being
simply desired or imagined) and that it reach a conclusion (rather than
having simply begun or being in progress). These binary conditions are
supplemented by five properties that can be present to different degrees
and must also be displayed by a change, if the event is to qualify as
eventful in the manner of a type II event. Thus, changes are more or
less eventful depending on the extent to which these five properties are
present. Specifically, the criteria are those of relevance (significance in
170 Peter Hühn

the represented world), unpredictability (deviation from what is ex-

pected, from the principles of the general order of the world), effect
(consequences of the change for the character concerned or for the nar-
rated world), irreversibility (persistence and irrevocability of the
change’s consequences), and non-iterativity (singularity of the change).
In theory, the necessary conditions of facticity and resultativity are
binary and context-independent, whereas the nature and magnitude of
the five additional criteria are predominantly dependent on cultural,
historical, or literary contexts and can be interpreted in different ways
by the various participants in narrative communication. The extent to
which a change in the narrated world qualifies as significant, unpredict-
able, momentous, or irreversible depends on the established system of
norms and current conventional ideas about the nature of society and
reality, but also on literary (e.g. genre-specific) conventions and can
therefore vary socially and historically between different mentalities
and cultures. This is ultimately true of facticity and resultativity as con-
ditions for full type II eventfulness, as well. In certain historical cultural
contexts, changes that are only imagined or not fully realized can ac-
quire (reduced) eventful status in so far as the acts of imagining, plan-
ning (etc.) as such signal a (beginning or faltering) change in a charac-
ter.
The relevance of a change can be evaluated differently from differ-
ent standpoints. Thus, the level of relevance often differs depending on
whether the point of reference is the real author, the narrator, or one or
more characters. In the case of unpredictability, we must distinguish the
expectations of protagonists from the scripts of author and reader. What
for a hero is an unpredictable event can for the reader be a central part
of a genre’s script. These are the central criteria for the definition of
event II as also suggested by Bruner: the role of interpretation, the mo-
dality of deviation, context sensitivity, and the relevance of norms.
Lotman’s plot model ([1970] 1977) offers a comprehensive ap-
proach that combines a context-sensitive and norm-related concept of
type II eventfulness with a practical apparatus for analyzing texts in
terms of their event structures (Titzmann 2003: 3077–3084; Hauschild
2009). Lotman explicitly distinguishes two kinds of event: a basic con-
cept of event of the event I variety, described as “the smallest indivisi-
ble unit of plot construction” (Lotman [1970] 1977: 233); and a concept
of event of the event II variety, occurring on a higher level, which he
defines in terms of spatial semantics as a “unit of plot construction,”
writing that “an event in a text is the shifting of a persona across the
borders of a semantic field” (233). By plot, Lotman means an eventful
action sequence with three components: “1) some semantic field divid-
 Event and Eventfulness 171

ed into two mutually complementary subsets; 2) the border between

these subsets, which under normal circumstances is impenetrable,
though in a given instance (a text with a plot always deals with a given
instance) it proves to be penetrable for the hero-agent; 3) the hero-
agent” (240; original emphasis). A semantic field represents a norma-
tive order, subdivided like any other order into two binary subsets, set
apart, that is, from its opposite. Lotman uses topological terms as the
basis for his definition of an event, but he stresses the normative rele-
vance of the definition by pointing out that normative values (e.g. good
vs. evil, ruling vs. serving, valuable vs. worthless) tend to be described
by spatial images and oppositions (above vs. below, right vs. left, open
vs. closed, near vs. far, moving vs. stationary, etc.). Thus, Lotman’s
spatial semantics should be understood as a metaphor for non-spatial,
normative complexes.
The concept of the semantic field is shaped by Lotman’s belief that
artistic language represents a “secondary modeling system” (9), that is,
that its role in creating world structure is culturally and historically spe-
cific and in this respect embodies the link between text and context. In
this way, Lotman takes the semantic field with its binary subdivisions
as a point of reference for establishing and elucidating the normative
dimension of eventfulness as well as its dependence on cultural and
social historical contexts. Whether or not a change is eventful (e.g. the
marriage of a female servant and a nobleman) depends on the histori-
cally variable class structure of society (such a marriage was eventful in
18th-century England; it would be so to a far lesser degree, if at all, in
the 21st century). Determining eventfulness is therefore a hermeneutic
process.
Lotman defines as “plotless” a text that simply describes a norma-
tive framework and anchors the characters in both subspaces without
the possibility of change—a text, that is, whose only function is classi-
fication. By adding cross-boundary mobility of one or more characters
to this plotless substrate, a text with a plot is created, producing an
event (237–238). An event therefore represents a violation of the estab-
lished order, a deviation from the norm, in extreme cases a “revolution-
ary event” (238). According to how strict the system of norms is and
how stable its order, the boundary between the subsets can be more or
less impermeable, making it possible for events to acquire various de-
grees of eventfulness, to be positioned at various points on the plot
scale (236).
Lotman’s plot model provides a powerful set of tools that makes it
possible to describe with precision the many forms and degrees of
eventfulness in narrative texts. The protagonist, for example, can be
172 Peter Hühn

integrated into the second semantic subset, and thereby become immo-
bile, after the boundary crossing has taken place; but he can also return
to the first subset and negate the event (meaning that the established
order and norms are affirmed) or remain in motion, set forth again, and
go through another important change, triggering a realignment of field
structure (what was the second subset becomes the first subset of a new
overall and differently defined field; 240–241).
Renner (1983, 2004), Titzmann (2003), and Krah (1999) seek to in-
crease the practical suitability of Lotman’s model for textual analysis
by refining its concepts and formalizing its categories. Renner (1983,
2004) reformulates Lotman’s spatial metaphor in terms of set theory,
describing the normative regularities of the semantic space as a set of
“ordering statements” so that spatial change can be redefined as a suc-
cessive process of disruption, removal, or replacement of such ordering
statements. This description of how the boundary crossing takes place
provides a more precise picture of it as a potentially progressive, as op-
posed to instantaneous, phenomenon. An important prerequisite for this
refinement lies in the observation that spaces are not homogeneous but
can display a graded structure with respect to their ordering principles:
through his changing position within the space, the protagonist increas-
es his opposition to the dominant order of this subset, until, at some
stage, he reaches an extreme point that qualifies as an event (the ex-
treme point rule). It is questionable, however, whether Renner’s ex-
treme formalization of Lotman’s categories really represents a step
forward for analysis in practical terms. Titzmann (2003) suggests two
additional categories to supplement those of Lotman. First, he introduc-
es the concept of “meta-event,” which involves not only the passage of
the protagonist from the first to the second subset as a result of his
boundary crossing, but also modification of the entire field, the world
order itself (e.g. if the boundary crossing transforms the social opposi-
tion between the subsets into a morally defined subdivision in the
field). Second, Titzmann introduces the concept of modalization of se-
mantic spaces, which accounts for the fact that it is possible for subsets
to differ from one another in terms of their modality (as dreams, fanta-
sies, wishes contrasting with reality). Subcategories of spatial opposi-
tion and boundary crossing, in particular, are suggested by Krah (1999:
7–9) in the context of a closer study of certain aspects of the concept of
space. Subspaces can represent autonomous alternatives in formal
terms, or they can be related to one another functionally as contrastive
spaces or by their relationship to a certain standpoint (system vs. envi-
ronment, inside vs. outside). Spatial subdivisions can also be conceptu-
ally defined in many ways, (in terms of nature vs. culture, home vs.
 Event and Eventfulness 173

foreign, normality vs. deviation, past vs. present, everyday vs. exotic,
etc.) as well as from a gender-specific perspective. An event can take
place in the form of a boundary crossing by a character in which that
character retains his features unchanged or, alternatively, adopts oppos-
ing ones (so as to adapt to the other field); or an event can also—as a
meta-event (Titzmann 2003)—take place as a transformation of the spa-
tial opposition. This corresponds to forms of event-deletion, (by which
Krah means ways of continuing after an event has taken place): return
to the initial space, absorption into the opposing space, or meta-deletion
(retracting the reorganization of the spatial opposition). Typologies of
this kind allow the phenomenon of eventfulness to be identified more
precisely, thus providing a prerequisite for a closer analysis of event-
fulness in narrative texts.
Members of the Narratology Research Group in Hamburg have
combined Lotman’s plot and concept of events with schema theory
(Emmott & Alexander → Schemata) to produce a text model designed
around narrative theory and a practical model for narratological analy-
sis that includes a detailed typology of events (Hühn & Schönert 2002;
Hühn & Kiefer 2005; Hühn 2005, 2008; Schönert et al. 2007). Refer-
ence is made to lyric poetry on the one hand, and to narrative fiction on
the other. The approach stresses the fact that eventfulness is dependent
on cultural and historical context, and it proposes that the relevant con-
texts be treated in terms of the schemata (frames and scripts) called to
mind and activated by the text—that is, the meaning-bearing cultural or
literary patterns relevant in each case (such as conventional patterns for
how to proceed in choosing a partner, etc., or literary, genre-specific
plot schemata). Eventfulness is constituted by deviation from a script, a
break with expectations. With this in mind, schema theory (whose
script concept makes it possible to model processes of change) and plot
theory in the Lotman style (which uses the boundary crossing to model
deviation and break with the norm) can be combined in the search for a
precise definition of eventfulness (Hühn 2008). As levels of deviation
can be more or less pronounced, eventfulness is not an absolute quality,
but relative and a matter of degree: a text can be more or less eventful
depending on the amount of deviation involved (Schmid 2003, 2005).
Eventful changes involve a participant in the action (an agent or a
patient) and can be located on various levels of textual structure. Corre-
spondingly, three types of event can be distinguished (Hühn, in Hühn &
Kiefer 2005: 246–251, 2008). In events in the happenings, the crucial
change affects the protagonist on the level of the narrated happenings,
i.e. one or more characters in the narrated world. Presentation events
involve the extradiegetic level, since they concern the narratorial figure
174 Peter Hühn

as an agent, the story of the narrator (Schmid 1982). In reception

events, the crucial change takes place neither on the level of the hap-
penings nor on that of presentation, since its occurrence involves nei-
ther the protagonist nor the narrator as agent. Instead, it must be enact-
ed by the (ideal) reader in place of the protagonist or the narrator
because they are unwilling or unable to do so, as in the dramatic mono-
logue (Browning, Tennyson) or in Joyce’s Dubliners. In such cases, a
full expression of the event is distinctively omitted from the text. This
prompts readers either to undertake an eventful mental change or to
somehow seek to achieve a better understanding—in both cases
‘against’ the text. In the context of practical analysis, such a differentia-
tion between event types, based on the structure of the narrative text,
can be combined with Krah’s concrete categorizations.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The historical dimension of the category of event, i.e. its relation-
ship to different types of culture and social world orders, remains open
to study: does it appear—as a sign of the new and the novel—more fre-
quently in periods when traditional orders are disintegrating or being
weakened (in the modern and modernist periods)? Are events to be
found in tradition-bound societies, or in cultures that operate in terms of
tradition and continuity? It would be interesting in this respect to pro-
vide a comparison with narrative texts from ‘distant’ cultures not yet
affected by the West (such as certain populations in South America,
Asia, Africa). (b) The potent concept of event forged by Lotman is par-
ticularly well suited for use with literary narrative texts. How might we
describe points of eventfulness, or tellability, in other text types (anec-
dotes, news reports, newspaper articles, jokes, gossip, etc.) that also
involve surprises and the unexpected? (c) How events are expressed in
other literary genres, such as drama and lyric poetry, requires consider-
ation. (d) And finally, the expression of event as it occurs in other me-
dia, particularly film and painting, is also an interesting topic for inves-
tigation.
 Event and Eventfulness 175

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aust, Hugo ([1990] 2006). Novelle. Stuttgart: Metzler.

Bremond, Claude ([1966] 1980). “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities.” New Literary
History 11, 387–411.
Bruner, Jerome (1991). “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18,
1–21.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Culler, Jonathan (1975). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study
of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Elsbree, Langdon (1991). Ritual Passages and Narrative Structures. New York: Lang.
Frawley, William (1992). Linguistic Semantics. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Friedemann, Käte ([1910] 1965). Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik. Darmstadt:
WBG.
Gennep, Arnold van ([1909] 1960). The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Goethe, Johann W. von ([1795] 1960). Goethes Werke. Vol. VI: Romane und Novellen.
Eds. B. v. Wiese & E. Trunz. Hamburg: Wegner.
Goethe Wörterbuch (1989). 2 Vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Halliwell, Stephen (1987). The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary.
London: Duckworth.
Hauschild, Christiane (2009). “Jurij M. Lotmans semiotischer Ereignisbegriff: Versuch
einer Neubewertung.” W. Schmid (ed.). Slavische Erzähltheorie. Russische und
tschechische Ansätze. Berlin: de Gruyter, 141–186.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
– (2005). “Events and Event-Types.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclo-
pedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 151–152.
Hühn, Peter (2005). “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry.” E. Müller-
Zettelmann & M. Rubik (eds.). Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 147–172.
– (2008). “Functions and Forms of Eventfulness in Narrative Fiction.” J. Pier & J.
Á. García Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 141–163.
– & Jens Kiefer (2005). The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in
English Poetry from 16th to the 20th Century. Berlin: de Gruyter.
– & Jörg Schönert (2002). “Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik.” Poetica 34,
287–305.
Kock, Christian (1978). “Narrative Tropes: A study of points in plots.” G. D. Caie et al.
(eds.). Occasional Papers 1976–1977. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 202–252.
Krah, Hans (1999). “Räume, Grenzen, Grenzüberschreitungen: Einführende Über-
legungen.” Kodikas/Code 22, 3–12.
Kunz, Josef ed. ([1968] 1973). Novelle. Darmstadt: WBG.
176 Peter Hühn

Labov, William (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Ver-
nacular. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.
Lotman, Jurij M. ([1970] 1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P.
Meister, Jan Christoph (2003). Computing Action: A Narratological Approach. Berlin:
de Gruyter.
Pabst, Walter (1953). Novellentheorie und Novellendichtung: Zur Geschichte ihrer
Antinomie in den romanischen Literaturen. Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter.
Perels, Christoph (1998). “Der Begriff der Begebenheit in Goethes Bemerkungen zur
Erzählkunst.” Ch. Perels Goethe in seiner Epoche. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 177–189.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1977). Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Prince, Gerald (1973). A Grammar of Stories: An Introduction. The Hague: Mouton.
– ([1987] 2003). A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Rathmann, Thomas (2003). “Ereignisse Konstrukte Geschichten.” Th. Rathmann (ed.).
Ereignis: Konzeptionen eines Begriffs in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur. Köln:
Böhlau, 1–119.
Renner, Karl Nikolaus (1983). Der Findling: Eine Erzählung von Heinrich von Kleist
und ein Film von George Moorse. Prinzipien einer adäquaten Wiedergabe narra-
tiver Strukturen. München: Fink.
– (2004). “Grenze und Ereignis: Weiterführende Überlegungen zum Ereigniskon-
zept von J. M. Lotman.” G. Frank & W. Lukas (eds.). Norm ― Grenze ― Abwei-
chung: Kultursemiotische Studien zu Literatur, Medien und Wirtschaft. Passau:
Stutz, 357–381.
Ricœur, Paul (1984). Time and Narrative, vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Rüth, Axel (2005). Erzählte Geschichte: Narrative Strukturen in der französischen
Annales-Geschichtsschreibung. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Schlaffer, Hannelore (1993). Poetik der Novelle. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Schmid, Wolf (1982). “Die narrativen Ebenen ‘Geschehen,’ ‘Geschichte,’ ‘Erzählung’
und ‘Präsentation der Erzählung’.” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 9, 83–110.
– (2003). “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” T. Kindt & H.-H. Müller (eds.). What Is
Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 17–33.
– (2005). Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Schönert, Jörg et al. (2007). Lyrik und Narratologie: Text-Analysen zu deutschsprachi-
gen Gedichten vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Stanzel, Franz ([1955] 1971). Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby-
Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Stempel, Wolf-Dieter (1973). “Erzählung, Beschreibung und der historische Diskurs.”
R. Koselleck & W.-D. Stempel (eds.). Geschichte―Ereignis und Erzählung.
München: Fink, 325–345.
Sternberg, Meir (2001). “How Narrativity Makes a Difference.” Narrative 9, 115–22.
– (2010). “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm.” Poetics Today
31, 507–650.
 Event and Eventfulness 177

Suter, Andreas & Manfred Hettling (2001). “Struktur und Ereignis―Wege zu einer
Sozialgeschichte des Ereignisses.” A. Suter & M. Hettling (eds.). Struktur und
Ereignis. Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 7–
32.
Swales, Martin (1977). The German ‘Novelle.’ Princeton: Princeton UP.
Titzmann, Michael (2003). “Semiotische Aspekte der Literaturwissenschaft: Litera-
tursemiotik.” R. Posner et al. (eds.). Semiotik / Semiotics. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol.
3, 3028–3103.
Todorov, Tzvetan ([1968] 1977). “The Grammar of Narrative.” T. Todorov. The Poet-
ics of Prose. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 108–119.
– (1971). “The 2 Principles of Narrative.” Diacritics 1, 37–44.
Turner, Victor W. (1967). “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Pas-
sage”. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 93−111.
– (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Vendler, Zeno (1967). Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

5.2 Further Reading

Audet, René et al. (2007). Narrativity: How Visual Arts, Cinema and Literature are
Telling the World Today. Paris: Dis Voir.
Czucka, Eckehard (1992). Emphatische Prosa: Das Problem der Wirklichkeit der Er-
eignisse in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Danto, Arthur C. (1965). Analytical Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Hühn, Peter & Jens Kiefer (2007). “Approche descriptive de l’intrigue et de la con-
struction de l’intrigue par la théorie des systèmes.” J. Pier (ed.). Théorie du récit.
L’apport de la recherche allemande. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires
du Septentrion, 209–226.
Kędra-Kardela, Anna (1996). “An (Un)Eventful Story: ‘Events’ in Frank O’Connor’s
Short Story ‘The Frying Pan’.” L. S. Kolek (ed.). Approaches to Fiction. Lublin:
Folium, 71–80.
Korthals, Holger (2003). Zwischen Drama und Erzählung: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie
geschehensdarstellender Literatur. Berlin: Schmidt.
Koselleck, Reinhart & Wolf-Dieter Stempel, eds. (1973). Geschichte―Ereignis und
Erzählung. München: Fink.
Lotman, Jurij M. (2009). “Zum künstlerischen Raum und zum Problem des Sujets.” W.
Schmid (ed.). Russische Proto-Narratologie. Texte in kommentierten Überset-
zungen. Berlin: de Gruyter, 261–289.
Meuter, Norbert (2004). “Geschichten erzählen, Geschichten analysieren. Das narrativ-
istische Paradigma in den Kulturwissenschaften.” F. Jäger & J. Straub (eds.).
Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften: Paradigmen und Disziplinen. Stuttgart:
Metzler, vol. 2, 140–155.
Naumann, Barbara (2003). “Zur Entstehung von Begriffen aus dem Ungeordneten des
Gesprächs.” Th. Rathmann (ed.). Ereignis: Konzeptionen eines Begriffs in Ge-
schichte, Kunst und Literatur. Köln: Böhlau, 103–118.
178 Peter Hühn

Nünning, Ansgar (2007). “Grundzüge einer Narratologie der Krise: Wie aus einer Situ-
ation ein Plot und eine Krise (konstruiert) werden.” G. Grunwald & M. Pfister
(eds.). Krisis! Krisenszenarien, Diagnosen und Diskursstrategien. München:
Fink, 48–71.
Scherer, Stefan (2003). “Ereigniskonstruktionen als Literatur.” Th. Rathmann (ed.).
Ereignis: Konzeptionen eines Begriffs in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur. Köln:
Böhlau, 63–84.
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration
Jean-Marie Schaeffer

1 Definition

Factual and fictional narrative are generally defined as a pair of oppo-

sites. However, there is no consensus as to the rationale of this opposi-
tion. Three major competing definitions have been proposed: (a) se-
mantic definition: factual narrative is referential whereas fictional
narrative has no reference (at least not in “our” world); (b) syntactic
definition: factual narrative and fictional narrative can be distinguished
by their logico-linguistic syntax; (c) pragmatic definition: factual narra-
tive advances claims of referential truthfulness whereas fictional narra-
tive advances no such claims. One could add a fourth definition, narra-
tological in nature: in factual narrative author and narrator are the same
person whereas in fictional narrative the narrator (who is part of the
fictional world) differs from the author (who is part of the world we are
living in) (Genette [1991] 1993: 78–88). But this fourth definition is
better seen as a consequence of the pragmatic definition of fiction.

2 Explication

2.1 The Validity of the Fact/Fiction Opposition

Poststructuralist philosophers, anthropologists and literary critics have

questioned the validity of the fact/fiction distinction as such, sometimes
contending, in a Nietzschean vein, that fact itself is a mode of fiction (a
fictio in the sense of a ‘making up’). Applied to the domain of narrative,
this approach insists on the ‘fictionalizing’ nature of narrative because
every narrative constructs a world. But at least in real-life situations, the
distinction between factual and fictional narrative seems to be unavoid-
able, since mistaking a fictional narrative for a factual one (or vice ver-
sa) can have dramatic consequences.
One could object to this common-sense assertion that not all socie-
ties produce fictional narratives and that often the socially most im-
180 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

portant narratives, notably myths, cannot be accounted for in terms of

the dichotomy between fact and fiction. But even if it may be true that
fictional narrative as a socially recognized practice is not an intercultur-
ally universal fact, all human communities seem to distinguish between
actions and discourses that are meant to be taken “seriously” and others
whose status is different: they are recognized as “playful pretense” or as
“make-believe.” Furthermore, developmental psychology and compara-
tive ethnology have shown that the distinction between representations
having truth claims and ‘make-believe’ representations is crucial in the
ontogenetic development of the cognitive structure of the infant psyche
and that this phenomenon is transcultural (see Goldman & Emmison
1995; Goldman 1998). Finally, as far as myth is concerned, it is clearly
considered a type of factual discourse: people adhere to it as serious
discourse referring to something real (this is also the case of the Bible;
see Sternberg 1985, 1990). As shown by Veyne ([1983] 1988), the so-
cial construction of “truthful discourse” posits an array of “truth pro-
grams” linked to various ontological domains (e.g. the profane as dis-
tinct from the sacred). Thus “myth” can be “true” (i.e. treated as serious
and referring to some reality), even if believing in its truth enters into
conflict with what in another ontological domain is accepted as truthful.
For example, in myth and its corresponding reality, people can be en-
dowed with powers nobody would imagine them having in everyday
life. This does not imply that there is no distinction between fact and
fiction, but that what counts as a fact may be relative to a specific “truth
program.”
The poststructuralist criticism of the fact/fiction dichotomy has
pointed out that every (narrative) representation is a human construc-
tion, and more precisely that it is a model projected onto reality. But the
fact that discourse in general, and narrative discourse in particular, are
constructions does not by itself disqualify ontological realism or the
distinction between fact and fiction. To rule out ontological realism, it
would be necessary to show independently that the constructive nature
of discourse in general or of narrative in particular makes them fictional
or at least implies a “fictionalizing” dynamics. This proof has never
been delivered, and so the common-sense hypothesis remains the de-
fault option.

2.2 Fact and Fiction, Narrative and Non-narrative

The relationship between narratology (Meister → Narratology) and

theory of fiction long remained non-existent, in part because classical
narratology rarely addressed the question of the fact/fiction difference.
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration 181

The theory was intended to be valid for all narratives, although in reali-
ty the classical narratologists drew only on fictional texts. The classical
models by Genette ([1972] 1980, [1983] 1988) and Stanzel (1964,
[1979] 1984), for example, were general narratologies whose sole input
was fictional texts. It was only at a later stage that narratologists explic-
itly investigated the relationship between narrative techniques and the
fictionality/factuality distinction (Genette [1991] 1993; Cohn 1999).
It is important, therefore, that the problem of the distinction between
factual and fictional narrative be placed in its wider context. First, not
every verbal utterance is narrative, nor is every referential utterance
narrative. Thus discursive reference cannot be reduced to narrative ref-
erence. More generally, reference is not necessarily verbal: it can also
be visual (e.g. a photograph makes reference claims without being of a
discursive nature). The same holds for fiction. Not every fiction is ver-
bal (paintings can be, and very often are, fictional), and not every fic-
tion, or even every verbal fiction, is narrative: both a painted portrait of
a unicorn and a verbal description of a unicorn are fictions without be-
ing narrations. Factual narrative is a species of referential representa-
tion, just as fictional narrative is a species of non-factual representation.
And of course not every verbal utterance without factual content is a
fiction: erroneous assertions and plain lies are also utterances without
factual content. Indeed, fiction, and its species narrative fiction, are best
understood as a specific way of producing and using mental representa-
tions and semiotic devices, be they verbal or not. This means that narra-
tive and fiction are intersecting categories and must be studied as such
(see Martínez & Scheffel 2003).

2.3 Types of Fiction

The difficulty of getting a clear picture of the distinction between factu-

al and fictional narrative results in part from a long history of shifting
uses of the term “fiction.” The sense which is most current today—that
of a representation portraying an imaginary/invented universe or
world—is not its original nor its historically most prominent domain of
reference. In Latin, fictio had at least two different meanings: on the
one hand, it referred to the act of modeling something, of giving it a
form (as in the art of the sculptor); on the other hand, it designated acts
of pretending, supposing, or hypothesizing. Interestingly, the second
sense of the Latin term fictio did not put emphasis on the playful di-
mension of the act of pretending. On the contrary, during most of its
long history, “fiction,” stemming from the second sense of the Latin
meaning, was used in reference to serious ways of pretending, postulat-
182 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

ing, or hypothesizing. Hence the term has usually been linked to ques-
tions of existence and non-existence, true and false belief, error and lie.
In classical philosophy, “fiction” was often used to designate what
we today would call a cognitive illusion (Wolf → Illusion (Aesthetic)).
Hume used the term in this sense when he spoke about causality or
about a unified self, calling them “fictions” (Hume [1739] 1992: Bk I,
Pt IV, Sec VI). Now, this type of fiction, as Hume himself explicitly
stated, is quite different from fiction in the artistic field. It is part of the
definition of a cognitive fiction that it is not experienced as a fiction.
An artistic fiction, by contrast, is experienced as a fiction. This means
that artistic fictions, contrary to cognitive fictions, should not produce
real-world beliefs (even if in fact they sometimes do: fiction has its own
pathologies).
The term fiction has also often been used to designate willful acts of
deception intended to be misleading or to produce false beliefs. In this
sense, deceptive fiction resembles cognitive fiction. But in the case of
willful deception, the production of a false belief depends at least partly
on the existence of true beliefs entertained by the person engaged in
deceiving others: to induce willfully false beliefs, one must hold at least
some correct beliefs concerning the state of affairs about which false
beliefs are to be produced, for otherwise the result of willful deception
will be haphazard. Willful deception (lies and manipulations) is, once
again, quite different from artistic fiction, which implies that at some
level pretense is experienced as pretense.
In science, the term is sometimes applied to theoretical entities pos-
tulated to account for observational regularities which otherwise would
be unexplainable. Electrons and other elementary particles have been
called “fictions” in this sense. “Fiction,” used this way, does not desig-
nate something known to be non-existent, but is rather the hypothetical
postulation of an operative entity whose ontological status remains in-
determinate. Theoretical fictions are postulated entities whose ontologi-
cal status remains unclear but which operate in real-world cognitive
commitments. Here again, the situation is quite different from fictional
entities in the context of artistic fiction: such entities do not operate in
real-world commitments. On the other hand, and contrary to theoretical
entities, artistic fictional entities are entities which, if they existed, or if
their existence were asserted, would have a canonical ontological sta-
tus—part of the real stuff of reality. So the difference is the following:
in the case of theoretical fictions, fictionality is due to the fact that the
ontological status (theoretical terms/real entities) of the entities is inde-
terminate; in the case of artistic fictions, fictionality is due to the fact
that the entities are not inferentially linked to real-world existential
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration 183

propositions (although they are of course in general inferentially linked

to real-world beliefs and evaluations).
Finally, the term is also used to designate thought experiments.
Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment and Putnam’s “Brain in a
Vat or Twin Earth” thought experiments are fictions in this sense of the
word. Thought experiments are generally counterfactual deductive de-
vices giving rise to valid conclusions which are integrated into the real-
world belief system. Superficially, this may seem to be a situation
which resembles that of artistic fiction, but in fact, a narrative fiction
cannot be a thought experiment in the technical sense. The principal
reason why this assimilation is impossible is that the mental experience
induced by an artistic fiction and its validation are very different from
those of a thought experiment, for the attitude adopted when creating or
reading a thought experiment is an attitude of logical discrimination:
we have to verify its formal validity, determine whether or not it is con-
clusive, think about how its relevance could be increased or refuted,
etc. Validating (or rejecting) a thought experiment is achieved through
technical controversies between specialists who accept it or not, refor-
mulate or modify it using criteria of logical consistency and necessity.
An artistic fiction, by contrast, is activated in an immersive way: it is
“lived” and stored in the reader’s or spectator’s memory as a universe
closed on itself. As far as validating it is concerned, this is also quite
different from validating a thought experiment, since one would not say
of an artistic fiction that it is conclusive or faulty, but rather that it is
successful or unsuccessful in terms of its “effectiveness” as a vector of
immersion, its richness as a universe, etc. In other words, its “felicity
conditions” are tied primarily to its immersion-inducing effectiveness
and to its capacity for producing an aesthetically and hermeneutically
satisfying experience of its mimetic and artifactual properties. Admit-
tedly, artistic fictions can be evaluated in terms of the consistency of
the fictional universe or in those of their plausibility in relation to sup-
posed real-world situations or in terms of the desirable character or not
of their explicit or implicit standards. But all this has nothing to do with
validating a thought experiment. To state the difference more bluntly: a
thought experiment is an experimental device of a logical nature, a sup-
positional or counterfactual propositional universe intended to help re-
solve a philosophical problem; an artistic fiction, by contrast, invites
mental or perceptual immersion in an invented universe, engaging the
reader or the spectator on an affective level with the persons and events
that are depicted or described.
184 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

2.4 Mimesis and the Fact/Fiction Distinction

Historically (at least in Western culture), the key concept for analyzing
and describing fiction in the sense of artistic and, more specifically,
narrative fiction has not been the Latin concept of fictio, but the Greek
concept of mimesis. Unfortunately, mimesis, like fictio, is far from be-
ing a unified notion. In fact, the first two important discussions of mi-
mesis, in Plato’s Republic (1974: chap. III and X) and a little later in
Aristotle’s Poetics, develop two quite divergent conceptions which
have structured Western attitudes toward fiction up to this day. Plato’s
theory of representation is founded on a strong opposition between imi-
tation of ideas and imitation of appearances (the empirical world): rep-
resentation of events as such, contrary to rational argument, is an imita-
tion of appearances, which means that it is cut off from truth. He further
posits a strong opposition between mimesis and diegesis. Speaking
about stories and myths, he distinguishes between: (a) a pure story
(haple diegesis), in which the poet speaks in his own name (as in dithy-
rambs) without pretending to be someone else; (b) a story by mimesis
(imitation), in which the poet speaks through his characters (as in trag-
edy and comedy), meaning that he pretends to be someone else; (c) a
mixed form combining the two previous forms (as in epic poetry, where
pure narration is mixed with characters’ discourse). Plato’s preference
goes to pure narration, for he disapproves of representation by mimesis
(in Book X of The Republic, he goes so far as to exclude mimetic artists
from the “ideal city”). Mimesis is a simulacrum, an “as if,” and as such
it is opposed to truth: mimesis can never be more than a “make-believe”
(for the concept of “make-believe,” see Walton 1990).
The concept of mimesis developed by Aristotle in his Poetics di-
verges from Plato in several important regards. For the fact/fiction
problem, only one is of interest: according to Aristotle, mimesis is a
specific form of cognition. Mimetic representation is even considered
by Aristotle to be superior to history because poetry expresses the gen-
eral (i.e. the verisimilar or necessary relations between events), while
history only expresses the particular (that which has happened): history
relates the life of the individual Alcibiades, while poetry is a mimetic
rendering of the typical actions that an Alcibiades-like individual would
probably or by necessity carry out (1996: chap. 9, 1451b). This means
not only that, according to Aristotle, mimesis triggers cognitive powers
of a different kind from those of history, but also that these powers are
of a higher order than those of factual discourse. Most classical literary
theories which assert that fiction possesses its own truth value do so by
reactivating some form or another of the Aristotelian distinction be-
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration 185

tween “mere” factual truth representing contingent actualities and a

more “general” type of truth, that of verisimilitude or of necessity, rep-
resenting ontological possibilities.
The Aristotelian conception must be distinguished from “possible
worlds” theories of fiction (Pavel 1986; Ryan 1991; Ronen 1994;
Doležel 1998, 1999), inspired by the possible worlds logics of Kripke
(1963, 1980) or Lewis (1973, 1978). In terms of possible worlds theo-
ries, a fictional world is a counterfactual world, but this counterfactual
world is as individual as the world we live in: the counterfactual world
is not of a superior kind to our actual world (whereas in Aristotle mi-
metic reference attains a higher order of truth than factual reference),
but simply an alternative world. In fact, the real world is also a possible
world. According to modal fictionalism, it differs from other possible
worlds because it is the only one which is also actual, whereas accord-
ing to the modal realism defended by Lewis, it differs from other possi-
ble worlds (which are as real as “our” world) only by the contingent
fact that we happen to live in it. Possible worlds theories of fiction
therefore do not claim that fictional truth is more general than factual
truth: it is simply true in another world or universe.

3 History of the Concepts and their Study

3.1 The Semantic Definition of the Fact/Fiction Difference

The semantic definition of the distinction between factual and fictional

narrative is the most classical one. It was defended by Frege in his fa-
mous “On Sense and Reference” ([1892] 1960) and by Russell in the no
less famous “On Denoting” ([1905] 2005), two seminal papers of 20th-
century philosophical theories of reference. It emphasizes the ontologi-
cal status of represented entities and/or the truth value status of the
proposition or the sequence of propositions which assert these entities.
The ontological status of entities and the truth value status of proposi-
tions are related, since an assertion which states something about an
entity that is non-existent is ipso facto referentially void. But it is im-
portant to bear in mind, firstly, that some types of fiction assign “fic-
tive” properties and actions to proper names that refer to existing enti-
ties. This is the case for example of the subgenre of counterfactual
novels which, like counterfactual history (see Ferguson ed. 1997), as-
cribe fictional actions to historical persons (e.g. Hitler winning World
War II). Autofiction can be seen as a special case of such counterfactual
fictions. Secondly, historical persons and descriptions of their real his-
186 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

torical actions figure prominently in fictional texts, as in historical nov-

els that often contain a fair amount of factual information.
These mixed situations are difficult to integrate into a semantic defi-
nition of the fact/fiction distinction (see e.g. Zipfel 2001), since seman-
tic definitions (with the exception of possible worlds semantic defini-
tions: see Doležel 1999) are by necessity “segregationist” (Pavel 1986:
11–17). Counterfactual fictions seem on the face of it easy to manage,
at least in terms of possible worlds semantic models. These models be-
ing ontologically holistic, it can be said, for example, that a narrative in
which Napoleon wins the battle of Waterloo is not an example of out-
right falsehood, but refers to a possible world in which Napoleon wins
the battle of Waterloo. But is it the same Napoleon? The principle of
“minimal departure” (Lewis 1973; Ryan 1991) suggests a positive an-
swer, but the holism of the possible worlds approach (each possible
world being complete) suggests a negative answer. Whatever the an-
swer, it is difficult to distinguish counterfactual fiction from counterfac-
tual history on these grounds. Other mixed situations are even more
difficult to handle. For example, the sentence “Napoleon lost the battle
of Waterloo” seems to express a plain simple truth. Does its status
change when it is read in a historical novel as compared to when it is
read in a biography of, say, Chateaubriand or Stendhal? Does it lose its
truth value when it is integrated into a novel? Most advocates of seman-
tic definitions of the fact/fiction dichotomy give a positive answer to
this question: the proper name “Napoleon,” when used in a novel, does
not refer to the real Napoleon but to some fictional counterpart (e.g.
Ryan 1991; Ronen 1994). However, this seems counterintuitive, for in
a historical novel it is important for the reader that the proper names
referring to historical persons really do refer to the historical persons as
he knows them outside of fiction, and not to some fictional homonym
of those real persons (see Searle [1975] 1979). Counterfactual fictions
give rise to an analogous problem: it seems counterintuitive to say that
in an autofiction, for example, proper names lose their referential pow-
er, since the point of autofiction is precisely the idea that fictional asser-
tions apply to an existing person (the author himself).
This does not amount to saying that semantic criteria are irrelevant,
for the idea that there is a semantic difference between fact and fiction
certainly is part of our conception of fiction. Thus a narrative in which
every sentence is true (referentially) and which nevertheless pretends to
be a fiction would not be easily accepted as a fiction. Invented entities
and actions are the common stuff of fiction, and for this reason the idea
of the non-referential status of the universe portrayed is part of our
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration 187

standard understanding of fictional narrative. Even so, this does not

necessarily mean that a semantic definition of fiction is workable.

3.2 Syntactic Definitions

Syntactic definitions of the distinction between factual and fictional

narrative commend themselves by their promise of economy: if it were
possible to distinguish factual and fictional narrative on purely syntac-
tic grounds, there would be no need to take a position as far as semantic
problems are concerned, be they epistemological or ontological. It
would then be possible to arrive at a purely “formal” definition of the
two domains.
The best-known theories that seek to define fiction on a syntactic
level have been elaborated by Hamburger ([1957] 1973) and Banfield
(1982). Both theories define fictional narrative by syntactic traits
which, in theory, are excluded from factual narrative. Hamburger fa-
mously stated that the domain of what is usually regarded as fiction
divides into two radically disjoined fields: “pretense,” which is a simu-
lation of real utterances and defines the status of first-person non-
factual narrative; and “fiction proper,” which is a simulation of imagi-
nary universes indexed to perspectively organized mental states and
which defines non-factual third-person narrative. In other words, ac-
cording to Hamburger, in the narrative realm only third-person narra-
tive is fictional, non-factual first-person narrative belonging to another
logical field, that of pretended utterances. Hamburger, at least in the
first edition of her book ([1957] 1973), contends that, contrary to pre-
tense, fiction is narratorless, a view sharply opposed to mainstream nar-
ratology according to which the narrator (not necessarily personified) is
a structural element of any narration, be it factual or fictional, first-
person or third-person. Banfield, although her theory is formulated in a
much more technical way (based on Chomskyan generative grammar),
defends a position similar to that of the German critic. She develops a
“grammatical definition” (Banfield 1982, 2002) of the genre “novel,”
which in fact is a definition of internally focalized heterodiegetic fic-
tion. Among the anomalies defining the novel understood this way,
Banfield puts particular emphasis on the specific use of deictics and
free indirect discourse. According to her theory, the specific grammar
of the novel consists in a double phenomenon: elimination of the first
person except in inner direct speech coinciding with the construction of
a special third-person pronoun (called “the E-level shifter” by Ban-
field). This special shifter suspends the “one text / one speaker” rule
that governs discourse outside of fiction and which is grounded in the
188 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

principle that deictics shift referents with each new E (each new speak-
er). In a novel, a new point of view need not correspond to a new refer-
ent of the first person and hence to a new text. This situation is of
course impossible in real-life communication, where each point of view
is tied to a specific person. Therefore, fictional sentences are “unspeak-
able.” In fact, Banfield’s “E-level shifter” is functionally equivalent to
Hamburger’s floating “narrative function” which can move freely be-
tween different “I-origins.”
Hamburger and Banfield have clearly identified linguistic processes
which are typical of internally focalized heterodiegetic fiction (Nieder-
hoff → Focalization) and which cannot be easily accounted for in terms
of pretense in third-person factual narrative. This is especially true of
free indirect discourse and grammatical anomalies of spatial and tem-
poral deictics. All of these phenomena are tied to what Banfield aptly
calls a “special” third-person pronoun which is able to shift freely be-
tween different Egos. They invite an analysis of fictional narrative in
terms of direct simulation of imaginary universes presented perspec-
tively and (on the side of the reader) in terms of immersion (see Ryan
2001: 89–171). The symptoms of fictionality (see Schmid 2010: 21–33)
analyzed by Hamburger and Banfield all share the same characteristic:
they use a third-person grammatical perspective to present a first-
person mental (perceptual, etc.) perspective (Schaeffer 1998: 148–166;
[1999] 2010: chap. 3.4, 153–173). On the side of the writer, these devi-
ating practices are in fact the grammatical third-person transcription of
the imaginative simulation of “fictive I-origins” (Jannidis → Charac-
ter). On the side of the reader, they activate an immersive dynamics: the
reader “slips into” the characters, experiencing the fictional world as it
is seen perspectively by the characters from within or sometimes, as
Banfield suggests, from a point of view that remains “empty” (in terms
of a specific “I”).
Contra Hamburger and Banfield, however, it is no less true that the
majority of heterodiegetic fictions also contain elements that are best
described as simulations of factual narrative statements (Schaeffer
[1999] 2010: cap. 2, 41–108). The textual passages which Banfield
calls “pure narration,” and which correspond to Plato’s haple diegesis,
are a case in point. Furthermore, if we look at the history of narrative
fiction, the systematic use of internal (variable) focalization is fairly
recent (as Banfield and Hamburger acknowledge). If we take a broad
historical and intercultural outlook, it appears that heterodiegetic fic-
tions without any element of formal mimesis of third-person factual
narrative are relatively rare except in some 19th-century fiction and,
more frequently, in the 20th-century fiction. So instead of interpreting
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration 189

the symptoms of fictionality in an essentialist way and trying to use

them as definitional criteria of fiction, as Hamburger and Banfield do,
we should study them in a historical, cultural, and cognitive perspec-
tive: why did verbal fiction in the course of its evolution develop devic-
es aimed at neutralizing the enunciative structure of language in favor
of a purely “presentational” use? To our best knowledge, the answer to
this question has to do with the processes of immersive simulation in-
duced by narrative and maximized by fictional narrative.
Whatever the importance of the insights gained by syntactic defini-
tions of the fact/fiction distinction, as definitions they have severe
shortcomings: to accept them, it would be necessary either to exclude
first-person narration from the realm of fiction (Hamburger) or to dis-
tinguish between a grammar of epic narration and a grammar of the
novel (Banfield). More generally, it would be necessary to accept the
counterintuitive conclusion that most fictional texts fall short of the def-
inition of fiction. If semantic definitions of fiction are generally too
weak (they fail to distinguish between a fiction and a lie), syntactic def-
initions are generally too strong (many texts must be excluded which
common sense considers to be fictional).

3.3 The Pragmatic Status of Narrative Fiction:

Imagination and Playful Pretense

The pragmatic definition of fiction is generally linked to the name of

Searle, who is certainly its most important proponent, even though the
idea of defining fiction pragmatically is much older than Searle. A
pragmatic theory of narrative fiction was implicitly defended by Hume.
It could be argued, more generally, that wherever and whenever public
representations function as fictions, people link them to their pragmatic
specificity because it is only by treating representations in this particu-
lar way that they become fictional representations (instead of false
statements or lies). Even so, Searle’s definition of verbal fiction in
terms of pretended speech acts ([1975] 1979: 58–75) is certainly one of
the most important and influential contemporary pragmatic analyses of
the fact/fiction distinction in the domain of verbal narrative.
Walton, whose contribution to a pragmatics of fiction is as important
as Searle’s, objected to the latter’s definition that the notion of a pre-
tended speech act cannot yield a general definition of fiction because it
has no application in, among other things, the domain of pictorial de-
piction: paintings cannot be described in terms of pretended speech acts
because pictorial depiction is not a speech act (1990: Part I, 2.6). It
could be argued, however, that Searle’s theory operates at two levels: a
190 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

definition of verbal narrative fiction in terms of pretended speech acts,

and a general definition of fiction in terms of intended playful pretense.
It has also been objected to Searle that his definition of fiction as in-
tended playful pretense is unable to explain the fact that many texts in-
tended to be factual end up being read as fictions. Walton argues that
fictional intention cannot be a defining property of fiction: a fiction is
any object which serves as a prop in a game of make-believe, meaning
that a fiction is a fiction because it functions as such independently of
the question of whether or not somebody intended it to function in that
way. Walton is surely right, but Searle’s interest lies primarily in the
canonical public status of narrative fiction, and most of the time narra-
tive texts which publicly function as props in a game of make-believe
or as playful pretenses are intended to function in this way and, more
importantly, have been specifically designed to do so. So if it is true
that fictional intention cannot define fiction as a pragmatic stance, it is
nevertheless the existence of a shared intention which explains the fact
that the emergence of fictional devices has the cultural and technical
history it has.
It is important to distinguish the question of the structural function
of intentionality from that of the communication of that intentionality.
According to Searle, public representations only possess derived inten-
tionality, which implies that mental intentionality is not transparent
across minds: it has to be communicated by conventional means, i.e.
using verbal or other signals. This is true also for the intention of fic-
tionality: as shown by Koselleck (1979), the intention to create a factual
or a fictional text has to be communicated by signals to be effective.
These signals are often paratextual, but for the competent reader there
also exist many textual “signposts” (Cohn 1990) signaling fictionality
or factuality (see Iser 1983: 121–152).
The pragmatic definition of fiction also highlights the difference be-
tween narrative fiction qua playful or artistic fiction and the types of
fiction which are tied to the question of truth value and belief. Narrative
fiction qua artistic fiction is not opposed to truth in the way cognitive
illusion, error, and manipulation are opposed to truth, nor is it con-
strained by real-world truth conditions in the way the suppositional and
counterfactual fictions of thought experiments are. As propounded by
Searle, it is best characterized by the irrelevance of real-world truth
conditions. In the light of this pragmatic definition, what distinguishes
fictional narrative from factual narrative is not that the former is refer-
entially void and the latter referentially full. What distinguishes them is
the fact that in the case of fictional narrative the question of referentiali-
ty is irrelevant, whereas in non-fictional narrative contexts it is im-
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration 191

portant to know whether the narrative propositions are referentially

void or not.
Searle has been criticized for excluding the possibility of any syn-
tactical criterion of fictionality (Cohn 1990). In fact, he only claims that
syntactical markers of fictionality are neither necessary (a fictional text
can be textually indistinguishable from a factual counterpart) nor suffi-
cient (a factual text may use fictional techniques). The same fact was
pointed out long ago by Hume: one and the same text may be read both
as fiction and non-fiction. The text (in its syntactic and semantic di-
mensions) remains the same whatever the type of pragmatic attitude,
but the use to which it is put will differ according to the pragmatic atti-
tude (see Hume [1739] 1992: Bk I, Pt III, Sec VII). So Searle’s thesis is
compatible with the fact that fictional texts and factual texts generally
differ syntactically.
A more important criticism is that Searle’s pragmatic definition is
only negative: it tells us what fiction is not, but not what fiction is. Ge-
nette ([1991] 1993: chap. 2), while accepting Searle’s definition of fic-
tion as a series of non-serious utterances, proposed to amend it by dis-
tinguishing two levels of illocution: a literal level—the level of the
pretended speech acts—concealing a figural or indirect level that
transmits a serious speech act (a declaration or a demand) which de-
clares fictionally that such and such an event occurred, or, alternatively,
invites the reader to imagine the content transmitted by the pretended
speech acts (see Crittenden 1991: 45–52; Zipfel 2001: 185–195).
In conclusion, the pragmatic definition claims that the syntactic sta-
tus of fiction depends on its formal make-up, its semantic status on its
relationship to reality, but that its status as fiction (or not) depends on
the way the representations implemented by the text are processed or
used. This would imply that the pair fact/fiction is logically heteroge-
neous. The conditions for satisfying the criteria of factual narrative are
semantic: a factual narrative is either true or false. Even if it is willfully
false (as is the case if it is a lie), what determines its truth or its untruth
is not its (hidden) pragmatic intention, but that which is in fact the case.
The conditions for satisfying the criteria of fictional narrative are prag-
matic: the truth claims a text would make if it (the same text, from the
syntactic point of view) were a factual text (be these claims true or
false) must be bracketed out.

3.4 Simulation, Immersion and the Fact/Fiction Divide

In recent years, theories of fiction and narratology have been renewed

by cognitive science (Herman → Cognitive Narratology). The notion of
192 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

simulation and its cognate immersion seem especially fruitful and may
well lead to a better understanding of both the distinction between fact
and fiction in narrative and their interplay.
Simulation and playful pretense are basic human capacities whose
roots are situated in mental simulation, a partly sub-personal process
(Dokic & Proust 2002: intro., vii). Could it be that the mental specifici-
ty of fictional narrative is to be found in mental simulation? Actually,
simulation is a very broad concept which encompasses much more than
fiction. Theories of mental simulation were originally developed in or-
der to account for “mind reading,” i.e. the ability to explain and predict
the intentional behaviors and reactions of others. The assumption of
simulation theories is that the competence of mind reading makes it
possible to put oneself imaginatively “into someone else’s shoes.” It is
true that mind reading has a strong narrative component, as the “mind
reader” immerses himself in scenarios and scripts. But, of course, not
every narrative is fictional.
Basically it can be said that if every fiction results from a process of
mental simulation, the opposite is not the case, i.e. that every simulation
produces a fiction. Mind reading has a strong epistemic component: (a)
it simulates the mental states of a really existing person; (b) simulation
must reproduce that person’s intentional states in a reliable way, i.e. it
is constrained by the necessity of correctly identifying and assessing the
real properties of the person whose mental states are being simulated as
well as by the context in which that person is found. In the case of fic-
tional simulation, however, the agents and actions are invented in and
through the process of simulation. This process is not referentially con-
strained and cannot be validated or invalidated in a direct way (e.g. by a
comparison between behaviors predicted by the simulation and an actu-
ally occurring behavior). This means that, contrary to the results of
mind reading, the results of a fictional narrative simulation are not di-
rectly fed into ongoing real-world interactions. Fictional (narrative)
simulation is not only off-line representational activity (as is every sim-
ulation), but also a pragmatically encapsulated activity of simulation.
Except for pathological cases, the postulated entities of fictional repre-
sentations are not fed into our belief system concerning the trappings of
the real world. Among other things, mental representations triggered by
fictional simulation are not fed into real-world feedback loops. This
does not mean that make-believe beliefs do not play into the inferential
processes concerning real-world situations, but that this “playing into”
is pretty much indirect.
Cognitive science also has shown that simulation and immersive
processes are not limited to fictional narratives. Every narrative induces
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration 193

varying degrees of immersive experience. As Ryan has convincingly

shown, both fictional and non-fictional narrative texts invite readers to
imagine a world (2001: 93): this “recreative” imagination (Currie &
Ravenscroft 2002) is a process of immersive simulation. Of course,
contrary to referentially oriented representing devices, fictional devices
are generally (but not always and not necessarily) constructed so as to
maximize their immersion-inducing power. Nevertheless, narrative
immersion is not limited to fiction.
Another point where simulation theories could be illuminating con-
cerns the ongoing debate in narrative studies as to whether, as is the
case in factual narrative, narrative (heterodiegetic) fiction implies the
existence of a narrator or not (Margolin → Narrator). What is at stake
here is in fact the question of the target domain of narrative immersion:
does the reader or spectator immerge into a (fictional) world, or into a
narrative act depicting a world? Does narrative fiction induce immer-
sion through mimetic primers feigning descriptive utterances, or simply
through a perspectively organized mentally centered and phenomeno-
logically saturated presentation of a universe? As Currie and Ra-
venscroft (2002) have shown, both options are open, depending on the
structure of the text.
Finally, simulation theories may also help to achieve a better under-
standing of the grammatical deviations or anomalies of internal focali-
zation in heterodiegetic fictional narrative as studied by Hamburger and
Banfield. These “deviations” are not the result of conscious stipulations
or decisions, but rather they have arisen slowly out of the practice of
writing fiction. At the same time, they are not random, but on the con-
trary structurally coherent and functionally pertinent. It could therefore
be hypothesized that they are the result of deep-level linguistic rear-
rangements due to cognitive-representational pressures stemming from
the immersive process of mental simulation. If such were the case, and
if these linguistic anomalies were to be read as a co-optation of lan-
guage by fictional simulation, this would imply that at some deep level
the immersion induced by verbal narrative is never only propositional,
but also phenomenological and imaginative. The fact that the evolution
of third-person fiction has given rise to techniques for neutralizing the
enunciative anchoring of sentences could be interpreted as a symptom
of the fact that narration as such induces this type of phenomenological
immersion. The difference between factual and fictional narrative as far
as simulation is concerned could thus be explained by the fact that once
narrative is liberated from the epistemic constraints of truth value, the
real aim of the immersive process becomes how to maximize it. This in
194 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

turn would serve to account for the development of the anomalies stud-
ied by Hamburger and Banfield.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

The interplay of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of fic-

tionality need to be further clarified. Historical and comparative studies
of the way they co-evolved differently in different historical and cultur-
al contexts are still too rare.
The problem of the inferences we draw from the fictional world to
the world in which we live is still very poorly understood, partly be-
cause these inferences are difficult to document by non-introspective
methodologies: (a) Studying the “pathologies of fiction”—the different
ways fictions can “go wrong”—would shed considerable light on the
conditions under which fictions function “normally.” Some psychologi-
cal studies suggest that these pathologies, operating on a sub-personal
level, might be more common than a fiction-friendly attitude would
have it. (b) Comparative work on various fictional “devices”—mental,
verbal, visual, “actantial”—is necessary, because fiction is still too of-
ten identified with verbal fiction, and verbal fiction with fiction incar-
nated in a narrative act (oral or written). This is a “reductionist” move
which underestimates the importance of theater, i.e. embodied verbal
fictions being acted out in front of a public.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aristotle (1996). Poetics. Tr. M. Heath. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Banfield, Ann (1982). Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the
Language of Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
– (2002). “A Grammatical Definition of the Genre ‘Novel’.” Polyphonie – linguis-
tique et littéraire / Lingvistik og litterær polyfoni No. 4, 77–100.
Cohn, Dorrit (1990). “Signposts of Fictionality.” Poetics Today 11, 753–774.
– (1999). The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Crittenden, Charles (1991). Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects. Ithaca:
Cornell UP.
Currie, Gregory & Ian Ravenscroft (2002). Recreative Minds. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Dokic, Jérôme & Joëlle Proust (2002). Simulation and Knowledge of Action. Amster-
dam: Benjamins.
 Fictional vs. Factual Narration 195

Doležel, Lubomír (1998). Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins UP.
– (1999). “Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting the Postmodernist Chal-
lenge.” D. Herman (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 247–273.
Ferguson, Niall, ed. (1997). Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactual. London:
Picador.
Frege, Gottlob ([1892] 1960). “On Sense and Reference.” P. Geach & M. Black (eds.).
Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Black-
well. 56–78.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Cornell:
Cornell UP.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– ([1991] 1993). Fiction & Diction. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Goldman, Laurence (1998). Child’s Play: Myth, Mimesis and Make-Believe. New
York: Berg.
– & Michael Emmison (1995). “Make-Believe Play among Huli Children: Perfor-
mance, Myth, and Imagination.” Ethnology 34, 225–255.
Hamburger, Käte ([1957] 1973). The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Hume, David ([1739] 1992). Treatise of Human Nature. Buffalo: Prometheus Books.
Iser, Wolfgang (1983). “Akte des Fingierens. Oder: Was ist das Fiktive im fiktionalen
Text?” D. Henrich & W. Iser (eds.). Funktionen des Fiktiven. München: Fink,
121–152.
Koselleck, Reinhard (1979). Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten.
Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Kripke, Saul (1963). “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic.” Acta Philosophica
Fennica 16, 83–94.
Kripke, Saul (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Lewis, David (1973). Counterfactuals. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
– (1978). “Truth in Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly 15, 37–46.
Martínez, Matías & Michael Scheffel (2003). “Narratology and Theory of Fiction:
Remarks on a Complex Relationship.” T. Kindt & H.-H. Müller (eds.). What Is
Narratology: Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 221–238.
Pavel, Thomas (1986). Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Plato (1974). The Republic. Tr. L. Desmond. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ronen, Ruth (1994). Possible Worlds in Fictional Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP.
Russell, Bertrand ([1905] 2005). “On Denoting.” Special Issue: 100 Years of “On De-
noting.” Mind 114, 873–887.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
– (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature
and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie (1998). “Fiction, Pretense and Narration.” Style 32, 148–166.
– ([1999] 2010). Why Fiction? Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
196 Jean-Marie Schaeffer

Schmid, Wolf (2010). Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Searle, John ([1975] 1979). “The logical status of fictional discourse.” J. Searle. Ex-
pression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 58–75.
Stanzel, Franz K. (1964). Typische Formen des Romans. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht.
– ( [1979] 1984). A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Sternberg, Meir (1985). The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and
the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
– (1990). “Time and Space in Biblical (Hi)story Telling: The Grand Chronology. ”
R. Schwartz (ed.). The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory. Ox-
ford: Blackwell.
Veyne, Paul ([1983] 1988). Did the Greeks Believer their Myths? Chicago: U of Chi-
cago P.
Walton, Kendall (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Zipfel, Frank (2001). Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität: Analysen zur Fiktion in der Lite-
ratur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Schmidt.

5.2 Further Reading

Caïra, Olivier (2011). Définir la fiction: Du roman au jeu d’échecs. Paris: Les Editions
de l’EHESS.
Doležel, Lubomír (2010). Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP.
Gu, Ming Dong (2007). Chinese Theories of Fiction. A Non-Western Narrative System.
Albany: SUNY P.
Hoffman, Michael J. & Patrick D. Murphy, eds. (2005). Essentials of the Theory of
Fiction. Duke UP.
Lavocat, Françoise & Anne Duprat, eds. (2010). Fiction et cultures. Paris: SFLGC.
Palmer, Alan (2002). Fictional Minds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1977). Towards a Speech Act Theory of Narrative Discourse.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Vaihinger, Karl ([1911] 1984). The Philosophy of “As If”. A System of the Theoretical,
Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. London: Routledge.
Zunshine, Lisa (2006). Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Colum-
bus: Ohio State UP.
 Focalization
Burkhard Niederhoff

1 Definition

Focalization, a term coined by Genette (1972), may be defined as a se-

lection or restriction of narrative information in relation to the experi-
ence and knowledge of the narrator, the characters or other, more hypo-
thetical entities in the storyworld.

2 Explication

Genette introduced the term “focalization” as a replacement for “per-

spective” and “point of view” (Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of
View). He considers it to be more or less synonymous with these terms,
describing it as a mere “reformulation” ([1983] 1988: 65) and “general
presentation of the standard idea of ‘point of view’” (84). This, howev-
er, is an underestimation of the conceptual differences between focali-
zation and the traditional terms.
Genette distinguishes three types or degrees of focalization—zero,
internal and external—and explains his typology by relating it to previ-
ous theories:

“The first term [zero focalization] corresponds to what English-language

criticism calls narrative with omniscient narrator and Pouillon ‘vision from
behind,’ and which Todorov symbolizes by the formula Narrator > Char-
acter (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly,
says more than any of the characters knows). In the second term [internal
focalization], Narrator = Character (the narrator says only what a given
character knows); this is narrative with ‘point of view’ after Lubbock, or
with ‘restricted field’ after Blin; Pouillon calls it ‘vision with.’ In the third
term [external focalization], Narrator < Character (the narrator says less
than the character knows); this is the ‘objective’ or ‘behaviorist’ narrative,
what Pouillon calls ‘vision from without’” ([1972] 1980: 188–189).
198 Burkhard Niederhoff

The passage synthesizes two models: a quasi-mathematical one in

which the amount of narrative information is indicated by the formulas
derived from Todorov; and a more traditional one based on the meta-
phors of vision and point of view, which is derived from Pouillon and
Lubbock. That these two models are not equivalent has been shown by
Kablitz (1988). If a novel begins by telling us who a character is, to
whom she is married, and for how long she has been living in a certain
town, it will reveal no more than the character knows herself, but no
one would describe such a beginning as an example of “vision with” or
character point of view. To tell a story from a character’s point of view
means to present the events as they are perceived, felt, interpreted and
evaluated by her at a particular moment.
Genette himself leans in the direction of the Todorovian, infor-
mation-based model. On occasion, he talks about focalization in terms
of the point-of-view paradigm, e.g. when he describes it as placing nar-
rative focus at a particular “point” ([1983] 1988: 73); but in general, he
thinks of focalization in terms of knowledge and information. He thus
defines it as “a restriction of ‘field’ [...], a selection of narrative infor-
mation with respect to what was traditionally called omniscience”
([1983] 1988: 74). This emphasis is also implied by the very term itself
and the preposition that goes along with it. Genette consistently writes
“focalisation sur” in French: while a story is told from a particular point
of view, a narrative focuses on something. This preposition indicates
the selection of, or restriction to, amounts or kinds of information that
are accessible under the norms of a particular focalization. If focaliza-
tion is to be more than a mere “reformulation” of point of view, it is
this aspect of the term, the information-based model, which should be
emphasized.
Genette’s emphasis on knowledge and information is also revealed
by his extensive treatment of alterations ([1972] 1980: 194–198), de-
fined as a transgression of the informational norm established by the
focalization of a text. Alterations take two forms: paralepsis, the inclu-
sion of an event against the norm of a particular focalization; and para-
lipsis, a similarly transgressive omission of such an event. According to
Genette, the norms that are violated by these transgressions cannot be
defined in advance (e.g. by commonsensical inferences as to what a
particular narrator may have learnt about the story he or she tells). In-
stead, the norms are established by each particular text: “The decisive
criterion is not so much material possibility or even psychological plau-
sibility as it is textual coherence and narrative tonality” (208). Shen
disagrees with this view, arguing that it boils down to a merely quanti-
tative approach, a measurement of the relative length of the normative
 Focalization 199

and the transgressive portions of the text; she suggests that there is a
more general “legitimacy” that is violated by alterations (2001: 168–
169). However, her examples and her analyses show that “legitimacy”
in matters of focalization is far from self-evident. In her case, it rests on
rather arbitrary assumptions about the limited knowledge of first-person
narrators and the unlimited knowledge of third-person narrators.
A major point in Genette’s theory is his rigorous separation between
focalization and the narrator (referred to with the grammatical metaphor
of “voice”). Most previous theories analyze such categories as first-
person narrator, omniscience, and camera perspective under one um-
brella term, usually point of view. Genette believes that such cavalier
treatments of the subject “suffer from a regrettable confusion [...] be-
tween the question who is the character whose point of view orients the
narrative perspective? and the very different question who is the narra-
tor—or, more simply, the question who sees? and the question who
speaks?” ([1972] 1980: 186). What follows from the separation of the
two questions is a plea for a relatively free combination of narrator
types and focalization types, a position that has ignited a considerable
amount of controversy.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Genette’s theory was welcomed as a considerable advance on the pre-

vious paradigm of perspective or point of view, and the neologism of
focalization has been widely adopted, at least by narratologists. Genette
himself claims that his term is preferable because it is less visual and
metaphorical than the traditional ones ([1972] 1980: 189). Other critics
prefer it because it is not part of everyday speech and thus more suita-
ble as a technical term with a specialized meaning (Bal [1985] 1997:
144; Nünning 1990: 253; Füger 1993: 44). However, the main argu-
ment is that the term dispels the confusion of the questions who sees?
and who speaks? This argument has become a veritable commonplace
(e.g. Bal [1985] 1997: 143; Edmiston 1991: x; O’Neill 1992: 331;
Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002: 71; Nelles 1990: 366; Nünning 1990:
255–256). Finney states it as follows: “‘Focalization’ is a term coined
by Gérard Genette to distinguish between narrative agency and visual
mediation, i.e. focalization. ‘Point of View’ confuses speaking and see-
ing, narrative voice and focalization. Hence the need for Genette’s
term” (1990: 144). It is true that Genette introduces the term focaliza-
tion immediately after his polemics against the typological conflation of
who sees? and who speaks?, but he does not establish a connection be-
200 Burkhard Niederhoff

tween these polemics and his neologism—nor is there such a connec-

tion. As a term, focalization dispels the confusion of seeing and speak-
ing no more than the traditional terms do. On the contrary, the connec-
tion between the question who sees? and point of view should be a little
more evident than between who sees? and focalization. It is perfectly
possible to embrace Genette’s scheme, including the separation and free
combination of narrator and focalization types, while referring to his
three focalizations as points of view.
The case that the advocates of focalization have made for its superi-
ority to point of view is by no means beyond dispute. Nor is it im-
proved by the fact that some of them use the new term while still think-
ing along the lines of the old, overlooking the semantic differences
between them and neglecting the new conceptual emphasis of the neol-
ogism. Füger, for example, explains that internal and external focaliza-
tion can be distinguished by the “situation of the agent of the process of
perception” (1993: 47), which is nothing but a roundabout paraphrase
of point of view. A characteristic instance of the reinterpretation of fo-
calization in terms of point of view is a change of preposition in the
English translation of Genette’s study: “[L]e mode narratif de la Re-
cherche est bien souvent la focalisation interne sur le héros” (1972:
214). “[T]he narrative mood of the Recherche is very often internal fo-
calization through the hero” ([1972] 1980: 199). The rendering of sur
as through speaks volumes. It seems that the translator is under the
spell of the point-of-view paradigm. Instead of thinking about focaliza-
tion as a selection of or a focusing on a particular region of the story-
world—in this case the mind of the protagonist—the translator regards
this mind as a kind of window through or from which the world is per-
ceived.
Bal’s influential revision of Genette’s theory is another example of
the reinterpretation of focalization in terms of point of view, although
she is more aware of this than others. Thus she admits that perspective
“reflects precisely” what she means by focalization ([1985] 1997: 143),
and she points out that Genette ought to have written “focalisation par”
instead of “focalisation sur” (1977: 29). The continuing influence of the
point-of-view paradigm also seems to underlie Bal’s reconceptualiza-
tion of Genette’s typology in terms of focalizing subjects and focalized
objects. According to her, the distinction between Genette’s zero focal-
ization and his internal focalization lies in the agent or subject that
“sees” the story (the narrator in the first case, a character in the second);
the difference between Genette’s internal and external focalization,
however, has nothing to do with the subject that “sees” but with the
object that is “seen” (thoughts and feelings in the first case, actions and
 Focalization 201

appearances in the second). Thus she ends up with a system of two bi-
nary distinctions that replace Genette’s triple typology. There are two
types of focalization: character-bound or internal (Genette’s internal
focalization) and external (Genette’s zero and external focalization
combined into one). Furthermore, there are two types of focalized ob-
jects: imperceptible (thoughts, feelings, etc.) and perceptible (actions,
appearances, etc.).
At least some of the elements in this reconceptualization result from
Bal’s adherence to the point-of-view paradigm, notably the elimination
of the distinction between Genette’s zero and external types (merged by
Bal into external focalization). Within the point-of-view model, this
change makes some sense. If one thinks about Genette’s zero and ex-
ternal focalization in terms of a point from which the characters are
viewed, this point would appear to lie outside the characters in both
cases. However, if one thinks in terms of knowledge and information,
zero and external focalization are worlds apart. The first provides us
with complete access to all the regions of the storyworld, including the
characters’ minds, whereas in the second the access is extremely limited
and no inside views are possible.
While it is possible to explain the motivation of Bal’s modifications
of Genette’s theory by pointing out her adherence to point of view, it
must be said that, in themselves, these modifications are hardly compel-
ling. It is simply erroneous to claim that Genette’s zero and internal
types are distinguished by the focalizing subjects, whereas his internal
and external types differ in the focalized objects. All of Genette’s focal-
izations vary, among other things, in the range of objects that can be
represented; his zero focalization and his internal focalization (distin-
guished in terms of the focalizing subjects by Bal) are also dissimilar in
this respect. Furthermore, the “focalized object” is a misleading con-
cept: the crucial distinction concerning such objects is between “per-
ceptible” and “imperceptible” ones, which means that the subjective
element of perception that Bal has previously eliminated is reintroduced
by way of the adjective. As Edmiston writes: “[T]he focalizer can be
characterized by his objects of focalization, despite Bal’s efforts to sep-
arate them [...]. Subject and object [of focalization] may be analyzed
separately, but they cannot be dissociated totally, as though there were
no correlation between them” (1991: 153).
Another feature of Bal’s theory, pointed out and criticized by Jahn,
is “that [...] any act of perception (brief or extended; real, hypothetical
or fantasized) presented in whatever form (narrated, reported, quoted,
or scenically represented) counts as a case of focalization” (Jahn 1996:
260). This is a problematic premise, which perhaps stems from taking
202 Burkhard Niederhoff

Genette’s question who sees? rather too literally. It ultimately reduces

the analysis of focalization to a paraphrase of narrative content, to iden-
tifying acts of perception. However, if a narrative tells us that Mary
sees John, we cannot be certain that the narrative is also focalized “by”
(to use Bal’s preferred preposition) Mary. Whether this is the case de-
pends on how Mary’s act of perception is narrated and on the context in
which it occurs. Admittedly, Bal is not the only one to equate focaliza-
tion with perception. This premise is also shared by Herman &
Vervaeck (2004), Margolin (2009) and Prince, who explicitly states
that his “discussion links focalization only to the perception of the nar-
rated by (or through, or ‘with’) an entity in that narrated” (2001: 47).
The equation of focalization with perception is also made by David
Herman in “Hypothetical Focalization” (1994), an article that I will use
here to point out the problems inherent in this equation. Drawing on
possible-worlds semantics, Herman examines passages that explicitly
describe what might have been seen at a particular point in the story
if anyone had been there to see it. Thus, in Poe’s “The Fall of the
House of Usher,” the narrator invokes an imaginary onlooker of this
kind when he describes the house: “Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing
observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, ex-
tending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the
wall [...]” ([1839] 1956: 97–98). The problem with Herman’s article is
that it analyzes hypothetical perception rather than hypothetical focali-
zation. The discovery of the fissure by Poe’s imaginary observer is hy-
pothetical only in comparison with the case of a character actually see-
ing this fissure. In terms of the focalization of Poe’s story, the
discovery is not hypothetical at all for the simple reason that the narra-
tor mentions it. It has an effect on the focalization in that it contributes
to the distancing of the narrating I from the experiencing I: the narrat-
ing I knows there was a fissure because he saw it very clearly at the end
of the story, whereas the experiencing I seems to be unaware of it when
he approaches the house for the first time. Generally speaking, instanc-
es of hypothetical perception would appear to point in the direction of
zero focalization (or narratorial point of view in the traditional para-
digm), just like the “report [of] what a character did not in fact think or
say” discussed by Chatman ([1978] 1980: 225). Hypothetical focaliza-
tion in the strict sense is a focalization option that is conceivable but not
realized in a text, such as an internally focalized version of Fielding’s
Tom Jones. Whether a text itself can achieve or suggest such hypothet-
ical focalization is an interesting question awaiting an answer.
While Bal’s revision of Genette’s theory involves deletions such as
“external focalization,” it also contains additions, notably the “focaliz-
 Focalization 203

er,” i.e. the “agent that sees” in a given focalization (Bal [1985] 1997:
146). This concept has spawned a considerable amount of controversy,
including a more specific debate about the question of whether narra-
tors can be focalizers. Bal, Phelan (2001) and many others assume that
both characters and narrators can be focalizers; Chatman (1990) and
Prince (2001) argue that characters can focalize while narrators cannot.
Genette, on the other hand, rejects character focalizers but concedes,
with some reluctance, the possibility of regarding the narrator as a fo-
calizer ([1983] 1988: 72–73). However, he does not see any great need
for the term, an attitude shared by Nelles, who considers it redundant
(1990: 374). The skepticism of the latter two critics seems to be justi-
fied. To talk about characters as focalizers is to confuse focalization and
perception. Characters can see and hear, but they can hardly focalize a
narrative of whose existence they are not aware. This leaves us with the
narrator (or the author?) as the only focalizer, an inference whose inter-
est is primarily scholastic. If all types of focalization can be attributed
to one agent, this attribution does not provide us with any conceptual
tools that we can use in distinguishing and analyzing texts.
Furthermore, the concept of focalizer is misleading because it sug-
gests that a given text or segment of text is always focalized by one
person, either the narrator or a character. But this is a simplification.
Consider the famous beginning of Dickens’s Great Expectations, in
which Pip, the first-person narrator, tells us how, as a little orphan, he
visited the graves of his family and drew some highly imaginative con-
clusions about his relatives from the shape of their tombstones. This
passage focuses on the thoughts and perceptions of the boy, but it also
communicates the knowledge and the attitude of the adult narrator,
primarily through style (elaborate language, ironically inflated lexis,
etc.). It makes little sense here to ask whether or not the boy is the fo-
calizer in this passage. It is more appropriate to analyze focalization as
a more abstract and variable feature of the text, wavering between the
knowledge and the attitudes of the adult narrator and the experience of
the child character.
To sum up, the various theoretical innovations introduced by the ad-
vocates of focalization are fraught with considerable problems; focali-
zation is hardly so much superior to point of view that the old term can
be discarded. Niederhoff (2001) compares the meanings and merits of
the terms, making a case for peaceful coexistence of and complementa-
rity between the two. There is room for both because each highlights
different aspects of a complex and elusive phenomenon. Point of view
seems to be the more powerful metaphor when it comes to narratives
that attempt to render the subjective experience of a character; stating
204 Burkhard Niederhoff

that a story is told from the point of view of the character makes more
sense than to claim that there is an internal focalization on the charac-
ter. Focalization is a more fitting term when one analyses selections of
narrative information that are not designed to render the subjective ex-
perience of a character but to create other effects such as suspense,
mystery, puzzlement, etc. If focalization theory is to make any pro-
gress, an awareness of the differences between the two terms and of
their respective strengths and weaknesses is indispensable.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The most pressing need is for an analysis of the specific conceptual
features of the focalization metaphor in comparison with related meta-
phors such as perspective, point of view, filter, etc. This needs to be
complemented by a thorough, non-dogmatic analysis of texts that
shows which of these terms is more appropriate to which kind of text.
(b) The question raised by Herman’s (1994) article remains to be inves-
tigated: Is there such a thing as hypothetical focalization? In other
words, can a text suggest or imply a focalization that is not present in
this text?

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Bal, Mieke (1977). Narratologie: Essais sur la signification narrative dans quatre
romans modernes. Paris: Klincksieck.
– ([1985] 1997). Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U
of Toronto P.
Chatman, Seymour ([1978] 1980). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction
and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca:
Cornell UP.
Edmiston, William F. (1991). Hindsight and Insight: Focalization in Four Eighteenth-
Century French Novels. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP.
Finney, Brian (1990). “Suture in Literary Analysis.” LIT: Literature Interpretation
Theory 2, 131–144.
Füger, Wilhelm (1993). “Stimmbrüche: Varianten und Spielräume narrativer Fokalisa-
tion.” H. Foltinek et al. (eds.). Tales and their “telling difference”: Zur Theorie
und Geschichte der Narrativik. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Franz K.
Stanzel. Heidelberg: Winter, 43–59.
 Focalization 205

Genette, Gérard (1972). “Discours du récit.” G. Genette. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 67–282.
– ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Oxford: Blackwell.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Herman, David (1994). “Hypothetical Focalization.” Narrative 2, 230–253.
Herman, Luc & Bart Vervaeck (2004). “Focalization between Classical and Postclassi-
cal Narratology.” J. Pier (ed.). The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in An-
glo-American Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter, 115–138.
Jahn, Manfred (1996). “Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a
Narratological Concept.” Style 30, 241–267.
Kablitz, Andreas (1988). “Erzählperspektive—Point of View—Focalisation: Überle-
gungen zu einem Konzept der Erzähltheorie.” Zeitschrift für französische Spra-
che und Literatur 98, 237–255.
Margolin, Uri (2009). “Focalization: Where Do We Go from Here?” P. Hühn et al.
(eds.). Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Nar-
rative. Berlin: de Gruyter, 48–58.
Nelles, William (1990). “Getting Focalization into Focus.” Poetics Today 11, 363–382.
Niederhoff, Burkhard (2001). “Fokalisation und Perspektive: Ein Plädoyer für friedli-
che Koexistenz.” Poetica 33, 1–21.
Nünning, Ansgar (1990). “‘Point of view’ oder ‘focalization’? Über einige Grundlagen
und Kategorien konkurrierender Modelle der erzählerischen Vermittlung.” Lite-
ratur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 23, 249–268.
O’Neill, Patrick (1992). “Points of Origin: On Focalization in Narrative.” Canadian
Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
19, 331–350.
Phelan, James (2001). “Why Narrators Can Be Focalizers—and Why It Matters.” W.
van Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Alba-
ny: SUNY, 51–64.
Poe, Edgar Allan ([1839] 1956). Selected Writings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Prince, Gerald (2001). “A Point of View on Point of View or Refocusing Focalization.”
W. van Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective.
Albany: SUNY, 43–50.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Routledge.
Shen, Dan (2001). “Breaking Conventional Barriers: Transgressions of Modes of Fo-
calization.” W. van Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative
Perspective. Albany: SUNY, 159–172.

5.2 Further Reading

Peer, Willie van & Seymour Chatman, eds. (2001). New Perspectives on Narrative
Perspective. Albany: SUNY.
Rossholm, Göran, ed. (2004). Essays on Fiction and Perspective. Bern: Lang.
 Gender and Narrative
Susan S. Lanser

1 Definition

The study of gender and narrative explores the (historically contingent)

ways in which sex, gender, and/or sexuality might shape both narrative
texts themselves and the theories through which readers and scholars
approach them. Within this broad inquiry, the field known as “feminist
narratology” has explored the implications of sex, gender, and/or sexu-
ality for understanding the “nature, form, and functioning of narrative”
(Prince [1987] 2003: 65), and thus also for exploring the full range of
elements that constitute narrative texts. Feminist narratology is thus
also concerned with the ways in which various narratological concepts,
categories, methods and distinctions advance or obscure the exploration
of gender and sexuality as signifying aspects of narrative.

2 Explication

Usually pursued under the rubrics of feminist narratology and, increas-

ingly, queer narratology, the study of sex, gender, and sexuality as sig-
nifying elements of narrative encompasses a diversity of approaches
and inquiries. Indeed, the three modifying terms—sex, gender, sexuali-
ty—are themselves subject to multiple definitions. In most academic
pursuits today, “sex” stands for the biological designations of male and
female (with some scholars including “intersex” as a designation),
while “gender” marks social identities, roles, and behaviors as well as
qualities of masculinity and femininity that have been associated with a
specific sex, and “sexuality” refers to the orientation of desire toward a
particular sexed or gendered object. The distinction between “sex” and
“gender” has been challenged, however, by postmodern theorists and
by biological confirmation that “sex” itself is not a singular entity. The
term “gender” is now the most common anchor term, since it avoids
binary assumptions about bodily identities and recognizes transgender
and “gender-queer” possibilities.
 Gender and Narrative 207

The field of gender and narrative stakes its diverse approaches on

the shared belief that sex, gender, and sexuality are significant not only
to textual interpretation and reader reception but to textual poetics itself
and thus to the shapes, structures, representational practices, and com-
municative contexts of narrative texts. In claiming that these key vec-
tors of social positioning carry narratological weight, feminist narratol-
ogy marked a significant departure of value from classical narrative
theory. Indeed, it was the insertion of gender that first challenged the
premises of classical narratology from within the field, pioneering what
is now known as “postclassical” narratology for its insistence on the
significance of historical and social context in the production and re-
ception of narrative and in the shaping of narrative forms and functions.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 From Universal Laws to Gender Consciousness

Whether we date the inception of narrative poetics to the ancient

Greeks, the Russian Formalists, the Anglo-American New Critics or the
French structuralists, we can safely say that questions of gender were
not among the field’s early distinctions or concerns. These “classical”
forms of narrative theory aimed at identifying universal laws, outlining
formal typologies, and describing stylistic and structural elements that
were understood to recur quite apart from thematic content, actual read-
erships or, in many cases, cultural codes. Yet some early formulations
do remind us that seeming universals may be unwittingly gendered.
Propp’s morphology ([1928] 1958) depends on gendered functions
even though Propp himself aspired to abstract those functions from
content (9). While thirty of Propp’s thirty-one functions of the dramatis
personae are named in relatively neutral terms, a male hero is implied
throughout, and the final function of the wedding—“the hero is married
and ascends the throne” (63)—evokes the conventional nature of the
folktales themselves. Widespread application of Propp’s functions to
other tales and texts reinforced attention to what was in effect a gen-
dered plot.
The interest in narrative poetics during the 1960s and 1970s that led
Todorov to coin the term “narratology” (1969: 10), pioneered by An-
glo-American theorists such as Frye and Booth and (mostly French)
structuralists such as Todorov, Barthes, Bremond, Genette, Greimas,
Prince, and Uspenskij, intensified the emphasis on a “science” of narra-
tive committed to eliciting general laws understood to assume the de-
208 Susan S. Lanser

tachability of texts from history, social context, and thematic concerns.

Although Genette’s Narrative Discourse used Proust’s A la recherche
du temps perdu as the key text for his exploration of narrative order,
duration, frequency, mood, and voice, his goal was to void his inquiry
of narrative content in order to identify “elements that are universal, or
at least transindividual” ([1972] 1980: 23). Thus when Genette
acknowledges that he “went regularly to the most deviant aspects of
Proustian narrative” (265, original emphasis), it is not sexual but narra-
tive “deviance” to which he refers. Nor did narrative theorists such as
Booth ([1961] 1983) and Chatman (1978) raise the possibility of gender
differences between the writers on whose works they relied.
The narratological landscape was soon challenged from within and
without, however, in response to a broader shift in literary studies that
questioned the abstraction of formal elements from cultural contingen-
cies. New, identity-conscious inquiries into narrative practice were
spurred by the emergence of political movements of the 1960s and their
academic institutionalization in women’s studies, ethnic studies, and
postcolonial studies. Perhaps the earliest internal reconfiguration of
narratology appeared with Bal (1977), whose emphasis on works by
women may not be unrelated to her integration of form, content, and
context. In that same year, Showalter (1977) took all formalisms to task
for “evad[ing] the issue of sexual identity entirely, or dismiss[ing] it as
irrelevant and subjective” and thus “desexing” women writers (8).
Along with the major epistemological challenges to structuralism’s fixi-
ties wrought by deconstruction, such identitarian challenges converged
to open the intellectual space for rethinking even the newest contribu-
tions to narrative poetics.
Several interventions of the early 1980s addressed this “desexed”
poetics that feminists saw as masking an androcentric view. Nancy K.
Miller (1981) exposed current notions of plot and plausibility as male-
centered constructs masquerading as universal norms and argued that
“the implausible twists” common to many women’s novels revealed
“the stakes of difference within the theoretical indifference of literature
itself” (44). Arguing that point of view was necessarily a matter of ide-
ology as well as technique, Lanser (1981) aimed explicitly to forge a
descriptive poetics of point of view that would accommodate both
women’s writings and feminist concerns. Through a psychoanalytic
lens, de Lauretis (1984) exposed the gendered Oedipal structure both of
narrative desire and of narratological language in conventional under-
standings of narrativity and plot. Brewer (1984), Homans (1984), and
DuPlessis (1985) likewise challenged conventional thinking about plot
 Gender and Narrative 209

by exploring what they saw as the different dynamics of women’s nar-

ratives.

3.2 Feminist Challenges to Narratology “Proper”

The tipping point in the study of gender and narrative occurred in 1986
through the simultaneous publication of Warhol’s “Toward a Theory of
the Engaging Narrator” (1986) and Lanser’s “Toward a Feminist Narra-
tology” (1986) that called for a gender-conscious narrative poetics.
Warhol posited a distinction between “distancing” and “engaging” nar-
rators and argued that the engaging narrator had been undertheorized
and devalued because of its association with women writers and “sen-
timental” novels. Associating the “distancing” narrator with masculine
cultural traits and the “engaging” narrator with feminine markers, while
also showing that both men and women practice each strategy, Warhol
criticized the dismissal of “engaging” practices as parcel to a gendered
devaluation of direct engagement with the reader around issues of pub-
lic concern. Taking on a broader set of narratological issues, Lanser
asked “whether feminist criticism, and particularly the study of narra-
tives by women, might benefit from the methods and insights of narra-
tology and whether narratology, in turn, might be altered by the under-
standings of feminist criticism and the experience of women’s texts”
(342). She argued that narratology could help to offset an overly mi-
metic approach to narrative by feminist readers and that, conversely,
feminist studies could demonstrate the utility of narratology for non-
narratologists. To those compatible ends, Lanser proposed a range of
interventions toward creating a more supple, rhetorically invested and
gender-aware narrative poetics.
Neither of these essays escaped critique. Warhol’s piece stirred suf-
ficient dissent to warrant responses in subsequent issues of PMLA that
challenged her gendering of distancing and engagement. More provoca-
tively, Diengott (1988) rejected Lanser’s coupling of terms entirely,
arguing that “there is no need, indeed no possibility” of a feminist nar-
ratology because “feminism has nothing to do with narratology” (49–
50). Lanser (1988) challenged Diengott’s understanding of narrative
poetics as separable from content and context and even from the specif-
ic textual instance. Feminist narratology has also faced criticisms from
feminist theorists who find narratology esoteric, elitist, and politically
unconcerned. In response, Bal argued that rejecting formal analysis is
foolhardy, since “political and ideological criticism cannot but be based
on insights into the way texts produce those political effects” ([1985]
2009: 13).
210 Susan S. Lanser

As Nünning concluded, however, “though Lanser and other feminist

narratologists have incurred the displeasure of those to whom this
sounds suspiciously like an ideological balkanization of narratology,
the new approaches have raised pertinent new questions which have
proved to be of greater concern to a larger number of critics than the
systematic taxonomies, typologies and models so dear to the hearts of
narratologists” (2000: 354). Indeed, by the turn of the new century, the
study of gender had become a standard pursuit within both narrative
theory in the broad sense and narratology “proper.” Simply defined by
Warhol, feminist narratology at this stage consisted in “the study of
narrative structures and strategies in the context of cultural construc-
tions of gender” (quoted in Mezei 1996: 6), though as Warhol (1999)
recognized, feminist narratologists were also likely to “mess up” (354)
the neat binaries and categories of structuralist narratology in its ques-
tioning of “either/or” reasoning (340).

3.3 The Post-classical Turn: The Emergence of Feminist Narratologies

Warhol’s Gendered Interventions (1989), Lanser’s Fictions of Authori-

ty (1992), and Mezei’s edited collection Feminist Narratology and Brit-
ish Women Writers (1996) all pushed the study of gender and narrative
into further prominence and encouraged new work in the field. This
trend helped to usher in the “postclassical” phase of narratology, an
umbrella term coined by Herman (1997) to designate a range of theo-
ries that “move toward integration and synthesis” not only by “ex-
pos[ing] the limits” but also by “exploit[ing] the possibilities of the old-
er, structuralist models” in “rethink[ing] their conceptual under-
pinnings” (Herman 1999: 3). Most common among these postclassical
approaches are the cognitive, the postmodern, and the contextual, the
latter pioneered by a feminist poetics that “refuses to separate questions
about narrative grammar from questions about the contexts in which
narratives are designed and interpreted” (11). By 2000, Richardson
(2000) could claim that feminist criticism had “utterly and fruitfully
transformed narrative theory and analysis” by subjecting “virtually eve-
ry component of or agent in the narrative transaction” to “sustained ex-
amination” (168). As Sommer (2007) has noted, feminist narratology
remains the “most established strand” of the contextual turn (61).
At this juncture, then, feminism and narratology form a visible inter-
section on the literary map with a thick and varied scholarly and meth-
odological dossier not always identified as “feminist narratology.” Bau-
er (1988) has fruitfully deployed Baxtin’s concepts of both carnival and
the dialogic (Shepherd → Dialogism) to think about the dynamics of
 Gender and Narrative 211

discourse and power in American women’s writing. Keen (2007) brings

a feminist perspective to her exploration of narrative empathy (Keen →
Narrative Empathy), calling for greater attention to women readers of
popular fiction. Dannenberg (2009), which offers new understandings
of plot that synthesize cognitive, ontological, and spatial approaches,
also quietly focuses on deep history of writing by and about women.
Rather than advancing a monolithic feminist narratology, these projects
collectively yield a range of gender-conscious interventions in narrative
thought that are not necessarily compatible with one another but each of
which recognizes the legitimacy and indeed necessity of addressing
gender in tandem with narrative inquiry.
However, the postclassical “turn” also exposed the limitations of
Lanser’s approach and, to a lesser extent, of Warhol’s, limitations that
have become more evident in the wake of separate transformations in
feminist and narratological thought. As Page has noted, Lanser (1992)
rests on a “binary model of gender that emphasize[s] difference” and
tends “to construct the category ‘women’ as if it were a universal
group” (2006: 46–47). This same binarism arguably informs the essays
in Mezei (1996) and continues in Case (1999), which advances the
work initiated by Lanser and Warhol by exploring “feminine” strategies
and male interventions that forge textual struggles over narrative au-
thority. Moreover, all of these books and most work on feminist narra-
tology of the 1980s and 1990s rests on a canon of English, American,
and French writers that dates primarily to the 19th and 20th centuries.
Page addresses this limitation by focusing variously on plot patterns in
medieval Japanese and English texts, on media narratives about Hillary
Rodham Clinton and Cherie Booth/Blair, and on children’s storytelling
in New Zealand. Using engaging strategies of her own, Warhol (2003)
takes up the question of the embodied and gendered reader by explor-
ing affective responses to serial narratives from soap operas to detective
novels. Thus Page and Warhol join several other scholars—Friedman
(1998), most notably—who have been “re-mapping” feminist narrative
thought along a multiplicity of theoretical and geographical routes in
what Alber and Fludernik (2010) describes as a “phase of diversifica-
tion” (5) for narratologies in general.

3.4 Re-Mapping: Toward an Intersectional Approach

In a provocative essay exposing a methodological faultline between

classical and contextual narratologies, Sommer (2007) argues that while
a top-down imposition of narrative categories of the kind practiced by
classical narratologists may be valid for projects attempting to describe
212 Susan S. Lanser

all narrative possibilities, this approach is invalid for fields such as

“postcolonial or intercultural narratologies” that are concerned with
“specific features of specific texts embedded in specific cultural and
historical contexts” (70). These contextual projects, Sommer claims,
must therefore work inductively to build an inclusive corpus of texts
from which to theorize. While of course no narrative poetics is entirely
separable from individual instances, feminist narratology has been ap-
proached in both ways: some feminist narratologists work to develop
fully universalist theories, whereas others argue for a more culturally
specific poetics that describes the contours of particular bodies of texts.
While the former group is more likely to favor deductive methodolo-
gies and the latter inductive ones, the more central difference concerns
the extent to which it is possible to develop any narrative poetics that
could account for all texts.
At the heart of this bifurcation, however, sits feminist narratology’s
still lopsided corpus, more white than interracial, more Anglo and
American than global, more post- than pre-1800, more novelistic and
cinematic than pan-generic. This imbalance has underscored the need
for intersectional approaches that, rather than isolating the presumptive
implications of gender, examine narratives within the specificities of
multiple social vectors. Named in 1989 by legal scholar Crenshaw, the
theory of intersectionality argues that diverse aspects of identity con-
verge to create the social positions, perceptions, limitations, and oppor-
tunities of individuals and groups ([1989] 1991). Thus motherhood,
often considered a universal female experience, is recalibrated as condi-
tioned by nationality, age, race, and social class, to name only a few
variables. Intersectionality theory maintains that no coherent female or
male experience exists even within a single culture let alone across cul-
tures, since cultures are always constituted within, and in turn consti-
tute, aspects of identity, location, individual agency, and discursive
realm. Intersectional thinking would thus reject a narratology that as-
sumes gender or sexuality to be predictable or predictive. Rather than
adopting a deductive approach by starting with the premise of differ-
ence, as was usually the case for feminist narratology in the 1980s, an
intersectional narratology works upwards to narratological theory from
the careful study of many and diverse textual instances.
Although it is not strictly a narratological project and does not ex-
plicitly use intersectional theory, Friedman (1998) helped significantly
to shift feminist narrative theory toward intersectional thought and
away from its Euro-American emphases by arguing for the primacy of
exploring “the role of geopolitical and cultural differences in providing
what generates, motivates, and fuels narrative” (134). Advocating a
 Gender and Narrative 213

shift from a psychoanalytic to an anthropological paradigm, Friedman

lays the ground for a feminist narrative poetics that is spatial as well as
temporal. In more recent work (Warhol & Lanser ed. forthcoming),
Friedman advances the case for incorporating religion, a frequently ig-
nored aspect of identity, in an intersectional narrative paradigm. Lanser
(2010) has called for a vast project of global mapping not only of texts
but of narratological scholarship generally in order to see where femi-
nist narratology has placed its empirical emphases and where narrative
study remains underexplored. Many other feminist scholars of narrative
have now advanced the project of inclusion through their own attention
to individual non-Anglo-American texts, to writings by and representa-
tions of men as well as to genres other than novel and film. Still, the
creation of a holistic narratology that is adequate to these multiple con-
tributions remains to be achieved.

3.5 Queer(ing) Narratology

Although sexuality has entered the narratological conversation more

recently and less fully than gender, the dramatic rise of “queer theory”
since the 1990s has drawn attention to the implications of sexuality for
narrative analysis. The term “queer” has been used in at least three
ways within the study of narrative: to designate, respectively, non-
heteronormative sexual identities, the dismantling of categories of sex-
uality and gender, and any practice that transgresses or deconstructs
categories and binaries. In different ways, these approaches pose chal-
lenges not only to narratology “proper” but to feminist narratology as
well. For example, Lanser’s (1995) insistence that non-dramatized het-
erodiegetic narrators are gendered—and normatively gendered accord-
ing to the sex of the author—might usefully yield to the argument that
heterodiegesis is a freer locus of non-gendered narrative voice.
A primary concern within queer narrative theory—and one that still
divides theorists along dystopic and utopic lines—has focused on
whether narrative is irrecoverably heteronormative or, conversely, is
capable of “queering.” Roof (1996) argued for the underlying heter-
onormativity of narratives that “include” lesbian, gay, or queer charac-
ters and of narrative theory itself, with its binary definitions that make
defining narrative “always a tautological project where the question of
a narrative ‘logic’ is preempted at the very moment one tries to answer
it” (48). In declaring that “there is no there to get” (187), Roof joins
such scholars as D. A. Miller (1992), who asks “so long as narrative is
wedded to marriage and kin to the family, what is left for us to tell?”
(46) and Edelman, who exposes “the (il)logic by which narrative pro-
214 Susan S. Lanser

duces the crime that it apparently only reports” (1994: 191). More san-
guine about narrative’s queer potential, Farwell argues that the lesbian
subject disrupts the “asymmetrical gender codes” (1996: 17) of tradi-
tional narrative and rewrites the dynamics of power, while Lanser
(1995), exploring the implications of narratives such as Jeanette Win-
terson’s Written on the Body in which the narrator’s gender is un-
known, suggests that narratological categories be revisited for their
queer potential. The implications of queerness for narrativity itself con-
tinue to preoccupy scholars of sexuality and narrative, and it is fair to
say that the jury is still out concerning the viability of narrative to take
a significantly queer turn. The inquiry has expanded as narrative theo-
rists consider heteronormativity in its broadest sense—what Berlant and
Warner (1998) describe as a system of “institutions, structures of un-
derstanding, and practical orientations” that privilege heterosexuality
even in “contexts that have little visible relation to sexual practice”
(547).
Meanwhile, however, queer narratology has turned to a range of
texts and topics from queer manifestations in Japanese novels to queer
formations in Hollywood cinema. Some of the most exciting new work,
which also engages questions of narrativity, has focused on queer tem-
porality, a topic whose broad ramifications for history, scholarship, and
politics were featured in a special issue of GLQ (2007). Recent work by
Rohy (2009), Freeman (2010) and Vincent (2012) also takes up the
question of narrative time from the perspective of queer theories and
positionalities, variously studying the implications of linear or
“straight” time, of pseudo-iterativity and recursivity, of arresting and
arrested temporalities, of queer convergences of time, and of the im-
passes that accrue when a narrative cannot move toward the heteronor-
mative promise of reproduction that some scholars have argued consti-
tutes the very foundation of narrativity. Others have looked at queer
voice and queer characterization although explicit intersections between
narratology and queer theory remain, in the early stages, ready for fur-
ther attention by both queer theorists and narratologists. A volume of
essays on feminist and queer narrative theories (Warhol & Lanser
forthcoming) should help to further conversation between queer and
feminist approaches while providing a fuller foundation for queer(ing)
narratology.
 Gender and Narrative 215

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Although the study of gender and narrative has opened up new vistas,
many challenges remain. (a) Paramount among these is to forge a genu-
inely global and intersectional narrative corpus and, through this cor-
pus, a poetics supple enough to address aspects of gender evoked by the
range of the world’s narrative texts present and past. (b) Given the gen-
eral neglect of character (Jannidis → Character) in narratology, as op-
posed to its significance in feminist and queer studies, feminist and
queer narratologists might profitably follow up on Woloch’s (2003)
innovative work by studying the gendered distribution of characters and
the intersectional implications of character distribution. (c) Narratology
still largely proceeds as though it is women who “have” gender and
men who are gender-free; very little work has been accomplished on
the gendering of male writers, narrators, and characters according to the
same intersectional principles that feminist narratologists have called on
with respect to women’s works.
(d) Like other identity-based studies of narrative, the study of queer
narratives has emphasized mimetic aspects of character and plot; fuller
attention to textual form will help to shape a more comprehensive poet-
ics for studying of queer narratives. (e) Questioning both gendered and
“gender-neutral” assumptions within narratology itself could yield a
productive “queering” of such narrative elements as heterodiegesis,
metalepsis, and free indirect discourse as a way to challenge the bina-
ries still prevalent even within postclassical narratologies. (f) Attending
to a burgeoning cognitive narratology is perhaps the toughest current
challenge for a gendered narrative poetics. While Palmer has argued
that a cognitive method creates the very basis for historical and cultural
approaches (2010: 7), gender has thus far been a sidebar to cognitive
narratology, and some feminist thinkers find its penchant for universal
theories of mind to be as problematic as the universal structures pro-
posed by classical narratology.
Finally, (g) a narratology conscious of gender and sexuality can
provide new opportunities for feminist and queer theory and scholar-
ship, particularly if non-literary genres are engaged. Thus, while narra-
tologists might work toward forging a narratology that is more broadly
gender-inclusive, scholars of gender and sexuality might forge feminist
and queer theories that are more deeply narratological. Extending narra-
tology to such socially invested fields might require addressing some
longstanding problems of terminology and relevance that have limited
the value of narrative poetics for non-specialists. But such efforts can
216 Susan S. Lanser

help to demonstrate the value of narratology for an interdisciplinary

community of scholars and readers.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Alber, Jan & Monika Fludernik, eds. (2010). Postclassical Narratology: Approaches
and Analyses. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Bal, Mieke (1977). Narratologie. Essais sur la signification narrative dans quatre ro-
mans modernes. Paris: Klincksieck.
– ([1985] 2009). Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U
of Toronto P.
Bauer, Dale (1988). Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community. Albany: State
U of New York P.
Berlant, Lauren & Michael Warner (1998). “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24, 548–
566.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Brewer, Mária Minich (1984). “A Loosening of Tongues: From Narrative Economy to
Women Writing.” MLN: Modern Language Notes 99, 1141–1161.
Case, Alison A. (1999). Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century British Novel. U of Virginia P.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé ([1989] 1991). “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity
Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43,
1241–1299.
Dannenberg, Hilary (2009). Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and
Space in Narrative Fiction. U of Nebraska P.
De Lauretis, Teresa (1984). Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Blooming-
ton: Indiana UP.
Diengott, Nilli (1988). “Narratology and Feminism.” Style 22, 42–51.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau (1985). Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of
Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Edelman, Lee (1994). Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory.
New York: Routledge.
Farwell, Marilyn (1996). Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives. New York: New
York UP.
Freeman, Elizabeth (2010). Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories.
Durham: Duke UP.
Friedman, Susan Stanford (1998). Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies
of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
 Gender and Narrative 217

Herman, David (1997). “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical

Narratology.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America 112, 1046–1059.
– (1999). “Introduction: Narratologies.” D. Herman (ed.). Narratologies: New Per-
spectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1–30.
Homans, Margaret (1984). “Feminist Fictions and Feminist Theories of Narrative.”
Narrative 2, 3–16.
Keen, Suzanne (2007). Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Lanser, Susan (1981). The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton:
Princeton UP.
– (1986). “Toward a Feminist Narratology.” Style 20, 341–363.
– (1988). “Shifting the Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology.” Style 22, 52–60.
– (1992). Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– (1995). “Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narra-
tology,” Narrative 3, 85–94. Published with some revisions in Mezei ed. (1996)
as “Queering Narratology,” 250–261.
– (2010). “Are We There Yet? The Intersectional Future of Feminist Narratology.”
Foreign Literature Studies 32, 32–41.
Mezei, Kathy, ed. (1996). Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P.
Miller, D. A. (1992). Bringing Out Roland Barthes. Berkeley: U of California P.
Miller, Nancy K. (1981). “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fic-
tion.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96,
36–48.
Nünning, Ansgar (2000). “Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology: Concepts,
Diachronic Approaches and Projects.” B. Reitz & S. Rieuwerts (eds.). Anglis-
tentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings. Trier: WVT, 345–373.
Page, Ruth E. (2006). Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology.
Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Palmer, Alan (2010). Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Prince, Gerald ([1987] 2003). A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Propp, Vladimir ([1928] 1958). Morphology of the Folktale. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
“Queer Temporalities” (2007). Special Issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 15.
Richardson, Brian (2000). “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narrative of Narra-
tive Theory.” Style 34, 168–175.
Rohy, Valerie (2009). Anachronism and its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality. Al-
bany: SUNY Press.
Roof, Judith (1996). Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia
UP.
Showalter, Elaine (1977). A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Sommer, Roy (2007). “Contextualism Revisited: A Survey (and Defence) of Postcolo-
nial and Intercultural Narratologies.” Journal of Literary Theory 1, 61–79.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1969). Grammaire du “Décameron.” The Hague: Mouton.
218 Susan S. Lanser

Vincent, J. Keith (2012). Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern

Japanese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Warhol, Robyn R. (1986). “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Inter-
ventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Lan-
guage Association of America 101, 811–818.
– (1989). Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
– (1999). “Guilty Cravings: What Feminist Narratology Can Do for Cultural Stud-
ies.” D. Herman (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 340–355.
– (2003). Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms. Co-
lumbus: Ohio State UP.
– & Susan S. Lanser, ed. (forthcoming). Narrative 2.0: Queer and Feminist Ap-
proaches. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Woloch, Alex (2003). The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the
Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP.

5.2 Further Reading

Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, & Robyn War-
hol (2012). Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus:
Ohio State UP.
Lanser, Susan S. (2010). “Sapphic Dialogics: Historical Narratology and the Sexuality
of Form.” J. Alber & M. Fludernik (eds.). Postclassical Narratology: Approaches
and Analyses. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 186–205.
Peters, Joan Douglas (2002). Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British
Novel. Gainesville: UP of Florida.
Prince, Gerald (1982). Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative. Berlin:
Mouton.
– (1995). “On Narratology: Criteria, Corpus, Context.” Narrative 3, 73–84.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London & New York: Routledge.
Scholes, Robert E. & Robert Kellogg (1966). The Nature of Narrative. New York:
Oxford UP.
Shen, Dan (2005). “Why Contextual and Formal Narratologies Need Each Other.”
Journal of Narrative Theory 35, 141–171.
 Heteroglossia
Valerij Tjupa

1 Definition

This term results from a translation (Morson & Emerson 1990) of Mix-
ail Baxtin’s neologism raznorečie. According to Baxtin’s understand-
ing of language use, a “social person,” who is also a “speaking person,”
operates not with language as an abstract regulatory norm, but with a
multitude of discourse practices that form in their totality a dynamic
verbal culture belonging to the society concerned: “language is some-
thing that is historically real, a process of heteroglot development, a
process teeming with future and former languages, with prim but mori-
bund aristocrat-languages, with parvenu-languages and with countless
pretenders to the status of language which are all more or less success-
ful, depending on their degree of social scope and on the ideological
area in which they are employed” (Baxtin [1934/35] 1981: 356–357).

2 Explication

The category of heteroglossia has entered the scholarly apparatus of

narratology because the verbal presentation of the narration necessarily
possesses certain linguistic characteristics that create the effect of a
voice. Narration not only takes place from a particular standpoint in
time and space, but also inevitably has a certain stylistic color, a certain
tone of emotion and intention that can be described as “glossality.” This
is directed at the reader’s ability to hear (Tjupa 2006: 35–37).
Heteroglossia is a “dialogical,” agonal structure of verbal communi-
cation whose essence lies in the fact that “within the arena of almost
every utterance an intense interaction and struggle between one’s own
and another’s word is being waged” (Baxtin [1934/35] 1981: 354), a
struggle, that is, involving two or more codes between which links of
selection and connotation emerge. The former kind of link is based on
the use of different words to describe one and the same reality in differ-
220 Valerij Tjupa

ent languages; the latter kind of link on the description of different real-
ities using the same words in different languages.
The phenomenon of heteroglossia is relevant to narratology in so far
as the narrative text is composed of two elements, the narrator’s (Mar-
golin → Narrator) text and the characters’ (Jannidis → Character) text
(Doležel 1960, 1973; Schmid [1973] 1986, 2005). The second of these
“heteroglot” texts that are “alien” to one another presents itself as “ut-
terance within utterance,” whereas the first is encountered as “utterance
about utterance” (Vološinov [1929] 1973: 115), as a “framing context”
that, “like the sculptor’s chisel, hews out the rough outlines of someone
else’s speech, and carves the image of language out of the raw empiri-
cal data of speech life” (Baxtin [1934/35] 1981: 358).
The text framed by narrative can be a diverse one (a bundle of het-
erogeneous texts produced by various characters) or a zero text (in the
case of a silent hero whose position within the event is not verbalized).
In the latter case, the character’s text is indeed pushed out of the
presentation of the narration, but it cannot be eliminated from the story
of narration of whose chain of events it is a part. As a silent dialogizing
background to the narrator’s speech, it can have a crucial influence on
that speech, on its stylistically relevant lexical features, its syntax, and
its tonality of emotion and intention (consider Dostoevskij’s “Gentle
Spirit”). And in the opposite case, that of a text stylized as skaz
(Schmid → Skaz), in which “the narrator’s speech has at one and the
same time the function of representing and of being represented”
(Schmid 2003: 191), the role of an actively silent dialogizing back-
ground is performed by the virtual zero text of the author, who would
have told the story in question in different words (Schönert → Author).
The effect of heteroglossia can be used in widely different ways by
the presentation of the narration, ranging from a “war of languages”
(Barthes [1984] 1986) to their tautology (zero heteroglossia). Between
these poles we find various ways of incorporating intratextual discours-
es into the narrator’s text in the manner of quotation, as well as various
forms of “textual interference” (Schmid 2003: 177–222) or, as Baxtin
([1934/35] 1981: 304) puts it, “hybrid construction,” namely “an utter-
ance that […] contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech
manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological
belief systems.”
The discourse related by the narrator can, for him, have the status of
an authoritative linguistic action. The turn to the authoritative text-
behind-the-text (the reading of the Gospel at the end of Tolstoj’s Resur-
rection, or the psalter in Bunin’s story “Exodus”) creates the effect of a
hierarchically constructed heteroglossia. The opposite of this kind of
 Heteroglossia 221

hierarchy occurs when a narrator occupies a position of power where he

appears as “editor” (Uspenskij [1970] 1973: 43) of the characters’ di-
rect speech, transforming it as he sees it and thereby reducing the over-
all level of heteroglossia in the text.
Following the norm established in the classical realism of the 19th
century, the direct speech of a character often serves to express that
character’s linguistic view of the world, which can differ to a greater or
lesser extent from the view of the world on which the narration is
based. In such cases, the lexical, grammatical, and intonation-related
syntactic features of the character’s text contrast with the narrator’s text
and combine to form a certain voice belonging to a different subject.
The quoted voice does not have the same compositional standing as the
quoting voice: fragments of the characters’ speech are extracted from
the flow of the characters’ verbal activity by the narrator in a manner
similar to the way in which the narrator makes selections from the flow
of connected events belonging to (historically real or invented) reality.
The axiological hierarchy need not be present here, though. In certain
special cases, texts-in-texts of this kind can be presented in a different
national language, e.g. French in Tolstoj’s War and Peace: “When for-
eign and irregular speech is represented […], the author stresses the
distance between the speaking character and the describing observer”
(Uspenskij [1970] 1973: 51). Even in the context of a single national
language, however, the heteroglossia that results from the distance be-
tween two or more “socio-linguistic belief systems” (Baxtin [1934/35]
1981: 356) can act as an effective means of organizing the narrative
world of a work. Thus, in Lermontov’s “The Fatalist” (a chapter of the
novel A Hero of our Times), the words of the Cossacks on the one hand
and of Maksim Maksimyč on the other are stylistically brief, but clearly
set apart from the speech of Pečorin (the narrator). They are the voices
of another life, the life of the “others.” The replies by Vulič and the un-
named officers, on the other hand, cannot be stylistically distinguished
from the text of the narrator. In this case, zero heteroglossia points not
to the anonymity of an act of narration that is inextricably bound to the
world of transmission it shares with the characters (as in Homer’s Ili-
ad), but to the potential power of the narrator where discourse is con-
cerned: for him, the characters (primarily Vulič, Pečorin’s inner Dop-
pelgänger) seem in some way to be actors in a drama taking place
inside his lonely mind. This is the zero heteroglossia of Romantic dis-
course. By providing other characters with lexical, grammatical, and
intonation-related syntactic voices, however, Lermontov brings his
prose beyond the boundary of the cultural paradigm of romanticism.
222 Valerij Tjupa

Interference, or “contaminations” (Uspenskij [1970] 1973: 32), be-

tween the narrator’s text and the characters’ text can take place through
forms of indirect speech and free indirect speech (McHale → Speech
Representation), for which Schmid (2003: 216–239, 2005: 177–222)
suggests a detailed classification. The leading role in a textual interfer-
ence with many forms is performed by the narrator’s text, which can be
characterized with reference to its intention regarding the characters’
text (its language, its style, its horizon of values). Using Baxtin’s terms,
we can distinguish here between (a) “assimilation,” (b) “demarcation”
(razmeževanie), and (c) “dialogized interillumination” as fundamental
intentions. In the case of (a), we are concerned with the incomplete ab-
sorption of the characters’ text by the narrator’s text: a lexical, gram-
matical, or syntactic remnant of a foreign discourse can be identified in
the narrator’s speech. In the case of (b), there is an axiological diver-
gence, a confrontation of horizons in which every foreign word is care-
fully preserved but given an undertone of caricature in the narrator’s
speech. In the case of (c), we would speak of a convergence of horizons
that have equal axiological status and contain “truths” of equal value
complementing each another.
The types of textual interference just described can be mutually in-
terrelated and intertwined in a complex manner. In Dostoevskij’s story
“Mr Prokharčin,” for example, this leads to mental conflict, intensified
to extremes, between the eponymous hero, characterized by his egocen-
tric, self-directed speech, and his surroundings, the brotherhood of the
officials who formulate their views of life in a flowery style. In the pro-
cess, the narrator (a biographer who represents the story with a side-
ways glance at the lovers of a noble style) manipulates all three possi-
ble intentions of heteroglossia with virtuosity in his efforts to establish
a balance between the opposing positions.
More recent prose (since Čechov) has seen the possibility of having
mutually complementary narrative entities emerge and establish them-
selves; this makes the convergence of narrator’s text and characters’
text an all-encompassing principle of narration. Here, without losing its
crucial compositional function, the “voice of the narrator” draws near to
the “axiological and linguistic horizon of the hero” (Schmid 2003:
233); the narrator, declining to exercise his power, does not give him-
self the last word, leaving no more than meaningful pointers behind
instead (consider Solženicyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovič).
This device, which bears a superficial resemblance to skaz but is really
the opposite of skaz styling, has been given the name “free indirect au-
thorial narration” (nesobstvenno-avtorskoe povestvovanie; Koževniko-
va 1994). This choice of term, though, does not seem entirely appropri-
 Heteroglossia 223

ate: the narrative text, as the result of the aesthetic verbal activity of
“indirect speaking” (Baxtin [1959/60] 1996: 314, 1986: 110), is never
directly correlated with the author; there are always mediating entities,
and so the narrative text is always an indirect authorial utterance.
For the most part, the phenomenon of heteroglossia in narrative dis-
course is treated as an aspect of the more general problem of point of
view (Uspenskij [1970] 1973); it is described in such cases as “phraseo-
logical perspective” (Korman [1975] 2006) or “linguistic” perspective
(Schmid 2003, 2005). Assuming that the terms are equivalent in this
way, though, can give cause for objection. The discursive practice to
which a text (or the quoted words of a text) belongs does not end with
perspective: behind the discourse there lies a certain axiological and
cultural, ideological and linguistic, socio-psychological horizon at-
tached to those who are speaking/writing. This horizon contains all the
potential objects, found by the mind in question, of a subjective stance
concerning them; it is a potential field of reference for the discourse.
Perspective, on the other hand, is always actual: it represents a “single
(unique, ‘immediate’) relationship between subject and object” (Kor-
man [1975] 2006: 184), it activates a certain segment of the horizon and
positions the subject itself within that horizon. As a narratological cate-
gory, it may well be sufficient to define narrative perspective as a “po-
sition of the ‘observer’ (the narrator, the character) in the represented
world,” as a position that “expresses the author’s evaluative stance to-
ward this subject and its mental horizon” (Tamarčenko 2004: 221).
Even in the text, the horizon of a narrating entity itself has only a po-
tential existence: it is represented by the stylistic “symptoms” of its
boundaries which are activated by the contrapuntal and/or polyphonic
heteroglossia of the multi-voiced text. In Lermontov’s novel, for exam-
ple, the fatalist Vulič is provided with an ideological and chronotopic
perspective, but does not have a voice of his own, since his axiological
horizon is, as that of a special being, potentially equivalent to the hori-
zon of Pečorin the narrator himself, another special being who remains
a doubting officer.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Baxtin’s pupil and successor Vološinov ([1926] 1995, [1929] 1973)

must be credited with providing the first fundamental formulation of
the problem of heteroglossia. In particular, he set up the term “speech
interference” (Vološinov [1929] 1973: 148). In Russian literary studies,
the terms “voice” and “socio-linguistic horizon” have become estab-
224 Valerij Tjupa

lished in the wake of Baxtin’s work on Dostoevskij (1929, [1963]

1984) and of his studies on the genre of the novel (Baxtin [1934/35]
1981). Baxtin conceives of voice in two dimensions at once: as one of
the products of the general language-producing “language-intention” of
the speaker and as a special stylistically realized “language” of a speak-
er, a language with its own picture of the world (“its own world inextri-
cably bound up with the parodied language” [1934/35] 1981: 364).
The term “voice” was introduced to Western literary studies by
Lubbock ([1921] 1957: 68), who believes that the author can make use
of both his own language and the languages (of the minds) of his char-
acters. Western scholarship became acquainted with Baxtin’s ideas
about heteroglossia via the work of Kristeva ([[1966] 1980, 1970),
whose writings have enjoyed a wide and favorable international recep-
tion. In enthusiastically adapting Baxtin’s theory to the emerging ideol-
ogy of postmodernism, however, this French scholar distorted his ideas
significantly: she replaced Baxtin’s “plentitude of speech” with the
concept of intertextuality; she speaks of an “insight first introduced into
literary theory by Baxtin: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quota-
tions; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The no-
tion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic lan-
guage is read as at least double” (Kristeva [1966] 1980: 66; italics in
original). In reality, Baxtin saw intersubjectivity as one of the funda-
mental concepts of his ontological and gnoseological deliberations, and
the text was never conceived of as an anonymous “mosaic” (in the
sense of Kristeva’s thesis that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of
quotations”). For Baxtin, the text was a compositionally unitary utter-
ance of a particular (in literature fictive) subject, a subject within which
there are foreign words and entire foreign intratextual discourses that
can enter into various relationships with the discourse surrounding
them: subordinated and subordinating relationships, relationships of
discussion as equals, and relationships of solidarity.
Somewhat later, without turning to Baxtin for support, Barthes
([1984] 1986) considered the phenomenon of heteroglossia in his es-
says “The Division of Languages” and “The War of Languages.”
Barthes, though, treated it as a negative phenomenon, one that must be
overcome by “progressive” écriture (Barthes [1984] 1986: 124). In his
Encyclopedia entry “Texte,” Barthes (1973)—who similarly to Baxtin
conceives of language as a multiplicity of voices surrounding the text
on all sides—treats the text as no more than a “new fabric woven out of
old quotations.” This is the path that led to deconstruction, which re-
places heteroglossia with intertextuality and thereby effectively sus-
 Heteroglossia 225

pends the narratological problem of narrating as a positioning of the

narrator in discourse.
Among the works that have restored an appropriate understanding of
Baxtin’s “plentitude of speech,” special mention must be made of a
book by the creators of the English term “heteroglossia” (Morson &
Emerson 1990). This study has had a visible influence on contemporary
narratology, despite the authors’ critical stance toward the narratologi-
cal approach to the study of literature. Close reading and an appropriate
development of the possibilities contained in Baxtin’s typology of the
prose word are typical of Schmid’s narratology (2005). In Russian-
language scholarship, Baxtin’s narratological ideas, particularly that of
heteroglossia, have been developed by Tamarčenko (2004) and Tjupa
(2006), as well as in Schmid’s book (2003, 2005).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

An important starting point for narratological studies is the need to dis-

tinguish between the categories of perspectivization (the system of
points of view) and glossality (the system of voices), which are of equal
status and complement each other. Genette ([1972] 1980: 186) had al-
ready begun making this distinction when he separated the question
“who sees?” from that of “who speaks?”

(Translated by Alastair Matthews)

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Barthes, Roland (1973). “Texte.” Encyclopædia universalis. Paris: Seuil, vol. 15,
1013–1017.
– ([1984] 1986). The Rustle of Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Baxtin, Mixail (1929). “Problemy tvorčestva Dostoevskogo.” Sobr. soč. v 7 tt. Moskva:
Russkie slovari, vol. 2, 5–175.
– (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1934/35] 1981). “Discourse in the novel.” M. M. The Dia-
logic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas P, 259–422.
– ([1959/60] 1996). “Problema teksta.” Sobr. soč. v 7 tt. Moskva: Russkie slovari,
vol. 5, 306–326.
– (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1963] 1984). M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Min-
neapolis: U of Minnesota P.
226 Valerij Tjupa

– (Bakhtin, Mikhail) (1986). Speech Genres and Other late Essays. Austin: U of
Texas P.
Doležel, Lubomír (1960). O stylu moderní ceské prózy. Vystavba textu. Praha: Nakl.
Československé Akad. Věd.
– (1973). Narrative Modes in Czech Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Korman, Boris O. ([1975] 2006). “Zametki o točke zrenija.” Teorija literatury. Iževsk:
Izd. Udmurtskogo un-teta, 180–185.
Koževnikova, Natal’ja A. (1994). Tipy povestvovanija v russkoj literature XIX–XX vv.
Moskva: Nauka.
Kristeva, Julia ([1966] 1980). “Word, Dialogue and Novel.” J. Kristeva. Desire in Lan-
guage: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 64–
91.
– (1970). Le texte du roman. Approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive
transformationelle. La Haye: Mouton.
Lubbock, Percy ([1921] 1957). The Craft of Fiction. London: Cape.
Morson, Gary Saul & Caryl Emerson (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin. Creation of a Prosaics.
Stanford: Stanford UP.
Schmid, Wolf ([1973] 1986). Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. Ams-
terdam: Grüner.
– (2003). Narratologija. Мoskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj literatury.
Schmid, Wolf (2005). Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Tamarčenko, Natan D. (2004). “‘Sobytie rasskazyvanija’: struktura teksta i ponjatija
narratologii.” N. D. Tamarčenko et al. (eds.). Teorija literatury. Moskva: Aca-
demia, t. 1, 205–242.
Тjupa, Valerij I. (2006). Analiz khudožestvennogo teksta. Moskva: Academia.
Uspenskij, Boris A. ([1970] 1973). A Poetics of Composition. Berkeley: U of California
P.
Vološinov, Valentin N. ([1926] 1995). “Slovo v žizni i slovo v poėzii.” Filosofija i
sociologija gumanitarnykh nauk. S-Peterburg: Asta-Press, 59–87.
– (Voloshinov) ([1929] 1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New
York: Seminar P.

5.2 Further Reading

Heuvel, Pierre van den (1985). Parole, mot, silence: Pour une poétique de l’énoncia-
tion. Paris: Corti.
Padučeva, Elena V. (1996). “Semantika narrativa.” Semantičeskie issledovanija. Мos-
kva: Jazyki russkoj kul’tury, 193–418.
Schmid, Wolf (1998). Proza kak poėzija. S-Peterburg: Inapress.
Todorov, Tzvetan ([1981] 1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle. Minneap-
olis: U of Minnesota P.
Zbinden, K. (1999). “Traducing Bakhtin and Missing Heteroglossia.” Dialogism: An
International Journal of Bakhtin Studies 2, 41–59.
 Historiographic Narration
Daniel Fulda

1 Definition

Historiographic narration is an umbrella term encompassing the forms

and functions of both narration (as an act) and narrative (as a structure)
in historiography (both within and beyond the academic study of histo-
ry) and in thinking about history. In the field of historiography (= the
representation of history–historia rerum gestarum) and history (= the
represented facts–res gestae–in their historical coherence), narration is
primarily discussed as a means of lending coherence to the historio-
graphic text or artefact (and to the narrated history) and interpreting a
historical event. Narrative configuration is currently considered funda-
mental to history as a genetic cause and effect relationship between fac-
tual events at various moments in time (cf. Ricœur [1983–85] 1984–
88).

2 Explication

History is narrated: historiography organizes its material by naming

adversaries, establishing or imputing intentions and identifying obsta-
cles and factors in overcoming them. This entails a fundamentally im-
portant operation, since only structuring the infinitely ramified process
of human actions in time according to the “dramaturgical model”
[dramatisches Handlungsmodell] (Harth 1980: 99–104) can give rise to
the coherence and meaningful development implied in the collective
singular “History” (coherence in the “syntagmatic” dimension). The
dramaturgical model and narrative linking structure serve as heuristics
for selecting among the amorphous happenings of the past (as attested
by sources) and configuring them historiographically as a consistent
and hence understandable (hi)story (cf. Gallie 1964 and Simmel [1916]
2003: 300 who describes the historiographical act as “drawing an ideal
line (ideelle Linie) through the happenings,” which connects certain
elements and leaves others aside).
228 Daniel Fulda

Furthermore, one can speak in terms of an “aesthetic dramaturgical

model” where the actors are understood as proponents of collective ac-
tors (classes, nations) or more general tendencies (ideas, structural
changes, etc.). Here, “aesthetic” refers to the interpretive act of project-
ing the relevant “foreground” of vivid personal interaction onto a
“background” of supra-personal, abstract processes (coherence in the
“paradigmatic” dimension). In order to write history, historiography
inevitably uses the process of narrative linkage, if history is understood
as portraying past events with the coherence, logical consistency and
significance demanded by the concept of history since the 18th century.
“[W]here there is no narrative, there is no distinctively historical dis-
course” (White 1999: 3).
By no means does all writing about history take the form of narra-
tive. For example, a critical discussion of sources need not of necessity
establish a link between actions at various moments in time. However,
once we begin to think of history as a process in time, narrative linkag-
es come into play as an assumption framing our understanding of it. For
“History,” as a concept or mode of thought, is characterized in its mod-
ern form—which integrates past, present and future—by the principle
of narrative configuration. The narrative structure of historical thought
manifests itself as configurational structure of one narrated (hi)story as
soon as historical processes are described in a text.

3 History of the Concept

3.1 From Antiquity to the 19th Century:

Rhetoric and Academic Scholarship

Within the field of historiography, the question of narrative hardly fig-

ures as a novel theme. The writing of history has been conceived as a
form of storytelling since Greek antiquity—for almost as long as it has
existed. Rhetorical theory thematized and regulated historiography as
narratio up to the 18th century (cf. Keßler 1982). Even after the emer-
gence of history as an academic discipline in the 19th century, the rep-
resentational work of the historian was consistently understood as a
narration, although the writing and narrating of history came to be re-
garded as posterior to historical research and of lesser importance than
it. No less a historian than Theodor Mommsen even summoned narra-
tion to the explanatory service of history:
 Historiographic Narration 229

In fact history is nothing else but the clear perception of factual processes,
composed in part of the examination and sifting of the available evidence,
and in part of its interweaving in a way that accords with the knowledge of
the people involved and the relations that exist to a narrative explicating
cause and effect (Mommsen 1905: 10).

3.2 Deep-structure Narrativity of Historiography and

Historical Thought

Demonstrations of the narrative structure of historiography have been

plentiful since the 1960s. These have been based on differing epistemo-
logical approaches, but they have built upon one another’s arguments.
Invariably, they do not deal with “narrative” features (focus on well
elaborated characters, intentions and interactions, vividly described set-
ting), as presented by classical historiographers from Antiquity through
to Historicism, but with a narrative “deep structure” (comparable to the
plot in narratology, but in very general way, not individuated for the
respective text) which constitutes historiography. This includes histori-
cal research with a post-narrative agenda, such as that of a sociological,
structuralist or “kilometric” orientation (for corresponding analyses by
annales historians, see Carrard 1992 and Rüth 2005).
Analytic philosophy was the first to establish that at a deep-
structural level—and thus of necessity—historiography proceeds
through narration. Here, narration was shown to be an explanatory form
particularly suited to historical processes (cf. Danto 1965). Laws are
ineffective in explaining historical processes, being contingent upon
multiple factors, whereas the typical three-phase structure of narrated
(hi)stories is inscribed with an immanent explanatory power: an initial
state of affairs is altered by an event, turning not only the temporal, but
also the qualitative difference, into a final state of affairs. Narrative
“explains” such changes in the state of affairs by proceeding from
Phase 1 to Phase 3 in a way deemed plausible in the experience, or at
least in the imagination, of narrator and recipient.
Furthermore, transcendental philosophy showed narrative to be an a
priori pattern forming the basis of all historical reconstruction and in-
deed perception (cf. Baumgartner 1972). According to this view, the
narrative model of coherence functions as a conceptual form in histori-
cal thought, transforming “bare,” amorphous happenings into structured
history characterized by continuity and meaningful development.
Hence, historical thought itself genuinely takes the general form of nar-
rative.
230 Daniel Fulda

3.3 Interpreting History through Emplotment and Multi-layering

At the most basic level, the structural principle of history is the necessi-
ty of narrating it. This structural principle expresses itself differently in
each particular historical work. As White (1973) has shown, the narra-
tion of classical historiographical works in particular follows the typical
plots of literary genres (White mentions comedy, tragedy, romance and
satire, following Northrop Frye). Not only does the narrative act give
rise to history as such, but each history narrated is given its own mean-
ingful plot, which is (or may be, to express it more cautiously than
White) structurally based upon the different types of story in literary
genres. In principle, this plot can be chosen from any of the types of
story accepted within a particular culture. Therefore, this choice of plot
is significant for the (hi)story being narrated, as it is for history in gen-
eral. Historiographic narration creates a meaning that may vary greatly,
thereby revealing something of the historiographer’s ideological inten-
tions. Hence, the comic structure of Johann Gustav Droysen’s History
of Alexander the Great (1833), with its tendency towards reconciliation,
attests to particularly high expectations of history to provide meaning.
The choice of emplotment is bound up with specific models of action
and society, ethics, ideologies and world-views (cf. White 1973; based
on this, but more differentiated, is Rigney 1990).
In terms of literary-historical location, historiography is closest to
the 19th-century Realist novel in its narrative technique. This applies
also to the historiography of the present. It has not taken its lead from
literary Modernism’s experimentation (fragmentation, achronicity, de-
personalisation)—nor can it, if it does not wish to undermine the very
concept of history based on narrative consistency. The repeated de-
mands to modernize historiography following the literary precedent can
only be satisfied in individual, experimental cases (e.g. Richard Price’s
The Convict and the Colonel, 1998). Expressed as a general stipulation,
such demands ignore the divergence of the two discourse formations
(literature and historiography) that has arisen from literary develop-
ments since circa 1900. White (2013) and Kansteiner (2009) consider a
historiography with Modernist multi-perspectivity to be possible, while
Jaeger (2000) remains skeptical.
The ascription of meaning through emplotment represents a crucial
moment of multi-layering in which historiography engages in a similar
way to literary texts. “Multi-layering” means that, beyond their conven-
tional meaning, other meanings are assigned to linguistic signs, based
on metaphoricity, isotopes, symbolic potential, sound correspondences,
repetitions of partial sentence structures (anaphora and other figures),
 Historiographic Narration 231

etc. Multi-layering techniques are also used in (academic) historiog-

raphy, in the representation of factual content (details of events, monu-
ments, but also horoscopes, dreams, etc.) as symbolic content, the
meaning of which extends beyond the given, specific situation, or in the
creation of structures of correspondence between different phases of the
(hi)story or parts of the text through repetition of motifs. This also
means that historical works, too, may exhibit the self-referentiality fre-
quently considered characteristic of literary texts (cf. McIntosh-
Varjabédian 2010: 43–65; by contrast, Rüth 2005: 193). They use self-
reference and multi-layering techniques to produce their meaning,
which thus remains at least partly implicit (besides the explanation de-
manded by academic rigor).

3.4 Historiographic vs. Literary-fictional Narration

The insight that narrative is the generative structure of history (see 3.2)
has frequently led to the conclusion that historiography, thus under-
stood, is mutating from an academic discipline into a literary genre.
Such a view fails to consider that narration is not unique to literature
but constitutes a real-life, omnipresent mode of understanding, structur-
ing, interpreting and transmitting real or imagined experience,
knowledge, ideas and intentions. If one’s view of scholarly insight is
not limited to the establishment of, and deduction from, laws, there is
no reason why the linking and representational power of narration may
not be deemed academically valid—provided that historiographic narra-
tives go along with methodical reflection and evidence from historical
sources (Chartier [1988] 1988: 61–63).
Where the term fiction is used interchangeably for both historiog-
raphy and literature, the aim is to homogenize them. White characteriz-
es historiography as “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much
invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with
their counterparts in literature than they have with those in sciences”
([1974] 1978: 82). On the one hand, White attributes fictive contents to
historiography, since not all of its statements are based on sources. In-
deed, collective subjects such as “The Bourgeoisie” or even abstrac-
tions such as “Modernity” are not referenced from sources, but consti-
tuted within narrative discourse (cf. Ankersmit 1983). On the other
hand, White infers from historiography’s narrative form that it belongs
to a mode of fictional literature that cultivates this form. The theory of
fiction objects to such arguments by pointing out that cognitive or me-
thodical (including heuristic) fiction differs from literary fiction, both in
its relationship to reality and in its pragmatics. Where historiography
232 Daniel Fulda

makes statements that go beyond what is substantiated by sources (even

if only by using language’s powers of abstraction or lending the struc-
ture of narrated stories to historical processes), there is an expectation
that it does so in order to develop insights into past reality. It does not,
however, have the same license to play with referentiality that is af-
forded to literary fiction by virtue of a ‘fiction contract’ agreed between
author and reader (Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narration).
Historiographic narration is rather a type of factual narration. While
McIntosh-Varjabédian (2010: 237) also attributes “une volonté de
croire” to the reader of historiography (similar to Coleridge’s “willing
suspension of disbelief”), this is not a matter of temporarily taking
leave of reality, but of a trust in the professionalism of the historian-
narrator that endures beyond the act of reception.
Nünning (1999: 368–377) has gathered internal textual criteria for
demarcating the boundary between historiographic and literary-fictional
narration. Among the privileges accorded to the latter, he includes the
opportunity for unlimited representation of inner worlds; the complete
freedom to combine invented components (characters, settings, events)
with real ones; intertextual references to fictional texts rather than just
to other scholarly texts; a meta-fictional reflexiveness that identifies the
text as fiction; the differentiation of author and narrator (who in fiction-
al texts is always fictitious); a broad spectrum of possible perspectives
such as internal point of view so that the “how” of transmission may
assume greater importance than “what” is narrated; scenic narrative
with extensive dialogue; and semanticization of space. However, a cat-
egorical rather than merely gradual separation of literary and historio-
graphic storytelling based on textual features in this way is open to ob-
jections. Some of the features that, according to Nünning, remain the
preserve of fiction can also be found in some historical works and not
only in pre-modern or non-academic texts: scenic narrative with dia-
logue, free indirect speech, symbols, sometimes even introspection.
The strongest argument against too close an approximation of histo-
riographic and literary narration is the fact that they have been situated
within two distinct social systems (sensu Niklas Luhmann) for two cen-
turies. Their reception can be assigned to one or the other system with-
out any reference whatsoever to internal textual features, purely on the
basis of paratextual clues (“Novel” as genre description, information on
the author) or where it is distributed or marketed (Fiction or History
section in a bookshop, seminar in literature or history, etc.). As a gen-
eral rule, however, historiography also demonstrates its academic affili-
ation intertextually by engaging explicitly with other scholarly opinions
or using footnotes as back-up. Doležel (2010: 37–39) argues that histo-
 Historiographic Narration 233

riography and fictional narratives can be distinguished from one anoth-

er by the type of gaps they leave. While historiography’s epistemologi-
cal gaps may be filled by using new sources or arguments, gaps in fic-
tion are ontological, since there are no referents beyond the fictional
world. This also applies where fictional narrative masquerades as histo-
rio-graphy.

3.5 The Historicity of the Storyformedness of History

History understood as the specific structure of the past in its connection

with the present and future does not follow automatically from the nar-
ration of stories about the past. Such (hi)stories (in the plural) can be
found in the earliest texts of our civilization. But these particular
(hi)stories must be clearly distinguished from the narrative configura-
tion of (virtually) all events we know as “history” (hereafter “History”;
cf. Megill 1995). To conceive of the past in narratives—be it the indi-
vidual past of one’s own life or be it in the larger sense of the past of
certain peoples—by no means implies that the entire past in its relation
to the present and the future forms one unique History. According to
Koselleck the conception of History as a single, totalizing process
emerged no earlier than the 18th century ([1979] 1985: 200–202).
Mink associates this modern concept of History with its sto-
ryformedness and regards it as the product of “a single unified story of
the human past” which emerged within the philosophy of history during
the second half of the 18th century (1978: 140). Since then, “the idea
that the past itself is an untold story has retreated from the arena of con-
scious belief and controversy to habituate itself as a presupposition in
that area of our a priori conceptual framework which resists explicit
statement and examination” (140–141). The narrative techniques of the
historiography that developed around 1800 made a decisive contribu-
tion to this habituation. In an exemplary work of historicism, Ranke’s
Römische Päpste, written in the early 1830s, ways of thinking and rep-
resentational techniques formed in the literature of the late Enlighten-
ment and of Romanticism (the Goethe period) can be recognized: e.g.,
the conversion of historical happenings into story form (often with plots
like those of the Bildungsroman), the assigning of ideal tasks to im-
portant characters together with the withdrawal of the omniscient narra-
tor, the immanent narrative explanation of historical processes, the
symbolic concentration of the whole (hi)story at decisive moments as
well as the incorporation of seemingly trivial but nevertheless signifi-
cant and/or vivid details (cf. Fulda 1996: 344–410, 2005a). Historio-
234 Daniel Fulda

graphy emerged as an academic discipline through the process of aes-

theticization and narrativization.

3.6 History as a Pattern of Thinking: Cognitivist Approaches

For the most part, narrativist historical theory has developed inde-
pendently of narratology in literary scholarship and rarely makes use of
its categories. Cognitivist narratologies, which have developed consid-
erably in recent years, offer the opportunity to form a substantial link
between the two. They postulate that knowing (understood in a com-
prehensive sense of including perceptions and utterances) is structured
by scripts and frames. What is perceived is perceived because the cog-
nitive apparatus checks it against “internally stored” schemata. These
schemata process narrativity when the signified can be related to the
recipient’s prior knowledge of standard narrative elements and patterns:
“Telling and understanding narratives is a certain way of reconciling
emergent with prior knowledge” (Herman 2002: 90; (Herman → Cog-
nitive Narratology; Emmott & Alexander → Schemata).
Cognitivism localizes such schemata in an interchange between ex-
perience and expectation: “Stored in the memory, previous experiences
form structured repertoires of expectations about current and emergent
experiences.” (Herman 2002: 89) This recursiveness or interchange can
explain the epistemological status as a pattern for thinking that History
achieved around 1800: actions and transformations are perceived as
historical on the basis of “historical experiences” (which, admittedly,
occur in eminently mediated forms) and are further elaborated on the
basis of this knowledge of History. Here, the object and mode of per-
ception mutually support one another such that they can be differentiat-
ed only on the basis of explicit theoretical criteria. Admittedly, this con-
trasts with the everyday understanding of History, which assumes that
history has actually happened. Using the cognitivist approach, it be-
comes possible to describe History narratologically as both a pattern for
reception and a product of reception, in contrast to the everyday under-
standing of history as simply happening and given (cf. Fulda 2005b:
178–181).
According to this view, History represents a cognitive (macro-)
schema containing, as sub-schemata, a number of elements already in-
voked in the foregoing paragraphs including dramatic action, coher-
ence, genetic cause and effect relationship, emplotment, aesthetic agen-
cy and referentiality. The (macro-) schema History does not seem to be
innate but is established inspecific cultures and epochs and must be ac-
quired by the members of these cultures. Its sub-schemata, by contrast,
 Historiographic Narration 235

may be anthropologically inherent and ubiquitous, or it may already

have been tried, developed and practiced in other discourse formations,
such as literature. Based on cognitivism, History is to be conceived as a
historical pattern of thinking.
This perspective appears to be all the more germane in view of con-
temporary representations of history, which are often suspicious of nar-
rative coherence. Such representations require considerable narrativiz-
ing effort on the part of the recipient: as History, these texts or other
artefacts are “incomplete,” for they have no readily discernible plot.
Nevertheless, they can be “read” as historical narratives, for narrativiza-
tion is a constructive process “which enables readers to re-cognize as
narrative those kinds of texts that appear to be non-narrative” (Fluder-
nik 1996: 46). Not least, narrations outside traditionally printed books
can be analyzed more appropriately, on a cognitivist basis, as historio-
graphic narrations: if narrativity is something attributed by the perceiv-
ing subject, then the object of this attribution is of secondary im-
portance, be it films, TV programs, or other sequences of images,
exhibitions (cf. Fulda 2005b: 182–190), theater, historical reenactments
or radio plays.
This approach also leads beyond the bounds of traditional narratolo-
gy in the sense that the analysis of artefacts takes a back seat to recep-
tion studies. This at least is the call of Nitz and Petrulionis (2011: 4):
“One of the first tasks of cultural analysts should be to study empirical-
ly how people ‘consume’ history and to examine which cognitive
frames of meaning-making they apply in order to come to an under-
standing of how the past is (re)created in collective memory” (as an
example of one such study, cf. Lippert [now Nitz] 2010).
By contrast, Fludernik, one of the best-known proponents of cogni-
tivist narratology, excludes historiography from the field of narrative,
since the narrator here is not recounting experiences (be it of his or her
own, be it of fictive characters) and personal motivs, emotions or per-
ceptions but knowledge obtained from a distance (1996: 328). Howev-
er, the dependence of narrativity upon experientiality is a minority view
within narratology. In any case, Fludernik softens her position in a
more recent publication: “I would now argue that experientiality (and
hence narrativity) occurs on a scale, and that the more academic a his-
torical text is, the less experientiality there will be” (2010: 50). She
concedes that not only can historiography “cite” the experience of peo-
ple living in earlier times, but that the reception of historiography “can
in itself constitute an experience” (51; cf. Jaeger 2009: 120–121).
236 Daniel Fulda

4 Topics of Further Investigation

While general or literary narratology has a wide array of systematically

elaborated theories and concepts at its disposal (most recently Schmid
[2003] 2010), there is nothing comparable for historiography. One dif-
ficulty lies in the fact that for a historiographic narratology to be com-
prehensive, it would have to explain the function of narrative in consti-
tuting History and its contribution to History as an academic discipline
and also to systematically set out the formal repertoire of narrative
techniques in historiography. The function of narrative in constituting
history has been relatively well studied, while less attention has been
given to the repertoire of narrative technique. This applies particularly
to narration as an act of a narrator, which is the focus of traditional nar-
ratologies. It is fundamentally lacking an inventory with a consistent
conceptual framework which frees itself from the models of literary
scholarship, be it Frye’s plot structures adopted by White or the termi-
nology of Genette.
In historical terms, the spectrum of historiographic narratives inves-
tigated from a more or less narratological perspective is encouragingly
broad, extending from Greek Antiquity (cf. Grethlein & Renkakos eds.
2009) to the present day (cf. Carrard 1992; Rüth 2005). Less satisfacto-
ry is the fact that it is almost exclusively “great works” that are ana-
lyzed, i.e. the histories of nations and epochs or major micro-historical
studies by famous historians. How and to what degree the many smaller
formats that form the bulk of historiographical text production can be
characterized as narrative remains entirely unclear. Periodical articles,
lectures, edited sources and possibly also reviews would need to be in-
corporated into investigations of the narrative disposition of historio-
graphical writing (and reading). Due to a lack of previous work to build
upon, developing a specific historiographical narratology on the basis
of these types of text seems to be a task that is as urgently required as it
is exceptionally difficult.
An important question of detail here would be whether unlimited va-
lidity should be given to the largely customary identification of the his-
toriographical narrator with the author. For Genette, the striking formu-
la reads: “A[uthor] = N[arrator] ≠ C[haracter]→ historical narrative”
([1991] 1993: 74). Indeed, first-person statements in historiographic
narration always refer to the author-historian. However, the narrator can
be removed both ideologically and temporally from the position of the
author such that it seems necessary to separate author and narrator (cf.
Rüth 2005: 35–36). The Protestant historian Ranke, for example, nar-
rates his (hi)story of the Römischen Päpste overwhelmingly from the
 Historiographic Narration 237

vantage point of this historical power. The authorial position can be

said to be temporally removed if the narrator attempts to portray the
course of history as remaining open and the past in question as the
erstwhile future. On this view, the narrator comes to be seen more as a
function of the historiographical concept in question than as being iden-
tical with the empirical author: for Droysen (1977: 365) the historian’s
“general I” is already distinguished from his or her “empirical I.” Nar-
rative perspective also seems to require differentiated consideration as
when, for example, Ranke’s narrator, despite attempting to reconstruct
the Popes’ perspective of the narrated conflicts, passes judgments from
a Protestant perspective. Schmid ([2003] 2010: 100–105, 116–117) ad-
ditionally provides a distinction between perceptive, ideological, spa-
tial, temporal and linguistic perspective.
Gathering historiographic narrations systematically becomes even
more difficult once we branch out beyond written historical texts. This
appears necessary, as the academic study of history does not have a
monopoly on gaining and imparting historical insights. A comprehen-
sive narratology of historiography would also have to consider sources
such as television programs, exhibitions and even historical reenact-
ments, and much more, thus engaging with a much broader range of
media than printed books. In addition to the cognitive power of narra-
tive forms, this would lead to a wider focus on non-cognitive, emotion-
al aspects of the reception of the various forms of historical representa-
tion. Philips (2013) has accomplished this “emotional turn” in an
otherwise classical analysis focusing on historiography and historiology
in the Enlightenment and in Romanticism.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Ankersmit, F[ranklin] R. (1983). Narrative Logic. A Semantic Analysis of the Histori-

an’s Language. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Baumgartner, Hans Michael (1972). Kontinuität und Geschichte. Zur Kritik und Meta-
kritik der historischen Vernunft. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Carrard, Philippe (1992). Poetics of the New History. French Historical Discourse from
Braudel to Chartier. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Chartier, Roger ([1988] 1988). Cultural History: Between Practices and Representa-
tions. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Danto, Arthur C. (1965). Analytical Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Doležel, Lubomír (2010). Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern
Stage. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
238 Daniel Fulda

Droysen, Johann Gustav (1977). Historik. Rekonstruktion der ersten vollständigen Fas-
sung der Vorlesungen (1857), Grundriß der Historik in der ersten handschriftli-
chen (1857/58) und in der letzten gedruckten Fassung (1882). P. Leyh (ed.).
Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
– (2010). “Experience, Experiantiality, and Historical Narrative. A View from Nar-
ratology.” Th. Breyer & D. Creutz (eds.). Erfahrung und Geschichte. Historische
Sinnbildung im Pränarrativen. Berlin: de Gruyter, 40–72.
Fulda, Daniel (1996). Wissenschaft aus Kunst. Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen
Geschichtsschreibung 1760–1860. Berlin: de Gruyter.
– (2005a). “Literary Criticism and Historical Science: The Textuality of History in
the Age of Goethe—and Beyond.” P. Koslowski (ed.). The Discovery of Historic-
ity in German Idealism and Historicism. Berlin: Springer, 112–133.
– (2005b). “‘Selective’ History. Why and how ‘History’ Depends on Readerly Nar-
rativization, with the Wehrmachtsausstellung as an Example.” J. Ch. Meister
(ed.). Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality, Disciplinarity. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 173–194.
Gallie, Walter B. (1964). Philosophy and the Historical Understanding. London: Chat-
to & Windus.
Genette, Gérard ([1991] 1993). Fiction and Diction. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Grethlein, Jonas & Antonios Rengakos, eds. (2009). Narratology and Interpretation.
The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Harth, Dietrich (1980). “Biographie als Weltgeschichte. Die theoretische und äs-
thetische Konstruktion der historischen Handlung in Droysens Alexander und
Rankes Wallenstein.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte 54, 58–104.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Jaeger, Stephan (2000). “Multiperspektivisches Erzählen in der Geschichtsschreibung
des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhundert: Wissenschaftliche Inszenierungen von Ge-
schichte zwischen Roman und Wirklichkeit.” V. Nünning & A. Nünning (eds.).
Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektiven-
struktur im englischen Roman des 18. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT, 323–
346.
– (2009). “Erzählen im historiographischen Diskurs.” Ch. Klein & M. Martínez
(eds.). Wirklichkeitserzählungen. Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-
literarischen Erzählens. Stuttgart: Metzler, 110–135.
Kansteiner, Wulf (2009). “Success, Truth, and Modernism in Holocaust Historiog-
raphy: Reading Saul Friedländer Thirty-five Years After the Publication of Me-
tahistory.” History and Theory, Theme Issue 47, 25–53.
Keßler, Eckhard (1982). “Das rhetorische Modell der Historiographie.” R. Koselleck,
H. Lutz & J. Rüsen (eds.). Formen der Geschichtsschreibung. München: dtv, 37–
85.
Koselleck, Reinhart ([1979] 1985). Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
 Historiographic Narration 239

Lippert, Julia (2010). Ein kognitives Lesemodell historio(bio)graphischer Texte. Georg

III. – Rezeption und Konstruktion in den britischen Medien (1990–2006). Trier:
WVT.
McIntosh-Varjabédian, Fiona (2010). Écriture de l’histoire et regard rétrospectif. Clio
et Épiméthée. Paris: Champion.
Megill, Alan (1995). “‘Grand Narrative’ and the Discipline of History.” F. Ankersmit
& H. Kellner (eds.). A New Philosophy of History. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
151–173, 263–271.
Mink, Louis O. (1978). “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument.” R. H. Canary & H.
Kozicki (eds.). The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understand-
ing. Madison: U of Madison P, 129–149.
Mommsen, Theodor (1905). “Rede bei Antritt des Rektorats. 15. Oktober 1874.” Th.
M. Mommsen. Reden und Aufsätze. Berlin: Weidmann, 3–16.
Nitz, Julia & Sandra Harbert Petrulionis (2011). “Towards a Historiographic Narratol-
ogy: Résumé.” SPIEL 30.1, 1–6.
Nünning, Ansgar (1999). “‘Verbal Fictions?’ Kritische Überlegungen und narratologi-
sche Alternativen zu Hayden Whites Einebnung des Gegensatzes zwischen Histo-
riographie und Literatur.” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 40, 351–380.
Philips, Mark Salber (2013). On Historical Distance. New Haven: Yale UP.
Ricœur, Paul ([1983–85] 1984–88). Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago
P.
Rigney, Ann (1990). The Rhetoric of Historical Representation. Three Narrative Histo-
ries of the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Rüth, Axel (2005). Erzählte Geschichte. Narrative Strukturen in der französischen
Annales-Geschichtsschreibung. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Schmid, Wolf ([2003] 2010). Narratology. An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Simmel, Georg ([1916] 2003). “Das Problem der historischen Zeit.” Gesamtausgabe.
Vol 15: Goethe. Deutschlands innere Wandlung. Das Problem der historischen
Zeit. Rembrandt. U. Kösser, H.-M. Kruckis, O. Ramstedt (eds.). Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 289–304.
White, Hayden (1973). Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP.
– ([1974] 1978). “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” H. White. Tropics of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 81–
100.
– (1999). “Literary Theory and Historical Writing.” H. White. Figural Realism.
Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1–26, 176–182.
– (2013). “Historical Discourse and Literary Theory. On Saul Friedländer’s Years
of Extermination.” N. Frei & W. Kansteiner (eds.). Den Holocaust erzählen. His-
toriographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität.
Göttingen: Wallstein, 51–78.
240 Daniel Fulda

5.2 Further Reading

Eckel, Jan (2007). “Der Sinn der Erzählung. Die narratologische Diskussion in der
Geschichtswissenschaft und das Beispiel der Weimargeschichtsschreibung.“ J.
Eckel & Th. Etzemüller (eds.). Neue Zugänge zur Geschichte der Geschichtswis-
senschaft. Göttingen: Wallstein, 201–229.
Munslow, Alun (2007). Narrative and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pier, John & Philippe Roussin, eds. (2012). “Écritures de l’histoire, écritures de la fic-
tion” – Dossier issu du colloque 16 au 18 mars 2006, Paris.
http://narratologie.ehess.fr/index.php?447
Roberts, Geoffrey, ed. (2001). The History and Narrative Reader. London: Routledge.
 Identity and Narration
Michael Bamberg

1 Definition

Identity designates the attempt to differentiate and integrate a sense of

self along different social and personal dimensions such as gender, age,
race, occupation, gangs, socio-economic status, ethnicity, class, nation
states, or regional territory.
Any claim of identity faces three dilemmas: (a) sameness of a sense
of self over time in the face of constant change; (b) uniqueness of the
individual vis-à-vis others faced with being the same as everyone else;
and (c) the construction of agency as constituted by self (with a self-to-
world direction of fit) and world (with a world-to-self direction of fit).
Claims to identity begin with the continuity/change dilemma and from
there venture into issues of uniqueness and agency; self and sense of
self begin by constructing agency and differentiating self from others
and then go on to navigate the waters of continuity and change.
Engaging in any activity requires acts of self-identification by rely-
ing on repertoires that identify and contextualize speakers/writers along
varying socio-cultural categories, often compared to mental or linguis-
tic representations (Emmott & Alexander → Schemata) that are less
fixed depending on context and function. Narrating, a speech activity
that involves ordering characters in space and time, is a privileged gen-
re for identity construction because it requires situating characters in
time and space through gesture, posture, facial cues, and gaze in coor-
dination with speech. In addition, narrating, whether in the form of fic-
tional or factual narration (Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narra-
tion), tends toward “human life”—something more than what is
reportable or tellable (Baroni → Tellability), something that is life- and
live-worthy (Taylor 1989). Thus, narrating enables speakers/writers to
disassociate the speaking/writing self from the act of speaking, to take a
reflective position vis-à-vis self as character (Jannidis → Character).
242 Michael Bamberg

2 Explication

Taking a reflective position on self as character has been elaborated in

the narratological differentiation between author (Schönert → Author),
narrator (Margolin → Narrator), and character. The reflective process
takes place in the present but refers to past or fictitious time-space,
making past (or imagined) events relevant for the act of telling, point-
ing toward the meaningfulness of relationships and worthwhile lives,
and exemplifying “the human good” (Aristotle 1996: 1461a). It is
against this backdrop that narrating in recent decades has established
itself as a privileged site for identity analysis—a new territory for in-
quiry (cf. Ricœur [1990] 1992; Strawson 2004).
Designing characters in fictitious timespace has the potential of
opening up territory for exploring identity, reaching beyond traditional
boundaries, and testing out novel identities. Narratives rooted in factual
past-time events, by contrast, are dominated by an opposite orientation.
The delineation of what happened, whose agency was involved, and the
potential transformation of characters from one state to another serve to
demarcate the identity of the reflective self under investigation. If past-
time narration is triggered by the question “Who am I?,” having the
narrator’s quest for identity or sense of self as its goal, the leeway for
ambiguity, transgression of boundaries, or exploration of novel identi-
ties is more restricted: the goal is rather to condense and unite, to re-
solve ambiguity, and to deliver answers that lay further inquiry into
past and identity to rest.
However, the reduction of identity to the depiction of characters and
their development in a story leaves out the communicative space within
which identities are negotiated in interaction with others. Limiting nar-
ratives to what they are about restricts identity to the referential or cog-
nitive level of speech activities and disregards real life, where identities
are under construction, formed, performed, and change over time. It is
within the space of everyday talk in interaction with others that narra-
tion plays its constitutive role in the formation and navigation of identi-
ties as part of everyday practices and that the potential for orientation
toward human values takes form. When considering the emergence of
identity, the narrating subject must be regarded: (a) as neither locked
into stability nor drifting through constant change, but rather as some-
thing that is multiple, contradictory, and distributed over time and
place, held together contextually and locally; (b) in terms of member-
ship positions vis-à-vis others that help to trace the narrator’s identity
within the context of social relationships, groups, and institutions; and
(c) as the active and agentive locus of control, though simultaneously
 Identity and Narration 243

attributing agency to outside forces that are situated in a broader socio-

historical context. Along these lines, identity is not confined by just one
societal discourse but open to change. Identity is able to transform itself
and adapt to the challenges of growing cultural multiplicities in increas-
ingly globalizing environments.
Based on the assumption that narration at its origin was a verbal act
performed locally in interactional contexts and from there evolved to-
ward other, differently constituted and contextualized media (writing,
electronic, and digital media, etc.; cf. Ryan 2006), the function of narra-
tion in identity formation processes cannot be reduced to the verbal
means used or to the messages conveyed. Rather, the local interactional
environments in which narrative units emerge form the foundation for
inquiry into identity formation and the sense of self. While transfor-
mations from oral to written forms of expression have been studied
(e.g. Ong 1982) and text-critical analysis has been undertaken from the
perspective of the hermeneutic circle, work with transcripts from audio
recordings is relatively new. More recent are concerted efforts to record
narratives audio-visually and to analyze the way they emerge in interac-
tion, including the sophisticated ways in which they are performed.
Audio-visual material, of course, can be more fully (micro-analytically)
scrutinized in terms of the contextualized coordination of narrative
form, content, and performance features (Berns → Performativity) in
the service of identity formation processes.
Recently, this type of micro-analytic analysis has been applied to
identity as achieved in narration under the heading of “positioning
analysis” (Bamberg 1997, 2003; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) in
order to focus more effectively on the situated nature of identification
processes that emerge from the three identity dilemmas mentioned
above. Navigating and connecting temporal continuity and discontinui-
ty, self and other differentiation, and the direction of fit between person
and world, take place in the small stories told on everyday occasions in
which tellers affirm a sense of who they are. It is precisely this sense of
self and identity grounded in sequential, moment-by-moment interac-
tive engagements, largely undertheorized and often dismissed in tradi-
tional identity inquiry, that operates on verbal texts or cognitive repre-
sentations (Herman → Cognitive Narratology).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Self and identity are traditionally bound up with what is taken to be the
essence of the individual person which continues over time and space in
244 Michael Bamberg

phylo- as well as in socio- and onto-genetic terms. However, this over-

looks how conceptions of self and identity have evolved historically
and culturally and also how each individual’s personal ontogenesis un-
dergoes continuous change. In addition, essentialist views of self and
identity camouflage the links between these concepts and their counter-
parts in narration and narrative practices. Section 3.1 will further ex-
plore the connection between self and identity dilemmas (b) and (c),
while section 3.2 will be devoted to identity and dilemma (a).

3.1 Self and Narration

Although self, like “I” and “me,” are highly specific morphological
items of the English lexicon, they are commonly assumed to refer uni-
versally to corresponding concepts in other languages—an assumption
that has been contested, however. A closer look reveals that these con-
cepts most often have a history of their own that varies in illuminating
ways (cf. Heelas & Lock eds. 1981; Triandis 1989). Modern notions of
self and individuality (cf. Elias [1987] 1991; Gergen 1991) are taken to
be closely intertwined with the emergence of local communities, nation
states, new forms of knowledge and reflection (“rationalization”), feel-
ing, and perception—all in conjunction with increasing interiorization
and psychologization.
In this process of becoming individualized, self-narration (autobiog-
raphy, life-writing, autofiction) springs to the fore as the basic practice-
ground for marking the self off from “I” as speaker/agent and “me” as
character/actor (cf. the narratological distinctions between “narrating
self” and “narrated self” and between narrator and protagonist). Acts of
thematizing and displacing the self as character in past time and space
become the basis for other self-related actions such as self-disclosure,
self-reflection and self-criticism, potentially leading to self-control,
self-constraint, and self-discipline. What further comes to light in this
process is an increasing differentiation between (and integration of) “I”
and “me” (James [1890] 1989), and simultaneously between “I-we-us”
and “them-other” (Elias [1987] 1991). Thus, self, apparently, is the
product of an “I” that manages three processes of differentiation and
integration: (a) it can posit a “me” (as distinct from “I”); (b) it can posit
and balance this “I-me” distinction with “we”; and (c) it can differenti-
ate this “we” as “us” from “them” as “other.” This process of differenti-
ation must be taken into account when talking about “self” as different
from “other” and viewing self “in relation to self” (as in self-reflection
and self-control). Self, as differentiated from other by developing the
ability to account for itself (as agent or as undergoer), to self-reflect,
 Identity and Narration 245

and to self-augment, can now begin to look for something like temporal
continuity, unity, and coherence, i.e. identity across a life (cf. Ricœur
[1990] 1992).

3.2 Identity and Narration: Biography and Life-Writing

The ability to conceive of life as an integrated narrative forms the cor-

nerstone for what Erikson ([1950] 1963) called “ego identity.” The un-
derlying assumption here is that life begins to co-jell into building
blocks that, when placed in the right order, cohere: important moments
tie into important events, events into episodes, and episodes into a life
story.
It is this analogy between life and story—or better: the metaphoric
process of seeing life as storied (in narratological terms: story and dis-
course) that has given substantive fuel to the narrative turn. The
strength of how scholars (and laypeople) in the past have made use of
this connection, though, varies: on the one hand, there is a relatively
loose connection according to which we tell stories of lives by using
particular narrative formats. Lives can be told as following an epic
script or as if consisting of unconnected patches. Most often, though,
lives are told by depicting characters and how they develop. Character,
particularly in modern times, rests on an internal and an external form
of organization. The former is typically a complex interiority, a set of
traits organizing underlying actions and the course of events as out-
comes of motives that spring from this interiority. The latter, an exter-
nal condition of character development, takes plot as the overarching
principle that lends order to human action in response to the threat of a
discontinuous and seemingly meaningless life by a set of possible con-
tinuities (often referred to by cognitive narratologists as “schemata” or
“scripts”; cf. Herman 2002: chap. 3). This interplay of human (and hu-
mane) interiority and culturally available models of continuity (plots)
gives narrative a powerful role in the process of seeing life as narrative.
It also should be noted that the arrangement of interiority as governed
by the availability of plots gives answers—at least to a degree—to the
“direction-of-fit” or “agency” identity dilemma. With narration thus
defined, life transcends the animalistic and unruly body so that narra-
tion gains the power to organize “human temporality” (Punday 2003;
see also Ricœur [1985] 1990): the answer to non-human, a-temporal,
and discontinuous chaos.
Another, and probably stronger reason for employing the narrative
metaphor for life starts with the assumption of a “narrative mode of
thinking.” Bruner (1986) and Polkinghorne (1988) similarly vie for the
246 Michael Bamberg

argument that there is a particular cognitive mode of making sense of

the (social) world which is organized “narratively” (an important theme
in cognitive psychology; cf. Herman 2002, 2009). Freeman’s (1993)
and Mishler’s (1986) work with autobiographical memories focuses
particularly on the interrelationship between memory, autobiographical
memory, and narrative. Mishler early on propagated the use of autobio-
graphic narrative interview data in the form of a “contextual approach”
which is not limited to recording data about human experience or to
looking “behind” the author, but that focuses on interaction and rela-
tionships.
McAdams (1985), building on narrative theorists such as Bruner,
Polkinghorne, and Sarbin, has turned the assumption of selves plotting
themselves in and across time into a life-story model of identity. His
model clearly states that life stories are more than recapitulations of
past events and episodes, that they have a defining character: “our nar-
rative identities are the stories we live by” (McAdams et al. 2006: 4).
McAdams’ efforts to connect the study of lives to life stories is paral-
leled in a wider turn to biographic methods in the social sciences, lead-
ing to Lieblich & Josselson’s eleven-volume series titled The Narrative
Study of Lives.
The origins of these efforts stretch across a wide range of disciplines
including psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Goodson and Sikes
(2001: 129) date the origins of life history methods in the form of auto-
biographies back to the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, life
history methods have spread from the study of attitudes in social psy-
chology to community studies in sociology, particularly within the Chi-
cago School, and forty years later back into psychology. Retrospective-
ly, it can be argued that the early studies by the members of the
Chicago School, and in particular “oral history” popularized by the
works of Studs Terkel, lacked the analytic component of modern day
narrative inquiry. However, without these origins and the works of Ber-
taux (1981) and Plummer (1983), the foundation of the Research
Committee on Biography and Society (within the International Socio-
logical Association) would have been unthinkable. The methodological
principles were laid out in the early work by Schütze (1977) and later
picked up and refined in current narrative interview approaches by
Fischer-Rosenthal & Rosenthal (1997).
Thanks to these developments, it is clearer how the relatively mas-
sive turn in the social sciences toward biography and life writing was
able to gain ground as a new approach to identity research. It emerged
as a concerted attempt to wed self-differentiation (self that can reflect
upon itself) and narration (plotting a sense of characterhood across
 Identity and Narration 247

time)—in narratological terms: “narrating self” and “narrated self”—

into an answer that addresses the three dilemmas of identity laid out
earlier. A teller accounts for how s/he (a) has emerged (as character)
over time, (b) as different from others (but same), and simultaneously
(c) how s/he views her-/himself as a (responsible) agent. Managing
these three dilemmas in concert is taken to establish what is essential to
identity. Consequently, life-writing and biography, preferably as auto-
biography or life story, become privileged arenas for identity research.

3.3 Problems of Linking Life, Narration, and Identity

The link between life and narration and the exploration of lives (includ-
ing selves and identity) through the exploration of narratives have tradi-
tions going back to Freud ([1900] 1913), Allport (1937), and Murray
(1938). However, this close connection between life and narrative is
said to require a particular retrospectiveness that values “life as reflect-
ed” and discredits “life as lived.” Sartwell (2000) has questioned (a)
whether life really has the purpose and meaningfulness that narrative
theorists metaphorically attempt to attribute to it and (b) whether narra-
tives themselves have the kind of coherence (Toolan → Coherence)
and telic quality that narrative theorists often assume. The problem
Sartwell sees in this kind of approach is that the lived moment, the way
it is “sensed” and experienced, is said to gain its life-worthy quality
only in light of its surrounding moments. Rather than empowering the
subject with meaning in life, Sartwell argues, narrative, conceived this
way, drains and blocks him or her from finding pleasure and joy in the
here-and-now. The subject is overpowered by narrative as a normaliz-
ing machine.
Another difficulty resulting from the close linkage between life, nar-
ration, and identity consists in what Lejeune ([1975] 1989) termed “the
autobiographical pact.” According to Lejeune, what counts as autobiog-
raphy is somewhat blurry, since it is based on a “pact” between author
and reader that is not directly traceable down into the textual qualities.
Thus, while a life story can employ the first-person pronoun to feign
the identity of author, narrator, and character, use of the third-person
pronoun may serve to camouflage this identity (cf. narrative unreliabil-
ity; Shen → Unreliability). Autobiographical fiction thrives on the
blurring of these boundaries. Of interest here are “the perennial theoret-
ical questions of authenticity and reference” (Porter 2008: 25) leading
up to the larger issue of the connection between referentiality and narra-
tion (cf. Genette’s 1990 distinction between fictional narrative and fac-
tual narrative).
248 Michael Bamberg

While most research on biography has been quite aware of the situ-
ated and locally occasioned nature of people’s accounts (often in insti-
tutional settings) and the problems this poses for claims with regard to
the speaker/narrator’s sense of self or identity, a number of researchers
have launched a large-scale critique of the biographic turn as reducing
language to its referential and ideational functions and thereby overex-
tending (and simplifying) narration as the root metaphor for the person,
(sense of) self, and identity. At the core of these voices is the call for a
much “needed antidote to the longstanding tradition of ‘big stories’
which, be they in the form of life stories or of stories of landmark
events, have monopolized the inquiry into tellers’ representations of
past events and themselves in light of these events” (Georgakopoulou
2007: 147; cf. Strawson 2004).

3.4 Narration as Identity Formation in Narrative Practice

Attempts to transport interactional context and performance-oriented

aspects of narration into the analysis of identities reach back to Burke
(1945) and Goffman (1959) and have been reiterated repeatedly by oth-
ers in the field of biography research (e.g. Mishler 1986; Riessman
2008). More recent attempts to integrate this acknowledgment into em-
pirical analysis center around a number of key positions. First is the
proposal to resituate narration as performative moves (cf. Langellier &
Peterson 2004), calling for the analysis of embodied practices and ma-
terial conditions of narrative productions. Similarly, Gubrium and Hol-
stein (2008) argue for a narrative ethnography—one that is able to ana-
lyze the complex interplay between “experience, storying practices,
descriptive resources, purposes at hand, audiences, and the environ-
ments that condition storytelling” (250).
Georgakopoulou (2006, 2007) and Bamberg (1997, 2003; Bamberg
& Georgakopoulou 2008) have tried to develop an alternative approach
to big story narrative research that takes “narratives-in-interaction,” i.e.
the way stories surface in everyday conversation (small stories), as the
locus where identities are continuously practiced and tested out. This
approach allows for exploring self at the level of the talked-about and
at the level of tellership in the here-and-now of a storytelling situation.
Both of these levels feed into the larger project at work in the global
situatedness within which selves are already positioned, i.e. with more
or less implicit and indirect referencing and orientation to social posi-
tions and discourses above and beyond the here-and-now.
Placing emphasis on small stories allows for the study of how peo-
ple as agentive actors position themselves—and in doing so become
 Identity and Narration 249

positioned. This model of positioning affords the possibility of viewing

identity constructions as two-fold: analyzing the way the referential
world is constructed, with characters (self and others) emerging in time
and space as protagonists and antagonists. Simultaneously, it is possible
to show how the referential world (what the story is about) is construct-
ed as a function of interactive engagement, i.e. the way the referential
world is put together points to how tellers “want to be understood,”
how they index their sense of self. Consequently, it is the action orien-
tation of the participants in small story events that forms the basic point
of departure for this functionalist-informed approach to narration and,
to a lesser degree, what is represented or reflected upon in the stories
told. This seems to be what makes this type of work with small stories
crucially different from work with big stories: the aim is to analyze how
people use small stories in their interactive engagements to construct a
sense of who they are, while big story research analyzes the stories as
representations of world and identities within them.
Behind this way of approaching and working with stories is an ac-
tion orientation that urges the analyst to look at constructions of self
and identity as necessarily dialogical and relational, fashioned and re-
fashioned in local interactive practices (cf. Antaki & Widdicombe eds.
1998; Shepherd → Dialogism). At the same time, it recognizes that
small story participants generally attune their stories to various local,
interpersonal purposes, sequentially gauging themselves to prior and
upcoming talk, continuously challenging and confirming each others’
positions. It is in and through this type of relational activity that repre-
sentations in the form of content, i.e. what the talk is intended to be
about, are brought off and come into existence. By contrast, story anal-
yses that remain fixated on the represented contents of the story in or-
der to conclude from there how the teller reflects on him-/herself miss
out on the very interactive and relational constructedness of content and
reflection. Furthermore, this kind of analysis aims at scrutinizing the
inconsistencies, ambiguities, contradictions, moments of trouble and
tension, and the tellers’ constant navigation and finessing between dif-
ferent versions of selfhood and identity in local interactional contexts.
However well-established the line of identities-in-interaction may be in
the context of the analysis of conversational data, this emphasis still
contrasts with the longstanding privileging of coherence by traditional
approaches to narrative theory. Through the scrutiny of small stories in
a variety of sites and contexts, the aim becomes to legitimize the man-
agement of different and often competing and contradictory positions as
the mainstay of identity through narrative. A final aim is to advance a
project of documenting identity as a process of constant change that,
250 Michael Bamberg

when practiced over and over again, has the potential to result in a
sense of constancy and sameness, i.e. big stories that can be elicited
under certain conditions.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) Whether narratives actually constitute a privileged territory for in-

quiry into life and identity requires further theoretical and empirical
inquiry. Usually, this question is decided on the basis of a pre-
theoretical, epistemological (if not ontological) stance. But the question
itself may be open to different interpretations. (b) The use of narrative
methods in the exploration of hybrid or hyphenated identities consti-
tutes an interesting new development in recent trends of social science
research in a turn to questions of citizenship, cultural exclusion, imag-
ined communities, symbolic representations of belonging, and even
general processes of globalization. (c) Illness and traumatic experiences
are typically viewed as disruptions of continuity and coherence, posing
challenges to the formation of a sense of self and (biographic) identity
as well as to our sense of agency. Recent discussions about the plot-
types employed in illness narratives and how patients’ narrative ac-
counts can be made use of more productively in narrative medicine
bring up interesting questions with regard to the construction of paths
and trajectories of experiences, their inherent action potential, and the
relationship to mapping out possible reconstructions from being re-
active to becoming pro-active in the construction of patients’ “healing
dramas.” (d) The increasing diversification into different narrative
methods and approaches (content/thematic vs. structural/formal meth-
ods, now joined by discursive/performative approaches) has led to the
question whether there is still a common core to the original “narrative
approach” as an alternative to the study of subjectivity, self, and identi-
ty—the way, in retrospect, it seemed to have begun about thirty-five
years ago.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Allport, Gordon W. (1937). Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. New York:

Holt.
Antaki, Charles & Sue Widdicombe, eds. (1998). Identities in Talk. London: Sage.
 Identity and Narration 251

Aristotle (1996). Poetics. Tr. M. Heath. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.

Bamberg, Michael (1997). “Positioning between Structure and Performance.” Journal
of Narrative and Life History 7, 335–342.
– (2003). “Positioning with Davie Hogan: Stories, Tellings, and Identities.” C.
Daiute & C. Lightfoot (eds.). Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of
Individuals in Society. London: Sage, 135–157.
– & Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2008). “Small Stories as a New Perspective in
Narrative and Identity Analysis.” Text & Talk 28, 377–396.
Bertaux, Daniel (1981). Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the So-
cial Sciences. London: Sage.
Bruner, Jerome (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Burke, Kenneth (1945). A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Elias, Norbert ([1987] 1991). The Society of Individuals. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Erikson, Erik H. ([1950] 1963). Childhood and Society. New York: Norton.
Fischer-Rosenthal, Wolfram & Gabriele Rosenthal (1997). “Narrationsanalyse biogra-
phischer Selbstrepräsentation.” R. Hitzler & A. Horner (eds.). Sozialwissenschaft-
liche Hermeneutik. Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 133–164.
Freeman, Mark P. (1993). Rewriting the Self. History, Memory, Narrative. London:
Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund ([1900] 1913). The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Macmillan.
Genette, Gérard (1990). “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today 11,
755–774.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2006). “The Other Side of the Story: Towards a Narrative
Analysis of Narratives-in-Interaction.” Discourse Studies 8, 265–287.
– (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Gergen, Kenneth (1991). The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary
Life. New York: Basic Books.
Goffman, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Dou-
bleday.
Goodson, Ivor F. & Pat Sikes (2001). Life History Research in Educational Settings:
Learning from Lives. Buckingham: Open UP.
Gubrium, Jaber F. & James A. Holstein (2008). “Narrative Ethnography.” S. B. Hesse-
Biber & P. Leavy (eds.). Handbook of Emergent Methods. New York: Guildford
P, 241–264.
Heelas, Paul & Andrew Lock, eds. (1981). Indigenous Psychologies: The Anthropology
of the Self. London: Academic P.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
– (2009). Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
James, William ([1890] 1900). Principles of Psychology. Vol. I. New York: Holt & Co.
Langellier, Kristin M. & Eric E. Peterson (2004). Storytelling in Daily Life: Performing
Narrative. Philadelphia: Temple UP.
Lejeune, Philippe ([1975] 1989). On Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
McAdams, Dan P. (1985). Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story: Personological Inquir-
ies into Identity. New York: Guildford P.
252 Michael Bamberg

– et al. (2006). “Introduction.” D. P. McAdams et al. (eds.). Identity and Story.

Washington: American Psychological Association, 1–11.
Mishler, Elliot G. (1986). Research Interviewing. Context and Narrative. Cambridge:
Harvard UP.
Murray, Henry A. (1938). Explorations in Personality. New York: Oxford UP.
Ong, Walter (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London:
Methuen.
Plummer, Kenneth (1983). Documents of Life. London: Allen & Unwin.
Polkinghorne, Donald (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany:
State U of New York P.
Porter, Roger J. (2008). “Introduction to World Narrative.” M. Fuchs & C. Howes
(eds.). Teaching Life Writing Texts. New York: Modern Language Association of
America, 23–31.
Punday, Daniel (2003). Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. New
York: Palgrave.
Ricœur, Paul ([1985] 1988). Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
– ([1990] 1992). Oneself as Another. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Riessman, Catherine Kohler (2008). Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Thou-
sand Oaks: Sage.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2006). “Narrative, Media, and Modes.” M.-L. Ryan. Avatars of
Story. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 3–30.
Sartwell, Crispin (2000). End of Story. Toward an Annihilation of Language and Histo-
ry. Albany: State U of New York P.
Schütze, Fritz (1977). Die Technik des narrativen Interviews in Interaktionsfeldstudien
dargestellt an einem Projekt zur Erforschiung von kommunikativen Machtstruk-
turen. Universität Bielefeld: Department of Sociology.
Strawson, Galen (2004). “Against Narrativity.” Ratio n.s. 17, 428–452.
Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cam-
bridge: Harvard UP.
Triandis, Harry Ch. (1989). “The Self and Social Behavior in Differing Contexts.”
Psychological Review 96, 506–520.

5.2 Further Reading

Bamberg, Michael, ed. (2007). Narrative—State of the Art. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

– et al., eds. (2007). Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Brockmeier, Jens & Donal Carbaugh, eds. (2001). Narrative and Identity: Studies in
Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fina, Anna de et al., eds. (2006). Discourse and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Holstein, James A. & Jaber F. Gubrium (2000). The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity
in a Postmodern World. New York: Oxford UP.
McAdams, Dan P. et al., eds. (2006). Identity and Story. Washington: American Psy-
chological Association.
 Ideology and Narrative Fiction
Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

1 Definition

In the context of narrative fiction, ideology may be defined as the frame

of values informing the narrative. This frame installs hierarchical rela-
tionships between pairs of oppositional terms such as real vs. false,
good vs. bad, and beautiful vs. ugly. These preferences may be explicit-
ly stated in the text or remain more or less implicit. The reader can en-
gage with the frame in variety of ways: he or she can make it explicit
(and thus engage with the hierarchy discovered in the text), construct it
only partially, or disregard it completely. It is always the reader who
pieces together the ideology of the fiction at hand, but relevant choices
invariably emerge from an interaction between three elements: reader,
context and text. Theories of ideology can be categorized according to
the element they stress: psychological approaches are mostly concerned
with the reader, sociological analyses tend to highlight the context (in-
cluding the author), and discursive inquiries focus on the actual text.
Any aspect of narrative form can lead to multiple ideological interpreta-
tions on the part of the reader, but some narrative scholars (esp. in gen-
der and postcolonial studies) have wanted to associate formal character-
istics such as voice and focalization with a specific ideological
meaning.

2 Explication

Ideological analysis is relational, since ideology is typically defined in

terms of the relation between one domain considered to be the expres-
sion of the ideology (consciousness, art, fiction) and another domain
considered as the source (the unconscious, the social and economic in-
frastructure). The sociologist Mannheim regards the study of ideology
as part of a broader sociology of knowledge that connects ideas to the
social systems in which they arise. His “relationism” (Mannheim
[1936] 1968) finds a middle ground between determinism (ideas are
254 Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

caused by social conditions) and relativism (Eagleton [1991] 2007:

107–110).
In general, three main approaches to ideology can be discerned (see
3.1), though they intertwine and overlap. As a collective set of beliefs,
ideology can be approached from a sociological angle (with a stress on
the collective element) or from a psychological perspective, ranging
from traditional Freudian psychoanalysis (focusing on the subconscious
undercurrent of the beliefs) to present-day cognitive studies that focus
on the mental schemata involved in the set of beliefs (van Dijk 1998;
Emmott & Alexander → Schemata). A third tradition focuses on lan-
guage and discourse and, more generally, on semiotic systems as the
centers of ideological enunciation.
Some representatives of these three traditions zoom in on narrative
fiction to study the workings of ideology (see 3.2). As a result of the so-
called ethical turn (Eskin 2004), philosophers and literary scholars alike
have studied the reading of narrative fiction as a form of moral en-
gagement with the textual other. Famous examples include Nussbaum
([1990] 1992) and Miller (1987). While the former stresses the need for
a humanist, “loving” and respectful approach to the laws contained in
the text, the latter highlights the inevitable relativism of the norms de-
veloped in the act of reading.
Within the discipline of narratology (see 3.3.), attention to the ideo-
logical dimension of narrative fiction has involved a wide variety of
approaches, ranging from textually oriented efforts (e.g. structuralism)
over pragmatic proposals (e.g. rhetorical narratology) to broad contex-
tualizations (e.g. feminist and postcolonial narratologies).
The disputes between the various general approaches to ideology
center on (1) the kind of deep structure (e.g. sociological or psychoana-
lytical); (2) the nature of the relation between deep and surface level
(e.g. deterministic or dialectical); (3) the concrete form of ideology:
negative (dissimulation, illusion) or positive (social function of collec-
tivization), small (ideology restricted to some forms of [false] con-
sciousness linked to specific classes) or large (ideology as general
worldview not tied up with particular classes). In the broadest sense,
ideology is close to common sense, doxa (Bourdieu [1980] 1992: 68),
and lived experience.
 Ideology and Narrative Fiction 255

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Ideology in General

The term ideology was coined at the end of the 18th century by the
French philosopher Destutt de Tracy, who systematized its usage in the
various volumes of Éléments d’Idéologie ([1801–15] 1827). He used
the term to indicate a new science of ideas, fulfilling the empiricist (and
in his case, revolutionary political) ideals of the Enlightenment, even
turning ideology into a part of zoology (Larrain [1979] 1980: 27).
The most influential sociological theory of ideology is found in
Marxism. However, there is no consensus on the exact meaning of ide-
ology in the Marxist tradition. Marx himself changed his view. The
German Ideology (1845–46), the early study with Engels, conceptual-
izes ideology as a false form of consciousness that legitimizes and dis-
simulates the fundamental divisions of society grounded in the division
of labor and entailing such dualisms as thinkers vs. doers, capitalists vs.
laborers. From 1858 (Grundrisse) onwards, Marx described the work-
ings of ideology through the theory of reification: capitalist commodi-
ties negate the process that produced the goods and that are responsible
for their value, namely the relations of production and the surplus value
added by the work of the laborer. Ideology presents goods as valuable
in their own right and thereby excludes the economic process creating
that value. This ideology is inherent in the capitalist mode of produc-
tion and can therefore no longer be restricted either to a form of false
consciousness or to the realm of the superstructure.
Marx’s commentators highlight diverse aspects of his concept of
ideology, ranging from positivist and deterministic materialism to rela-
tivist and dialectical historicism, and including many in-between posi-
tions. These interpretations also differ as to the degree of coercion in-
volved in ideology. Bourgeois ideology may be seen as a forcefully
imposed tool of indoctrination in class struggles, but it may also appear
as a self-imposing process. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony typically in-
volves non-coercive adherence to the dominant worldview via all kinds
of institutions belonging to the “civil state, such as the family, youth
movements, and television.” Ideology, “used in its highest sense of a
conception of the world,” may be a factor facilitating this adherence
(Gramsci [1971] 2005: 328).
Next to sociology, psychoanalysis is another field that has made no-
table contributions to the study of ideology. In Freudian psychoanaly-
sis, the ideological process is captured in terms of mechanisms such as
sublimation and suppression which make unconscious urges (governed
256 Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

by the pleasure principle) acceptable while adapting them to the reality

principle. Freud’s studies of religion (esp. [1928] 1961) provide a good
example of this approach. In the same tradition, Reich ([1933] 1970)
approached fascist ideology with reference to the suppression of the
pleasure principle, a mechanism in which the family plays a central
role. Lacanian psychoanalysis has become the main source of ideologi-
cal study and critique in the work of Žižek, who inverts the traditional
sociological view: “The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not
that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (uncon-
scious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself” ([1989] 2008: 30).
The third tradition describes ideology in linguistic, discursive and
semiotic terms. Structuralist linguistics may have the reputation of
studying language in isolation, but it has generated a lot of attention to
ideology as well. In structuralist anthropology, Lévi-Strauss ([1962]
1966) places ideology in the frame of mythical or “savage thinking,”
which he does not regard as a failed but as an exaggerated form of ra-
tionality: it installs rational relations (e.g. of cause and effect) between
objects and subjects that have no such links (as in fetishism). This ra-
tionalization is a defense against arbitrariness; it brings about harmoni-
ous relations between opposed elements. As a result, social tensions are
dissimulated. Lévi-Strauss tends to study this mechanism as an innate
capacity of the mind. Godelier (1977), on the other hand, focuses on the
social and political conditions of this capacity. He uses Marx’s theory
of reification to ground mythical thinking such as fetishism in social
relations.
As Williams (1977: 21–44) shows, early Marxism paid little atten-
tion to language and usually reduced it to an ideological dissimulation
of economic tensions. One positive exception is Marxism and the Phi-
losophy of Language, a two-volume study by Vološinov ([1929–30]
1973). Vološinov did not reduce language to a misleading representa-
tion and application of a fundamental structure, but underscored its
practical and creative nature. Instead of being an abstract, fixed and
arbitrary signifier, the linguistic sign is a concrete, changing and con-
ventional sign that derives its meaning and function from the social re-
lations in which it is used. In this dialectical and never-ending interac-
tion between language and society, consciousness and ideology develop
hand in hand: “The logic of consciousness is the logic of ideological
communication, of the semiotic interaction of a social group. If we de-
prive consciousness of its semiotic, ideological content, it would have
absolutely nothing left” ([1929–30] 1973: 13). Language can only func-
tion as long as it is social and ideological. There is no abstract or non-
ideological language. And vice versa, for there can be no ideology
 Ideology and Narrative Fiction 257

without a sign system: “Everything ideological possesses meaning: it

represents, depicts, or stands for something lying outside itself. In other
words, it is a sign. Without signs there is no ideology” (9).
Language-oriented approaches that do not pay attention to material
conditions tend to look at ideology as a rhetorical effect of language
that turns words into realities. The analyses of Yale critic de Man de-
fine ideology as the power to present linguistic reality as the reality:
“What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with
natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism” (de Man 1986: 11).
Quite often, theories of ideology combine two (or even all three) of
the traditions mentioned above. Habermas links the Marxist tradition
with a discursive, communicational approach. Communicative struc-
tures may become distorted in such a systematic way (related to ten-
sions in the social economic system) that it looks as if it were the right
and only way. As a result, it seems impossible to communicate and
think outside the distorted system, which thereby becomes accepted as
the dominant, normative and natural “universe of discourse” (Habermas
[1981] 1984–87). Ideology is that process of naturalization whereby the
dominant discourse becomes the only one (Eagleton [1991] 2007: 133).
Van Dijk’s multidisciplinary approach to ideology involves “cogni-
tive and social psychology, sociology and discourse” ([1998] 2003: 4).
He defines ideology neutrally as “socially shared beliefs that are asso-
ciated with the characteristic properties of a group, such as their identi-
ty, their position in society, their interests and aims, their relations to
other groups, their reproduction, and their natural environment” (1998:
12). His approach is in no way Marxist, but he does confine ideology to
social groups (to distinguish it from generally shared and uncontested
beliefs), which he studies in the framework of social psychology and
discursive mechanisms that separate one group from another.
A Marxist version of such an approach can be found in the work of
Zima (1981: 83–89), who sets up two links between language and so-
cial classes. First is the “sociolect,” which refers to the lexical and se-
mantic structure of a language typical of a certain social class. Second
is the “discourse” of that group, which for Zima comes down to a spe-
cific use of syntactic structures. Together, these two aspects infuse lan-
guage with the ideology of social classes.
Another Marxist slant on discourse analysis is provided by Laclau,
who combines Gramsci’s notion of hegemony with a focus on aspects
of discourse. Ideology produces “the belief that there is a particular so-
cial arrangement which can bring about the closure and transparency of
the community. There is ideology whenever a particular content shows
itself as more than itself” (Laclau 1997: 303). Ideology dissimulates the
258 Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

openness and undecidability inherent in discourse and blocks the end-

less struggle for hegemony between the various discourses.
Althusser combines (post)structuralism with Marxism, Lacan with
Gramsci. Ideology suppresses certain unconscious “problematics” and
imposes typical answers to problems that are allowed to surface (Eagle-
ton [1991] 2007: 137). Ideology is not a theory or a false conscious-
ness, but a lived experience of social relations, an experience replete
with the Lacanian “imaginary” confusion of subject and object. To Al-
thusser, ideology “expresses the way [people] live the relation between
them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real re-
lation and an ‘imaginary,’ ‘lived’ relation” (Althusser [1965] 2006:
233–234). Central to the modern organization of these relations is the
State and its ideological apparatuses such as family, church and the me-
dia. The State acts as a Subject (comparable to Lacan’s Other)—a mod-
el for becoming a subject.

3.2 Ideology in Narrative

Since the novel became popular during the period of the rise of the
bourgeoisie, when the term ideology was coined, and since the novel
has often been studied as the bourgeois genre par excellence (e.g. Lu-
kács [1950] 2002; Jameson 1981: 152–154), it is not surprising that the
study of narrative fiction and of ideology have often met. In general,
literary studies of ideology aim at uncovering the connection between,
on the one hand, the literary field (involving narrative techniques, but
also authors and publishing houses), and on the other hand, psychologi-
cal or socio-economic domains and aspects such as unconscious fanta-
sies or class and gender.

3.2.1 The Marxist Tradition

Williams links “narrative stance” (e.g. the choice of an omniscient nar-

rator) to social mechanisms and “conventions of selection and exclu-
sion […], involving radical social assumptions of causation and conse-
quence” (1977: 176). Goldmann’s (1964) genetic structuralism links
literature with the social realm through the mediation of class
worldview: the successful author elaborates, systematizes and renders
explicit the vision du monde that remains implicit in the non-artistic
class members.
For the Frankfurt school, this view of literature focuses too much on
worldview and content. Benjamin’s ([1934a] 1998/2003) study of the
author as producer highlights literary technique as the progressive and
 Ideology and Narrative Fiction 259

critical way to relate literature to social and economic production tech-

niques. Traditional techniques reproduce bourgeois ideology, whereas
new techniques disrupt that ideology and may contribute to political
innovation: “technical progress is, for the author as producer, the basis
of his political progress” (95). This is not a cause and effect relation,
but a dialectical interaction between literature and society. It makes lit-
erature political, and politics literary. Benjamin ([1936] 2010) summa-
rizes this as “politicizing art” (as opposed to the fascist estheticization
of politics), referring to this as “the literarization of the conditions of
living” ([1934b] 2005: 742).
To Adorno ([1970] 1998) the critical power of literature resides in
its negativity: it refuses (in the sense that it says no to) the capitalist
mode of production. In capitalism, mass produced goods are not only
interchangeable, but their value is thought to reside in their exchange
value (basically their translatability into money), which is disconnected
from the surplus value created in the labor process. Literary works of
art, on the contrary, are unique, not interchangeable and hence not sub-
jected to the logic of exchange value. This way, they run counter to
capitalist ideology. Without negativity, cultural products are subjected
to the industrial logic of capitalism, forming part of what Adorno and
Horkheimer ([1947] 2007) labeled “the culture industry.”

3.2.2 Psychological Approaches

Psychological studies of ideology in narrative rarely stress the critical

powers of fiction. In line with the Freudian theory of the writer as a
day-dreamer, fiction is often regarded as an imaginary form of consola-
tion and even escapism. Davis links the ideological potential of novels
with their power to transport the reader to another world: “Novels are
not life, their situation of telling their stories is alienated from lived ex-
perience, their subject matter is heavily oriented towards the ideologi-
cal, and their function is to help humans adapt to the fragmentation and
isolation of the modern world” (1987: 12). For Davis, ideology consists
of “public ideas wedded to collective and personal defenses” (15). The
ideological effect of fiction resides in its defense mechanisms (such as
projection, identification and denial; 20–21) which enable readers to
find illusory solutions to social, political and personal tensions. As ide-
ological instruments, novels invite this escapism on the level of spatial
location, characterization, narration and speech representation. Davis’s
analyses reveal these aspects of narrative fiction to be ideological and
defensive refractions of social and political structures: thus “[fictional]
locations are intertwined with ideological explanations for the posses-
260 Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

sion of property” (54)—explanations derived from, e.g. colonialism

(colonizing space) and monetary economics (acquiring space).

3.2.3 Discursive Approaches

Early language-oriented approaches to ideology in literature were de-

veloped within the “Baxtin Circle” (Holquist in Baxtin 1981: xxii).
Baxtin himself continues Vološinov’s approach. He studies the novel’s
dialogic and polyphonic narrative as a deviation from monologic and
hegemonic bourgeois discourse (Shepherd →Dialogism). The novel’s
disruptive ideology is comparable to the ‘carnivalesque’ disruption of
the social order. Ideology to Baxtin is a general and neutral term, com-
ing close to “idea-system.” In that sense, ideology is inherent to every
form of discourse and every utterance. Hence, “The speaking person in
the novel is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his own
words are always ideologemes” (Baxtin 1981: 333).
Uspenskij explicitly aligns his work on “point of view” in fiction
with Vološinov and Baxtin ([1973] 1983: 5–6). He uses “ideological”
as a synonym of “evaluative (understanding by ‘evaluative’ a general
system of viewing the world conceptually)” (8). He does not defend
one ideology over the other, but develops a typology that neutrally sys-
tematizes various points of view, such as the monologic versus the dia-
logic. His system links up the ideology of a work of fiction at the phra-
seological level (e.g. the phrasing of the narratorial ideology vs. the
style used to describe a character’s perspective), the spatiotemporal lev-
el (e.g. the authorial camera viewpoint involving no clear spatial and
temporal coordinates vs. the localized viewpoint of a character) and the
psychological level (e.g. the internal perspective of a character vs. the
external stance of an invisible narrator). Interestingly, Uspenskij does
not use the term ideology when he mentions that the phrases used to
name and describe characters (e.g. princes vs. peasants) “reflect abso-
lute social norms of a class society” (24).

3.2.4 Combined Approaches

Both in sociological and discursive approaches, literary ideology is

regularly described as a form of closure. Jameson analyses the ideolog-
ical process in Conrad’s early novels as an attempt “to seal off the tex-
tual process” (1981: 216) from the economic and social context that
infuses it, described in Jameson’s Marxist terminology as “late nine-
teenth-century rationalization and reification” (266). A comparable
view is propounded by Eagleton, who sets out to investigate “the most
 Ideology and Narrative Fiction 261

potent of all ideological forms—that of narrative. For narrative is cer-

tainly a paradigm case of closure” (1979: 71). However, Eagleton does
not go on to analyze narrative, but simply uses it as a metaphor for a
closed (ideological) system. In his view, Christianity is a narrative
while Marxism is not, since the latter disrupts linear and closed models.
Jameson, like Althusser, studies ideology from a combined psycho-
logical and sociological perspective. He focuses on the social, political
and cultural frames that influence the act of literary interpretation while
remaining at the level of the subconscious. Such a focus on the dynamic
and transformative mediation between the literary and the non-literary
goes against ideology defined as “strategies of containment” (Jameson
1981: 53): the prevailing strategies of interpretation (re)produce bound-
aries (e.g. between literary form and political struggle) and thereby en-
sure “ideological closure” (52). Jameson’s alternative comprises three
interpretative stages. The first reads the individual text as a symbolic
act, a symbolization of (unconscious) political tensions. In the second
phase, the text is studied as discourse and linked with “collective and
class discourses” (76). The text is placed in the social context, loses its
individuality and becomes an ideologeme, “that is, the smallest intelli-
gible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social
classes” (ibid.). The third stage expands the context (political in the
first, social in the second) to “the horizon of human history as a whole,”
thus broadening the perspective (symbol in the first, discourse in the
second) to sign systems. The work is now seen as a textual form of pro-
duction interlacing various sign systems that are linked with various
“modes of production” in the Marxist sense of the term (ibid.).
Macherey adapts Althusser’s ideology theory to the study of litera-
ture. Althusser regards ideological power as an appeal that is made by a
powerful institution (a Subject) and that creates adherence in the sub-
jects identifying with it. From this perspective, Macherey studies sub-
jects in the literary domain, namely authors, characters and readers
([1966] 1978/2006: 40). In their case, the process of adherence and
identification comes about through language. The language of literature
plays with everyday language and the “everyday ideology” (72) it em-
bodies. The evocation of a storyworld invariably evokes (i.e. confirms)
and parodies (i.e. contests) everyday ideology (68–69). In this double
nature, it presents and makes explicit the contradictions and distinctions
that are at the basis of language and ideology but that usually go unno-
ticed. Reproduction and contestation of ideology are at the heart of lit-
erature. As a result, literature is neither autonomous nor a reflection of
social reality.
262 Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

3.3 Ideology and Narratology

Before the breakthrough of postclassical narratology, ideology in fic-

tion was most often studied as the “range of cultural stereotypes or ac-
cepted knowledge” (Culler [1975] 1994: 141) contained within the nar-
rative and accepted by the reader as natural and self-evident. In
Barthes’ S/Z, ideology forms part of the “cultural code” that refers to a
body of cultural knowledge activated by the narrative ([1970] 1974:
19–20). To Genette, the founder of classical structuralist narratology,
the ideology of a narrative can be found in the “body of maxims and
prejudices that make up both a world-view and a system of values”
([1969] 1979: 73, our translation) and that incite the reader to accept the
storyworld as plausible and credible. Ideology, in other words, founds
the narrative’s verisimilitude or vraisemblance. Cultural conventions
are turned into natural and self-evident givens. To represent this ideo-
logical process in a simple way, Jameson (1981: 46–49) turns to Grei-
mas’s semiotic square (1970: 136–138), which lays bare the opposi-
tions and values that ground the storyworld.
This line of reasoning is developed by Tambling (1991). When
studying narratives, he investigates “the everyday life beliefs that oper-
ate through a culture” (3) and that are present in the ideological, seem-
ingly natural system pervading the narrative. The system consists of
“oppositions, which seem natural and seem to dictate their own terms,”
though, in fact, they “are cultural, part of a conventional way of think-
ing that is so automatic […] that they are passed off as natural and
spontaneous ways of thinking” (25). Successful narratives present these
oppositions in a way that convinces and seduces the reader. This may
take many forms: the narrative may be a faithful and one-dimensional
embodiment of the prevailing cultural system, or it may be multi-voiced
and critical of that system. There is not one ‘correct’ recipe to get the
ideology across to the reader, for there are many different types of
readers.
French structuralism quickly became the starting point for a broader
approach of ideology in narrative. At the outset, this tradition, initiated
by Hamon (1984), continued to hold on to the text itself as the source
of “the ideology-effect.” That effect was supposedly “inscribed in the
text,” namely as a normative and often contradictory system of values
(9). In the narratological work of Korthals Altes (1992), Greimas and
Hamon are combined with an ever-growing attention to the role played
by the reader. In her earlier analysis of the narrative’s “value-effect,”
Korthals Altes focuses on the text influencing the reader, whereas her
more recent work (1999) reverses the hierarchy. Jouve (2001), influ-
 Ideology and Narrative Fiction 263

enced by Korthals Altes’s early studies, sticks to the former position in

his study of the “value-effect.” That effect is inscribed in the conscious
organization of the text (e.g. plot organization, characterization and
speech representation), whereas the “ideological effect” operates on a
subliminal level (11).
In postclassical narratology, the rhetorical paradigm provides the
most common framework for an approach to ideology. This line of in-
quiry studies narrative as a form of communication between sender (au-
thor, implied author and/or narrator) and receiver (narratee and/or read-
er). A guiding light here is Booth, who introduced the implied author as
the source and locus of the narrative’s ideological norms and choices
([1961] 1983: 70–77) (Schmid → Implied Author). The implied author
is not only used to study the ideology of the text, but also to evaluate
the reader’s response: readers that go against the implied author violate
the text’s norms and as a result refuse the “friendship” (Booth 1988:
175) offered by the narrative.
From the rhetorical perspective, Phelan and Rabinowitz have paid
attention both to the ideological workings of a text and to the moral
judgments readers continually make (Phelan → Narrative Ethics). Ide-
ology is part of the thematic component of the text, to be distinguished
from the mimetic (reference to the real world) and the synthetic (refer-
ence to the artificial construct) elements (Phelan 2005a: 20). Reading
always entails making ‘narrative judgments’ concerning not just narra-
tive elements such as actions, but also ethical and aesthetic values of
the narrated world and the narration (Phelan [2005b] 2008: 324). Moral
judgments are part of what Doležel calls the narrative’s “axiological
component” (1998: 123–125). To Rabinowitz, such judgments follow
‘the rules of signification’ (1987: 84–93), one of four set rules of read-
ing involving a process of linking textual aspects to the reader’s every-
day way of making sense of the world. Characters and narrators play a
central role in the formation of moral judgments, but all narrative ele-
ments have a part to play.
In combining the world of the text with the realm of the reader, rhe-
torical narratology tries to reconcile the claims of the text (typically
imposed by the authority of the implied author) with the freedom of the
narrative audience. Consequently, the reader’s response is at the same
time linked with the ethics of everyday life (Gregory 2009) and phrased
in terms of respect for the textual offerings (Chambers 1984: 146–148).
The “narrative ethics” developed by Newton combines this rhetorical
approach with the philosophy of Levinas concerning the appeal that the
other (in this case, the text) makes to us. Newton (1995: 17–18) situates
the ethical workings of narratives on three levels: a narrational ethics
264 Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

(focusing on form, i.e. narration), a representational ethics (focusing on

content, esp. the characters) and a hermeneutic ethics, which pertains to
the reader’s “response as responsibility” (21).
The intimate link between narratology and (moral) philosophy is
part of what Eskin (2004: 557) called “the Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and
Literature”: this involves “a ‘turn to ethics’ in literary studies and, con-
versely, a ‘turn to literature’ in (moral) philosophy.” The issue of Poet-
ics Today he edited (2004) provides a representative selection of philo-
sophical and narratological approaches to the manifold relations
between ethics and esthetics, ideology and narrative.
Fludernik’s ([1996] 2005) natural narratology broadens the link (in-
herent in rhetorical narratology) between narrative and everyday life,
and as such provides a general frame which can accommodate critical
and political approaches of ideology such as gender and postcolonial
theories (358–370). The unnatural narratology advocated by Richard-
son (2006) unravels the ideology of natural narratives by focusing on
the critical transformations of that ideology in narratives that ostenta-
tiously defy mimetic and natural presuppositions. As such, it sides with
“ideological critique” which, according to Elias “examines the ways in
which subjects both incorporate and resist definitions of life-world and
selfhood structured by hegemonic social powers” (2010: 281). A criti-
cal type of narratology looks beneath “the said” in a narrative and “re-
veals the political unsaid of both the text and the social conditions that
produced it” (ibid.).
The best-known examples of this critical tradition are provided by
the narratologies inspired by feminism (Lanser → Gender and Narra-
tive) and postcolonial theory. Since the 1980s, feminist narratology has
highlighted the central role played by gender, sex and sexuality in the
construction and interpretation of narrative fiction. Working against the
limitations of structuralist narratology and its mostly male practitioners,
scholars such as Lanser (1986, 1992) and Warhol (1989, 1999, Warhol
in Herman et al. 2012) have insisted that “even the broadest, most ob-
vious elements of narration are ideologically charged and socially vari-
able, sensitive to gender differences in ways that have not been recog-
nized” (Lanser 1992: 23), arguing that in fact all “politically significant
and historically grounded differences” (Warhol in Herman et al. 2012:
11) should be placed at the center of narratological inquiry. While fem-
inist narratology has long since moved beyond the early “presupposi-
tion that the speaker’s gender can explain the form of the narrative”
(Page 2003: 53) and instead holds that “gender is produced through
narrative processes” (Robinson 1991: 4), it does not fail to foreground
issues related to (the resistance against) patriarchy, ranging from a
 Ideology and Narrative Fiction 265

“communal voice” (Lanser 1992) to the incorporation of male uncer-

tainty in the (biblical) construction of woman (Bal 1987).
In Prince’s concise definition, postcolonial narratology “is sensitive
to matters commonly, if not uncontroversially, associated with the post-
colonial (e.g. hybridity, migrancy, otherness, fragmentation, diversity,
power relations); it envisages their possible narratological correspond-
ents; and it incorporates them” (2005: 373). Attention to these matters
may lead to richer accounts of narrative diversity, e.g. by focusing on
“immediate discourses […] issuing from a group” (377) or by including
the narrator’s status as colonizer or formerly colonized as an element on
the same level as his intrusiveness or self-consciousness. Prince is con-
vinced, in other words, that working with the toolbox of classical narra-
tology on “postcolonial” texts will have implications for the theory. In
earlier contributions, Fludernik (1999), Gymnich (2002) and Birk and
Neumann (2002) seemed more interested in the ideological relevance of
this application. According to Birk and Neumann, “it is the task of
postcolonial narratology to describe the narrative strategies that help to
construct stereotypical representations of the Other, and also to analyze
their function” (123–124, our translation).
For Sommer, both feminist and postcolonial narratology constitute a
persuasive example of “contextualism” in the study of narrative fiction.
Seeing their potential for the future place of the discipline, he argues on
behalf of an “intercultural” narratology which would “combine struc-
turalist descriptions of textual features with cognitive insights into nar-
rative comprehension, within an overall interpretive framework of in-
tercultural concepts” (Sommer 2007: 62). An excellent early example
of such an encompassing narratological approach can be found in
Sternberg’s study of biblical narrative as governed by “three principles:
ideological, historiographic, and aesthetic” (1987: 41). These principles
“join forces to originate a strategy of telling that casts reading as a dra-
ma, interpretation as an ordeal that enacts and distinguishes the human
predicament” (46). The biblical emphasis on knowledge centers on the
limitations of man, with various narrative strategies “twisting, if not
blocking, the way to knowledge” (47). The audience, however, is not
entirely lost when it comes to developing the “proper” attitude to char-
acters and events. Thus the reader’s orientation is helped by “the rule
that complexity of representation is inversely proportioned to that of
evaluation: the more opaque (discordant, ambiguous) the plot, that is,
the more transparent (concordant, straightforward) the judgment” (54).
266 Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck

4 Topics for Further Investigation

To determine the ideological workings of a narrative, it is vital to clari-

fy the exact role played by the text (its so-called force or appeal) and
the reader (his or her disposition, including frames and scripts). Empiri-
cal and/or sociological research might throw light on the interaction
between the two, which remains vague in existing approaches. In addi-
tion, discovery procedures that point to relevant textual signs of ideolo-
gy are still waiting to be formulated.

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Nussbaum, Martha C. ([1990] 1992). Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and
Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Page, Ruth (2003). “Feminist Narratology? Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on
Gender and Narratology.” Language and Literature 12(1), 4–56.
Phelan, James (2005a). Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character
Narration. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– ([2005b] 2008). “Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative:
Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” J. Phelan & P. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion to
Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 322–336.
Prince, Gerald (2005). “On a Postcolonial Narratology.” J. Phelan & P. Rabinowitz
(eds.). A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 372–381.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. (1987). Before Reading. Narrative Conventions and the Politics of
Interpretation. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Reich, Wilhelm ([1933] 1970). The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Richardson, Brian (2006). Unnatural Voices. Extreme Narration in Modern and Con-
temporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Robinson, Sally (1991). Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in
Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P.
Sommer, Roy (2007). “‘Contextualism’ Revisited: A Survey (and Defence) of Post-
colonial and Intercultural Narratologies.” Journal of Literary Theory 1, 61–79.
Sternberg, Meir (1987). The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and
the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Tambling, Jeremy (1991). Narrative and Ideology. Milton Keynes: Open UP.
Uspenskij, Boris ([1973] 1983). A Poetics of Composition. The Structure of the Artistic
Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Berkeley: U of California P.
Vološinov, Valentin N. (Voloshinov) ([1929–30] 1973). Marxism and the Philosophy
of Language. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Warhol, Robyn (1989). Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian
Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
– (1999). “Guilty Cravings: What Feminist Narratology Can Do For Cultural Stud-
ies.” D. Herman (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 341–355.
Williams, Raymond (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP.
 Ideology and Narrative Fiction 269

Zima, Peter (1981). Literatuur en maatschappij. Inleiding in de Literatuur- en Tekst-

sociologie. Assen: Van Gorcum.
Žižek, Slavoj ([1989] 2008). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

5.2 Further Reading

Adorno, Theodor W. ([1974] 1998). Noten zur Literatur. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Herman, Luc & Bart Vervaeck (2007). “Ideology.” D. Herman (ed.). The Cambridge
Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 217–230.
Korthals Altes, Liesbeth ([2005] 2008). “Ethical Turn.” D. Herman et al. (eds.).
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 142–146.
Mieth, Dietmar (2000). Erzählen und Moral. Narrativität im Spannungsfeld von Ethik
und Äthetik. Tübingen: Attempto.
Williams, Patrick ([2005] 2008). “Ideology and Narrative.” D. Herman et al. (eds.).
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 235–236.
Zima, Peter (1977). Textsemiotik als Ideologiekritik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
 Illusion (Aesthetic)
Werner Wolf

1 Definition

Aesthetic illusion is a basically pleasurable mental state that frequently

emerges during the reception of representational texts, artifacts or per-
formances. These representations may be fictional or factual, and in
particular include narratives (2.3 and 4). Like all reception effects, aes-
thetic illusion is elicited by a conjunction of factors that are located (a)
in the representations themselves, (b) in the reception process and the
recipients, and (c) in framing contexts, e.g. cultural-historical, situa-
tional and generic ones. Aesthetic illusion consists primarily of a feel-
ing, with variable intensity, of being imaginatively and emotionally
immersed in a represented world and of experiencing this world in a
way similar (but not identical) to real life. At the same time, however,
this impression of immersion is counterbalanced by a latent rational
distance resulting from a culturally acquired awareness of the differ-
ence between representation and reality.

2 Explication

2.1 The Nature of Aesthetic Illusion

Aesthetic illusion is distinguished from real-life hallucinations and

dreams in that it is induced by the perception of concrete representa-
tional artifacts, texts or performances. Moreover, it is distinct from de-
lusions in that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a
complex phenomenon characterized by an asymmetrical ambivalence.
This ambivalence derives from the positioning of aesthetic illusion on a
scale simultaneously influenced to varying (increasing or decreasing)
degrees by its two poles of total rational distance (disinterested “obser-
vation” of an artifact as such [Walton 1990: 273]) and complete immer-
sion (“psychological participation” [240–289]) in the represented
world. Typical aesthetic illusion maintains a position that is closer to
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 271

the pole of immersion rather than to the pole of distance. While aesthet-
ic illusion is not restricted to an effect of works of art, the term “aes-
thetic” is justified by the fact that it etymologically gestures towards a
quasi-perceptual quality of the imaginative experience involved and
implies an awareness, typical of the reception of art, that “illusion” is
triggered by an artifact rather than (an, e.g., magic) reality. The etymo-
logical presence of ‘playfulness’ in “in-lusio” also contributes to fore-
grounding this important facet. Thus the term “aesthetic illusion” is ar-
guably more satisfactory than the various synonyms used in research:
“absorption” (Cohen 2001: 258); “recentering” and “immersion” (Ryan
1991: 21–23; cf. also Schaeffer 1999: 243 passim); “involvement” and
“psychological participation” (Walton 1990: 240–289); “transporta-
tion” (Gerrig 1993: 12 passim); “effet de réel” (Barthes 1968). Strictly
speaking, it is even erroneous to call aesthetic illusion simply “illusion”
or “immersion” except by way of abbreviation, since by this—as in all
of these alternative terms (and also in the misleading attempt to regard
aesthetic illusion as a form of magic; Balter 2002)—the rational dis-
tance induced by the underlying awareness of the non-natural character
of representation would be disregarded.
Illusion, to the extent it is aesthetic, presupposes the implicit ac-
ceptance of a “reception contract,” one of whose stipulations Coleridge
described as “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment”
([1817] 1965: 169). Aesthetic illusion thus involves several men-
tal/psychic spheres and simultaneously operates within two dimensions
(cf. also Walton 1990: 273): (a) in the background as a latent, rational
awareness “from without,” namely that the illusion-inducing artifact is
a mere representation; and (b) in the foreground as a mainly intuitive
mental simulation where this awareness is bracketed out in favor of an
imaginary experience of represented worlds “from within.” This simu-
lation involves emotions and sensory quasi-perceptions (including, but
not restricted to, visual imagination), but also reason to the extent that a
certain rationality is required to make sense of the represented world.
Owing to its dual nature, aesthetic illusion is gradable according to the
degrees of immersion or distance present in given reception situations
and is thus unstable. Immersion, which in many cases seems to be the
default option during the reception process of representations and there-
fore continues to hold on subsequent readings (Walton 1990: 262–263),
can be suspended or undermined at any given moment by the actualiza-
tion of the latent consciousness of representationality. This “willing
construction of disbelief” (Gerrig 1993: 230) can be triggered not only
by the recipient, but also by the work itself, thanks to metalepsis (Pier
→ Metalepsis) and to other illusion-breaking devices employed by
272 Werner Wolf

metafictionality (Neumann & Nünning → Metanarration and Metafic-

tion), or due to interference by contextual factors.
Since illusionist works provide a simulation of real-life experience,
aesthetic illusion always has a quasi-experiential quality about it and
sometimes, in addition, a referential dimension: the tendency to credit
illusionist representation with having indeed taken place in the real
world. This referential aspect is not always at issue, however, for fanta-
sy or science fiction, which make no pretense at referring to reality, can
nevertheless induce a powerful aesthetic illusion. In all cases, aesthetic
illusion implies the subjective impression of being experientially “re-
centered” in a represented world, whether factual or fictional, an im-
pression that amounts to a “side-participant stance” (Gerrig 1993: 108,
239) rather than to identification with a character (Jannidis → Charac-
ter), the latter being a special case of feeling re-centered.
Functionally, aesthetic illusion constitutes one of the most effective
ways of ensuring the reception of representations, since it can cater to
various human desires and offers vicarious experience without serious
consequences. The general attractiveness of aesthetic illusion also qual-
ifies it as a vehicle of persuasion for didactic, advertising or propaganda
purposes. A persuasive purpose may be seen also at work in the poten-
tial of aesthetic illusion to make the recipient accept more readily the
tendency of aesthetic representations to introduce an unrealistic surplus
of coherence and meaning, i.e. to present worlds whose closure and
meaningfulness, through such devices as the use of coincidence, poetic
justice, etc., may be regarded as deviating from the contingency of life.
From a historical point of view, the persuasiveness of aesthetic illusion
may even be regarded as related to the process of secularization in the
Western world, for the relevance of illusion as an effect of texts and
artworks created according to the principle of “matching” them “con-
vincing[ly]” with life-like appearances appears to have increased pro-
portionally as belief in the self-evident meaningfulness of the world has
decreased alongside the “making” of schematic artifacts according to
the principle of efficient readability (cf. Gombrich 1960: 131, 99). It
seems that with the increase of credibility invested in individual works,
“aesthetic” belief has progressively filled the place occupied by philo-
sophical and religious beliefs as tacit basis of meaning, even though,
outside deconstructionist and postmodernist circles, belief in the power
of representation as such persists.
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 273

2.2 Factors Contributing to Aesthetic Illusion

Aesthetic illusion is produced by several factors, described by Gom-

brich (1960: 169) as elements contributing to a “guided projection.”
Such projection takes place in the mind of the recipient. When it is in a
state of aesthetic illusion, however, the mind’s activity is not free-
floating, but rather guided by the illusionist representation, both recipi-
ent and representation being influenced by contexts which in turn also
contribute to the illusionist projection. Thus the representation, the re-
cipient and the context (situational, cultural, etc.) must all be taken into
account as factors in a theory of illusion.
The individual representation is the guiding “script” that provides
the raw material for what will appear on the mental “screen” and serves
to trigger aesthetic illusion. Owing to the quasi-experiential nature of
this state of mind, successful illusionist representations furnish formal
analogies to the structures and features of real-life experience. Moreo-
ver, they offer contents that correspond to the objects and scripts en-
countered in, or applicable to, real-life experience, at least to a certain
extent. Generally, illusionist representations are accessible with relative
facility. They offer potential recipients with material to lure them into
the represented worlds and create a sense of verisimilitude, a prerequi-
site for the emergence of aesthetic illusion, although generic conven-
tions may serve to counteract improbable elements.
While the illusionist representation provides the script, the recipients
are called on to act as its (mental) “directors” or “producers,” using it
along with their own world-knowledge and empathetic abilities for
“projection” onto their mind’s “screen.” This activity, as well as the
nature of the mental screen, results in the recipients and the reception
process becoming decisive, albeit problematic, factors in the production
of aesthetic illusion. For even if it is conceded that the principal pre-
condition of aesthetic illusion (namely the human ability to mentally
dissociate oneself from the here-and-now and imagine being some-
where else, someone else, in some other time) is an anthropological
constant, a recipient’s illusionist response to an artifact remains heavily
dependent on individual factors. These include range of experience,
age, gender, interests, cultural background, and the ability to read
works of art aesthetically, but also the situation of reception and, of
course, the recipient’s willingness to “participat[e] psychologically in
[a] game of make-believe” (Walton 1990: 242). As for the latter factor,
immersion seems to satisfy a powerful psychological predisposition,
even enabling one, under the influence of generic conventions, to inte-
274 Werner Wolf

grate into the reception such blatantly non-realistic phenomena as non-

diegetic film music (Cohen 2001: 254).
As for cultural and historical contexts—the “rooms” in which poten-
tially illusionist scripts are originally located and the locations where
guided projections take place—a plurality of such contexts must always
be assumed, although to a lesser degree when a text, its author and its
reader are contemporary and form part of the same culture. This context
dependence has significant consequences, for it means that aesthetic
illusion can be conceived of as the effect of a relative correspondence
or analogy between a representation and essential culturally and histori-
cally induced concepts of reality and schemata of perception. It is these
schemata and epistemic frameworks together with certain experiential
contents that govern verisimilitude as a prime condition of aesthetic
illusion. Since there is no universally valid perception and experience
of reality, let alone a worldview that is generally acknowledged to be
natural, any disparities between the contexts of production and those of
reception may substantially affect aesthetic illusion. Verisimilitude—
and with it aesthetic illusion—is therefore to a large extent a historical
and cultural variable. Another relevant and equally variable contextual
factor is the set of frames, including generic conventions, that rule the
production and reception of the arts and media in a given period. Most
important, however, is the question of the extent to which aesthetic illu-
sion itself and an aesthetic approach to artworks that implies aesthetic
distance are practiced or known in a given culture or period or whether,
for instance, a worldview that favors magic enchantment prevails, ow-
ing to which specific artifacts are regarded as numinous realities.
With the two variables recipient and context in mind, everything
that can be said about the core of all text-centered approaches to aes-
thetic illusion, namely illusionist representation itself, becomes prob-
lematic. For these variables make it difficult, if not impossible, to de-
cide on the actual illusionist effect of a given work, text, technique, etc.
for all periods and all individuals. However, this does not mean that
nothing at all can be said about the factor artifact or text, for given simi-
lar recipients and similar reception contexts, representations will appear
as more or less illusionist according to intra-compositional factors. One
essential similarity among recipients, contributing to the theoretical
construct of an “average” recipient, can in fact be postulated, namely
that the recipient is prepared and able to “willingly suspend disbelief”
when confronted with illusionist artifacts, but remains distanced enough
not to become enmeshed in experiential or referential delusion.
Historically and culturally, the average recipient or reader (Prince →
Reader) as a factor in a theory of illusion can be assumed to have exist-
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 275

ed at least over the past few centuries of Western culture, during which
the evolution of aesthetic verisimilitude and responses to illusionist art
are comparatively well documented. In fact, Western cultural history of
this period offers an extensive corpus of primary works that continue to
be read as illusionist, in contrast to works that obstruct illusionist access
such as radically experimental postmodernist fictions. With this illu-
sionist corpus and its features in mind, a number of points regarding the
illusionist potential of a given representation can in fact be made. If, in
the following argument, terms such as “characteristics” and “princi-
ples” are employed, they are not meant to function in the illusionist re-
ception process as essences with fixed effects. Rather, the characteris-
tics and principles of illusionist representation are to be regarded as
deriving from prototypes that possess a particularly high degree of illu-
sionist potential according to aesthetic theory and testimonies of recep-
tion of the past and/or of personal experience.

2.3 Typical Characteristics of Illusionist Representations and the

Principles of Illusion-making: The Case of Narrative Fiction

Aesthetic illusion can be elicited by a broad range of texts and works.

There is no restriction as to their being factual or fictional, narrative or
descriptive (a fact often overlooked in narratological treatments of im-
mersion, as e.g. in Schaeffer & Vultur 2005), and they may occur in a
wide variety of media and genres. Aesthetic illusion is therefore a
transmedial, transmodal and transgeneric phenomenon. There is only
one general proviso, namely that it be triggered by a representation. It
thus is relevant to narrative fiction, drama, lyric poetry (Wolf 1998;
Müller-Zettelmann 2000: chap. 3.2.6; Hühn & Kiefer 2005), painting,
sculpture, photography, film, and contemporary virtual realities such as
computer games (Ryan 2006: 181–203), while excluding (most) in-
strumental music from the range of potentially illuding media (Ryan
2001: 15, Bernhart 2013 is less sure in this respect). Since describing
aesthetic illusion in the various media would require, at least in part, a
media-specific theory in each case and also because, as will become
clear below, verbal narratives are characterized by a special affinity to
aesthetic illusion, the following discussion will focus on certain fea-
tures and principles at work in illusionist representations with reference
to narrative fiction.
In the history of prose fiction, one illusionist prototype is the 19th-
century realist novel, a genre that has always been credited with a
particularly high potential for eliciting illusionist immersion. Realist
novels draw their readers into their worlds by maintaining a feeling of
276 Werner Wolf

verisimilitude and experientiality while minimizing aesthetic distance.

Considering illusionist texts such as these, it is possible to single out
illusion-relevant textual features and link them to principles of fictional
illusion-making which contribute to producing these features through
specific narrative devices.
In narratological terms, typically illusionist novels (e.g. Eliot’s
Adam Bede or Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles) display the following
four characteristic features (Wolf 1993a: chap. 2.3): (a) their content or
story level is the central text level, as their storyworlds are character-
ized by a certain extension and complexity, are consistent, tend to be
life-like in their inventory and thus elicit the interest of the (contempo-
rary) reader; (b) their transmission or discourse level remains compara-
tively inconspicuous and ‘transparent,’ serving mainly to depict the
storyworld and to enhance the tellability (Baroni → Tellability), con-
sistency and life-likeness of the story; (c) the content and its transmis-
sion tend to be serious; (d) illusionist texts are predominantly hetero-
referential.
As not all of these traits are self-explanatory, some comment is re-
quired. Highlighting of the content level (a) can be explained by the
attempt to portray (facets of) a represented world in which recipients
can become experientially immersed. A certain textual extension is typ-
ical of illusionist worlds because aesthetic illusion is a state that emerg-
es during a process in which a transition must occur from the percep-
tions normally experienced in everyday life to aesthetic reception. If
this process is too short owing to a minimal text basis, immersion may
fail to take place. This factor also accounts for the relative complexity
of typical illusionist worlds. Although this may seem a special feature
of realist fiction only, it is in fact in keeping with the general illusionist
effect of re-centering the recipient in a world whose quality as “world”
is enhanced by both extension and complexity.
The consistency and life-likeness (or probability) of realistic narra-
tives are actually facets of a more general quality of illusionist worlds,
namely their accessibility. Represented worlds can provide different
degrees and types of accessibility (Ryan 1991: 32–33). It is obvious
that enhanced accessibility facilitates illusionist immersion and that
illusionist works therefore tend to lower the threshold of access as
much as possible. In realism, this tendency is manifest in the construc-
tion and presentation of fictional worlds that seem to be an extension of
the recipients’ real world in terms of spatial, temporal (contemporary)
and social settings but also, for instance, in terms of norms, ideals and
epistemological preconceptions about the “readability” of reality.
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 277

The relative inconspicuousness of the transmission level (b), which

is responsible for the mediality (Ryan → Narration in Various Media)
but also for the artificiality of representation and thus for potentially
distance-creating factors, corresponds to the centrality of the content
level and is closely related to the tendency of illusionist immersion to
predominate over aesthetic distance. Therefore, typically illusionist
works, and in particular realist novels, usually keep distancing elements
to a minimum.
The shunning of aesthetic distance can also be witnessed in a no less
typical tendency of illusionist works toward seriousness (c), although
this does not exclude the comic from illusionism entirely. Comedy and
laughter imply emotional distance, which runs counter to the strong
affinity between emotional involvement and aesthetic illusion. The in-
terrelation between illusion, emotions and seriousness can be seen not
only in realist fiction, but also in drama: tragedy tends toward aesthetic
illusion (Aristotle’s catharsis presupposes empathetic immersion),
while comedy frequently suspends illusion.
The predominant hetero-referentiality of realist fiction (d) is a con-
sequence of the general fact that all illusionist artifacts, even those that
ultimately play with illusion, are representational: they evoke or “re-
present” (elements of) a world that seems to exist outside the artifact,
and they appear to refer to something other than the works in question.
As a special, historical kind of mimesis, the realistic novel is in fact
strongly hetero-referential. This does not mean, however, that mimesis
alone guarantees the emergence of aesthetic illusion, nor that all illu-
sionist texts must be either realistic (they may also be modernist) or
mimetic in the sense of imitating a slice of life (science fiction, in defi-
ance of such imitation, can also be illusionist).
The basic characteristics found at the textual level of illusionist fic-
tion can be linked to a number of intra-compositional principles of illu-
sion-making, the cumulative effect of which is to produce its typical
features of illusion-making as detailed above. These principles regulate
the predominant immersive facet of illusionist works, while the latent
distance also implied in aesthetic illusion is usually regulated by fram-
ing devices (e.g. the paratextual or metatextual marking of a novel as
such [Wolf 2006]). Owing to the extra-compositional factors involved
in the emergence of aesthetic illusion, however, these principles can
only be regarded as tendencies that enhance a potential of aesthetic illu-
sion but cannot guarantee its realization per se. The following four
principles, which shape the material, coherence and presentation of an
illusionist world, plus two additional principles that contribute to the
278 Werner Wolf

persuasiveness peculiar to the rhetoricity of illusionist texts, must be

distinguished (Wolf 1993a: chap. 2.2; 2004).

(a) The principle of access-facilitating, detailed world-making. The

main function of this principle is to provide the inventory or
repertoire of an illusionist world with activating concepts,
schemata and scripts stored in the recipient’s mind, stemming
mostly from previous real-life experience. These schemata
(Emmott & Alexander → Schemata) are bound mainly to con-
crete phenomena (story existents in the case of narratives) ra-
ther than abstract ones. This principle also ensures easy access
to the worlds thus constructed and facilitates imaginative im-
mersion by maintaining a certain balance between familiarity
and novelty (cf. principle (e)) as well as by providing graphic
details about this world.
(b) The principle of consistency of the represented world. Illusion-
ist works enhance the probability of their worlds by linking
their inventory according to abstract “syntactic” concepts (in
narratives this includes chronology, causality, etc.) on the basis
of fundamental logical and epistemological rules that are com-
patible with, or identical to, the rules that (appear to) govern re-
al life. All of this produces the impression of consistency and
invites meaningful interpretations while avoiding contradictions
(the “natural” quality of the resulting representations is what
renders the level of transmission relatively inconspicuous).
Thus the overall tendency is to ensure a fundamental analogy
between the illusionist world and the perception of the real
world. Consistency operates according to Ryan’s “principle of
minimal departure” (1991: 51): it is a default option, although
departures are possible and may even remain compatible with
illusion, provided they are explained or linked to generic con-
ventions, for example, thus obtaining a secondary kind of plau-
sibility.
(c) The principle of life-like perspectivity. The experientiality and
probability of illusionist representations, which tend to provide
recipients with “deictic centers” as a vantage point from which
to experience the represented worlds (Zwaan 1999: 15), are the
result of other principles as well. Motivated by the perspectivity
of everyday experience—i.e. the inevitable limitation of percep-
tion according to the point of view (Niederhoff → Perspective –
Point of View) and the horizon of the perceiver—one of the
noteworthy characteristics in the history of illusionism (in both
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 279

painting and literature) is the development and perfection of

techniques that imitate this perspectivity. In Western fiction,
this development has resulted in the increasing use of internal
focalization (Niederhoff → Focalization) since the 18th-century
first-person epistolary novel and later in modernist third-person
“figural narration” with its covert narrators and effect of imme-
diacy. On the other hand—and this illustrates the fact that aes-
thetic illusion is frequently the result of a fine balance between
the various principles of illusion—extreme curtailment of overt
narrators can also threaten textual coherence. In this way, the
principle of perspectivity may come into conflict with the prin-
ciple of consistency.
(d) The principle of respecting and exploiting the potentials of the
representational macro-frames, media and genres employed.
Representations rely on semiotic macro-frames (typically narra-
tive and descriptive ones), and they also employ specific media
and genres. All of these basic frames of individual representa-
tions have particular potentials and limits. The principle under
discussion is responsible for keeping illusionist representations
within these limits in order to ensure easy accessibility and
avoid self-reflexive foregrounding of the means of transmission,
for instance. As a result, illusionist narratives show the basic
features of narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity) and employ de-
scriptions in a way that is compatible with both the medium and
the narrative macro-frame. Again, certain deviations may re-
main illusion-compatible, but going too much against the grain
of these basic frames of representation (as in the hypertrophy of
description in the French nouveau roman, for example) would
highlight mediality as such and foreground the conventionality
of narrative or of certain narrative genres. As a result, the read-
er’s focus would shift from the represented world as the center
of aesthetic illusion to the conditions and means of its construc-
tion and transmission, thereby activating aesthetic distance and
undermining immersion.
(e) The principle of generating interest, and in particular emotional
interest, in the represented world. This is an active rhetorical
principle resulting from the use of various devices of persuasio
that render representations attractive and keep distance at a min-
imum. It imitates real-life perception in that perception is usual-
ly motivated by certain interests. The means by which the recip-
ient’s interest is elicited are highly variable. They often include
moderate departures from conventions and expectations as men-
280 Werner Wolf

tioned in connection with other illusionist principles, and they

may range from catering to recipients’ desires by providing cer-
tain inventory-elements (e.g. sex and crime and otherwise sen-
sationalist representations) to topical references and discursive
devices intended to create suspense. In accordance with the im-
portance of feelings for illusionist immersion, one particular ar-
ea of this principle is appeal to the recipient’s emotions. This
principle is also responsible for the scarcity, in typically illu-
sionist representations, of elements such as carnivalesque com-
edy, as this tends to reduce emotional involvement.
(f) The principle of celare artem. The tendency of illusionist fic-
tion to minimize aesthetic distance and the inconspicuousness
of its discourse is regulated mainly by a principle which, in ac-
cordance with the rhetoric of antiquity and post-medieval aes-
thetics, may be called the principle of celare artem. Similarly to
other illusionist principles, celare artem contributes to forming
an analogy with a condition of real-life perception, namely the
tendency to disregard the fact that perception is limited owing
to its inevitable mediacy. This principle favors immersion by
concealing the mediacy and mediality of representation, but al-
so, where applicable, fictionality by avoiding paradox-creating
devices such as (non-naturalizable) metalepsis and abstaining
from overly intrusive metatextual elements and, generally, from
devices that lay bare scripts and clichés as constituents of the
represented world (although in some cases authenticity-
enhancing metatextual devices may be illusion-compatible).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 History of the Term

In Latin, illusio (from illudere [in+ludere]: “make fun of,” “jeer,” “de-
ceive”) has both a negative sense (“deceit,” “jeering”) and a neutral or
positive sense, notably in classical rhetoric, where illusio is an accepta-
ble device sometimes used as a synonym of “irony.” The negative sense
acquires Christian overtones in post-classical times, as in illusiones di-
aboli (the devil’s deceits), and retains this negative meaning through
Medieval Latin, Old French and Middle English to Shakespeare. A neu-
tral or positive meaning re-emerges only in the 17th century, as can be
seen in the title of Corneille’s comedy L’Illusion comique (1636).
Shortly afterwards, the term can be encountered as an aesthetic notion
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 281

denoting dramatic illusion in French aesthetic theory (e.g. in Abbé

d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre, 1657). In French 18th-century aes-
thetic theory from Dubos to Marmontel and Diderot, illusion becomes a
much discussed term, and it is also in the 18th century that the term be-
gins to be used in an aesthetic sense in German (often equated with
Schein; Oelmüller ed. 1982). In English, Henry Home, Lord Kames
called illusion an “ideal presence” (Home [1762] 1970), but Coleridge
began to use the term “Dramatic Illusion” ([1804/05] 1960, vol. 1:
176). In the 20th century, it is the art historian Gombrich who, owing to
his magisterial Art and Illusion (1960), perhaps, has done most to dis-
seminate the term. It continues to be used in spite of Brinker’s plea that
the “concept” (he actually means “term”) be “eliminate[d] from aesthet-
ic theory” (1977/78: 191). Nowadays, “immersion” is often used in
place of illusion.

3.2 History of the Concept

The beginnings of the Western tradition of aesthetic illusion (“illusion-

ism”) were located by Gombrich (1960: 108) for the visual arts in the
so-called “Greek revolution” which took place between the 6th and the
4th centuries B.C. The transition from the magical and religious use of
artworks (in which representational meaning was to be “read” without
recourse to an illusionist “matching” to real-life appearance) to aesthet-
ic objects which aimed at persuasive life-likeness inaugurated the
Western tradition of illusionist representation. The famous anecdote of
the illusionist contest between the trompe-l’œil painters Parrhasios and
Zeuxis is a good illustration of this new approach to art.
With reference to literature, Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, which
hinges on the notion of mimesis in conjunction with the triggering of
the emotional effects of eleos and phobos, also points toward aesthetic
illusion while further evidence of literary illusion can be found in the
form of the playful incursions in classical Greek comedy. Most im-
portant, however, is Plato’s hostility toward the mimetic arts due to the
illusory nature of artistic representation. Indications of aesthetic illusion
in the Middle Ages are rare (for a discussion of medieval immersion see
Wolf 1993b and Bleumer ed. 2012). Among such indications an intri-
guing testimony of immersive (narrative) reception concerning both
reading and the viewing of pictures from Li Bestiaires d’Amours by
Richart de Fournival (1201–1259/60) is worth mentioning: “When one
sees painted a story, whether of Troy or something else, one sees the
noble deeds which were done in the past exactly as though they were
still present. And it is the same thing with reading a text, for when one
282 Werner Wolf

hears a story read aloud, listening to the events one sees them in the
present.” (Richart de Fournival 1957: 5, quoted from, and translated by
Carruthers 1990: 314). During the Renaissance, aesthetic illusion be-
came a consciously produced effect in literature and was even the ob-
ject of metatextual commentary (although not under this term), as can
be seen in Cervantes’s Don Quixote and in Shakespeare (Wolf 1993b).
In the history of fiction, Don Quixote is a particularly remarkable mile-
stone, owing to its illusionist ambivalence (Wolf 1993a: chap. 4; Alter
1975): the novel is informed by both pro-illusionist elements (thanks to
its realistic opposition to the improbable chivalric romances it parodies)
and playful anti-illusionism (resulting from its obtrusive metafictional
dimension). It can thus be said to inaugurate two antagonistic traditions:
the great tradition of illusionist fiction, which found its peak in the
19th-century realist novel, and an anti-illusionist counter-tradition in
which various devices of “defamiliarization” (ostrananie) were devel-
oped, notably in Romanticism (in texts characterized by romantic iro-
ny), in modernism and in the experimentations of radical postmodern-
ism, the hitherto unsurpassed climax of anti-illusionism. In
contemporary post-postmodernist fiction, a compromise seems to have
been achieved in which an often ironic return to illusionism is com-
bined with moderate illusion-breaking devices in double-layered am-
bivalent texts.

3.3 Influential Positions

Ever since it has been cognized as such, aesthetic illusion has been ac-
companied by controversial evaluations, the first manifestation of
which can be seen in the differing stances taken by Plato and Aristotle
toward immersion as an effect of mimesis. From the 17th to the end of
the 19th century, the pro-illusionist position prevailed with the aesthet-
ics of sensibility (represented inter alia by Diderot) and with realism
(endorsed inter alia by Henry James) propagating an illusionism that
was fuelled by an emphasis on the emotional and moral effects of litera-
ture and art as well as on a probabilistic persuasiveness rivaling non-
fictional discourses. The illusion-critical position was motivated by
equally diverse factors. With reference to literature, one factor was con-
cern for the aesthetic appreciation of literature as an art (in his entry on
“Illusion” in the Encyclopédie, Marmontel opposes Diderot’s ideal of
complete illusion); another factor was distrust of complacent passivity
in the reception of literature, which was thought to prevent its political
efficiency (cf. Brecht)—a position overlooking the fact that all recep-
tion is an active process. Yet another factor was the Romantic and, lat-
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 283

er, postmodernist diffidence with regard to the pre-condition of all aes-

thetic illusion, namely representation. It does not come as a surprise,
however, that despite fierce opposition, particularly in recent cultural
history, aesthetic illusion seems to be more alive than ever and contin-
ues to influence the development of contemporary (digital) technology
for, in particular, commercial representations (resulting, e.g., in the en-
hanced life-likeness of films on blu-ray 3 D discs with dolby 5.1 sur-
round sound), since immersion appears to cater well to a fundamental
human need for imaginary experience.
Both aesthetic illusion and anti-illusionism (often designated by oth-
er terms such as “realism” and “immersion” for illusion, and “metafic-
tion” for anti-illusionism) have been discussed from various angles. Up
to the 1990s, historical approaches (e.g. in part, Gombrich 1960; Strube
1971; Alter 1975), phenomenological and reader-response approaches
(e.g. Lobsien 1975; Smuda 1979; Nell 1988) as well as text-centered
approaches (Wolf 1993a) prevailed. More recently, aesthetic illusion
has been viewed from the perspective of possible-worlds theory (Ryan
1991, 2001) as well as in the context of emotion research (Mellmann
2002, 2006; Opdahl 2002), a focus which also informs part of empirical
reader response research (Miall 1995) and cognitive and/or psychologi-
cal approaches (Walton 1990; Gerrig 1993; Anderson 1996; Zwaan
1999; Bortolussi & Dixon 2003). In addition, aesthetic illusion is in-
creasingly discussed with reference to arts and media other than litera-
ture (Hedinger ed. 2010; Cammack 2007; Krüger 2011; Wolf, Bernhart
& Mahler eds., 2013).

3.4 Relevance for Narratology

Aesthetic illusion is not restricted to narratives, as illustrated by im-

portant forms of non-narrative illusionist painting (portraits, still lives,
genre scenes, landscape painting, etc.). However, there is a special rela-
tionship between aesthetic illusion and narrative and, consequently, a
special relevance of this phenomenon to narratology. The link between
illusion and narrative resides in the quasi-experiential quality of all aes-
thetic illusion and the characteristic experientiality of typical narratives.
It is true that experience can relate merely to space, a moment in time or
a static state, but that movement and change, especially if unexpected,
have a particular affinity to experience (as the German Erfahrung sug-
gests, containing fahren, “to move,” “to ride”), pointing to narrative as
the most important cognitive macro-frame man has developed to make
sense of experience in and of time. Experientiality has therefore justly
been viewed as one of the fundamental elements of narrativity (Fluder-
284 Werner Wolf

nik 1996). Another link, closely related, is that aesthetic illusion pro-
vides life-like experience and that illusionist works provide analogies to
structures and contents of real-life experience, while life is in turn often
experienced according to narrative patterns.
If there is indeed a special but not necessary relationship between
narrative and aesthetic illusion, the question arises with reference to
fiction as to which aspect or part of narrator-transmitted stories is most
important for providing spaces for the “projection” of illusion. It has
been claimed that this is the narrating process and thus the narrator
(Nünning 2000, 2001). While in some cases this may be true (e.g. in
Tristram Shandy), privileging the narrator in this general way would
render stories with covert narrators or narratives without narrators
(drama, film) less prone to illusion, which is clearly not the case. We
may experience a single voice (including a narrator’s voice), yet a
whole world usually has a higher potential of experientiality, in particu-
lar if it is a narrative world with a high degree of tellability, and this
shows that the primary center of illusion in narratives is the story, i.e.
characters and events (Hühn → Event and Eventfulness), rather than
narration.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

In spite of the fact that aesthetic illusion is an extremely widespread

phenomenon in the reception of artistic representations, it has received
amazingly scant attention in research, leaving open several areas for
additional research. Investigations could focus on a broader systematic
search for historical evidence of aesthetic illusion, its nature and func-
tions in the various media (narrative as well as descriptive media), and
also on empirical testing of illusion-creating principles (3.3) by collect-
ing responses of contemporary readers to certain representations and
determining to what degree they reflect these principles. Cognitive psy-
chology, together with empirical enquiries, also seems to provide a
promising approach to aesthetic illusion, particularly if it is focused on
the link between immersion and emotion and the analogy between real-
life experience and the experience provided by illusionist works. Last
but not least, owing to the dependency of immersion on the semiotic
macro-frames of narrative and description as well as on the media and
the genres used, a desideratum for future research is certainly interdis-
ciplinary cooperation, not only between narratologists and cognitive
psychologists, but also, and closer to aesthetic concerns, between narra-
tology and drama theory, art history and film studies. For aesthetic illu-
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 285

sion is a transmedial, transmodal and transgeneric phenomenon (Wolf,

Bernhart & Mahler, eds. 2013), and if this is taken into account, a still
better understanding of it will be achieved, ultimately leading, perhaps,
to a general theory of aesthetic illusion that transcends individual gen-
res, modes of representation and media.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Alter, Robert (1975). Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley:
U of California P.
Anderson, Joseph D. (1996). The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cogni-
tive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.
Balter, Leon (2002). “Magic and the Aesthetic Illusion.” Journal of the American Psy-
choanalytical Society 50, 1163–1196.
Barthes, Roland (1968). “L’Effet de réel.” Communications No. 11, 84–89.
Bernhart, Walter (2013). “Aesthetic Illusion in Instrumental Music?”. Werner Wolf,
Walter Bernhart & Andreas Mahler, eds. (2013). Immersion and Distance: Aes-
thetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media. Studies in Intermediality 6. Am-
sterdam: Rodopi. 365–380.
Bleumer, Hartmut, ed., in collaboration with Susanne Kaplan (2012). Zeitschrift für
Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 167. Special volume Immersion im Mittelal-
ter.
Bortolussi, Marisa & Peter Dixon (2003). Psychonarratology: Foundations for the
Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Brinker, Menachem (1977/78). “Aesthetic Illusion.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 16, 191–196.
Cammack, Jocelyn (2007). “Cinema, Illusionism and Imaginative Perception”. Silke
Horstkotte, Karin Leonhard, eds. Seeing Perception. Newcastle; Cambridge
Scholars Publishing. 270–291.
Carruthers, Mary J. (1990). The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Cul-
ture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Cohen, Annabel J. (2001). “Music as a Source of Emotion in Film.” P. N. Juslin & J. A.
Sloboda (eds.). Music and Emotion: Theory and Research. Oxford: Oxford UP,
249–272.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor ([1804/05] 1960). Elements of Shakespearean Criticism, 2
vols. Ed. Th. Middleton Raysor. London: Dent.
– ([1817] 1965). Biographia Literaria. Ed. G. Watson. London: Dent.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Gerrig, Richard J. (1993). Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activ-
ities of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP.
Gombrich, Ernst H. (1960). Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation. Oxford: Phaidon.
286 Werner Wolf

Hedinger, Bärbel, ed. (2010). Täuschend echt: Illusion und Wirklichkeit in der Kunst.
Munich: Hirmer.
Home, Henry, Lord Kames ([1762] 1970). Elements of Criticism. Ed. R. Voitle. Hil-
desheim: Olms.
Hühn, Peter & Jens Kiefer (2005). The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies
in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Krüger, Klaus (2011). Unveiling the Invisible: Image and Aesthetic Illusion in Early
Modern Italy. New York: Zone Books.
Lobsien, Eckhard (1975). Theorie literarischer Illusionsbildung. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Mellmann, Katja (2002). “E-Motion: Being Moved by Fiction and Media? Notes on
Fictional Worlds, Virtual Contacts and the Reality of Emotions.” PsyArt: A Hy-
perlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. Article 020604
<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2002_mellmann01.shtml> (accessed March
23, 2006).
– (2006). “Literatur als emotionale Attrappe: Eine evolutionspsychologische Lö-
sung des ‘paradox of fiction’.” U. Klein et al. (eds.). Heuristiken der Literatur-
wissenschaft. Paderborn: Mentis, 145–166.
Miall, David S. (1995). “Anticipation and Feeling in Literary Response: A Neuropsy-
chological Perspective.” Poetics 23, 275–298.
Müller-Zettelmann, Eva (2000). Lyrik und Metalyrik: Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer
Selbstbespiegelung anhand von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutschsprachi-
gen Dichtkunst. Heidelberg: Winter.
Nell, Victor (1988). Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. New
Haven, CT: Yale UP.
Nünning, Ansgar (2000). “‘Great Wits Jump’: Die literarische Inszenierung von Erzäh-
lillusion als vernachlässigte Entwicklungslinie des englischen Romans von Lau-
rence Sterne bis Stevie Smith.” B. Reitz & E. Voigts-Virchow (eds.). Lineages of
the Novel: Essays in Honour of Raimund Borgmeier. Trier: WVT, 67–91.
– (2001). “Mimesis des Erzählens: Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsästhetik, Typo-
logie und Funktionsgeschichte des Akts des Erzählens und der Metanarration.” J.
Helbig (ed.). Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Wil-
helm Füger. Heidelberg: Winter, 13–47.
Oelmüller, Willi, ed. (1982). Kolloquium Kunst und Philosophie. Vol. 2: Ästhetischer
Schein. Paderborn: Schöningh.
Opdahl, Keith M. (2002). Emotion as Meaning: The Literary Case for How We Imag-
ine. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP.
Richart de Fournival (1957). Li Bestiaires d’Amours. Ed. Cesare Segré. Milan: Riccar-
di.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
– (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature
and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
– (2006). Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie (1999). Pourquoi la fiction? Paris: Seuil.
– & Ioana Vultur (2005). “Immersion.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Ency-
clopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 237–239.
 Illusion (Aesthetic) 287

Smuda, Manfred (1979). Der Gegenstand in der bildenden Kunst und Literatur: Typo-
logische Untersuchungen zur Theorie des ästhetischen Gegenstands. München:
Fink.
Strube, Werner (1971). Ästhetische Illusion: Ein kritischer Beitrag zur Geschichte der
Wirkungsästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts. PhD Diss. U of Bochum.
Walton, Kendall L. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Rep-
resentational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Wolf, Werner (1993a). Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzähl-
kunst. Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstören-
den Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
– (1993b). “Shakespeare und die Entstehung ästhetischer Illusion im englischen
Drama.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, n.s. 43, 279–301.
– (1998). “Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry?” Poetica 30, 251–289.
– (2004). “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction.” Style 38, 325–351.
– (2006). “Introduction: Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and
Other Media.” W. Wolf & W. Bernhart (eds.). Framing Borders in Literature and
Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–40.
– Walter Bernhart & Andreas Mahler, eds. (2013). Immersion and Distance: Aes-
thetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media. Studies in Intermediality 6. Am-
sterdam: Rodopi.
Zwaan, Rolf A. (1999). “Situation Models: The Mental Leap into Imagined Worlds.”
Current Directions in Psychological Science 8, 15–18.

5.2 Further Reading

Burwick, Frederick & Walter Pape, eds. (1990). Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and
Historical Approaches. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Grabes, Herbert (1978). “Wie aus Sätzen Personen werden ... Über die Erforschung
literarischer Figuren.” Poetica 10, 405–428.
Grau, Oliver (2003). Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge: MIT P.
Pape, Walter & Frederick Burwick, eds. (1995). Perception and Appearance in Litera-
ture, Culture and the Arts. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Strube, Werner (1976). “Illusion.” J. Ritter & K. Gründer (eds.). Historisches Wörter-
buch der Philosophie. Darmstadt: WBG, vol. 4, 204–215.
Walsh, Dorothy (1983). “The Non-Delusive Illusion of Literary Art.” The British Jour-
nal of Aesthetics 23, 53–60.
Wolf, Werner (2008). “Is Aesthetic Illusion ‘illusion référentielle’? ‘Immersion’ and its
Relationship to Fictionality and Factuality.” Journal of Literary Theory 2.1, 99–
126, 171–173.
 Implied Author
Wolf Schmid

1 Definition

The concept of implied author refers to the author-image evoked by a

work and constituted by the stylistic, ideological, and aesthetic proper-
ties for which indexical signs can be found in the text. Thus, the im-
plied author has an objective and a subjective side: it is grounded in the
indexes of the text, but these indexes are perceived and evaluated dif-
ferently by each individual reader. We have the implied author in mind
when we say that each and every cultural product contains an image of
its maker. The implied author is therefore not a category specific to
verbal narration; nevertheless, it is most often discussed in relation to
verbal texts, particularly in narratological contexts.

2 Explication

Introduced by Booth in 1961 in connection with his conceptualization

of the unreliable narrator (Shen → Unreliability; Yacobi 1981), the im-
plied author has become a widespread term for a concept referring to
the author evoked by, but not represented in a work. The concept ap-
pears in various forms. Many users treat it as a term for an entity posi-
tioned between the real author and the fictive narrator in the communi-
cation structure of narrative works. Those adopting a critical stance, on
the other hand, use it as a term for a reader- generated construct without
an equivalent pragmatic role in the narrative work. In neither of these
usages is it claimed that authors have the intention of creating an image
of themselves in their works. Instead, the image is understood as one of
the by-products that, in the sense of Bühler’s expressive function of
language ([1934] 2011), necessarily accompanies each and every sym-
bolic representation. Any of the acts that produce a work can function
as an indexical sign bearing this indirect form of self-expression. In
particular, these acts include the fabrication of a represented world; the
invention of a story with situations, characters, and actions; the selec-
 Implied Author 289

tion of a particular action logic with a more or less pronounced world-

view; the deployment of a narrator and his or her perspective; the trans-
formation of the story into a narrative with the aid of techniques such as
flattening simultaneous events into a linear progression and rearranging
the order of episodes; and finally, the presentation of the narrative in
particular linguistic (or visual) forms.
Some of these acts can also serve as indexical signs expressing the
narrator. The question of to which of the two entities the indexes should
be applied is a hermeneutical problem which can be answered only with
very general remarks. The representation of a story and of a narrator to
present it are a matter for the author. The selection of the elements of
the happenings, their combination into a story, their evaluation and
naming are operations that fall into the ambit of the narrator, who is
revealed in them. All acts that express the narrator also function ulti-
mately as indexes for the author, whose creation the narrator is.
The concept of implied author has provoked questions above all be-
cause it has two dissimilar aspects. On the one hand, it has an objective
component: the implied author is seen as a hypostasis of the work’s
structure. On the other hand, it has a subjective component relating to
reception: the implied author is seen as a product of the reader’s mean-
ing-making activity. The relative importance of these two aspects varies
depending on how the concept is used: essentialists insist on the im-
portance of the work’s structure in defining the implied author, whereas
constructivists highlight the role played by the freedom of interpreta-
tion. At any rate, it must be remembered that, like the readings of dif-
ferent recipients, the various interpretations of a single reader are each
associated with a different implied author. Each single reading recon-
structs its author. Depending on the function a work is believed to have
had according to a given reading, the implied author will be recon-
structed as having predominantly aesthetic, practical, or ideological
intentions.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Russian Formalism, Czech and Polish Structuralism

The concept of the implied author was first formulated systematically

against the background of Russian formalism. The formalist Tynjanov
([1927] 1971: 75) coined the term “literary personality,” which he used
to refer to a work’s internal abstract authorial entity. Vinogradov, a
scholar of language and style with links to the formalist movement, be-
290 Wolf Schmid

gan developing the concept of the author’s image (obraz avtora) in

1926 (Čudakov 1992: 237–242; Gölz 2009). He later defined this im-
age as “the concentrated embodiment of the essence of the work,” as
“drawing together the entire system of the linguistic structures of the
characters in their correlation with the narrator or narrators, and thereby
being the conceptual stylistic centre, the focus of the whole” (Vinogra-
dov 1971: 118).
In the 1970s, Russian thought on the idea of the author in the text
was taken further by Korman (Rymar’ & Skobelev 1994: 60–102).
Drawing on Vinogradov’s concept of the author’s image and Baxtin’s
theory of dialogic interaction between different evaluative positions,
Korman (1977) developed a method he described as “systemically sub-
ject-based.” At its center lies the study of the author as the “conscious-
ness of the work.” Korman’s approach differs from the theory of his
predecessors in two ways. In Vinogradov’s writings, the author’s image
is described stylistically and presented as the product obtained when the
different styles brought into play in a work are drawn together; Kor-
man, on the other hand, concentrates primarily on the relations between
the various centers of consciousness in the work. And whereas Baxtin’s
interest in the problem of the author’s image is primarily philosophical
and aesthetic in nature, Korman’s deliberations are dominated by poet-
ics. For Korman, the author in the work, which he calls the “conceived
author,” is realized “in the correlation of all the constituent textual ele-
ments of the work in question with its subjects of speech, i.e. those sub-
jects to whom the text is attributed, and the subjects of consciousness,
i.e. those subjects whose consciousnesses are expressed in the text”
(120).
In the context of Czech structuralism, Mukařovský (1937: 353)
spoke of the author in the work as an “abstract subject that, contained in
the structure of the work, is merely a point from which it is possible to
survey the entire work at a glance.” In any given work, Mukařovský
adds, it is possible to find indications pointing to the presence of this
abstract subject, which must never be identified with an actual individ-
ual such as the author or the recipient. He writes that the subject of the
work “in its abstraction […] merely makes it possible to project these
personalities into the internal structure of the work” (353).
Taking the ideas of his teacher as his starting point, the second-
generation Czech structuralist Červenka suggested that the “subject of
the work,” or “personality” (the entity that Mukařovský called the “ab-
stract subject”) is the “signified,” the “aesthetic object” of the literary
work, the work itself being treated as an index in the Peircean sense
(Červenka [1969] 1978). For Červenka, the “personality” thus defined
 Implied Author 291

embodies the principle by which all the semantic levels of the work are
dynamically united, without forcing us to suppress the inner richness
and personal color that points back to the concrete author.
At the beginning of Polish research on the subject of the work we
find Sławiński (1966, [1967] 1975), whose writings reflect the ideas of
Vinogradov and Mukařovský. Where Vinogradov introduces the con-
cept of the “author’s image,” Sławiński refers to the “subject of the cre-
ative acts” or the “maker of the rules of speech.” Balcerzan (1968) uses
the term “internal author” to refer to the same entity. “Subject of the
work” is the name given to the work’s authorial entity in the framework
of literary communication outlined by Okopień-Sławińska (1971).
Fieguth (1975: 16), Okopień-Sławińska’s German translator and com-
mentator, describes it as the “subject of the use of literary rules in the
work.”

3.2 Approaches in the West

In Western narratology, the introduction of the implied author concept

was linked to work on the notion of the unreliable narrator, in other
words, the axiological disconnection of the narrator from the horizon of
values against which a work operates. The paradigmatic form of the
concept was developed by Booth ([1961] 1983), an American literary
scholar belonging to the Chicago School (Kindt & Müller 1999, 2006a,
2006b). Since Flaubert and in the Anglo-American sphere, particularly
with Henry James, there had existed a view according to which authors
should be objective, that is to say neutral and dispassionate. Booth, in
contrast, underlined the inescapable subjectivity of the author: “As he
writes, [the real author] creates not simply an ideal, impersonal ‘man in
general’, but an implied version of ‘himself’ that is different from the
implied authors we meet in other men’s works. […] the picture the
reader gets of his presence is one of the author’s most important effects.
However impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably con-
struct a picture of the [author] who writes in this manner” (Booth
[1961] 1983: 70–71). These words have been understood by some as
referring to a self-image intentionally created by the author. However,
it is more likely that Booth’s rather imprecise formulation was meant to
capture the idea that the creator of every product is inevitably and in-
voluntarily represented through the indexical properties inherent in the
product.
According to Booth, the implied author embodies the work’s “core
norms and choices” (74). Booth, who subscribed to the criticism of the
“intentional fallacy” presented by Wimsatt and Beardsley ([1946]
292 Wolf Schmid

1976), hoped to sidestep two tenets of the New Criticism with the help
of the implied author concept: the doctrine of autonomy and insistence
on the need to concentrate solely on the work itself. As Booth (1968:
112–113) objected, the New Criticism’s fight against a string of “falla-
cies” and “heresies” served to rule out not just the author but also the
audience, the “world of ideas and beliefs,” and even “the narrative in-
terest” itself. The concept of authorship in the work was meant to pro-
vide a way around these obstacles so as to make it possible to talk about
a work’s meaning and intention without falling afoul of the criminal
heresies.
Booth’s approach has subsequently been taken up and refined on
many occasions (cf. in particular Iser [1972] 1974; Chatman 1978: 147–
149; Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002: 87–88). Equivalent concepts have
also been introduced, some closely associated with Booth’s, others less
so. Eco (1979) speaks of the “model author,” which he treats as an inter-
pretive hypothesis of the empirical reader, and Easthope (1983: 30–72)
draws on the linguistic work of Benveniste in suggesting the term “sub-
ject of enunciation.” Building on the Slavic origins of the concept,
Schmid (1973) introduced the term “abstract author” (taken up by, e.g.,
Link 1976: 40; Lintvelt [1981] 1989: 17–22; Hoek 1981), which he has
subsequently defended against criticism (Schmid 1986: 300–306; cf. also
the revision in Schmid [2005] 2008: 45–64; 2010: 36–51).

3.3 The Implied Author Debate

The concept of the implied author has given rise to heated debate.
Hempfer (1977: 10) passed categorical judgment over the concepts of
the implied (in his words “implizit,” i.e. “implicit”) author and reader,
writing that the two entities “not only seem to be of no theoretical use
but also obscure the real fundamental distinction, that between the
speech situation in the text and that outside it.” Over two decades later,
Zipfel (2001: 120) presented a similar indictment of the implied author,
condemning the concept as “superfluous to narrative theory,” “hope-
lessly vague,” and “terminologically imprecise.” Bal has established
herself as a bitter opponent of both Booth’s implied author and
Schmid’s abstract author. These “superfluous” concepts (1981a: 208–
209), she believes, have fostered the misguided practice of isolating
authors from the ideologies of their works. The implied author, she be-
lieves, is a deceptive notion that promised to account for the ideology
of the text. “This would have made it possible to condemn a text with-
out condemning its author and vice versa—a very attractive proposition
to the autonomists of the ’60s” (1981b: 42).
 Implied Author 293

More balanced criticism has been put forward in many forms. The
objections raised can be summarized as follows: (a) unlike the fictive
narrator, the implied author is not a pragmatic agent but a semantic en-
tity (Nünning 1989: 33, 1993: 9); (b) the implied author is no more than
a reader-created construct (Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002: 87; Toolan
[1988] 2001: 64) and as such should not be personified (Nünning 1989:
31–32); (c) despite repeated warnings against an overly anthropo-
morphic understanding of the implied author, Chatman (1978: 151)
puts forward a model in which the implied author functions as a partic-
ipant in communication—which is, according to Rimmon-Kenan
([1983] 2002: 89), precisely what the implied author is not; (d) in so far
as it involves a semantic rather than a structural phenomenon, the con-
cept of the implied author belongs to the poetics of interpretation rather
than the poetics of narration (Diengott 1993: 189); (e) Booth and those
who have used the concept after him have not shown how to identify
the implied author of any given text (Kindt & Müller 2006b: 167–168).
These criticisms are perfectly legitimate, but they are not sufficient
to justify excluding the implied author from the attention of narratolo-
gy. Many critics continue to use the concept, clearly because no better
term can be found for expressing that authorial element whose presence
is inferred in a work.
It is also striking that those who advocate abandoning the implied
author have put forward few convincing alternatives. Nünning, e.g.,
who believes that it is “terminologically imprecise,” “theoretically in-
adequate,” and “unusable in practice,” suggests replacing it with the
“totality of all the formal and structural relations in a text” (1989: 36).
In a chapter “In Defense of the Implied Author,” Chatman (1990: 74–
89) suggests a series of alternatives for readers uneasy with the term
implied author: “text implication”; “text instance”; “text design”; or
simply “text intent.” Finally, Kindt and Müller (1999: 285–286) identi-
fy two courses of action. We should, they suggest, either replace the
term implied author with that of “author” itself (which would attract
familiar objections from anti-intentionalistic quarters); or, if a non-
intentiona-listic concept of meaning is to be retained, we should speak
instead of “text intention.” (Since texts as such do not have intentions,
the latter term brings with it an undesirable metonymic shift from mak-
er to product.)
The case of Genette sheds light on the double-sided view of the im-
plied author concept held by many theorists. Genette did not cover the
implied author in his Narrative Discourse ([1972] 1980), which led to a
certain amount of criticism (e.g., Rimmon 1976: 58; Bronzwaer 1978:
3); he then devoted an entire chapter to it in Narrative Discourse Revi-
294 Wolf Schmid

sited ([1983] 1988: 135–154). Detailed analysis in the latter work leads
to a conclusion that is not at all unfavorable to the implied author. Ge-
nette observes first that, because it is not specific to the récit, the auteur
impliqué is not the concern of narratology. His answer to the question
“is the implied author a necessary and (therefore) valid agent between
the narrator and the real author?” (139; original emphasis) is ambiva-
lent. The implied author, he says, is clearly not an actual agent, but is
conceivably an ideal agent: “the implied author is everything the text
lets us know about the author” (148). But we should not, Genette
warns, turn this “idea of the author” into a narrative agent. This places
Genette in a position not so different from that of the proponents of
“full-blown models” of narrative communication to which he refers
(Schmid 1973; Chatman 1978; Bronzwaer 1978; Hoek 1981; Lintvelt
[1981]1989), none of whom intended to make the implied author a nar-
rative agent.
That the debate over the existence and utility of the concept of the
implied author has not yet come to a standstill is attested by a special
issue of Style (Vol. 45, 2011) Implied Author: Back from the Grave or
Simply Dead Again? This question was formulated by Richardson who,
examining cases in which “the values, sensibility or beliefs of the im-
plied author differ radically from those of the actual author” (2011: 6),
comes to three conclusions: 1) “the implied author does not communi-
cate”; 2) “we can predicate values of an inferred author based on the
material of a given text”; 3) “the implied author remains a very useful
heuristic construct” (7). Shen (2011) also argues in favor of the con-
cept, making clear its relevance and significance in today’s critical con-
text. Ryan (2011) proposes a critique of the three functions assigned to
the implied author: “1) The implied author is a necessary parameter in
the communicative model of literary narrative fiction. 2) The implied
author is a design principle, responsible for the narrative techniques and
the plot of the text. 3) The implied author is the source of the norms and
values communicated by the text.” Her conclusion is that if an author
figure reveals itself through a text, it is as the manifestation of a real
person that this figure attracts the interest of the reader. Lanser (2011)
formulates “An Agnostic’s Manifesto” containing eight propositions
that are meant to “speak to theorists on both sides of the implied author
divide” (153). She concludes by calling for an empirical inquiry into
whether and how belief in an implied author might affect the poetic or
hermeneutic enterprise: “We will learn more about implied authorship
by testing out how readers process a sense of the author than by contin-
ued debate” (158).
 Implied Author 295

3.4 Towards an Impartial Definition

The implied author can be defined as one of the correlates of the index-
ical signs in a text that a recipient, depending on his or her conception
of the work’s intention, may interpret as referring to the author of that
text. These signs mark out a specific world-view and aesthetic stand-
point. The implied author is not an intentional creation of the concrete
author and differs categorically in this respect from the narrator, who is
always an implicitly, or even explicitly, represented entity. The implied
author belongs to a different level of the work; the implied author
stands for the principle behind the fabrication of a narrator and the rep-
resented world in its entirety, the principle behind the composition of
the work (note here Hühn’s “subject of composition” [1995: 5], a de-
velopment of Easthope’s “subject of enunciation” [1983]). The implied
author has no voice of its own, no text. Its word is the entire text with
all its levels. Its position is defined by both ideological and aesthetic
norms.
The implied author has only a virtual existence in the work and can
be grasped only by turning to the traces left behind in the work by the
creative acts of production, taking concrete shape only with the help of
the reader. The implied author is a construct formed by the reader on
the basis of his or her reading of the work. If the process of construction
is not to simply confirm to the meanings that readers want to find in the
first place, it must be based on the evidence in the text and the con-
straints this places on the freedom of interpretation. It would therefore
be more appropriate to speak of “reconstruction” instead of “construc-
tion.”
The implied authors of various works by a single concrete author
display certain common features and thereby constitute what we might
call an œuvre author, a stereotype that Booth (1979: 270) refers to as a
“career author.” There are also more general author stereotypes that re-
late not to an œuvre but to literary schools, stylistic currents, periods,
and genres.
Contrary to the impression given by the term “author’s image,” the
relation between the implied author and the real author should not be
pictured in such a way that the former becomes a reflection or copy of
the latter. And despite the connotations of the German impliziter Autor
(implicit author, which brings with it a shift from the reception-based
orientation of implied to an ontologizing concept), the implied author
cannot be modeled as the mouthpiece of the real author. It is not unusu-
al for authors to experiment with their world-views and put their beliefs
to the test in their works. In some cases, authors use their works to de-
296 Wolf Schmid

pict possibilities that cannot be realized in the context of their real-life

existence, adopting in the process standpoints on certain issues that they
could not or would not wish to adopt in reality. In such cases, the im-
plied author can be more radical than the real author ever really was or,
more circumspectly, than we imagine him or her to have been on the
basis of the evidence available. Such radicalization of the implied au-
thor is characteristic, e.g., of Tolstoj’s late works. The late Tolstoj was
much less convinced by many of his ideas than his implied authors; the
latter embodied, and took to extremes, one particular dimension of Tol-
stoj’s thought. Conversely, it is also possible for the ideological hori-
zons of the implied author to be broader than the more or less markedly
ideologically constrained ones of the real author. An example of this is
Dostoevskij, who in his late novels developed a remarkable understand-
ing of ideologies that he vehemently attacked as a journalist.
Dostoevskij’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, shows another
phenomenon, a split of the implied author: whereas ‘Dostoevskij I’ de-
signs the novel as a modern theodicy, ‘Dostoevskij II’ undermines this
intention by a subliminal critique of God. The whole novel is character-
ized by a restless oscillation between the “Pro” of the intending and
controlling Dostoevskij I and the “Contra” of its subversive antagonist
Dostoevskij II.

3.5 Relevance to Narratology

Why should a semantic entity that is neither a pragmatic participant in

communication nor a specific component of the narrative work be the
concern of narratology at all? Recall here Rimmon (1976: 58), who
points out that “without the implied author it is difficult to analyze the
‘norms’ of the text, especially when they differ from those of the narra-
tor.” Similarly, Bronzwaer (1978: 3) notes that “we need an instance
that calls the extradiegetic narrator into existence, which is responsible
for him in the same way as he is responsible for the diegesis.” Chatman
(1990: 76) points out another advantage of the concept when he writes
that “positing an implied author inhibits the overhasty assumption that
the reader has direct access through the fictional text to the real author’s
intentions and ideology.”
The concept of the implied author is particularly useful in textual in-
terpretation because it helps us describe the layered process by which
meaning is generated. The existence of the implied author, not part of
the represented world but nonetheless part of the work, casts a shadow
over the narrator, who often appears as master of the situation and
seems to have control over the semantic order of the work. The pres-
 Implied Author 297

ence of the implied author highlights the fact that narrators, their texts,
and the meanings expressed in them are all represented. Only on the
level of the implied author do these meanings acquire their ultimate
semantic intention. The presence of the implied author in the work,
above the characters and the narrator and their associated levels of
meaning, establishes a new semantic level arching over the whole
work: the authorial level.

4 Topics for Further Research

(a) Where systematic considerations and practical applications are con-

cerned, there is a pressing need to identify the indexical signs that refer
to the implied author, and to distinguish between author- and narrator-
specific indexes. (b) The manifestation of the implied author in differ-
ent periods, cultural spheres, text types, and genres has yet to be exam-
ined in detail. (c) The presence of the implied author in non-verbal nar-
ratives is an important issue.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Bal, Mieke (1981a). “The Laughing Mice, or: on Focalisation.” Poetics Today 2, 202–
210.
– (1981b). “Notes on Narrative Embedding.” Poetics Today 2, 41–59.
Balcerzan, Edward (1968). “Styl i poetyka twórczości dwujęzycznej Brunona Jasiński-
ego.” Z zagadnień teorii przekładu. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolin-
skich, 14–16.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago UP.
– (1968). “‘The Rhetoric of Fiction’ and the Poetics of Fictions.” Novel: A Forum
on Fiction 1, 105–117.
– (1979). Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago:
Chicago UP.
Bronzwaer, Wilhelmus J. M. (1978). “Implied Author, Extradiegetic Narrator and Pub-
lic Reader.” Neophilologus 62, 1–18.
Bühler, Karl ([1934] 2011). Theory of Language. The Representational Function of
Language. Tr. by D. F. Goodwin. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Červenka, Miroslav ([1969] 1978). “Das literarische Werk als Zeichen.” Der
Bedeutungsaufbau des literarischen Werks. München: Fink, 163–183.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
298 Wolf Schmid

– (1990). Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca:
Cornell UP.
Čudakov, Aleksandr (1992). “V. V. Vinogradov i ego teorija poėtiki.” Slo-
vo―vešč’―mir. Moskva: Sovremennyj pisatel’, 219–264.
Diengott, Nilli (1993). “Implied Author, Motivation and Theme and Their Problematic
Status.” Orbis Litterarum 48, 181–193.
Easthope, Antony (1983). Poetry as Discourse. London: Methuen.
Eco, Umberto (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Fieguth, Rolf (1975). “Einleitung.” R. Fieguth (ed.). Literarische Kommunikation.
Kronberg: Scriptor, 9–22.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Gölz, Christine (2009). “Autortheorien im slavischen Funktionalismus.” W. Schmid
(ed.). Slavische Narratologie. Russische und tschechische Ansätze. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 187–237.
Hempfer, Klaus W. (1977). “Zur pragmatischen Fundierung der Texttypologie.” W.
Hinck (ed.). Textsortenlehre – Gattungsgeschichte. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer,
1–26.
Hoek, Leo H. (1981). La marque du titre. La Haye: Mouton.
Hühn, Peter (1995). Geschichte der englischen Lyrik, vol. 1. Tübingen: Francke.
Iser, Wolfgang ([1972] 1974). The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in
Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Kindt, Tom & Hans-Harald Müller (1999). “Der implizite Autor. Zur Explikation und
Verwendung eines umstrittenen Begriffs.” F. Jannidis et al. (eds.). Rückkehr des
Autors. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 273–287.
– (2006a). The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy. Berlin: de Gruyter.
– (2006b). “Der implizite Autor. Zur Karriere und Kritik eines Begriffs zwischen
Narratologie und Interpretationstheorie.” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 48, 163–
190.
Korman, Boris (1977). “O celostnosti literaturnogo proizvedenija.” Izbrannye trudy po
teorii i istorii literatury. Iževsk: Izd. Udmurtskogo un-ta, 119–128.
Lanser, Susan (2011). “The Implied Author: An Agnostic’s Manifesto.” Style 45, 153–
160.
Link, Hannelore (1976). Rezeptionsforschung. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Lintvelt, Jaap ([1981] 1989). Essai de typologie narrative. Le “point de vue”. Théorie
et analyse. Paris: Corti.
Mukařovský, Jan (1937). “L’individu dans l’art.” Deuxième congrès international
d’esthétique et de la science de l’art. Paris: F. Alcan, vol. 1, 349–354.
Nünning, Ansgar (1989). Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der
erzählerischen Vermittlung. Trier: WVT.
– (1993). “Renaissance eines anthropomorphisierten Passepartouts oder Nachruf
auf ein literaturkritisches Phantom? Überlegungen und Alternativen zum Konzept
des ‘implied author’.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte 67, 1–25.
 Implied Author 299

Okopień-Sławińska, Alexandra ([1971] 1975). “Die personalen Relationen in der litera-

rischen Kommunikation.” R. Fieguth (ed.). Literarische Kommunikation. Kron-
berg: Scriptor, 127–147.
Richardson, Brian (2011). “Introduction. Implied Author: Back from the Grave or
Simply Dead Again?” Style 45, 1–10.
Rimmon, Shlomith (1976). “A Comprehensive Theory of Narrative: Genette’s Figures
III and the Structuralist Study of Fiction.” PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics
and Theory of Literature 1, 33–62.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Methuen.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2011). “Meaning, Intent, and the Implied Author.” Style 45, 29–47.
Rymar’, Nikolaj & Vladislav Skobelev (1994). Teorija avtora i problema chud-
ožestvennoj dejatel’nosti. Voronež: Logos-Trast.
Schmid, Wolf (1973). Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. Amsterdam:
Grüner.
– (1986). “Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage. Eine Antwort an die Kritiker.” W.
Schmid. Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. Amsterdam: Grüner,
299–318.
– ([2005] 2008). Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin: de Gruyter.
– (2010). Narratology. An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Shen, Dan (2011). “What is the Implied Author?” Style 45, 80–98.
Sławiński, Janusz (1966). “O kategorii podmiotu lirycznego. Tezy referatu.” J.
Trzynadłowski (ed.). Wierz i poezja. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Osso-
linskich, 55–62.
– ([1967] 1975). “Die Semantik der narrativen Äußerung.” Literatur als System und
Prozeß. München: Nymphenburger, 81–109.
Toolan, Michael J. ([1988] 2001). Narrative. A Critical Linguistic Introduction. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Tynjanov, Jurij ([1927] 1971). “On Literary Evolution.” L. Matejka & K. Pomorska
(eds.). Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Cam-
bridge: MIT P, 66–78.
Vinogradov, Viktor (1971). “Problema obraza avtora v chudožestvennoj literature.” O
teorii chudožestvennoj reči. Moskva: Izd. Vysšaja škola, 105–211.
Wimsatt, William K. & Monroe C. Beardsley ([1946] 1976). “The Intentional Fallacy.”
D. Newton-de Molina (ed.). On Literary Intention. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1–
13.
Yacobi, Tamar (1981). “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.” Poetics
Today 2, 113–126.
Zipfel, Frank (2001). Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Berlin: Schmidt.
300 Wolf Schmid

5.2 Further Reading

Booth, Wayne C. (2005). “Resurrection of the Implied Author. Why Bother?” J. Phelan
& P. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell,
75–88.
Díaz Arenas, Angel (1986). Introduccion y Metodología de la Instancia del Au-
tor/Lector y del Autor/Lector abstracto-implícito. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger.
Kahrmann, Cordula et al. ([1977] 1996). Erzähltextanalyse. Weinheim: Beltz.
Schmid, Wolf (2008). “Zum ‘Autor im Text’ – eine Replik auf Willem Weststeijn am
Beispiel Dostoevskijs.” E. de Haard et al. (eds.). Literature and Beyond. Fest-
schrift for Willem G. Weststeijn on the Occasion of his 65. Birthday. Amsterdam:
Pegasus, 701–712.
Schönert, Jörg (1999). “Empirischer Autor, Impliziter Autor und Lyrisches Ich.” F.
Jannidis et al. (eds.). Rückkehr des Autors. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 289–294.
Weststeijn, Willem (1984). “Author and Implied Author. Some Notes on the Author in
the Text.” J. J. van Baak (ed. ). Signs of Friendship. To Honour A.G.F van Holk,
Slavist, Linguist, Semiotician. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 553–568.
 Implied Reader
Wolf Schmid

1 Definition

The term “implied reader,” coined by Booth ([1961] 1983) as a coun-

terpart of the implied author (Schmid → Implied Author), designates
the image of the recipient that the author had while writing or, more
accurately, the author’s image of the recipient that is fixed and objecti-
fied in the text by specific indexical signs. Alternative terms are
Prince’s (1973: 180) “lecteur virtuel” and Schmid’s ([1973] 1986: 23–
25) “abstrakter Leser.”

2 Explication

The implied reader is a function of the work, even though it is not rep-
resented in the work. An “intended reader” (in the terminology of Link
1976: 28 and of Grimm 1977: 38–39), who is not fixed in the text but
exists merely in the imagination of the author and who can be recon-
structed only with the latter’s statements or extra-textual information,
does not form a part of the work. Such a reader belongs exclusively to
the sphere of the real author, in whose imagination he or she exists.
The relationship between implied author and implied reader is not a
symmetrical one, for there is no symmetry between the ways in which
the two implied entities are formed. The implied reader is ultimately
one of the attributes of the concrete reader’s reconstructed implied au-
thor. It follows that the implied reader is no less dependent on the read-
er’s individual acts of reading, understanding, and reconstructing than
the implied author whose attribute it is (Schmid 2010: 51–52).
302 Wolf Schmid

3 Aspects of the Concept and History of its Study

3.1 Implied Reader as Presumed Addressee and Ideal Recipient

Two manifestations of the reconstructed implied reader must be distin-

guished on the basis of the functions they can be thought to have (cf.
Schmid 1974: 407; Lintvelt [1981] 1989: 18).
First, the implied reader can function as a presumed addressee to
whom the work is directed and whose linguistic codes, ideological
norms, and aesthetic ideas must be taken into account if the work is to
be understood. In this function, the implied reader is the bearer of the
codes and norms presumed in the readership. The addressee of Dosto-
evskij’s later novels, e.g., is conceptualized as a reader who can not
only read Russian and who knows how to read a novel, but who also
has a command of all the language’s registers, possesses a developed
sense for the stylistic expression of evaluative positions, has at his or
her disposal a good knowledge of Russian literature and a high level of
intertextual competence, knows the dominant philosophical positions of
the century, has an overview of the history of ideas in Europe and is
familiar with the social discourses of the period.
Of course, authors may very well err in the assumptions they make
about the norms and abilities of their readerships. They may be mistak-
en about the prevailing philosophical and ideological positions of their
contemporaries, overestimate the ability of their readers to decode met-
aphorical statements or overestimate the public’s understanding of aes-
thetic innovation. It is not unusual for authors to fail in addressing the
intended public due to being mistaken about the language, values and
norms of that public or to being unable to encode their message corre-
spondingly.
Second, the abstract reader functions as an image of the ideal recipi-
ent who understands the work in a way that optimally matches its struc-
ture and adopts the interpretive position and aesthetic standpoint put
forward by the work. Booth ([1961] 1983: 137–144) called this entity
the “postulated reader,” Prince (1973: 180) the “lecteur idéal,” distin-
guishing it both from the “lecteur virtuel” and the “narrataire” (Schmid
→ Narratee). The attitude of the ideal recipient, his relation to the
norms and values of the fictive entities, are more or less specified by
the acts of creation objectified in the work. If contradictory evaluative
positions are found in a work, the ideal recipient will identify with the
entity that is highest in the hierarchy. The position of the ideal recipient
is thus more or less pre-determined by the work; the degree of ideologi-
cal certainty, however, varies from author to author. Whereas works
 Implied Reader 303

with a message demand a specific response, the spectrum of readings

permitted by the work is wider with experimental or questioning au-
thors. With Tolstoj, the spectrum of positions permitted by the work is
undoubtedly narrower than, e.g., with Čexov.
The difference between the two functions, the presumed addressee
and the ideal recipient, is all the more relevant the more specific the
work’s ideology is and the more it calls for a way of thinking that does
not correspond to what is generally accepted in a society. In Tolstoj’s
later work, the ideal reader is clearly very distant from the presumed
addressee. Whereas the latter is conceptualized with very general char-
acteristics—such as command of the Russian language, knowledge of
the social norms of the late 19th century and the ability to read a liter-
ary work—the former is distinguished by a series of specific idiosyn-
crasies and Tolstojan evaluative positions.
The concept of the implied reader as an ideal recipient (as put for-
ward in Schmid 1971, [1973] 1986) has encountered objections. In his
workbooks of the 1960s and 1970s, Baxtin, commenting on an excerpt
from Schmid (1971), expressed criticism of the concept of the ideal
recipient current in literary studies at the time: “Today’s literary schol-
ars (in the majority structuralists) usually define the listener inherent to
the work as an all-understanding ideal listener, and as such he has been
postulated in the work. Naturally, this is not the empirical listener and
not the psychological idea, the image of the listener in the soul of the
author. It is, rather, an abstract ideal construction. It is the counterpart
of an equally abstract ideal author. In this conception, the ideal listener
is a mirror image who is the equivalent of the author, which duplicates
him or her” (Baxtin 2002: 427). Baxtin criticizes the idea that the ideal
reader conceptualized in this way does not contribute anything of him-
self, anything new, to the work and that he lacks “otherness,” a prereq-
uisite of the author’s “surplus” (427–428).
Of course, the concept of the implied reader as an ideal recipient
does not mean that an ideal meaning must be contained in the work and
has only to be correctly grasped by the reader. The concept does not
mean in any way that the concrete reader’s freedom is constrained, nor
does it require any kind of presuppositions with regard to the legitima-
cy of the meanings actually assigned to the work, as critics of the con-
cept (e.g., Lintvelt [1981] 1989: 18; van der Eng 1984: 126–127) have
argued. The co-creative activity of the recipient can take on a degree
and pursue a direction that is not provided in the work. Readings that
fail to achieve or that even deliberately resist a reception designed in
the work may well broaden the work’s meaning. However, it must be
conceded that every work contains, to a greater or lesser degree of am-
304 Wolf Schmid

biguity, signs pointing to its ideal reading. This ideal reading is seldom
a specific meaning. Only in rare cases does it consist of a concrete as-
cription of meaning. As a rule, the ideal reception comprises a variable
spectrum of functional attitudes, individual concretizations and subjec-
tive ascriptions of meaning. In extreme cases, the ideal reading can ex-
ist precisely as a contradiction to any predetermined attitude or seem-
ingly overt meaning if an author demands of his or her reader the
rebuttal of evaluative positions suggested by the narrator. Examples are
Tolstoj’s “Kreutzer Sonata” and Dostoevskij’s Notes from the Under-
ground, narrative monologues proclaiming provocative positions whose
relativization or refutation is required from the ideal recipient. A fa-
mous example from American literature of a narration to be refuted is
Henry James’ “The Figure in the Carpet” (cf. Iser [1976] 1978, 3–10).
Essentially, any unreliable narration (Shen → Unreliability) establishes
an ideal reader who corrects the narrator’s story.

3.2 Implied Reader as Presumed Addressee vs. Fictive Addressee

The implied reader as author’s addressee is to be sharply distinguished

from the fictive narrator’s addressee, called “narratee” (Prince 1971;
1985), “fictive reader” (Schmid [1973] 1986: 28) or, more accurately,
“fictive addressee” (Schmid 2007: 175–180). Implied reader and fictive
addressee never coincide, as is assumed by Genette ([1972] 1980), who
identifies the “extradiegetic narratee” (i.e., the addressee addressed by
an “extradiegetic narrator”) with the implied reader. Genette later
([1983] 1988: 138) embraces this supposed coincidence as a small sim-
plifying measure “to the delight of our master Ockham.” But this econ-
omy is only possible on the basis of Genette’s system, where the extra-
diegetic narrator does not appear as a fictive entity, but rather takes the
place of the absent implied author. Genette ([1983] 1988: 132–133)
states: “the extradiegetic narrator merges totally with the author, whom
I shall not call ‘implied’, as people too often do, but rather entirely ex-
plicit and declared.” For Bal (1977: 179), distinguishing implied and
fictive reader is “semiotically insignificant,” while the Russian linguist
Padučeva (1996: 216), referring to Toolan ([1988] 2001), explains that
there is no need for such a duplication: “The narrator’s addressee is not
a representative of the reader but the reader himself.”
Of course, the more closely the fictive narrator is associated with the
implied author, the more difficult it is to separate clearly the ideological
positions of the fictive reader and implied reader. Even so, their differ-
ence remains absolutely in force. The border between the fictive world,
to which every narrator belongs, no matter how neutrally, objectively or
 Implied Reader 305

“Olympic” s/he may be constituted, and the reality to which, for all his
or her virtuality, the implied reader belongs cannot be crossed, barring
some structural paradox such as metalepsis (Pier → Metalepsis).
There is yet another essential difference to be considered between
the fictive addressee and the implied reader as ideal recipient. Works
that are predisposed to function in a predominantly aesthetic way call
for a reading which is sensitive to the demands of this predisposition:
such works accomplish this by presupposing an ideal recipient who
adopts an aesthetic attitude towards the text. By adopting an aesthetic
attitude, the reader will not react to the work as s/he would to a situa-
tion in everyday life, but rather regard the work’s fabric and structure
and, notwithstanding any ethical or ideological reactions to the story,
derive pleasure from the interplay of the narrative levels (Pier → Narra-
tive Levels) and artistic devices which constitute the work. An aesthetic
attitude can also be suggested to the fictive addressee if, for instance,
the narrator sees himself as an artist ascribing aesthetic value to his own
narration. However, to the extent that the narrator is dissociated from
the author in this regard, the fictive addressee will remain distinct from
the implied reader in the attitude adopted towards the narrative.

3.3 Russian, Polish, and Czech Formalism and Structuralism

In the Slavic area, which has made significant contributions to the study
of literary communication that remain largely unknown in the West, the
text’s addressee was first systematically described by the Polish literary
scholar Głowiński ([1967] 1975) as the “virtual recipient.” The virtual
recipient was not postulated as a pragmatic entity, but as a potential role
laid out by the text. For Głowiński, the most important question was
“how the structure of the […] work configures the role of the address-
ee” ([1967] 1975: 97). He drew a distinction between the addressee of
the author and the addressee of the narrator, the former of which breaks
down into two differing attitudes to the work’s meaning: that of the
“passive reader,” who needs to reckon only with obvious meanings that
emerge from the work; and that of the “active reader,” called on to re-
construct meanings encrypted in specific techniques.
Głowiński’s approach was adopted and refined by Okopień-
Sławińska ([1971] 1975: 145), who distinguished the “work’s address-
ee,” or the addressee to whom the author speaks, and the “narration’s
addressee,” the addressee to whom the narrator speaks (cf. Fieguth
1975). Whereas the narrator’s addressee can be endowed with personal
traits, the work’s addressee is characterized only by the use of a specific
code: “The work’s structure dictates the whole area of his decoding
306 Wolf Schmid

tasks, and these are the only properties that can be ascribed to him”
(142).
Červenka, the second-generation Czech structuralist, defined the im-
age of the addressee evoked by the work following Mukařovský’s
(1937) category of the “subject of the work,” used to designate the im-
plied author: “If the subject of the work was the correlate of the totality
of the acts of creative choice, then the overall meaning of the work’s
addressee is the totality of the interpretive abilities required: the ability
to use the same codes and develop their material analogously to the cre-
ative activity of the sender, the ability to transform the potentiality of
the work into an aesthetic object” ([1969] 1978: 174–175).
In Russia, Korman ([1977] 1992: 127) paired the “author as bearer
of the work’s concept” with the corresponding entity of the “reader as
postulated addressee, ideal principle of reception”: “The method of re-
ception is the process of transforming the real reader into the ideal,
conceived reader.” In this definition, however, the different roles of the
implied reader as presumed addressee and ideal recipient are merged.
Following on from Korman, Rymar’ and Skobelev (1994: 119–121)
continue to use the term “conceived reader.”

3.4 Approaches in the West

Booth’s concept of the implied author was influenced by Gibson’s

“mock reader” (1950). After the formulation of the implied reader con-
cept by Booth ([1961] 1983), the investigation of reader roles was
deepened and concretized in the works of Iser ([1972] 1974, [1976]
1978). His German term, “impliziter Leser,” meaning “implicit reader,”
is not completely equivalent to “implied reader” employed in the Eng-
lish editions. Whereas implied stresses the real reader’s inferring activi-
ty, implicit connotes an ontological definition, as though the image of
the addressee were an entity independent of the reception process. The
English term “implied reader” was not defined by Iser in an entirely
unambiguous way and was left to fluctuate between the addressee of
the work and the addressee of the narration. In the first German version
of The Act of Reading, Iser describes the “implicit” reader as a “struc-
ture inscribed in the texts,” not having any real existence (1976: 60). He
then goes on (to quote his subsequent English version of the text) to say
that the implied reader “embodies all those predispositions necessary
for a literary work to exercise its effect—predispositions laid down, not
by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the
implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure
of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real
 Implied Reader 307

reader […] The concept of the implied reader is therefore a textual

structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily
defining him […] Thus the concept of the implied reader designates a
network of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp
the text” (Iser [1976] 1978: 34). (On Iser’s conception and a critique of
it Prince → Reader, 746–747).
A clear differentiation of the addressees was introduced by Grimm
(1977: 38–39) who, alongside Wolff’s (1971) and Link’s (1976) “in-
tended” reader (the author’s “objective”), placed an “imagined” reader
(“the conception that the author has of his actual readership”) and a
“conceived” reader (“the construction of a reader oriented on the text”).
Eco (1979) paired the “model author” with the “model reader,” defining
it analogously to Iser’s “implied reader” (Prince → Reader, 748).
Drawing on Slavic theories, Schmid ([1973] 1986, 1974, 2007,
2010) has dealt with the implied reader under the name of “abstract
reader,” a notion with affinities to Mukařovský’s concept of the “ab-
stract” entities of the work.

4 Topics for Further Research

(a) Similar to the topics mentioned for further research into the implied
author, there is a need to identify the indexical signs that refer to the
implied reader in its two manifestations. (b) The specific image of pre-
sumed addressees in different periods, cultural spheres, text types, and
genres has yet to be examined in detail. (c) Also, the degree to which
ideal recipients are designed by texts needs to be examined historically
and culturally.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Bal, Mieke (1977). Narratologie. Les instances du récit. Essais sur la signification
narrative dans quatre romans modernes. Paris: Klincksieck.
Baxtin, Mixail (2002). “Rabočie zapisi 60-x–načala 70-x godov.” M. Baxtin. Sobranie
sočinenij v semi tomax. Vol. 6. Moskva: Russkie slovari; Jazyki slavjanskoj
kul’tury, 371–439.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Červenka, Miroslav ([1969] 1978). “Das literarische Werk als Zeichen.” M. Červenka.
Der Bedeutungsaufbau des literarischen Werks. Ed. by F. Boldt & W.-D. Stem-
pel. München: Fink, 163–183.
308 Wolf Schmid

Eco, Umberto (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Eng, Jan van der (1984). “Ästhetische Dominante und Fiktionalisierung. Wahrheitsan-
spruch und Intensivierung der Information. Autor und Leser.” J.-R. Döring-
Smirnov et al. (eds.). Text – Symbol – Weltmodell. Johannes Holthusen zum 60.
Geburtstag. München: Sagner, 111–130.
Fieguth, Rolf (1975). “Einleitung.” R. Fieguth (ed.). Literarische Kommunikation.
Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor, 9–22.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Gibson, Walker (1950). “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers.” College
English 11, 265–269.
Głowiński, Michał ([1967] 1975). “Der virtuelle Empfänger in der Struktur des poeti-
schen Werkes.” R. Fieguth (ed.). Literarische Kommunikation. Kronberg/Ts.:
Scriptor, 93–126.
Grimm, Gunter (1977). Rezeptionsgeschichte. Grundlegung einer Theorie. München:
Fink.
Iser, Wolfgang ([1972] 1974). The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in
Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
– (1976). Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. München: Fink.
– ([1976] 1978). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP.
Korman, Boris ([1977] 1992). “O celostnosti literaturnogo proizvedenija.” B. Korman.
Izbrannye trudy po teorii i istorii literatury. Iževsk: Izd. Udmurtskogo un-ta,
119–128.
Link, Hannelore (1976). Rezeptionsforschung. Eine Einführung in Methoden und Prob-
leme. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Lintvelt, Jaap ([1981] 1989). Essai de typologie narrative. Le “point de vue” Théorie et
analyse. Paris: José Corti.
Mukařovský, Jan (1937). “L’individu dans l’art.” Deuxième congrès international
d’esthétique et de la science de l’art. Vol. I. Paris, 349–350.
Okopień-Sławińska, Aleksandra ([1971] 1975). “Die personalen Relationen in der lite-
rarischen Kommunikation.” R. Fieguth (ed.). Literarische Kommunikation. Kron-
berg/Ts.: Scriptor, 127–147.
Padučeva, Elena (1996). “Semantika narrativa.” E. Padučeva. Semantičeskie issledo-
vanija. Moskva: Jazyki russkoj kul’tury, 193–418.
Prince, Gerald (1971). “Notes toward a Characterization of Fictional Narratees.” Genre
4, 100–106.
– (1973). “Introduction à l’étude du narrataire.” Poétique 14, 178–196.
– (1985). “The Narratee Revisited.” Style 19, 299–303.
Rymar’, Nikolaj & Vladislav Skobelev (1994). Teorija avtora i problema xudožestven-
noj dejatel’nosti. Voronež: Logos-Trast.
Schmid, Wolf (1971). “Review of B. A. Uspenskij, A Poetics of Composition [in Rus-
sian, Moskva 1970].” Poetica 4, 124–134.
 Implied Reader 309

– ([1973] 1986). Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. With an after-

word: “Eine Antwort an die Kritiker”. Amsterdam: Grüner.
– (1974). “Review of D. Janik, Die Kommunikationsstruktur des Erzählwerks. Ein
semiologisches Modell.” Poetica 6, 404–415.
– (2007). “Textadressat.” Th. Anz (ed.). Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft. Stuttgart:
Metzler, vol. 1, 171–181.
– (2010). Narratology. An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Toolan, Michael ([1988] 2001). Narrative. A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London:
Routledge.
Wolff, Erwin (1971). “Der intendierte Leser. Überlegungen und Beispiele zur Einfüh-
rung eines literaturwissenschaftlichen Begriffs.” Poetica 4, 141–166.

5.2 Further Reading

Suleiman, Susan R. & Inge Crosman (eds.) (1980). The Reader in the Text. Princeton:
Princeton UP.
 Mediacy and Narrative Mediation
Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik

1 Definition

The term “mediacy” was coined by Stanzel ([1955] 1971: 6) and de-
scribes the fact that the story is mediated by the narrator’s discourse in
one of two ways. Either the story is openly transmitted through a narra-
tor who functions as a teller of the tale (“teller mode”) or the mediation
is apparently occluded by a direct,im-mediate presentation of the story
through the consciousness of a reflector (character). In the reflector
mode, we seem to see the storyworld through the eyes of a character
and there seems to be no narratoroperating as a mediator. Since the in-
troduction of Stanzel’s term, the fact of a mediate presentation of the
story has become a general foundation in structuralist narratology. In
Genette, mediation is two-fold on the levels of the discourse (récit) and
the narrator’s act of telling (narration) ([1972] 1980: 27, [1983] 1988:
13); Prince ([1987] 2003: 58) defines narrative as always having a me-
diating narratorial level; and Chatman, who looks at film and non-
verbal narratives like ballet, speaks of “narrative transmission” (1978:
22). In recent years, the emphasis on different media using narrative has
resulted in the term mediation being applied to the way in which a story
is told in film, drama, cartoons, ballet, music, pictures, hypertext narra-
tives, and other genres and forms of narrative.

2 Explication

Narratives can be mediated by narrators who tell and comment on the

story or through agents who merely think, feel, or perceive. Stanzel dis-
criminates between teller- and reflector-characters, arguing that they are
“mediators of [...] fictional events” ([1979] 1984: 150). However, they
mediate story material, i.e. event sequences, in different ways. Teller-
characters narrate, inform, and comment as if they were transmitting a
piece of news or a message. Reflector-characters, on the other hand, do
not narrate or transmit. Rather, the reader perceives the action through
 Mediacy and Narrative Mediation 311

the eyes of the reflector character, and this veiled mediacy produces
what Stanzel calls “the illusion of immediacy” (141). For Genette, the
so-called “narrating instance” ([1972] 1980: 212) is the communicative
act that initiates both the story and the narrative discourse that produces
the story. More specifically, the narrating instance represents events
and existents (story), and they are thereby mediated in a particular (ver-
bal, visual, or audio-visual) sign system (narrative) ([1983] 1988: 13).
Chatman speaks of the process of “narrative transmission” as “the
source or authority for the story” (1978: 22). For him, the process of
narrative transmission centrally concerns the relationship between story
time and discourse time as well as issues of voice and point of view.
Chatman discriminates between “overt narrators,” who communicate
directly to the reader, and “covert narrators,” who remain more or less
hidden in the narrative’s discursive shadows (1990: 115). Fludernik
argues that all narrative is built on the mediating function of conscious-
ness, a complex “natural” category with several available cognitive
frames to choose from. She integrates Stanzel’s mediacy into a more
general cognitive model of narrative transmission based on “real-life”
schemata. Teller-mode narratives are mediated by the consciousness of
a narrator; reflector-mode narratives by the consciousness of a protago-
nist; and neutral narratives by the reader who “views” and constructs
narrative experience (1996: 50).
Underlying the question of what constitutes narrative is the concept
of mediacy. While most narrative theorists define narrative in terms of
event sequences, Stanzel and Genette reject blanket uses of the term
“narrative,” the latter defining narrative stricto sensu as a “verbal
transmission” ([1983] 1988: 16). In Stanzel’s account, drama and film
are im-mediate renderings of story, while (verbal) narrative is a mediat-
ed representation—mediated by the discourse of a narrator (openly me-
diated) or a reflector (obliquely mediated by presenting an illusion of
im-mediacy). In contrast, Chatman also considers plays, movies, and
cartoons to be narrative because they present stories (1990: 117). For
him, there are “diegetic” and “mimetic” forms of narrative; narratives
can be told or shown. Finally, Fludernik’s redefinition of narrativity on
the basis of experientiality, i.e. “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-
life experience’” (1996: 12), and its mediation through consciousness
allows her to open up the field of narrative inquiry not only to drama
and film, but also to oral storytelling and some kinds of poetry.
312 Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Mediacy from Plato to Stanzel

Stanzel’s notion of mediacy has roots in the distinction between mime-

sis and haple diegesis in Plato’s Republic (cf. also Lubbock [1921: 62],
Blackmur [1934: xvii–xviii], and Friedman [1955: 1161–1165]). In Pla-
to’s diegetic or “pure” mode, the poet “himself is the speaker and does
not even attempt to suggest to us that anyone but himself is speaking.”
In the mimetic mode, however, the poet “delivers a speech as if he were
someone else.” According to Plato, the poet may also combine these
two modes and use the mixed mode, as in epic poetry (Plato 1937:
392c–95; cf. also Schaeffer & Vultur 2005: 309). Although Plato talks
about speech representation (“pure” narrative and poetry vs. “pure”
drama vs. narrative including dialogue insets), the Platonic mime-
sis/diegesis distinction as a dichotomy (rather than a triad) has been
used to support both models of speech and thought representation (di-
rect vs. free indirect speech) and the generic distinction between narra-
tive and drama. Stanzel’s assignment of drama to the pole of immedia-
cy (i.e. unmediated representation of story) therefore aligns immediacy
with mimesis and mediacy with diegesis in the Platonic sense (McHale
→ Speech Representation).
While for Plato (and later Stanzel) the term “diegetic” refers to nar-
ratorial discourse (i.e. the act of telling), Genette uses the term diégèse
(adopted from Souriau 1951) to denote the fictional world of the char-
acters ([1972] 1980: 27 n. 2, [1983] 1988: 17–18). Genette’s term dié-
gèse has many affinities with Aristotle’s notion of mimesis. For Aristo-
tle, “pure” narratives and direct representations are two varieties of
what he calls mimesis because both represent a world (2002: 1448a).
Similarly, Genette’s notion of diégèse refers to the primary story level,
specifically excluding the narratorial discourse which is constitutive of
both Plato’s and (in his wake) Stanzel’s understandings of diegesis. For
Genette, “the diégèse is [...] the universe in which the story takes place”
([1983] 1988: 17). Despite this terminological disparity, however, Ge-
nette and Stanzel agree with regard to the constitutive narratorial me-
diation of narrative, even though for Genette this is achieved through
the narrating instance. For him, the narrator’s speech act produces the
story through the narrative discourse.
Stanzel’s concept of mediacy is directed against Spielhagen’s pre-
scriptive demand for “objectivity,” i.e. immediacy of presentation
([1883] 1967: 220). Stanzel seeks to counter the excessive demands of
“neutralists” like Spielhagen, who argued that the narrator should re-
 Mediacy and Narrative Mediation 313

main completely invisible throughout the narrative and thus wished to

see every trace of a narrator erased. Stanzel’s proposal is closely related
to Friedemann’s argument that the presence of a narrator in prose writ-
ings is in no way inferior to immediacy in drama, since the narrator is
evocative of actual experience of the world. According to Friedemann,
it is the narrator “who evaluates, who is sensitively aware, who ob-
serves” ([1910] 1965: 26), thus conveying an image of the world as s/he
sees it, not as it is in a depersonalized objectivity.
From the beginning, Stanzel presents the concept of mediacy as the
linchpin for a definition of the term “narrative,” and he puts forth a so-
phisticated argument for mediacy as a gradable concept ([1955] 1971:
6). More specifically, he points out that mediacy is more or less fore-
grounded (as revealed by the presence or absence of comments by an
authorial narrator), but its absence in the figural narrative situation is
merely apparent. In the final version of his model, Stanzel revises the
figural narrative situation by integrating it into the illusion of immedia-
cy in order to constitute the reflector mode of narration, which is re-
sponsible for producing this illusion. In opposing the teller mode and
the reflector mode, he significantly reformulates his original typology,
dating from 1955, by instituting two basic types of mediacy: teller-
mode and reflector-mode mediacy.
In this discussion, Stanzel proceeds from three pairs of oppositions
arranged as scaled categories of person, perspective, and mode (media-
cy). The first element of the narrative situation, person, is based on the
relations between the narrator and the characters, and it ranges from
identity (first-person reference) to non-identity (third-person reference)
of the realms of existence of the narrator (Margolin → Narrator) and
the characters (Jannidis → Character). Perspective directs the reader’s
attention to the way in which s/he perceives the fictional world, extend-
ing from internal (perception located in the main character or within the
events) to external (perception located at the periphery of the events)
(Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of View). Finally, mode breaks
down into “overt mediacy of narration [teller mode, J.A./M.F.]” and
“covert [...] mediacy which produces the illusion of immediacy in the
reader [reflector mode, J.A./M.F.]” (Stanzel [1979] 1984: 141).
Stanzel regards the three narrative situations (first-person, authorial,
and figural) as descriptions of basic possibilities of theorizing narration
as mediacy. He also introduces a dynamic analysis into narrative trans-
mission by demonstrating that narrative situations do not span entire
novels uniformly. In his remarks on narrative dynamization, he discuss-
es narrative profile and narrative rhythm. Although this dynamization
is defined as a dynamization “of the narrative situation,” i.e. a study of
314 Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik

“the variations of the narrative situation during the course of the narra-
tive process,” the subsequent analysis actually focuses on the “relation
of the narrative parts, that is, to dialogue and dramatized scene; specifi-
cally [on] their purely quantitative ratio and their distribution” ([1979]
1984: 63–67). Besides these proportions, the incidence of direct speech
vs. indirect and free indirect speech and thought representation is also
taken into account. The second term, narrative rhythm, concerns the
distribution of narratorial emphasis in a specific novel and refers to the
fact that in most novels, the narrator figure manifests him- or herself
prominently at the beginning of the text and sometimes at the end, but
then lapses into inactivity when the plot becomes exciting, resurfacing
only at moments of narrative report, commentary, or description. The
result of this configuration is a simultaneous “decrease in these authori-
al intrusions [which] parallels the increase of the hero’s ‘perspective
solipsism’” ([1979] 1984: 69).
Nevertheless, it must be noted that the introduction of the three axes
(identity vs. non-identity of realms of existence; external vs. internal
perspective, teller vs. reflector modes) and emphasis on the dynamiza-
tion of the narrative situation tend to foreground “mode” (i.e. the dis-
tinction between tellers and reflectors) and to background “person”
(Cohn 1981: 168). Cohn additionally points out that Stanzel’s category
of perspective merges the “presentation of space (the visible outer
world)” into the “presentation of consciousness (the invisible inner
world)” (175). And since perspectives on fictional space and fictional
minds do not always coincide (Uspenskij 1973: 105–107), Cohn con-
siders this axis to be less unified than the other two (cf. also Cohn
1990). She therefore proposes to simplify Stanzel’s typological circle
by subsuming the category of perspective under the heading of mode
(1981: 179).

3.2 Mediacy in Genette and Chatman

Genette considers Stanzel’s category of mode to be superfluous, as he

finds it “easily reducible to our common category of perspective”
([1983] 1988: 116). In his view, Stanzel’s distinction between teller-
and reflector-characters confuses the question of voice, or, more pre-
cisely, person (“who speaks?”) with that of mood or, more precisely,
perspective (“who sees?”). He thus revises Cohn’s amendment of Stan-
zel by proposing a different taxonomy which “diversifies an initial ty-
pology that was [...] altogether too limited to the most frequent situa-
tions” (119). Genette’s model is based on the cross-tabulation of
heterodiegetic and homodiegetic forms of narrating (“who speaks?”)
 Mediacy and Narrative Mediation 315

and the three types of focalization (zero, internal, external) (“who

sees?”) (21; [1972] 1980: 189–194, 245). Genette considers this taxon-
omy to be an improvement because it is more systematic and includes
less common narrative forms such as Hemingway’s “The Killers,” a
form of heterodiegetic narration with external focalization (the neutral
subtype in Stanzel ([1955] 1971: 93), and Camus’s L’Étranger, a form
of homodiegetic narration with external focalization.
Stanzel’s mediacy is equivalent to what Genette calls “narrating act”
and “narrative.” More specifically, Genette discriminates between “sto-
ry (the totality of the narrated events), narrative (the discourse, oral or
written, that narrates them), and narrating (the real or fictive act that
produces that discourse—in other words, the very fact of recounting)”
([1983] 1988: 13). In this model, the narrating act shapes and trans-
forms the story through the narrative discourse. Similarly, Rimmon-
Kenan uses the terms story, text, and narration ([1983] 2002: 3), while
Bal modifies Genette’s terminology by arguing that it is by way of the
text that the reader has access to the story, of which the fabula is a me-
morial trace that remains with the reader after the reading ([1985] 1997:
5).
When Chatman introduced the principle of “narrative transmission,”
he discriminated between “overt narrators,” “covert narrators,” and
forms of “non-narration” for neutral narratives (1978: 22). Later, Chat-
man rejects the idea of non-narration by arguing that “every narrative is
by definition narrated—that is, narratively presented” (1990: 115), but
he maintains the distinction between overt and covert narrators, equiva-
lent to Stanzel’s mediacy. His model is in close agreement with Stan-
zel’s, except that he includes drama and film among the narrative gen-
res and therefore does not reduce narrative transmission or mediacy to
the discourse of a narrative voice. Chatman provides a sliding scale
from overt to covert narrators based on the linguistic markers of subjec-
tivity, the presence of narratorial comments, and the use of evaluative
phrases. Like Stanzel and Genette, he argues that all narratives have a
narrator, so that all three theorists clearly oppose the Banfieldian “no-
narrator” theory (1982), according to which certain sentences of fiction
cannot possibly be enunciated by a narrator. Chatman argues that “nar-
rative presentation entails an agent,” even when “the agent bears no
signs of human personality” (1990: 115). The three authors agree that
narratives always present a story which is mediated by a narrator’s dis-
course. Furthermore, Chatman stresses the conjunction of story and
mediatory discourse by pointing out that “narrative entails movement
through time not only ‘externally’ (the duration of the presentation of
316 Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik

the novel, film, play), but also ‘internally’ (the duration of the sequence
of events that constitute the plot)” (9).
It is quite apparent that Stanzel’s teller mode corresponds to Chat-
man’s scale which ranges from overt to covert narration (i.e. from sub-
jective and foregrounded tellers to “objective,” neutral, and back-
grounded narration). By contrast, with regard to Stanzel’s reflector-
mode narrative, in which an illusion of immediacy is projected, Chat-
man (1978: 198) argues that a covert narrator expresses the thoughts of
a character, while Genette ([1983] 1988: 115) describes such a scenario
as heterodiegetic narration with internal focalization. What the two ter-
minologies fail to take into account, however, is the prototypical ab-
sence of a foregrounded narrator in reflector-mode narratives or, to put
it differently, the fact that in order to read an extended passage as inter-
nal focalization, a pronounced teller must not interfere because such a
foregrounded narrative voice would impede a reading of the text from
the character’s perspective. Stanzel shows that Modernist novels (e.g.
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) establish a representa-
tion of the narrative world which is (or seems to be) filtered through the
consciousness of the protagonist (cf. also James [1909] 1934: 322–
325). This effect can only be achieved by completely backgrounding
the narrative voice reporting on external events (for a critique of this
claim, see Schmid 1968). By distinguishing between a teller and a re-
flector mode, however, the mere reduction of the narratorial voice to a
default existence is not sufficient to characterize the reflector mode,
since it is equally necessary to have a predominant internal perspective
to produce the relevant effect. The reflector mode as mode only makes
sense theoretically when one conceives of a different type of transmis-
sion through the character’s perspective or consciousness in contrast to
the prominent (first- or third-person) teller-mode narrative which is
mediated by an explicit transmitter.

3.3 Newer Developments

Schmid (1982) puts forth an alternative model of narrative mediation

by breaking down the story vs. discourse dichotomy into four terms:
Geschehen (events); Geschichte (fabula or story); Erzählung (plot);
Präsentation der Erzählung (narrative discourse). He goes on to posit
three processes of transformation between these levels, all of which are
accomplished by the narrator. According to Schmid, the mediating nar-
rator first selects particular situations, characters, events, and qualities
from the invented story material and transforms them into a story. The
narrator then transforms the story into a narrative plot, going through a
 Mediacy and Narrative Mediation 317

process that correlates with the linearization of simultaneous event se-

quences and the permutation of chronological story segments. And fi-
nally, the narrator presents the narrative by verbalizing it in a particular
style. However, as Cohn argues, fictional narratives do not typically
transform something pre-existent into a narrative, and they are thus
plotted rather than emplotted (1990: 781). It is therefore worth noting
that Schmid assumes an ideal-genetic perspective: the invented story
material logically precedes the presentation of the narrative.
Fludernik (1996) takes Stanzel’s concept of mediacy further by lo-
cating all mediation in narrative transmission through consciousness
(which can surface on several levels and in different shapes). For her,
all narratives operate through the projection of consciousness—the
character’s, that of the narrative voice, or the reader’s. She also departs
from the general tendency to identify narrativity (Abbott → Narrativi-
ty) with the presence of a story/plot transmitted in narrative discourse.
While most narrative theorists define narrative through sequentiality or
progression, Fludernik argues that there can be narratives without plot,
but there cannot be narratives without a human experiencer of some
sort at some narrative level. She redefines narrativity in terms of expe-
rientiality, with embodiment constituting the most basic feature of ex-
perientiality: embodiment evokes all the parameters of a real-life sche-
ma of existence which has to be situated in a specific time and space
frame. In addition, she broadens the analysis to include a wide variety
of narratives, following on from Chatman (1978: 96, 1990: 115) and
Bal ([1985] 1997: 5).
Fludernik proposes to expand the ways in which narrative transmis-
sion occurs, arguing that all mediacy (or mediation) occurs through
cognitive schemata (Emmott & Alexander → Schemata) and that what
is being mediated is not primarily a story (although in the vast majority
of narratives such a series of events does indeed occur), but experienti-
ality, a conjunction of reportability and point (Baroni → Tellability).
“Reportability” characterizes the interest which tellers and listeners en-
tertain in narratives while “point” refers to the motivations for telling
the story. Since experience is closely associated with actions, event se-
quences underlie experientiality, with suspense fulfilling a prominent
role. Other emotions or thoughts may be foregrounded, however, and
some narratives (though few) actually operate without plot. Beckett’s
short prose work “Ping” is an example of a plotless narrative. In this
text, a disembodied voice presents us with repeated descriptions of the
same strange world which is somewhat reminiscent of a prison scenar-
io. The only thing we learn is that a body is trapped in a small, white
container. This prose work lacks events, but it clearly depicts con-
318 Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik

sciousness and might be read as the agonized ruminations of the body’s

mind struggling with some kind of traumatic experience (Alber 2002).
Mediacy is constituted by the following cognitive frames or schema-
ta, all of which relate to our real-world knowledge (about telling, expe-
riencing, viewing/observing, and reflecting) and provide us with access
to the narrative: (a) the “telling” frame (narratives focusing on a teller
figure); (b) the “experiencing” frame (narratives roughly corresponding
to reflector-mode narratives); (c) the “viewing” frame (this frame oc-
curs less frequently than (a) or (b), but relies on a basic witness position
in relation to observed events); (d) the “reflecting” frame (when narra-
tives project a ruminating consciousness). Consciousness mediates
these frames in the reading process in which readers narrativize what
they read as narrative, resorting to these four schemata but also to ge-
neric concepts and narratological tools as well as basic real-world
knowledge (such as our understanding of intentionality as a goal-
oriented process) which is also stored in scripts and frames (Fludernik
1996: 12–52). On this basis, natural narratology moves away from the
idea of the narrator or the illusion of narration to a wider spectrum of
cognitive frames and processes on different levels which feed into the
constitution of narrative and its reception. Like all cognitive approach-
es, this model is grounded in the real-world frames of everyday experi-
ence and is reader- rather than production-oriented (Alber 2005).
The question of mediacy in narrative fiction has also been examined
by Walsh, who argues quite provocatively that “the narrator is always
either a character who narrates, or the author” (2007: 78). For him, “ex-
tradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators […], who cannot be represented
without thereby being rendered homodiegetic or intradiegetic, are in no
way distinguishable from authors” (84). Walsh suggests eradicating
both “impersonal” and “authorial” narrators. While the first case aligns
with Stanzel’s illusion of immediacy, the second differs radically from
Stanzel’s distinction between authors and authorial narrators. Walsh
maintains that the only way to account for the knowledge of an authori-
al narrator would be to take quite literally the figurative concept of om-
niscient narration: “in order to know rather than imagine, the (evidently
superhuman) agent of narration must indeed have such power, or some
lesser or intermittent version of it” (73). Thus, omniscience is not a fac-
ulty possessed by a certain class of narrators, but a quality of the au-
thor’s imagination. While some theoreticians infer from this an implied
author (Schmid → Implied Author) (“an ideal, literary, created version
of the real man” (Booth [1961] 1983: 75) as the mediating agent of nar-
rative, Walsh speaks of “the author,” stating that “our idea of the author
of a written narrative is no more than an interpretation” (2007: 84).
 Mediacy and Narrative Mediation 319

Two things are worth noting here. First, the difference between Booth’s
implied author and Walsh’s interpretation of the author is of course
minimal or non-existent. Second, why should it be problematic to argue
that third-person narrators can occasionally have “supernatural” (Ryan
1991: 67) or “unnatural” (Cohn 1999: 106) powers?

3.4 Mediacy and Narrative Media

As pointed out in Nünning and Nünning (2002) and Wolf (2002), the
definition of narrativity in reference to experientiality and the extension
of mediacy to include an open list of cognitive frames, scripts, and
schemata lead in the direction of transmedial and transgeneric narratol-
ogy, as proposed in Fludernik (1996; Hühn & Sommer → Narration in
Poetry and Drama; Ryan → Narration in Various Media). Many forays
have recently been made into the area of narratological approaches to
film, hypertext narrative, ballet, comic strips, drama, poetry, even paint-
ing and music (Ryan 2006, ed. 2004; Wolf 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2004;
Nünning & Nünning 2002). In this area, Chatman (1978, 1990) was an
important innovator, for it was he who staked out a place for film in
narratology (Kuhn & Schmidt → Narration in Film) and who also con-
fronted narrative with other text-types, putting the concept of narrative
under a new light.
Chatman sees narrative transmission as media-related, and he there-
fore dissociates narrativity from the figure of a human narrator (1990:
116; cf. Ryan 2001, 2006). Although he reintroduces a so-called “cin-
ematic narrator” for film, this figure is not a human or human-like nar-
rator as in novels. Rather, the term denotes “the organizational and
sending agency” (1990: 127) behind the film and fulfills a neutral or
covert shower or arranger function. The notion is similar to what Jahn
calls the “filmic composition device (FCD),”which refers to “the theo-
retical agency behind a film’s organization and arrangement” (2003:
F4.1). Even so, the question of who (or what) mediates a film as a
whole remains highly disputed. Bordwell, for one, argues that film has
narration but no narrator, and that consequently cinematic narration is
created by the viewer (1985: 61). On the other hand, Lothe (like Chat-
man) posits a cinematic or film narrator as “the superordinate ‘instance’
that presents all the means of communication that film has at its dispos-
al” (2000: 30). And finally, theoreticians such as Gaut speak of an “im-
plied filmmaker” who mediates the film (2004: 248). From the perspec-
tive of natural narratology, one can alternatively argue that film resorts
more generally to the “viewing” frame than to the “telling,” “reflect-
ing,” or “experiencing” frame.
320 Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik

Like experimental literary narratives (Alber 2009), new media such

as hypertext narratives or computer games require the introduction of
new cognitive frames into the model proposed by Fludernik. From this
perspective, mediacy does not refer to mediating through a (narrator’s)
discourse, but mediation through consciousness. More specifically, we
can gain access to these new media through the identification of con-
sciousness. The verbal medium of a teller/narrator is only one possibil-
ity among many others; cognitive frames such as viewing, observing,
experiencing, and reflecting (and maybe others) also play an important
role.
However, some of the media that have come into focus since the
turn towards transmedial narratology are hard to analyze on the basis of
narratological categories. As shown by Wolf (2002), paintings and mu-
sic can only occasionally be narrativized. These aesthetic products lack
crucial elements of experientiality in what they are able to represent
(most types of music are perhaps not able to represent anything at all).
With poetry, the situation is more vexed. On the one hand, there is nar-
rative poetry (the epic, the ballad), a genre much neglected by narrative
theory. On the other hand, many lyric poems exist that are also readable
as narratives or contain narrative elements (Fludernik 1996: 304–310;
Hühn 2002, 2005; Hühn & Schönert 2002; Müller-Zettelmann 2002,
2011; Schönert et al. 2007). All types of poetry (narrative and lyric) are
mediated by a speaker. The lyric persona also clearly operates as a me-
diator on the “reflecting” frame. However, this does of course not turn
lyric poetry into a narrative genre. Lyric poetry does not typically
evoke experientiality, i.e. temporal and spatial parameters, and thus
lacks the situatedness of narrative. In prototypical cases of lyric poetry,
we are confronted with the musings of a disembodied voice about feel-
ings or abstract ideas.
Drama has long been a neglected object of narratological analysis.
Drama was the focus not only of Aristotle’s discussion of mimesis and
has thus become a subtext of all narrative theory, but like epic forms it
is closely bound up with sequentiality and thus invites narratological
analysis. Hence, Pfister (1977) undertakes a narrative analysis of dra-
ma, studying the relationship between story time and discourse time.
Since then, Richardson (1987, 1988, 1991, 2006), Fludernik (1996,
2008), Jahn (2001), and Nünning and Sommer (2002, 2008) have start-
ed to focus on drama and its relation to narrative. Much of this work
analyzes elements in drama which have to do with mediacy such as the
introduction of teller figures (the Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our
Town), first-person narrators (Henry Carr in Stoppard’s dream play
Travesties), or the fictionalizing of stage directions to include psycho-
 Mediacy and Narrative Mediation 321

narration, puns, or authorial commentary (Fludernik 2008). For the pre-

sent purpose, these impositions of a teller figure on the plot level, the
introduction of an extradiegetic frame into the play, or the narrativiza-
tion of stage directions are not really relevant due to the fact that the
mediacy of drama is constituted by other factors. Plays partake of the
same stock of cognitive parameters and depend on the same reception
frames as do other narratives. Since plays represent experientiality, they
are narrative, irrespective of narrator figures or additional narrative
techniques (such as the use of music). In other words, having a narrat-
ing character on stage, for example, is not required to bring plays with-
in the domain of narrative.
From this perspective, a problem very similar to that of film arises:
what is the discourse level of drama? Here, the dramatic performance
needs to be distinguished from the dramatic text (Berns → Performa-
tivity; cf. also Jahn 2001: 675). Does one treat only performances as
drama in which performance is the discourse and the script merely the
plot with instructions on how to perform? Or is performance a separate
manifestation of the play and the play script the equivalent of the dra-
matic discourse? If one takes the text as central, it could be argued that
an idealized abstract performance is sketched in it and that a unique
center of origin can be posited for the performance: the text underwrites
a singular “meaning” of the play that one might associate with “the im-
plied author,” i.e. the real author’s “second self,” which, according to
Booth, satisfies “the reader’s need to know where, in the world of val-
ues, he stands, that is, to know where the author wants him to stand”
([1961] 1983: 73). By contrast, if the performance is to be taken as the
only acceptable discourse, there results a collaborative venture—as in
film—for which the term “dramatic composition device,” in analogy
with Jahn’s “filmic composition device” (2003: F4.1), might be appro-
priate. Most crucially, assuming performance to be the basic medium of
drama requires taking account of the acoustic, visual, kinetic, and spa-
tial aspects of a performance within narratological description. Jahn in
fact argues that plays “are structurally mediated by a first-degree narra-
tive agency which, in a performance may either take the totally unmet-
aphorical shape of a vocally and bodily present narrator figure [...] or
remain an anonymous and impersonal narrative function in charge of
selection, arrangement, and focalization” (2001: 674). This suggestion
is of course reminiscent of Chatman’s distinction between overt and
covert narrators. If only the script and a possible performative realiza-
tion are focused on as the relevant medium of drama, then kinesis,
lighting, and sound would acquire narratological significance only if
they are explicitly grounded in the script. The performance level in
322 Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik

drama is much more complicated than in film. Filming results in one

fixed copy of the narrative, whereas with plays a variety of productions
and different performances within each production occur, and none of
them (unless videotaped) is accessible except in a viewer’s experience
of watching the performance.
It is obvious from these remarks that playscripts are much easier to
handle for narratologists and that they allow a much clearer idea of how
story and discourse are related to one another. Performance poses quite
difficult problems for mediacy. In fact, one could enquire whether the
notion of mediacy might here be an exclusively reception-oriented one.
Is the story mediated to the audience through the experience of the per-
formance? This question indicates that current research on mediacy has
some distinct limits or horizons and that there are numerous matters
waiting to be resolved by further research.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The role of mediacy in drama and film remains open to study: does
it make sense to posit a dramatic or cinematic narrator? Can one argue
that they are mediated by the performance? Or should we assume that
plays and films are mediated by an implied author or filmmaker? Or are
all of these terms dispensable so that we can simply speak of the author
or filmmaker (a larger group of professionals) as mediating instances
(see also Alber 2010)? (b) One should also address the question of
whether we can follow Walsh’s proposal to dispense with all extra- and
heterodiegetic narrators in novels and short stories. In most cases, it
certainly makes sense to discriminate between the author and the autho-
rial or impersonal narrator. (c) It is also necessary to investigate the de-
velopment of new cognitive frames of mediation in relation to experi-
mental literary narratives and new media (hypertext narratives and
computer games).

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5.2 Further Reading

Jahn, Manfred (2005). “Mediacy.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of

Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 292–293.
Stivers, David (2007). “Witnessing the Invisible: Narrative Mediation in The Princess
Casamassima. ” The Henry James Review 28, 159–173.
 Metalepsis
John Pier

1 Definition

In its narratological sense, metalepsis, first identified by Genette, is a

deliberate transgression between the world of the telling and the world
of the told: “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into
the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic uni-
verse, etc.), or the inverse […], produces an effect of strangeness that is
either comical […] or fantastic” ([1972] 1980: 234–235). After review-
ing a few examples, Genette observes that “[a]ll of these games, by the
intensity of their effects, demonstrate the importance of the boundary
they tax their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude—a
boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a
shifting but sacred frontier [or boundary] between two worlds, the
world in which one tells, the world of which one tells. […] The most
troubling thing about metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable and
insistent hypothesis that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic
and that the narrator and his narratees—you and I—perhaps belong to
some narrative” (236, original emphasis). Described as “taking hold of
(telling) by changing level” (235, n. 51), narrative metalepsis combines
the principle of narrative levels (Pier → Narrative Levels) with “au-
thor’s metalepsis,” a narrative figure with roots in the trope of metalep-
sis. Narrative metalepsis constitutes a “deliberate transgression of the
threshold of embedding […]: when an author (or his reader) introduces
himself into the fictive action of the narrative or when a character in
that fiction intrudes into the extradiegetic existence of the author or
reader, such intrusions disturb, to say the least, the distinction between
levels,” producing an effect of “humor” or of “the fantastic” or “some
mixture of the two […], unless it functions as a figure of the creative
imagination” (Genette [1983] 1988: 88).
These definitions, which remain foundational, providing the basis
for a narrative category which, up to the early 1970s, had never been
properly formulated, have been expanded, amended and refined by sub-
sequent research, partly by Genette himself in his book Métalepses
 Metalepsis 327

(2004), an exploration of the phenomenon not only in narrative fiction

but also in theater, film, television, painting and photography. These
developments have come about with the realization that metalepsis is
not a mere localized stylistic device or oddity, but also that it occurs in
various forms, thus calling for the elaboration of typologies, that it can
be found in media other than language and is indeed a phenomenon
which is not inherently bound by or restricted to narrative, and that its
effects are not exclusively anti-illusionistic. A survey of the literature
suggests that the criteria for determining the occurrence of metalepsis
and the conditions of its extension are the focus of as much if not more
attention than the various definitions that have been set forth.

2 Explication

In addition to Genette’s “transgression” of levels or to Wagner’s (2002)

“sliding” between levels, metalepsis has been characterized as “under-
mining the separation between narration and story” (Rimmon-Kenan
[1983] 2002: 93); as a “strange loop” in the structure of narrative levels
or a “short circuit” between the “fictional world and the ontological
level occupied by the author” (McHale 1987: 119, 213); as a “narrative
short circuit” causing “a sudden collapse of the narrative system” (Wolf
1993: 358); or as producing a “disruptive effect on the fabric of narra-
tive” (Malina 2002: 1). Being the “embryo” or “outline” (esquisse) of a
fiction, metalepsis triggers “a playful simulation of belief” (Genette
2004: 17, 25).
As can be seen from the diversity of these characterizations (among
others), current research cannot be neatly classified into clearly identi-
fied paradigms. Nevertheless, three partially overlapping conceptions
do seem to stand out, all deriving more or less directly from the defini-
tions of narrative metalepsis listed above, although with little reference
to its connection with the trope of metalepsis:

- Rhetorical vs. ontological metalepsis

This distinction is contained implicitly in Genette’s definitions
and examples but is not systematically elaborated.
- Transmedial dimensions
This approach expands investigations to include non-verbal and
plurimedial manifestations of the phenomenon. A type of me-
tareference, metalepsis, particularly in its ontological form, pos-
sesses a potential for self-reference and thus for laying bare the
fictionality of the work in which it appears.
328 John Pier

- Metalepsis as paradox
Recentering on the original definition of narrative metalepsis,
this approach insists not on the rhetorical/ontological distinction
but on the logically paradoxical movements between at least two
hierarchically distinct text-internal narrative levels.

On the whole, discussions support the idea that metalepsis appears only
in fictional contexts. Essentially, it functions with varying dosages of
three parameters: (a) illusion of contemporaneousness between the time
of the telling and the time of the told; (b) transgressive merging of two
or more levels; (c) doubling of the narrator/narratee axis with the au-
thor/reader axis. These features are illustrated by Balzac’s “While the
venerable churchman climbs the ramps of Angoulême, it is not useless
to explain […]”—a “minimal” metalepsis (cf. Pier 2005: 249–250)
which, being incipiently transgressive, leaps the boundary between nar-
rator and extradiegetic narratee on the communicative plane and puts
story time on hold while the narrator, in a relative cohabitation with the
character, intervenes with a metanarrative comment, demonstrating the
latent metaleptic quality of narrative embedding in general. This exam-
ple leads to the idea that fictional narrative is by nature metaleptic, that
it is bound to the paradox of “a current presentation of the past” (Bes-
sière 2005), that it betrays “at least the potential for narrative metalep-
sis” (Nelles 1997: 152).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

It is important to bear in mind that although metalepsis has its roots in

ancient rhetoric, narrative metalepsis is a recent concept in the history
of poetics, with the practice itself, under different denominations, or
none at all, reaching back to antiquity in both literary and visual forms,
as copiously demonstrated by a recent anthology edited by Eisen and
von Möllendorff (2013). The fact that metalepsis can now be theorized
and applied according to definable criteria has opened up avenues of
historical research that extend beyond the corpus of modernist and
postmodernist works habitually taken into consideration in the study of
the concept and the practice.

3.1 The Rhetorical Background

The etymology of metalepsis is disputed, but its sense can readily be

grasped from the word’s Latin equivalent—transumptio: “assuming one
 Metalepsis 329

thing for another.” Metalepsis has a complex history in that it has been
regarded either as a variety of metonymy, a particular form of synony-
my, or both. As metonymy, it has been identified (a) in simple form as
an expression of the consequent understood as the antecedent or vice
versa and (b) as a chain of associations (“a few ears of corn” for “a few
years,” the transfer of sense implying “a few harvests” and “a few
summers”). Another possibility is to regard metalepsis in terms of an
overlap between synonymy and homonymy in such a way as not to re-
spect the semantic demarcation between distinct signifiers, resulting in
the use of an inappropriate synonym: cano (“sing”) is a synonym of
canto (“sing”) and canto (“repeat”) a synonym of dico (“relate”); there-
fore, cano is a synonym of dico (cf. Lausberg [1960] 1973: § 571;
Morier 1961; Burkhardt 2001; Meyer-Minnemann 2005: 140–143;
Roussin 2005: 41–44).
From the perspective of narrative theory, two positions derive from
the rhetoric of metalepsis. Genette (2004: 7–16), drawing on the first of
the two types above, notes that metalepsis shares with metaphor and
metonymy the principle of transfer of sense, and he considers it (fol-
lowing Dumarsais) a metonymy of the simple type; he then expands it
(with Fontanier) beyond the single word to include an entire proposi-
tion. Metalepsis of antecedent and consequent, he argues, is implicitly
metalepsis of cause for effect or effect for cause. From such causal rela-
tions he forges the notion of author’s metalepsis whereby an author “is
represented or represents himself as producing what, in the final analy-
sis, he only relates” (Fontanier). He also draws attention to the proximi-
ty for the two rhetoricians of metalepsis and hypotyposis (a figure in
which the copy is treated, illusorily, as though it were the original, as in
a present-tense description), but particularly to the fact that, with met-
alepsis, the narrator transgresses not merely the threshold of narrative
but that of representation, resulting in a “reduced metadiegetic” or
“pseudodiegetic” narrative in which, due to the lack of metadiegetic
relay, the secondary narrator effectively takes the place of the primary
narrator (see also Genette [1972] 1980: 236–237; a more radical form is
“heterodiegesis,” which “gathers in one single universe the world of
production, fiction and reception”; Rabau 2005: 60).
There have also been proposals to refer narrative metalepsis back to
metalepsis as use of an inappropriate synonym, notably by Meyer-
Minnemann (2005) and Schlickers (2005) (see also Nelles 1997: 152–
157). The emphasis here is not on authorial metalepsis as a type of me-
tonymy, but on the transgression of boundaries, of which there are two
main types: one at discourse level, with breaching of the “me-here-
now” of enunciation (in verbis transgression), the other at story level,
330 John Pier

with violation of the coordinates of the enunciate (in corpore transgres-

sion) (see chap. 3.2.1 below).
Recent research has taken a somewhat different view of the rhetori-
cal heritage of narrative metalepsis. Thus, Nauta (2013a), re-examining
the sources of metalepsis from antiquity to Dumarsais and Fontanier,
delineates two strains, one concerned with allusion (following Quintil-
ian), the other with narrative (metalepsis as metonymy of the preceding
and the following). The latter, he maintains, is a trope in its own right,
“operating on an expression signifying the act of representing a situa-
tion or action, in which such an expression is substituted by one signi-
fying the act of creating or causing that situation or action” (477)—a
conception which is close to the narratological definition: “any intru-
sion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe
(or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the in-
verse” (Genette [1972] 1980: 234–235). Yet, in his more recent work
on the topic, Genette advocated a special case of metonymy in which
cause is substituted for effect or effect for cause, proposing, according-
ly, “to restrict the term ‘metalepsis’ from now on to a manipulation—at
least figural, but sometimes fictional […]—of this particular causal re-
lation which, in one way or another, connects the author to his work or,
more broadly, the producer of a representation to this representation
itself” (Genette 2004: 13–14). But from Nauta’s rhetorical perspective,
“manipulation” of causal relation is not substitution of cause and effect,
and it is, moreover, inconsistent with metalepsis as a reflexive relation-
ship between narrative levels (2013a: 479–480; this position is also ral-
lied to by Klimek 2010: 34–37).
The connection between the metalepsis of ancient grammar and
rhetoric and narrative metalepsis is “rather tenuous,” as Nauta observes.
Nevertheless, important work has been undertaken in the study of the
metaleptic features of ancient literatures such as de Jong’s (2009) semi-
nal discussion of apostrophe, the blending of narrative voices and other
techniques in Greek texts, Baumann’s (2013) study of metalepsis in
ancient ekphrasis or Nauta’s (2013b) considerations on metalepsis and
metapoetics in Latin poetry, but also Cornils’ (2005) essay on the met-
aleptic effects of evidentia, a specific form of phantasia (characterized
by a persuasive function) in the Acts of the Apostles, to mention only a
few sources. One major finding of these studies is that, unlike modern
practices, metalepsis in ancient literatures is a serious technique which
is used not for comic or anti-illusionistic effects, but rather as a means
for increasing the narrator’s authority and intensifying the credibility of
the narrative. This suggests the need for further work on the rhetorical
 Metalepsis 331

dimension of metalepsis, possibly in conjunction with pragmatics and

the theory of argumentation.

3.2 Principal Approaches

3.2.1 Rhetorical vs. Ontological Metalepsis

One widely acknowledged group of theories, originally formulated by

Ryan ([2004] 2006), consists in breaking metalepsis down into rhetori-
cal (Genette) and ontological (McHale) forms. This represents an ex-
tension of Ryan’s theory of illocutionary and ontological boundaries,
frames and stacks (cf. Pier → Narrative Levels, chap. 3.2.3) in so far as
it incorporates the transgression of boundaries which, in principle, are
inviolable in narrative. The distinction remains implicit in Genette, she
notes, although his more recent “figural” vs. “fictional” metalepsis cor-
responds roughly to her own. The rhetorical variety “opens a small
window that allows a quick glance across levels, but the window closes
after a few sentences, and the operation ends up reasserting the exist-
ence of the boundaries” while the ontological type “opens a passage
between levels that results in their interpenetration, or mutual contami-
nation” (207). Taking a cue from McHale (1987: chap. 8), Ryan defines
ontological metalepsis in accordance with Hofstadter’s (1979: 10, 621)
Strange Loops and Tangled Hierarchies, and she further comments on
the connection of the violation of narrative hierarchies with similar
phenomena in logic, mathematics, language and science. As for Ryan’s
rhetorical metalepsis, Klimek (2010: 65) finds this inappropriate, and,
referring instead to Cohn’s ([2005] 2012) metalepsis at the discourse
level and metalepsis at the story level, she proposes the term “discourse
metalepsis.”
Ryan’s distinction has been further broken down by Fludernik
(2003). On scrutinizing Genette’s narrative metalepsis, she concludes
that this is an umbrella term which contains an implicit four-term ty-
pology: (a) authorial metalepsis (Virgil “has Dido die”): a metafictional
strategy that undermines mimetic illusion, foregrounding the invented-
ness of the story; (b) narratorial or type 1 ontological metalepsis (in
Eliot’s Adam Bede, the narrator invites the narratee to accompany him
to Reverend Irwine’s study): transgression from the extradiegetic to the
intradiegetic level is illusionary, drawing a fine line between the read-
er’s immersion and lifting of the mimetic illusion; (c) lectorial or type 2
ontological metalepsis (in a story by Cortázar, the reader of a novel is
[almost] killed by a character in that novel): implication of the narratee
on the story level or passage of a character from an embedded to an
332 John Pier

embedding level (also occurs in second-person narration); (d) rhetorical

or discourse metalepsis (simultaneity of time of the telling/time of the
told; cf. Pier 2005: 249–250 on “minimal” metalepsis).
A related group of theories, less focused on the rhetorical/ ontologi-
cal divide, emphasizes what Wagner (2002) has termed “metaleptic
movements.” Wagner divides these movements into three varieties: (a)
from a higher to a lower level (extra- to intradiegetic or, jumping a lev-
el, intra- to metadiegetic; also intra- to metadiegetic: an author inter-
venes in her fiction); (b) from a lower to a higher level, proceeding in
the opposite direction, as when a character transgresses the extradieget-
ic boundary; (c) “auto-intertextuality” between diegeses of the same
level, thus confronting parallel heterogeneous fictive universes. He also
takes up the question, largely neglected, of the compositional distribu-
tion of metalepses: their location, amplitude and frequency can have a
significant impact on the strategy and readability of a narrative (on this
point, see also Häsner 2001: 40–43). Two comments, however. First,
although he does not use the term, Wagner implicitly adopts Bal’s “hy-
podiegetic” inversion levels, (a) being an ascending transgression for
Genette and (b) a descending transgression (the latter dubbed “anti-
metalepsis” by Genette 2004: 27). Second, the metaleptic status of (c),
later called “horizontal” metalepsis, has been contested, notably by
Klimek (2010: 67–68; 2011), who considers this to be an issue of inter-
textuality or quotation. This phenomenon has been studied under the
name of “transfictionality” (cf. Saint-Gelais 2011).
Klimek herself is among those to subscribe to descending and as-
cending metalepsis (see chap. 3.2.3 below). But mention must also be
made at this point of the model elaborated by Meyer-Minnemann
(2005) and Schlickers (2005). Taking a cue from Genette, this model
provides for metalepsis of enunciation (in verbis, at discourse level) and
metalepsis of the enunciate (in corpore, at story level), where each
functions either vertically (bottom-up or top-down) or horizontally,
without change of level (dubbed “perilepsis” by Prince 2006: 628). To
take only a few illustrations: (a) vertical metalepsis of enunciation (top-
down) obtains when an extradiegetic narrator transgresses the intradie-
getic boundary; (b) horizontal metalepsis of enunciation occurs with the
juxtaposition of two communicative situations at the same level; (c)
with transgression of the diegetic, ontological, spatial or temporal order
there occurs a vertical metalepsis of the enunciate; (d) horizontal met-
alepsis of the enunciate is produced when, say, Woody Allen enters the
world of Madame Bovary. In this system metalepsis is seen as produc-
ing an effect of strangeness, either comical or fantastic, but it is not
considered a figure of fictionality in Genette’s (2004) sense. The Mey-
 Metalepsis 333

er-Minnemann/ Schlickers model of metalepsis forms part of a larger

theory of “paradoxical narration” in which devices are employed either
to cancel out boundaries (syllepsis, epanalepsis, the latter type includ-
ing mise en abyme) or to transgress boundaries (metalepsis, hyperlep-
sis, the latter equivalent to pseudodiegesis: metadiegetic narrative pre-
sented as though it were diegetic). For a typology, see Lang (2006).
In an earlier model, Nelles (1997: 152–157) differentiates metalepsis
as being either “unmarked” (occurring at discourse level) or “distinctly
marked” (occurring at story level). The latter divides into “intramet-
alepsis” (movement from the embedding to the embedded level) and
“extrametalepsis” (movement in the opposite direction), with each type
possessing analeptic and proleptic forms on the temporal plane (for the
related notions of “inward” vs. “outward” metalepsis, see Malina 2002:
46–50). Rather than the rhetorical (discourse) vs. ontological (story)
distinction, Nelles, invoking epistemic (vertical) and ontological (hori-
zontal) embedding, adopts epistemological or verbal metalepsis
(knowledge of the other world) as opposed to ontological or modal
metalepsis (physical penetration of the other world). However, this lat-
ter pair partly reduplicates and contradicts the other distinctions while
the classification as a whole leaves little room for the transgressive or
paradoxical nature of metalepsis.
In a proposal that partly cuts across the above models, Pier (2005:
252–253) sets descending metalepsis off from ascending metalepsis.
The former, which occurs in Fludernik’s authorial and narratorial (type
1 ontological) varieties, follows an intrametaleptic movement while the
latter, found in the lectorial (type 2 ontological) variety, involves an
extrametaleptic movement; as for discourse (or minimal) metalepsis, it
remains poised, sometimes precariously, between the two movements.
Moreover, intrametaleptic movements mark an affinity between narra-
tor and narratee, and extrametaleptic movements an affinity between
character and narratee. Finally, these movements pertain both in exter-
nal metalepsis (between the extradiegetic and the intradiegetic levels)
and in internal metalepsis (occurring between two levels within the sto-
ry itself; cf. Cohn [2005] 2012).

3.2.2 Transmedial Dimensions

Originally, metalepsis was formulated within the scope of language-

based narratives, and its study was largely reserved to works of high
culture and the avant-garde. Rather quickly, however, it was realized
that the phenomenon also extends to other media as well as to works of
popular culture, particularly those involving plurimedial and/or non-
334 John Pier

narrative forms of representation. Examples can be found in Genette

(2004) and in Pier and Schaeffer eds. (2005) but also in Kukkonen and
Klimek eds. (2011), not to mention a host of other publications too nu-
merous to mention here. (On transmediality, see Ryan → Narration in
Various Media, Ryan ed. 2004.)
One important step in this direction was taken by Wolf (2005) who,
looking at examples from drama, film, comics and painting, laid the
foundations for “exporting” metalepsis to media other than language.
Four features are singled out that enable metalepsis to occur beyond
verbal media: (a) it is found within artefacts/performances that repre-
sent possible worlds (cf. Ryan 1991: esp. chap. 9), but has no essential
link with narrativity; (b) existence within these artefacts/ performances
of distinct levels or possible (sub)worlds that differ from one another
with reference to “reality” vs. “fiction” (the latter combining “fictio” as
artefact and “fictum” as “invention without direct reference to reality”;
Wolf 1993: 38–39); (c) actual transgression between or confusion of
(sub)worlds; (d) paradoxical nature of the transgression with reference
to a “natural” or conventional belief in the inviolability of these
(sub)worlds in “normal” life and fiction. On this basis, metalepsis, in
any medium, is defined as “a usually intentional paradoxical trans-
gression of, or confusion between, (onto)logically distinct (sub)worlds
and/or levels that exist, or are referred to, within representations of
possible worlds” (Wolf 2005: 91, original emphasis). Note, however,
should be made of the fact that this definition (as is the case with the
partial redefinition in Wolf 2009: 50) is heavily weighted in favor of
ontological (i.e. story level) metalepsis involving impossible physical
transgressions, and that although rhetorical metalepsis is included in the
discussion, the different types of metaleptic movements mentioned in
the previous section are not taken into account. Also introduced is epis-
temological metalepsis, the “impossible” knowledge characters might
have of their fictional status, the effect of which is to reflect the me-
tareferential nature of metalepsis, although metareferential potential
remains highest in the ontological form, laying bare the fictionality of
the work (52–56).
Exploring the transmedial dimensions of metalepsis poses the chal-
lenge of rethinking narrative metalepsis so as to accommodate the fea-
tures of visual and performance media, for which the language-based
story-discourse distinction is not well adapted. One option is of course
to address the issues through ontological reconceptualization. Another
possibility is to take into consideration so-called media affordances, i.e.
how the various media influence and shape the forms of representation,
but also how, in the different media environments, metalepsis interacts
 Metalepsis 335

with representation. This is the avenue chosen by the contributors to

Kukkonen and Klimek eds. (2011), a collection of essays on metalepsis
in media-rich artifacts drawn from popular culture. In her introductory
essay, Kukkonen (2011b) identifies the essential terms of metalepsis as
worlds, boundaries and transgressions along with their types, effects
and functions; she also provides a “basic matrix of types” applicable
across media which allows for various combinations of the direction
(ascending or descending) and mode (rhetorical or ontological) of met-
alepsis as well as for horizontal or intertextual metalepsis—a matrix
that overarches the various models developed in the volume.
On the basis of an exhaustive typology developed out of this matrix,
Limoges (2011) demonstrates the strong potential of animation film for
illusionistic extradiegetic transgressions, both ascending and descend-
ing. This is unlike comics, where the “gutter” between panels that gov-
erns the page layout offers possibilities of foregrounding such that a
character might lift the corner of a page to hide an object in the image
(or throw it out), thus highlighting the production process through onto-
logical metalepsis (Kukkonen 2011a). Klimek (2011: 26–27) observes
that if metalepsis in the performing arts has a potential for spilling over
into the audience’s “real” world, this is not the case in narrative fic-
tions, where it can occur only between levels within the artifact (on
metalepsis in film, theater, the visual arts and picture books, see Klimek
2010: 73–75). Where Klimek considers horizontal “intertextual” trans-
gressions not to be metaleptic, Feyersinger (2011), studying trans-world
“crossovers” in TV series and spinoffs in which characters and situa-
tions are carried over from one show to another, sees crossovers and
metalepses as two poles along a spectrum of world-connecting devices
that share certain elements and effects. As shown by these and other
essays, technical innovations brought in by the mass media and, more
recently, by the digital technologies, have contributed significantly to
the use of metalepsis and to the diversity of metaleptic effects in the
popular culture corpus.

3.2.3 Metalepsis as Paradox

At the heart of metalepsis is transgression of the “sacred boundary” be-

tween the world of the telling and the world of the told. In the logic of
representation, levels of existence are distinct, and their violation con-
stitutes a paradox. In literary theory such paradox is often understood in
the everyday sense of a statement contrary to received opinion or belief,
something “unnatural.” In the technically logical sense, however, para-
dox is an issue that arises in self-reference, as illustrated by the liar’s
336 John Pier

paradox, where the principle that a proposition cannot be both true and
false at the same time is contradicted (Epimenides, a Cretan, says “All
Cretans are liars”)—a mind-bender also conveyed visually by the Mö-
bius strip, Klein’s bottle and Escher’s drawings. Hofstadter (1979) ex-
amines various manifestations of this paradox in modern mathematics
and science, even providing a recursive dialogue (103–126) that illus-
trates the problem of metalepsis, although the term appears nowhere in
the book.
It is important to note that paradox has been integrated into the poet-
ics of postmodernist fiction, a type of writing which, according to
McHale (1987), “foregrounds ontological issues of text and world”
(27). Adopting an ontology taken from possible worlds theory (33–36),
McHale recasts Genette’s narrative levels in terms of ontological levels,
and he goes on to describe metalepsis as “the ontological dimension of
recursive embedding” (120). Metalepsis is characterized, on the one
hand, as a “short circuit” between the “fictional world and the ontologi-
cal level occupied by the author” (213), a special case which, as ob-
served by Klimek (2010: 57), corresponds to Genette’s author’s met-
alepsis. On the other hand, the violation of narrative levels in more
complex forms of metalepsis is identified with the “Strange Loop,” a
phenomenon that occurs “whenever, by moving upwards (or down-
wards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly
find ourselves right back where we started,” and also with a subcatego-
ry of the Strange Loop, the “Tangled Hierarchy”: “when what you pre-
sume are clean hierarchical levels take you by surprise and fold back in
a hierarchy-violating way” (Hofstadter 1979: 10, 691; qtd. in McHale
1987: 119). Conceptually speaking, however, short circuits and strange
loops/tangled hierarchies are not of the same order.
In a refinement of this model, Wolf (1993: 349–372), considering
the forms of disturbance of mimetic illusion caused by the failure to
observe ontological boundaries, sets the “contamination” of extra-
fictional reality with textually produced fiction off from that of inner-
fictional boundaries. Unlike in McHale (1987), where metalepsis, short
circuit and strange loop are employed synonymously, here it is only the
latter, inner-fictional form that gives rise to metalepsis, also called “nar-
rative short circuit” by Wolf, a metafictional technique whose effect is
to trigger “a sudden collapse of the narrative system” (358). Narrative
short circuits appear punctually either (a) between the extradiegetic and
the intradiegetic levels or (b) between the intradiegetic and one or more
hypodiegetic levels, although no distinction is made between descend-
ing and ascending metalepsis as discussed in the previous section. To
these simple forms of metalepsis is added a complex form in which the
 Metalepsis 337

previous two types are combined, setting in motion a recurrent Möbius-

strip-like contamination of levels, as would be the case of a first-person
narrator confronted with her own fictionality on reading a text about
herself.
It is against the backdrop of a critical discussion of McHale, Wolf
and other authors that Klimek sets out a theory of metalepsis, not in
terms of ontology but rather of paradox. All metalepses, she argues, are
paradoxical, but not all forms of paradox (e.g. temporal, spatial) are
metaleptic. The “short circuit” metaphor is rejected and with it the idea
that metalepsis “collapses the narrative system,” thereby systematically
disrupting aesthetic illusion. Klimek’s conception is in fact closely
aligned with Genette’s original definition with which, not surprisingly,
the expansion of metalepsis from “figure” to “fiction” (cf. “All fictions
are woven through with metalepses”; Genette 2004: 131) is judged in-
compatible (Klimek 2010: 36).
The typology of metalepsis developed out of these considerations
makes no reference to the rhetorical vs. ontological paradigm or to the
reality vs. fiction divide evoked by many of the transmedial approach-
es. Rather, three major types are identified: (1) descending metalepses,
passing (a) from extradiegesis to intra- or hypodiegesis, or (b) from in-
tradiegesis to hypodiegesis; (2) ascending metalepses, going in the op-
posite direction; (3) complex forms including (a) Möbius-strip narra-
tives in which (1) and (2) fold recurrently onto one another, the
intradiegesis turning out to be the extradiegesis and vice versa, and (b)
tangled heterarchy, where the representing and the represented are not
hierarchically ordered (in computer science heterarchy is “a structure in
which there is no single ‘highest level’”; Hofstadter 1979: 134)
(Klimek 2010: 69–72, 2011).
It will be noted that with the introduction of complex forms this ty-
pology rules out horizontal metalepsis (e.g. Wagner 2002; Meyer-
Minnemann 2005; Schlickers 2005; Lang 2006). This is due to the fact
that the representation of parallel worlds belonging to the same level
entails no transgression between the world of the telling and the world
of the told (Klimek 2010: 68). Moreover, the complex forms, although
compatible with Genette’s original treatment of metalepsis, were not
foreseen by him, or in any case they were nearly ruled out ([1983]
1988: 88). Finally, underlying Klimek’s system is an explicit theory of
metareference which incorporates paradox: (a) gradated metareference
demanding a strict separation of sign levels; (a.1) infinite metarefer-
ence, a gradated and never-ending circular repetition; (a.2) recursive
metareference, e.g. mirror within a mirror; (b) paradoxical metarefer-
338 John Pier

ence, as in Escher’s Drawing Hands (cf. Fricke 2003, 2011: 256–257;

Klimek 2010: 51, 330–332).

3.3 Effects

As research on metalepsis has advanced, so too has reflection on the

conditions, diversity and nuances of its effects. Noted early on for the
strangeness of its comic or fantastic effects or the mixing of humor and
the fantastic and also as something “troubling,” metalepsis has been
characterized as “a figure of the creative imagination” (see chap. 1
above). Between its deconstructive “mutinous nature as a narrative de-
vice that disrupts narrative structure” (Malina 2002: 132) and its im-
mersive qualities there lies a store of positions on these issues.
For a starter, it is more likely that metalepsis will be encountered in
the baroque, in romanticism and in postmodernism than in classicism or
realism, and also that it will be employed in the comic and fantastic
genres more readily than in tragedy or in lyric poetry (Pier & Schaeffer
2005: 10–11). Moreover, the effects will vary widely according to the
media and combinations of media in which metaleptic devices are em-
ployed (e.g. Wolf 2005; Kukkonen & Klimek eds. 2011).
The anti-illusionistic quality of metalepsis has never been called into
question. Even so, there remains the thorny question of knowing under
what conditions it is illusion-breaking or illusion-building. Metalepsis
has been described by Wolf as a radically disruptive metafictional de-
vice that prevents immersion and aesthetic illusion (Wolf 1993: 356–
358, 2005: 103; Wolf → Illusion (Aesthetic)). But in consideration of
his work on metareference, he has more recently come to the view that
similar metaleptic devices may, subject to “filter factors” such as the
intracompositional makeup of the work, generic frames and habituation,
produce different effects and possibly contribute to immersion: “the
feeling of experientially participating in a representation” (Wolf 2013:
121). Schaeffer (2005) takes a different view of the matter. From a cog-
nitive perspective, metalepsis, as a representational technique, is not
incompatible with immersion but serves, rather, as an “emblem” of the
“split state” of immersion: “the dynamics of immersion involves met-
aleptic mental operations in the most literal sense of the term” (333; for
a critique, cf. Wolf 2013: 121, n. 14; on metalepsis and “double-scope”
cognitive blending, see Feyersinger 2012). Klimek (2010), focusing on
the device itself, looks at the issues in the context of descending and
ascending metalepses. The former, both as production (cf. author’s
metalepsis) and as reception (cf. reader immersion), tends toward aes-
thetic illusion (231–233) whereas the latter (when for instance a charac-
 Metalepsis 339

ter bursts out of the fiction) postulates a higher and purely fictitious
reality (247–249).
It is also possible to consider the effects of metalepsis through the
lens of defamiliarization. Metalepsis was never identified as such by the
Russian formalists, but it can be associated with one of their key con-
cepts: “laying bare the device.” Rather than a rhetorical figure, the vio-
lation of ontological boundaries or a paradox, and rather than culminat-
ing in the collapse of narrative categories or in the breaking of mimetic
illusion, metalepsis conceived as laying bare the device enters the
work’s composition via sjužet construction: more even than digressions,
parallelisms, etc., it highlights the artificial relations between “form”
and “material,” between sjužet and fabula, and thus supports the idea
that art is “made” of devices. These principles were set out particularly
in Šklovskij ([1921] 1990). This famous essay discusses the digressions
and various techniques employed in Tristram Shandy for conflating
narration and action in a conspicuous way so as to defamiliarize the
objects of perception in the process of sjužet construction, compelling
the reader to a heightened awareness of the constructedness of narrative
(cf. Schmid 2005, [2005] 2010: 176–179).

3.4 Related Concept: Mise en abyme

Mise en abyme is founded on a relation of similarity between the em-

bedded and embedding stories—“simple,” “infinite” or “aporetic” re-
duplication or reflection, according to Dällenbach (1977)—rather than
on transgression. Although both phenomena are dependent on levels,
they must not be confused. Even so, there is a significant coincidence
between the aporetic form (“fragment supposedly including the work in
which it is included”; 51), or what Cohn ([2005] 2012) termed “pure
mise en abyme,” and metalepsis. The two are bound together by the
troubling effect produced on the reader by the “unacceptable and in-
sistent hypothesis that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic and
that the narrator and his narratees—you and I—perhaps belong to the
same narrative” (Genette [1972] 1980: 236). Such a mise en abyme,
triggering a sense of vertigo, is the product of a Möbius-strip-like met-
alepsis, or paradoxical iteration occurring in the system of metarefer-
ence (cf. Fricke 2003, 2011: 257).
340 John Pier

4 Topics for Further Investigation

More than a rhetorical flourish, metalepsis raises the question of the

porosity of levels and boundaries in narratives and in other cultural rep-
resentations, but not their dissolution. Research in recent years has ex-
panded the scope of the phenomenon considerably and contributed to
significant refinement of scholarly understanding of its workings and
modalities. Among topics requiring additional study are the following:
(a) relative weight of local vs. global effects of metalepsis; (b) metalep-
sis and fictionality (breaking/intensification of mimetic illusion, immer-
sion, etc.); (c) the role of metalepsis in trans-/intermediality with regard
to multimedia and to popular culture; (d) metalepsis and related practic-
es in historical poetics going back to ancient narrative as well as a his-
torical inventory of artistic movements and corpuses employing these
devices; (e) the rhetorical potential of metalepsis.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Baumann, Mario (2013). “Der Betrachter im Bild. Metalepsen in antiken Epphrasen.”

U. E. Eisen & P. von Möllendorff (eds.). Über die Grenze. Metalepse in Text-
und Bildmedien des Altertums. Berlin: de Gruyter, 257–291.
Bessière, Jean (2005). “Récit de fiction, transition discursive, présentation actuelle du
récit, ou que le récit de fiction est toujours métaleptique.” J. Pier & J.-M.
Schaeffer (eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation. Paris: Éd.
de l’EHESS, 279–294.
Burkhardt, Arnim (2001). “Metalepsis.” G. Ueding (ed.). Historisches Wörterbuch der
Rhetorik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, vol. 5, 1087–1099.
Cohn, Dorrit ([2005] 2012). “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme.” Narrative 20.1, 105–
114.
Cornils, Anja (2005). “La metalepses dans les Actes des Apôtres: un signe de narration
fictionnelle?” J. Pier & J.-M. Schaeffer (eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de
la représentation. Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 95–107.
Dällenbach, Lucien (1977). Le récit spéculaire. Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris:
Seuil.
Eisen, Ute E. & Peter von Möllendorff, eds. (2013). Über die Grenze. Metalepse in
Text- und Bildmedien des Altertums. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Feyersinger, Erwin (2011). “Metaleptic TV Crossovers.” K. Kukkonen & S. Klimek
(eds.). Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter, 127–157.
– (2012). “The Conceptual Integration Network of Metalepsis.” R. Schneider & M.
Hartner (eds.). Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applica-
tions. Berlin: de Gruyter, 173–197.
 Metalepsis 341

Fludernik, Monika (2003). “Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode.” Style
37, 382–400.
Fricke, Harald (2003). “Potenzierung.” G. Baumgart et al. (eds.). Reallexikon der deut-
schen Literaturwissenschalft. Neubearbeitung der deutschen Literaturgeschichte,
Band III. Berlin: de Gruyter, 144–147.
– (2011). “Pop-Culture in History: Metalepsis and Metareference in German and
Italian Music Theatre.” K. Kukkonen & S. Klimek (eds.). Metalepsis in Popular
Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter, 252–267.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– (2004). Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction. Paris: Seuil.
Häsner, Bernd (2001). Metalepsen. Zur Genese, Systematik und Funktion transgressi-
ver Erzählweisen. PhD Dissertation. Freie Universität Berlin.
Hofstadter, Douglas (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New
York: Basic Books.
Jong, Irene J. F. de (2009). “Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature.” J. Grethlein & A.
Rengakos (eds.). Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Form in Ancient
Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter, 87–115.
Klimek, Sonja (2010). Paradoxes Erzählen. Die Metalepse in der phantastischen Lite-
ratur. Paderborn: Mentis.
– (2011). “Metalepsis in Fantasy Fiction.” K. Kukkonen & S. Klimek (eds.). Me-
talepsis in Popular Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter, 213–231.
Kukkonen, Karin (2011a). “Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels.” K. Kukkonen
& S. Klimek (eds.). Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter, 213–231.
– (2011b). “Metalepsis in Popular Culture: An Introduction.” K. Kukkonen & S.
Klimek (eds.). Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–21.
– & Sonja Klimek, eds. (2011). Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Lang, Sabine (2006). “Prolegómenos para una teoría de la narración paradójica.” N.
Grabe, S. Lang & K. Meyer-Minnemann (eds.). La narración paradójica. “Nor-
mas narrativas” y el principio de la “transgresión.” Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert,
21–47.
Lausberg, Heinrich ([1960] 1973). Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grund-
legung der Literaturwissenschaft. München: Hueber.
Limoges, Jean-Marc (2011). “Metalepsis in the Cartoons of Tex Avery: Expanding the
Boundaries of Transgression.” K. Kukkonen & S. Klimek (eds.). Metalepsis in
Popular Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter, 196–212.
Malina, Debra (2002). Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the
Subject. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen.
Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus (2005). “Un procédé narratif qui ‘produit un effet de bizarre-
rie’: la métalepse littéraire.” J. Pier & J.-M. Schaeffer (eds.). Métalepses. En-
torses au pacte de la représentation. Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 133–150.
Morier, Henri (1961). “Métalepse.” Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 673–676.
342 John Pier

Nauta, Ruurd (2013a). “The Concept of ‘Metalepsis’: From Rhetoric to the Theory of
Allusion and to Narratology.” U. E. Eisen & P. von Möllendorff (eds.). Über die
Grenze. Metalepse in Text- und Bildmedien des Altertums. Berlin: de Gruyter,
469–482.
– (2013b). “Metalepsis and Metapoetics in Latin Poetry.” U. E. Eisen & P. von
Möllendorff (eds.). Über die Grenze. Metalepse in Text- und Bildmedien des Al-
tertums. Berlin: de Gruyter, 223–256.
Nelles, William (1997). Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narratives. New
York: Lang.
Pier, John (2005). “Métalepse et hiérarchies narratives.” J. Pier & J.-M. Schaeffer
(eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation. Paris: Éd. de
l’EHESS, 247–261.
– & Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2005). “Introduction. La métalepse, aujourd’hui.” J. Pier
& J.-M. Schaeffer (eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation.
Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 7–15.
– & Jean-Marie Schaeffer, eds. (2005). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la
représentation. Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS.
Prince, Gerald (2006). “Disturbing Frames.” Poetics Today 27, 625–630.
Rabau, Sophie (2005). “Ulysse à côté d’Homère. Interprétation et transgression des
frontières énonciatives.” J. Pier & J.-M. Schaeffer (eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au
pacte de la représentation. Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 59–72.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Routledge.
Roussin, Philippe (2005). “Rhétorique de la métalepse, états de cause, typologie, récit.”
J. Pier & J.-M. Schaeffer (eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représenta-
tion. Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 37–58.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
– ([2004] 2006). “Metaleptic Machines.” Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: U of Min-
nesota P, 204–30, 246–248.
– ed. (2004). Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P.
Saint-Gelais, Richard (2011). Fictions transfuges. La transfictionnalité et ses enjeux.
Paris: Seuil.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie (2005). “Métalepse et immersion fictionnelle.” J. Pier & J.-M.
Schaeffer (eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation. Paris: Éd.
de l’EHESS, 323–334.
Schlickers, Sabine (2005). “Inversions, transgressions, paradoxes et bizzareries. La
métalepse dans les littératures espagnole et française.” J. Pier & J.-M. Schaeffer
(eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation. Paris: Éd. de
l’EHESS, 151–166.
Schmid, Wolf (2005). “La métalepse narrative dans la construction du formalisme rus-
se.” J. Pier & J.-M. Schaeffer (eds.). Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la
représentation. Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 189–195.
– ([2005] 2010). Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
 Metalepsis 343

Šklovskij, Viktor (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1921] 1990). “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy.” V. Šklovskij. Theory of Prose. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Ar-
chive P, 148–171.
Wagner, Frank (2002). “Glissements et déphasages: note sur la métalepse narrative.”
Poétique 33, No. 130, 235–253.
Wolf, Werner (1993). Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzähl-
kunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstören-
den Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
– (2005). “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case
Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts.” J. Ch. Meister
(ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 83–107.
– (2009). “Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potential and
Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” W. Wolf (ed.). Metareference across Me-
dia: Theory and Case Studies. Dedicated to Walter Bernhart on the Occasion of
his Retirement. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–85.
– (2013). “‘Unnatural’ Metalepsis and Immersion: Necessarily Incompatible?” J.
Alber, H. S. Nielsen & B. Richardson (eds.). A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 94–141.

5.2 Further Reading

Alber, Jan & Alice Bell (2012). “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology.”
Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2, 66–92.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2005). “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratolo-
gy.” J. Ch. Meister (ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Dis-
ciplinarity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–23.
– (2006). “Narrative, Media, and Modes.” Avatars of Story. Minneapolis/London:
U of Minnesota P, 1–30.
Thoss, Jeff (2011). “Unnatural Narrative and Metalepsis. Grant Morrison’s Animal
Man.” J. Alber & R. Heinze (eds.). Berlin: de Gruyter, 189–209.
 Metanarration and Metafiction
Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning

1 Definition

Metanarration and metafiction are umbrella terms designating self-

reflexive utterances, i.e. comments referring to the discourse rather than
to the story. Although they are related and often used interchangeably,
the terms should be distinguished: metanarration refers to the narrator’s
reflections on the act or process of narration; metafiction concerns
comments on the fictionality and/or constructedness of the narrative.
Thus, whereas metafictionality designates the quality of disclosing the
fictionality of a narrative, metanarration captures those forms of self-
reflexive narration in which aspects of narration are addressed in the
narratorial discourse, i.e. narrative utterances about narrative rather than
fiction about fiction.

2 Explication

The terms “metanarration” and “metafiction” are both based on the

model of metalanguage, which designates a (system of) language posi-
tioned on a level above the ordinary use of words for referential pur-
pose (Fludernik 2003: 15). Metanarration and metafiction therefore
have one point in common, namely their self-reflexive or self-
referential character. However, these two types of narrative self-
reflexivity differ greatly, and this difference has tended to be ignored in
most existing typologies. Therefore, the widely-used umbrella term
metafiction not only needs to be elaborated, but a clear distinction also
has to be made between metanarration and other forms of self-reflexive
narration.
Metafiction describes the capacity of fiction to reflect on its own sta-
tus as fiction and thus refers to all self-reflexive utterances which the-
matize the fictionality (in the sense of imaginary reference and/or con-
structedness) of narrative. Metafiction is, literally, fiction about fiction,
i.e. fiction that includes within itself reflections on its own fictional
 Metanarration and Metafiction 345

identity (Hutcheon 1980). Thus, the term is a hypernym denoting all

sorts of self-reflective utterances and elements of a fictional narrative
that do not treat their referent as apparent reality but instead induce
readers to reflect on the textuality and fictionality of narrative in terms
of its artifactuality (Wolf 1993: 224). To characterize different forms of
metafiction, Wolf introduces a distinction between fictio- and fictum-
metafiction (cf. ibid.: 247–248): Fictum-metafiction relates to a text’s
potential truth status, that is, the feasibility of determining its truth. In
contradistinction, fictio-metafiction refers to a text’s constructedness as
well as the conditions of production and reception that contribute to the
characterization of texts as fiction. Hence, fictio-metafiction refers to
elements of construction that do not directly concern the feasibility of
determining the truth status of the text. According to Wolf, the term
metafiction can thus be defined as a form of discourse that draws the
recipient’s attention to the fictionality and artifactuality of the narrative.
Proposing an alternative categorization of self-reflexive utterances,
Nünning (2004) introduces a distinction between metafiction and meta-
narration. Metanarrative comments are concerned with the act and/or
process of narration, and not with its fictional nature. In contrast to
metafiction, which can only appear in the context of fiction, types of
metanarration can also be found in many non-fictional narrative genres
and media. Metanarrative passages need not destroy aesthetic illusion
(Wolf → Illusion (Aesthetic)), but may also contribute to substantiating
the illusion of authenticity that a narrative seeks to create. It is precisely
the concept of narratorial illusionism, suggesting the presence of a
speaker or narrator, that illustrates that metanarrative expressions can
serve to create a different type of illusion by accentuating the act of
narration, thus triggering a different strategy of naturalization, viz. what
Fludernik (1996: 341) has called the “frame of storytelling.”
As a distinct form of narratorial utterance, metanarration displays a
variety of textual functions (Prince [1987] 2003: 51). In contrast to Ge-
nette’s ([1972] 1980: 261–262) suggestion, it cannot be restricted to the
narrator’s “directing functions,” i.e. to references thematizing the “in-
ternal organization” of the text. Rather, all comments which address
aspects of narration in a self-reflexive manner as well as the narrator’s
references (Margolin → Narrator) to his or her communication with the
narratee on the discourse level can be subsumed under the term
“metanarration.” Although such comments are detached from the nar-
rated world, they do not possess a high degree of generality because
they refer to one specific object: the act of narrating. Since such self-
reflexive comments can be defined according to their reference to the
act of narration, they make the reader (Prince → Reader) realize that
346 Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning

what s/he is dealing with is a narrative. Fludernik (1996: 278) describes

the accumulation of metanarrative expressions as “a deliberate meta-
narrative celebration of the act of narration.”

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Research in the field of metafiction has been cultivated over decades

and goes back well before 1970, when the term was first introduced in
essays by Scholes (1970) and Gass (1970). Analyzing Laurence
Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, Šklovskij ([1921] 1965), for instance,
addresses the concept as a “device of laying bare the device,” namely as
a device through which the storytelling itself is made part of the story
told. Scholes (1970) coined the term “metafiction” to designate fiction
that incorporates various perspectives of criticism into the fictional pro-
cess, thereby emphasizing structural, formal, or philosophical problems.
Since then, metafiction has become a major topic in narratological re-
search, replacing the hitherto established and more narrowly defined
terms “self-conscious narration” (Booth 1952) and “irony of fictionali-
ty.” In fact, metafiction has met with considerable academic interest
both as a historical element of (narrative) fiction and as a hallmark of
postmodernism, and book-length studies (Hutcheon 1980; Waugh
1984) have been devoted to it. The conceptualization of forms and
functions of metafiction evolved from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s,
precisely when scholars were attempting to define postmodernism as an
epoch and ethos (O’Donnell 2005).
The first attempt to propose a comprehensive theory of metafiction
was made by Hutcheon (1980). She understands metafictional narra-
tives as “narcissistic” because they are fundamentally self-referring and
auto-representational (1980: x). By mirroring their own process of fic-
tional construction, metafictional texts, such as Gabriel García Már-
quez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Italo Calvino’s If on a Win-
ter’s Night a Traveler, draw the reader’s attention to the storytelling
process and undermine the realism of the narrative. Metafictional strat-
egies therefore often produce a hermeneutic paradox: readers are forced
to acknowledge the fictional status of the narrative, while at the same
time they become co-creators of its meanings. Hutcheon’s most crucial
distinction is that between overt and covert forms of metafiction. While
overtly metafictional texts disclose their self-awareness in “explicit
thematizations […] of their diegetic or linguistic identity within the
texts themselves,” covert forms “internalize” this process: They are
“self-reflective but not necessarily self-conscious” (1980: 7). Similarly,
 Metanarration and Metafiction 347

Waugh (1984: 14) defines metafiction as fiction which “self- con-

sciously reflects upon its own structure as language,” thereby ostenta-
tiously parading the conventions and language of the realistic novel.
Although Hutcheon’s and Waugh’s approaches have contributed to a
better understanding of metafiction, they are problematic because they
reduce its effects to anti-illusionism.
A different approach is put forward by Wolf (1993, [1998] 2004)
who focuses, firstly, on the formal variety of metafiction. To capture
the different forms of metafiction and their potential effects, Wolf
(1993: 220–265) develops a typology based on three dimensions: the
form of mediation, the contextual relation, and the contents value. The
first dimension refers to the level of narration on which the speaker en-
gaged in metafictional reflections can be situated. Metafictional com-
ments can be explicitly uttered by a character of the narrated world or
by the narrator when reflecting on the fictional nature of the text (mode
of telling). Alternatively, they can be conveyed implicitly through for-
mal means, e.g. through contradictory and highly implausible elements
which disrupt the mimetic illusion (mode of showing). According to the
second criterion, contextual relation, various forms of metafiction can
be distinguished depending on whether they appear in a central or mar-
ginal position and how deeply they are entangled with the narrated sto-
ry. Using Wolf’s third criterion, contents value, one can differentiate
between various forms of metafiction depending on whether metafic-
tion refers to the “fictio or the fictum status” of a passage, whether it
contains comments on the entire text or only on parts of it, and whether
the commentary refers to the text itself, to literature in general, or to
another text.
While metafiction has often been perceived as a primary quality of
postmodern literature, Wolf ([1998] 2004) stresses that (Western) nar-
rative fiction has contained metafictional elements ever since its begin-
nings (cf. also Alter 1975 and Hutcheon 1980). From Homer to Salman
Rushdie, from Don Quixote and Jacques le fataliste to The Remains of
the Day, narratives have bared the conventions of storytelling and high-
lighted their constructed nature. However, its frequency and function
vary depending on genres and epochs. The functions of metafiction
range from undermining aesthetic illusion to poetological self-
reflection, commenting on aesthetic procedures, the celebration of the
act of narrating, and playful exploration of the possibilities and limits of
fiction.
Wolf’s detailed typology has also provided a sound basis for the
analysis of metafiction in various other genres such as poetry, drama
and music. In recent contributions, Wolf (2009) seeks to increase the
348 Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning

transmedial applicability of metafiction by reconceptualizing it in a first

step as a non media-specific concept, namely as “metareference.” Ac-
cording to Wolf (2009: 31), metareference can be defined as “a special,
transmedial form of […] self-reference produced by signs or sign con-
figurations which are (felt to be) located on a logically higher level, a
‘metalevel’, within an artefact or performance”. Metareference thus
denotes a signifying practice that generates self-referential meaning and
actualizes a secondary cognitive frame in the recipient, thus eliciting a
“meta-awareness” (ibd.: 31). On the basis of this media-unspecific def-
inition, one can examine individual media with respect to their specific
metareferential capacities (cf. Wolf 2009; ed. 2011). Hence, the catego-
ry metareference supplies a “heuristically motivated umbrella term for
all meta-phenomena occurring in the arts and media” (Wolf 2009: 12).
In contrast to metafiction, the terms “metanarration” or “metanarra-
tive comment” have not become common categories of narratology,
although they have been used in some narratological studies (e.g. Ge-
nette [1972] 1980; Hamon 1977; Prince 1982; Scheffel 1997; Cutter
1998). There are at least two reasons for this. Firstly, the term metafic-
tion is so widely used in English for all sorts of anti-illusionistic tech-
niques that forms of metanarration are generally subsumed under this
umbrella. Secondly, in the few contributions in which the term meta-
narrative is used at all, it is commonly perceived as an English equiva-
lent of grand récit (in Lyotard’s sense) and thus as synonymous with
“master narrative” (e.g. Hutcheon [1989] 1996: 262). Due to the equa-
tion of metanarration with metafiction, narratological research has
largely focused on metafictional forms of narrative self-reflexivity, giv-
ing little attention to such metanarrative phenomena as digressions and
other self-reflexive narratorial interventions. The exception to the rule
is Prince (1982: 115–128). A number of recent articles have redressed
the balance, putting the subject of metanarrative on the map of narrato-
logical research (Nünning 2004; Fludernik 2003; Weidle 2009). They
have provided a descriptive analysis of different types of metanarration
as well as a survey of its changing functions in English novels from the
17th century to the present.
Predicated on the assumption that metanarration is a distinct form of
narratorial utterance, Nünning (2004), drawing on Wolf’s (1993) dis-
tinction between various forms of metafiction, develops a typology that
identifies the most important sub-categories of metanarration. The ty-
pology is based on four basic aspects, which in turn give rise to subsid-
iary distinctions: (a) formal; (b) structural; (c) content-related; and (d)
reception-oriented types of metanarrative.
 Metanarration and Metafiction 349

Firstly, a formal distinction can be made between diegetic, extradie-

getic, and paratextual types of metanarration, depending on the level of
communication at which the speaker of the metanarrative comments
can be situated. Metanarrative comments typically occur on the dis-
course level, though intradiegetic character-narrators may also thema-
tize narrative aspects.
Secondly, structural types of metanarration can be differentiated ac-
cording to the criterion of the quantitative and qualitative relations be-
tween metanarrative expressions and other parts of a narrated text as
well as the syntagmatic integration of such metanarrative passages.
Thirdly, depending on the subject area or the selection of topic, var-
ious types of metanarration can be distinguished on the basis of content.
One important content-related criterion concerns the reference point of
metanarrative expressions. Metanarrative reflections can be restricted to
auto-referential comments on the narrator’s own act of narrating, they
can thematize the narrative style of other authors and texts, or they can
refer to the process of narration in general. Fludernik (2003) has coined
the terms “proprio-metanarration,” “allo-metanarration” and “general
metanarration” in order to distinguish between these different reference
points.
Fourthly, a typological differentiation arises as to the potential ef-
fects and functions of metanarration. This differentiation is based on the
assumption that an accumulation of metanarrative commentaries con-
tributes to foregrounding the narrative act and to creating the illusion of
being addressed by a personalized voice or a “teller” (Fludernik 1996:
278). As in Tristram Shandy, the plethora of metanarrative often en-
hances the “mimesis of narrating” (Nünning 2001). The functions of
metanarration differ according to a decreasing level of compatibility
with diegetic illusion or to an increasing level of destruction of aesthet-
ic illusion. These functions range from authenticating and empathy-
inducing functions (Keen → Narrative Empathy), which are fully com-
patible with mimetic aesthetic illusion, to parodic and anti-illusionistic
types of metanarrative interventions. Of course, not only the forms but
also the functions of metanarration are subject to historical variability.
Whereas, for instance, in realistic 19th-century novels metanarration
primarily serves to create a trust-inducing conversation between the
explicit narrator and the narratee, in numerous novels from the second
half of the 20th century it is functionalized in a metafictional way. In a
recent article, Weidle (2009) has drawn attention to the various ethical
functions, such as the promotion of empathy, that can be fulfilled by
metanarration.
350 Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning

Drawing on Nünning’s typology of metanarration, Fludernik (2003)

suggests subdividing the category of metanarration into metadiscursive,
metanarrational, meta-aesthetic and metacompositional elements, high-
lighting the extensiveness and historical variability of this narrative
form. Moreover, she proposes an alternative schema which differenti-
ates between metafiction, metanarrative and non-narrational self-
reflexivity. To circumvent the potential ambiguity between metanarra-
tion and metafiction, she employs the term metanarrative exclusively
with regard to self-reflexive statements referring to the discourse and its
constructedness and limits the term metafiction to self-reflexive utter-
ances about the inventedness of the story (i.e. to Wolf’s explicit meta-
fiction). By introducing the category of non-narrational self-reflexivity
(i.e. Wolf’s implicit metafiction), which comprises, e.g. mise-en-abyme
or metaleptic plot configurations, Fludernik sets out to dissociate the
mimesis of narration from a teller figure and highlights the contact
zones between various self-reflexive devices across different genres and
media. In a recent contribution, Rajewsky (2009) argues that metanarra-
tion is not restricted to “narrative texts proper” (2009: 137) but can be
found in a range of other media. Thus attempting to capture the trans-
medial scope of this specific form of metaization, she introduces the
category of “form-based metareference” (ibid).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Desiderata for narratological research still include differentiated inves-

tigations of the forms, functions, and diachronic development of meta-
fiction and metanarration. One relatively unexplored issue is the devel-
opment of metafiction and metanarration across different periods of
literary history in different literary genres. In this context, Wolf’s (ed.
2011: 7) thesis of an ongoing increase in meta-elements within given
works since the 1950s and “a current rage for metaization” (ibid.: 29)
certainly warrants critical attention. Although recent research has exam-
ined forms of self-reference and meta-reference, respectively, in a range
of genres and media, such as films, comics, music and computer games
(cf. Nöth & Bishara eds. 2007; Grausam 2011; Bernhard & Wolf eds.
2010; Wolf ed. 2011), the various media-specific forms of metafiction
and metanarration still await closer analysis. Moreover, there are hardly
any studies concerning functions that may be fulfilled by certain forms
of self-reflexive narration in different historical epochs and literary gen-
res. Finally, it is also necessary to investigate the culture-specific forms
and functions of metafiction and metanarration. In this respect, it would
 Metanarration and Metafiction 351

be interesting to provide comparisons between forms of narrative self-

reflexivity or self-referentiality in Western and non-Western literature.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Alter, Robert (1975). Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley:
U of California P.
Bernhard, Walter & Werner Wolf, eds. (2010). Self-Reference in Literature and Music.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Booth, Wayne C. (1952). “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tris-
tram Shandy.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America 67, 163–185.
Cutter, Martha J. (1998). “Of Metatexts, Metalanguages, and Possible Worlds: The
Transformative Power of Metanarrative in C.P. Gilman’s Later Short Fiction.”
American Literary Realism 31, 41–59.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
– (2003). “Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to
Metanarration and Metafiction.” Poetica 35, 1–39.
Gass, William H. (1970). Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York : Knopf.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Grausam, Daniel (2011). “Games People Play: Metafiction, Defense Strategy, and the
Cultures of Simulation.” ELH, 507–532.
Hamon, Philippe (1977). “Texte littéraire et metalanguage.” Poétique 31, 261–284.
Hutcheon, Linda (1980). Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New
York: Methuen.
– ([1989] 1996). “Incredulity toward Metanarrative: Negotiating Postmodernism
and Feminisms.” K. Mezei (ed.). Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology
and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 262–267.
Nöth, Winfried & Nina Bishara, ed. (2007). Self-Reference in the Media. Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Nünning, Ansgar (2001). “Mimesis des Erzählens: Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsäs-
thetik, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte des Akts des Erzählens und der Me-
tanarration.” J. Helbig (ed.). Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert:
Narratologische Studien aus Anlass des 65. Geburtstags von Wilhelm Füger.
Heidelberg: Winter, 13–47.
– (2004). “Towards a Definition, a Typology and an Outline of the Functions of
Metanarrative Commentary.” J. Pier (ed.). The Dynamics of Narrative Form:
Studies in Anglo- American Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter, 11–57.
O’Donnell, Patrick (2005). “Metafiction.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclo-
pedia of Narative Theory. London: Routledge, 301–302.
352 Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning

Prince, Gerald (1982). Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
– ([1987] 2003). A Dictionary of Narratology. Aldershot: Scolar Press.
Rajewsky, Irina O. (2009). “Beyond Metanarration: Form-Based Metareference as a
Transgeneric and Trandmedial Phenomenon.” W. Wolf (ed.) in collaboration
with Katharina Bantleon & Jeff Thoss. Metareference across Media. Theory and
Case Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 135–168.
Scheffel, Michael (1997). Formen selbstreflexiven Erzählens: Eine Typologie und
sechs exemplarische Analysen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Scholes, Robert (1970). “Metafiction.” Iowa Review 1, 100–115.
Šklovskij, Viktor (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1921] 1965). “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Sty-
listic Commentary.” L. Lemon & M. Reis (eds.). Russian Formalist Criticism:
Four Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 25–57.
Waugh, Patricia (1984). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fic-
tion. London: Methuen.
Weidle, Roland (2009). “The Ethics of Metanarration: Emphaty in Ian McEwan’s The
Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, Atonement and Saturday.” Anglistik &
Englischunterricht 73, 57–72.
Wolf, Werner (1993). Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzähl-
kunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstören-
den Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
– ([1998] 2004). “Metafiktion.” A. Nünning (ed.). Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und
Kulturtheorie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 447–448.
– (2009). “Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials
and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” W. Wolf (ed.) in collaboration with
Katharina Bantleon & Jeff Thoss. Metareference across Media. Theory and Case
Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–85.
– ed. (2011) in collaboration with Katharina Bantleon & Jeff Thoss. The Me-
tareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media. Forms, Functions, Attempts
at Explanation. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

5.2 Further Reading

Dupuy, Jean-Pierre (1989). "Self-reference in Literature." Poetics 18, 491–515.

Peters, Joan D. (2002). Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel.
Gainesville: UP of Florida.
Quendler, Christian (2001). From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction: A
Contribution to the History of Literary Self-Reflexivity in its Philosophical Con-
text. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang.
 Multiperspectivity
Marcus Hartner

1 Definition

In the study of narrative the term ‘multiperspectivity’ is employed in a

variety of different and often incongruous ways. Nevertheless, the ar-
guably most common usages of the term refer to multiperspectivity ei-
ther as a basic aspect of narration or as a mode of storytelling in which
multiple and often discrepant viewpoints are employed for the presenta-
tion and evaluation of a story and its storyworld. In the contexts of both
definitions, the perspectival arrangements in multiperspective narratives
may fulfil a variety of different functions; mostly, however, they high-
light the perceptually, epistemologically or ideologically restricted na-
ture of individual perspectives and/or draw attention to various kinds of
differences and similarities between the points of view presented there-
in. In this way, multiperspectivity frequently serves to portray the rela-
tive character of personal viewpoints or perspectivity in general.

2 Explication

The idea of multiperspectivity, sometimes also called polyperspectivity,

is conceptually related to the notion of perspective and point of view
(Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of View). Most understandings im-
ply a tacit definition of this underlying concept and consequently inher-
it the semantic vagueness, metaphoricity, and conceptual plurality gen-
erally connected with the notion of perspective. Correspondingly, a
variety of different meanings has been assigned to the term multiper-
spectivity. Scholars who, for instance, discuss point of view as a fun-
damental condition or intrinsic design principle of storytelling also tend
to perceive multiperspectivity as a general, inherent aspect of narration:
As the presentation of a narrative invariably implies diverse choices of
selection and projection on different levels, each choice potentially ac-
tivates alternative perspectives; in this light, multiperspectivity is not
seen as a mode of narration or presentation, but as a characteristic
354 Marcus Hartner

which is always at least potentially present in a narrative and can be

foregrounded in various ways. Alternative definitions of the term, how-
ever, are directed at entirely different aspects of analysis. Regarding the
level of narrative transmission in literary prose, for example, the con-
cept can also be used in a narrower sense to refer to texts with multiple
narrators (Margolin → Narrator) and/or reflector figures (= narrative
perspective). In yet another understanding of multiperspectivity, the
term is employed to specifically denote semantic clashes between dif-
ferent characters’ (Jannidis → Character) worldviews in drama, film
and prose fiction (= character perspective); but it can also designate the
overall orchestration of a narrative’s complete set of voices (including
implied author, narrator etc.; Schmid → Implied Author) and their
ideological stance, as discussed in Baxtin’s ([1963] 1984, 1981) influ-
ential work on the notions of polyphony and heteroglossia (Tjupa →
Heteroglossia).
Despite the different understandings of the concept, many narratolo-
gists tend to agree that any meaningful notion of the term has to go be-
yond the mere presence of several viewpoints (cf. Nünning & Nünning
eds. 2000: 18–20). It is not a sufficient condition for a multiperspective
narrative to feature more than one of the aforementioned types of per-
spectives, because such a definition would apply to most stories. For
the notion to make sense pragmatically, its usage has to be restricted to
cases where points of view interact in salient and significant ways and
thus create multiperspectivity by, for instance, repeatedly portraying the
same event from various different angles. In this context, Lindemann
(1999: 54) sees the most important aspect in the emergence of semantic
friction (“Reibungseffekt”) between the points of view employed. Iser
([1972] 1974: 57–80) already shows that such instances of tension draw
the reader’s interest (Prince → Reader) both to the object presented and
to the viewpoint presenting it, thereby implicitly foregrounding their
epistemological relativity.
The phenomenon of multiperspectivity thus proves to be conceptual-
ly related to the philosophy of perspectivism (e.g. Nietzsche, Ortega y
Gasset; cf. Anderson 1998) and seems to be particularly suited to stage
perceptual relativism and skepticism towards knowledge and reality. In
this context, scholars have attempted to differentiate between basic
types of the phenomenon and their differing epistemological and se-
mantic implications. The most widely employed distinction is the one
between ‘open’ vs. ‘closed’ forms (Pfister [1977] 1988) of multiper-
spectivity: it serves to differentiate between the presentation of entirely
incompatible points of view and the depiction of perspectives which,
despite their differences, can still be integrated into a coherent account
 Multiperspectivity 355

of the story. Such ‘closed’ forms seem to be particularly suited to stage

the relative or limited nature of individual viewpoints, while at the
same time creating a dominant voice that provides an authoritative ac-
count of the narrated events. The form thus tends to ultimately support
traditional philosophical notions of intersubjective truth, reality, or
knowledge. ‘Open’ forms of multiperspectivity, on the other hand, are
marked by an overall quality of dissonance, contradiction and dialo-
gism (Shepherd → Dialogism). They usually feature discordant, some-
times kaleidoscopic arrangements of conflicting perspectives which
cannot be resolved and therefore often possess an implicitly subversive
or alienating quality.
Yet, multiperspectivity is not limited to the questioning of truth and
knowledge. As with all narrative structures and techniques, there is no
single one-to-one mapping of form and function. Although perspectival
plurality is indeed primarily associated with forms of aesthetic and
epistemological self-reflection, Nünning and Nünning (eds. 2000: 28–
31) demonstrate that multiple interacting perspectives can also fulfill a
broad range of other functions: inter alia, they can serve as a means of
creating suspense, as a self-reflective way of foregrounding the process
of narration, or as a method of endorsing a thematic aspect or a moral
within the narrative by, for example, presenting it repeatedly from dif-
ferent standpoints.
It is furthermore a general characteristic of multiperspective strate-
gies of narration that they tend to force the reader “into much closer
scrutiny of the text” (Hutchinson 1984: 35). Since each new perspective
potentially provides a “different view on plot and character” (ibid.), the
viewpoints employed have to be continually revised, re-evaluated and
re-contextualized. Multiperspective narrative structures are therefore
never semantically empty, but always contribute to the overall meaning
of the text.

3 Forms of Multiperspectivity and the Study of the Concept

3.1 Forms of Multiperspective Narration

From a historical point of view, multiperspectivity is not a recent phe-

nomenon. Early examples can be found in Plato’s Symposium, the Edda
(13th century), or Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” (~1382) (cf. Frank
ed. 1991). However, pre-modern forms of multiperspective narration
remain relatively few and often fulfill primarily rhetorical functions.
This situation changes with what Martin Klepper (2011) has called the
356 Marcus Hartner

“discovery of point of view” in the 18th and 19th centuries, i.e. the
growing awareness of the problematic “relation between observation
and narration” which triggered an increasing interest in the “link be-
tween observation, epistemology, power, narrative, perspective and aes-
thetics-at-large” (5). This concern with the conditions of perception and
narration leads to a rising number of multiperspective texts across dif-
ferent genres—a development initiated by the epistolary novel of the
18th century such as Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or Tieck’s William
Lovell (1795/96). In the 19th century the phenomenon becomes more
widespread and polymorphous as a growing number of writers adopt
various strategies of multiperspective narration in their work (e.g.
Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa [1805–15], Eliot’s Mid-
dlemarch [1871–72]). This trend continues in the 20th century, where
various forms of multiperspectivity continue to feature in increasing
numbers in the literatures of Modernism (e.g. Woolf’s The Waves
[1931]) and Postmodernism (e.g. Saramago’s Blindness [1995],
Pamuk’s Snow [2002]). Here they are often combined with other stylis-
tic or artistic innovations, resulting in such literary classics as Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922), Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), or Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses (1988).

3.1.1 The Novel

If one attempts to distinguish different types of multiperspectivity, its

perhaps most prominent form can be found in the novel narrated by
multiple characters. The prototype of this version is the classic episto-
lary novel: Texts like Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), de Laclos’ Les Li-
aisons Dangereuses (1782), or Smolett’s The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker (1771) are composed of a succession of letters from several
correspondents and illustrate “how the same event may be viewed dif-
ferently by different characters” (Mullan 2006: 56). The same strategy
of “multiple narration” (Lonoff 1982: 143) is also frequently used in
narratives about the investigation of a mystery or crime. In countless
stories, from Collins’ classic detective fiction The Moonstone (1868) to
Pamuk’s postmodern mystery novel My Name is Red (1998), the solu-
tion has to be pieced together from different witness accounts—a struc-
ture that implicitly suggests that “the only authentic approach to the
problem of reality is one which allows multiple perspectives to be heard
in debate with each other” (Schonfield 2009: 140).
The usage of multiple narrators, however, is not the only way to por-
tray an event from the vantage point of different fictional agents. Nu-
merous techniques for presenting consciousness in narrative (cf. Her-
 Multiperspectivity 357

man ed. 2011; Cohn 1978) enable texts to stage individual points of
view for different reflector figures. In this way, tension between the
perspectives of these characters and/or the narrator(s) can be created
(e.g. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain [1995]). Similarly, framing devices
and multiple narrative levels (Pier → Narrative Levels), as for instance
in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), may also lead to multiperspec-
tivity by establishing an array of differing points of view on the subject
and the story presented (cf. Wolf 2000). Another strategy is the em-
ployment of montage- or collage-like structures. Novels like Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) or Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer
(1925) interrupt and supplement their plot-lines with quotations, news-
paper articles, posters, songs, or speeches. By enriching their narratives
with such information, they succeed, among other effects, in creating a
more multifaceted account of the figures, objects, or events portrayed.

3.1.2 Poetry, Drama, and Film

Multiperspectivity is not only to be found in literary prose writing. A

famous example is Browning’s narrative poem The Ring and the Book,
which dramatizes a murder trial in a series of dramatic monologues.
Lyric poetry, on the other hand, is seldom associated with the presenta-
tion of multiple perspectives. Nevertheless, the concept can also be ap-
plied to poems such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Cole-
ridge’s “Kubla Kahn” (1797–98) or Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818) in
which different images of an ancient tyrant are contrasted (cf. Menhard
2009: 30–31).
Like poetry, dramatic texts are also rarely discussed with reference
to the term multiperspectivity. Yet drama is intrinsically based on the
audience’s reconstruction of the individual viewpoints of the dramatic
figures on stage. Plays such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet unfold as each
character in turn acts according to his/her plans, beliefs, and states of
knowledge. Pfister ([1977] 1988) therefore defines the dramatic text as
a “perspectival” and network-like “pattern of contrasting and corre-
sponding figure-perspectives” (59), which he terms the text’s “perspec-
tive structure” (56, passim).
The necessity of inferring and tracing characters’ mental states in
order to make sense of their behavior also applies to the reception of
film (cf. Eder 2008). Here, however, the notion of perspective is “not
only a metaphor but often also a concrete perceptual fact, linked to the
camera position” (Grodal 2005: 168). The analysis of point of view
with respect to narration in film (Kuhn & Schmidt → Narration in
Film) is thus largely concerned with the arrangement of camera angles
358 Marcus Hartner

and the range of “focussing strategies which select and control our per-
ception as well as our emotional involvement” (Kuhn & Schmidt →
Narration in Film, 396). Most motion pictures commonly considered as
multiperspective (e.g. Kurosawa’s Rashomon [1950], Travis’ Vantage
Point [2008], or Singer’s The Usual Suspects [1995]) use such audio-
visual strategies of presentation in order to align the filmic action with
the differing or shifting viewpoints of several characters in some form
(cf. Griem 2000). This is particularly interesting in a film like
Rashomon, in which the story of a crime is presented in four mutually
incompatible testimonies, enabling the movie to question the presuma-
bly objective nature of the camera’s visual gaze (cf. Menhard 2009:
31).

3.2 Theoretical Approaches to Multiperspectivity

Despite the ubiquity of multiperspectivity, there are still comparatively

few narratological studies devoted to its research. One reason might lie
in a skepticism towards the concept itself on grounds of its semantic
vagueness. As Bode (2011: 199) points out, it is “necessary to ask
whether the catch-all phrase ‘multiperspectivity’ does not in fact sum-
marize very different phenomena in a dangerously sweeping way.” An-
other explanation could be that “the phenomena gathered under [this]
umbrella term” have simply been studied under different labels, such as
‘character constellations’ or ‘narrative frames’ (ibid.). A final pragmatic
reason may have to do with preference for the term ‘point of view’ over
‘perspective’ by narratologists in the English-speaking world. Here,
unlike in the German academic context, the term multiperspectivity is
rather unusual in academic discourse. As a result, multiperspective text
structures are often either subsumed under the discussion of point of
view or analyzed with reference to related theories like those of Mixail
Baxtin (e.g. Townsend 2003).
Historically, Baxtin’s (1929) work in fact constitutes one of the first
scholarly discussions of the phenomenon. Although he does not use the
label multiperspectivity, he assigns individual viewpoints to all entities
involved in the act of narration: Narrator, protagonist, addressee and
author, in his opinion, all possess a personal point of view which is de-
termined by their social and ideological background and position. Bax-
tin’s ideas of ‘polyphony’ and ‘heteroglossia’ have been highly influen-
tial in the study of literature and narrative, as they take the discussion of
perspective beyond questions of narrative transmission and structure
and reveal narratives to be orchestrated compositions of numerous
‘voices.’ Despite this general influence, however, his concepts have
 Multiperspectivity 359

only peripherally influenced early studies which explicitly address the

notion of ‘multiperspectivity’. The first (and for three decades virtually
only) monograph investigating this term is Neuhaus (1971), who identi-
fies the phenomenon vaguely with multiple narration. Buschmann
(1996) criticizes this definition for ignoring the potential of multiple
focalization (Niederhoff → Focalization) to create distinct viewpoints.
Furthermore, he suggests speaking of a multiperspective text only if a
central “point of attention” is being portrayed from different vantage
points (260). Taking up this discussion, Lindemann (1999) emphasizes
that the epistemological relevance of the phenomenon hinges on the
degree of dissonance between the employed perspectives. He thus
changes the focus from the number of viewpoints to their semantic rela-
tionship—an idea that Vera and Ansgar Nünning (cf. eds. 2000; Nün-
ning 2001) develop further.
In their work, they turn the vague notion of multiperspectivity into a
more precise narratological tool by drawing on the distinction between
story and discourse and on Pfister’s ([1977] 1988) concept of ‘perspec-
tive structures’, which they employ as the conceptual basis for their
discussion of multiperspectivity. Arguing that adequate terminology for
the analysis of point of view on the level of narrative transmission al-
ready exists, their approach exclusively focuses on the semantic rela-
tionship between the perspectives of a text’s fictional entities, i.e. char-
acters and overt narrators. In their view, multiperspectivity is the result
of the arrangement of discrepant figural standpoints—a perspective
structure which is prototypically produced by successive portrayals of
the same event from various points of view.
Although scholars have noted that this is not the only way of creat-
ing multiperspective discrepancy (cf. Bode 2011: 198–199), most re-
cent studies have similarly focused on fictional agents and the various
kinds of differences (psychological, ideological, perceptual, etc.) be-
tween their individual viewpoints. Surkamp (2003), for example, com-
bines the concept of perspective structures with the theory of possible
worlds (Ryan → Possible Worlds). Menhard (2009) analyses the rela-
tionship between multiperspectivity and narratorial unreliability (Shen
→ Unreliability), and demonstrates that both phenomena are often
combined in literary texts, while Hartner (2012) draws on blending the-
ory (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) to study the interaction of character
perspectives from the vantage point of cognitive narratology (Herman
→ Cognitive Narratology). He suggests that there is no definable set of
multiperspective text structures and that the phenomenon should be
perceived as a readerly effect that can be triggered by a variety of narra-
tive strategies.
360 Marcus Hartner

Despite the recent trend in narratology to investigate multiperspec-

tivity by drawing on the concept of perspective structures, this ap-
proach has not remained without criticism (cf. Schmid 2011; Nieder-
hoff → Perspective – Point of View). One of the major disadvantages
of the focus on figural perspectives and their mutual differences is that
this research strategy implies “a strong shift in the direction of the
viewing subject” (Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of View, 701) and
largely neglects the traditional analysis of point of view as a structural
and relational phenomenon. As Schmid (2011) points out, perspectives
are fundamentally determined by the way they are represented; conse-
quently, he argues that the notion of figural viewpoints is incomplete as
long as it is not related to the classic, relational study of narrative per-
spective (cf. 139). His own approach to the study of point of view
(2010) is influenced by the work of Uspenskij ([1970] 1973), who ar-
gues that the phenomenon of perspective simultaneously exists on mul-
tiple levels (“planes”). Drawing on this idea, Schmid (2010) develops a
more elaborated model which is based on the understanding of point of
view as a complex of multiple conditions necessary for the comprehen-
sion and representation of narrative events (cf. 99). By distinguishing
between five parameters of perspective (perception, ideology, space,
time, and language) and combining them with the categories of narrato-
rial and figural point of view, his model points to the intrinsic multiper-
spectivity of narration per se and thus provides an alternative angle of
approach to the analysis of the phenomenon.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Most recent works on multiperspectivity emphasize that reception pro-

cesses must play a crucial role in any attempt to understand the phe-
nomenon. Although preliminary steps in this direction have been taken,
many questions remain. In particular, the mechanisms of evaluation and
the establishment of hierarchies among a text’s perspectives require
further study. Similarly, the relevance and construction of potential in-
dividual perspectives for fictive or implied readers as well as implied
authors has not been sufficiently addressed to date.
Another important aspect concerns the intermedial dimension of
multiperspectivity. So far, there have been no comparative analyses
between multiperspective strategies of narration in different genres and
media. Furthermore, research needs to be extended to study of the phe-
nomenon in new media products (e.g. computer games). The same ap-
plies to the interplay of multiperspectivity with other modes, aspects, or
 Multiperspectivity 361

functions of storytelling. Although some research has been conducted

in this direction, there is yet no comprehensive account of the specific
conditions for different types or facets of the phenomenon, or its impact
on other stylistic devices and/or narrative strategies and functions.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Anderson, R. Lanier (1998). “Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism.” Synthese 115,

1–32.
Baxtin, Mixail (1929). Problemy tvorčestva Dostoevskogo. Leningrad: Priboj.
– (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1963] 1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneap-
olis: U of Minnesota P.
– (Bakhtin, Mikhail) (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. by M.
Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P.
Bode, Christoph (2011). The Novel: An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Buschmann, Matthias (1996). “Multiperspektivität – Alle Macht dem Leser?”
Wirkendes Wort 46, 259–275.
Cohn, Dorrit (1978). Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Conscious-
ness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Eder, Jens (2008). Die Figur im Film. Marburg: Schüren.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Marc Turner (2002). The Way We Think. New York: Basic
Books.
Frank, Armin Paul, ed. (1991). Frühe Formen multiperspektivischen Erzählens von der
Edda bis Flaubert. Ein Problemaufriss. Berlin: Schmidt.
Griem, Julika (2000). “Mit den Augen der Kamera? Aspekte filmischer Multiperspek-
tivität in Bryan Singers The Usual Suspects, Akiro Kurosawas Rashomon und Pe-
ter Weirs The Truman Show.” A. Nünning & V. Nünning (eds.). Multiperspekti-
visches Erzählen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektivenstruktur im
englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT, 307–322.
Grodal, Torben (2005). “Film Narrative.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclo-
pedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 168–72.
Hartner, Marcus (2012). Perspektivische Interaktion im Roman: Kognition, Rezeption,
Interpretation. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Herman, David, ed. (2011). The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness
in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln: U of Nebrasca P.
Hutchinson, Peter (1984). Games Authors Play. London: Methuen.
Iser, Wolfgang ([1972] 1974). The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in
Prose Fiction From Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Klepper, Martin (2011). The Discovery of Point of View: Observation and Narration in
the American Novel 1790–1910. Heidelberg: Winter.
362 Marcus Hartner

Lindemann, Uwe (1999). “Die Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen: Polyperspekti-

vismus, Spannung und der iterative Modus der Narration bei Samuel Richardson,
Choderlos de Laclos, Ludwig Tieck, Wilkie Collins und Robert Browning.” K.
Röttgers & M. Schmitz-Emans (eds.). Perspektive in Literatur und bildender
Kunst. Essen: Die blaue Eule, 48–81.
Lonoff, Sue (1982). “Multiple Narratives and Relative Truths.” Browning Institute
Studies 10, 143–161.
Menhard, Felicitas (2009). Conflicting Reports: Multiperspektivität und unzuverlässi-
ges Erzählen im englischsprachigen Roman seit 1800. Trier: WVT.
Mullan, John (2006). How Novels Work. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Neuhaus, Volker (1971). Typen multiperspektivischen Erzählens. Köln: Böhlau.
Nünning, Ansgar (2001). “On the Perspective Structure of Narrative Texts: Steps To-
ward a Constructivist Narratology.” W. van Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Per-
spectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: State U of New York P, 207–224.
– & Vera Nünning, eds. (2000). Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Zur Theorie und
Geschichte der Perspektivenstruktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis 20.
Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT.
Pfister, Manfred ([1977] 1988). The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP.
Schmid, Wolf (2010). Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
– (2011). “Perspektive.” M. Martínez (ed.). Handbuch Erzählliteratur. Stuttgart:
Metzler, 138–145.
Schonfield, Ernest (2009). “Moonstone and ‘Mondgebirge’: Exile and Identity in Wil-
helm Raabe and Wilkie Collins.” G. Dirk (ed.). Wilhelm Raabe: Global Themes –
International Perspectives. London: Legenda, 138–148.
Surkamp, Carola (2003). Die Perspektivenstruktur narrativer Texte: Zu ihrer Theorie
und Geschichte im englischen Roman zwischen Viktorianismus und Moderne.
Trier: WVT.
Townsend, Alex (2003). Autonomous Voices: An Exploration of Polyphony in the Nov-
els of Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Uspenskij, Boris (Uspensky, Boris) ([1970] 1973). A Poetics of Composition: The
Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Berkeley:
U of California P.
Wolf, Werner (2000). “Multiperspektivität: Das Konzept und seine Applikationsmög-
lichkeit auf Rahmungen in Erzählwerken.” A. Nünning & V. Nünning (eds.).
Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektiven-
struktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT, 79–110.

5.2 Further Reading

Guillén, Claudio (1971). “On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective.” C. Guillén.
Literature as a System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 283–371.
Hartner, Marcus (2012). “Constructing Literary Character and Perspective: An Approach
from Psychology and Blending Theory.” R. Schneider & M. Hartner (eds.). Blend-
ing and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications. Berlin: de Gruyter.
 Multiperspectivity 363

Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Hönnighausen, Lothar (1980). “‘Point of View’ and Its Background in Intellectual His-
tory.” Comparative Criticism 2, 151–166.
Hühn, Peter et al., eds. (2009). Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling
Mediation in Narrative. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Mausfeld, Rainer (2011). “Intrinsic Multiperspectivity: Conceptual Forms and the
Functional Architecture of the Perceptual System.” W. Welsch et al. (eds.). Inter-
disciplinary Anthropology: Continuing Evolution of Man. Berlin: Springer, 19–
54.
Pätzold, Torsten (2000). Textstrukturen und narrative Welten: Narratologische Unter-
suchungen zur Multiperspektivität am Beispiel von Bodo Kirchhoffs Infata und
Helmut Kraussers Melodien. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Richardson, Brian (2006). “I Ecetera: Multiperson Narration and the Range of Contem-
porary Narrators.” B. Richardson. Unnatural Voices. Extreme Narration in Mod-
ern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 61–78.
 Narratee
Wolf Schmid

1 Definition

The term “narratee,” coined by Prince (1971) following the French term
“narrataire” (Barthes 1966: 10), designates the addressee of the narra-
tor, the fictive entity to which the narrator directs his narration. The
alternative term, “fictive reader” (Schmid [1973] 1986: 28), should be
replaced with “fictive addressee” (Schmid 2007: 175–180), since only
the image of the addressee is meant rather than the listening or reading
figure.

2 Explication

The narratee is to be divided into two entities which differ functionally

or intensionally, even when they coincide materially or extensionally:
the addressee and the recipient. The addressee is the narrator’s image
of the one to whom the message is sent; the recipient is the factual re-
ceiver. The necessity of this distinction is clear: if, e.g., a letter is not
read by the person who was the intended addressee, but by someone
else into whose hands it happens to fall, misunderstanding and various
unintended effects may ensue.
The narratee, just like the fictive narrator, can be represented in two
ways: explicitly or implicitly.
Explicit representation occurs with the aid of pronouns and gram-
matical forms of the second person or with well-known forms of ad-
dress such as “gentle reader,” etc. The image of the addressee created in
this way can be characterized as having more or less concrete features.
Implicit representation is based on the narrative text’s symptoms or
indexes operating with the same indexical signs as the representation of
the narrator and equally based on the expressive function of language
(sensu Bühler [1934] 1990). All the actions that constitute narration
participate in the indexical representation both of the narrator and of his
image of his addressee. In general, the representation of the narratee is
 Narratee 365

built up on the representation of the narrator insofar as the former is an

attribute of the latter, similar to the way in which the image of the im-
plied reader partakes of the characteristics of the implied author
(Schmid → Implied Author).

3 Aspects of the Concept and History of its Study

3.1 Fictive Addressee and Fictive Recipient

The fictive addressee of a secondary narrative (i.e., an inner or embed-

ded story) may seem to coincide with one of the characters of the pri-
mary narrative (the frame story). For example, the sentimental narrator
in Puškin’s “The Stationmaster,” to whom the abandoned title hero tells
the story of his abducted daughter Dunja and who thus functions as a
secondary fictive addressee, appears to coincide with the narrated self,
that is, with the actor of the primary narrative. However, the equation
fictive addressee in the secondary narrative = character in the primary
narrative, an equation that forms the basis for many essays on this enti-
ty (cf. Genette [1972] 1980, [1983] 1988), simplifies the facts in an in-
admissible way. The fictive addressee is nothing other than the schema
of the narrator’s expectations and presumptions and therefore cannot
coincide functionally with the figure who, in the primary narrative, acts
as the recipient of the secondary narrative and who, possibly, is concre-
tized with particular features by the primary narrator. The addressee to
whom Puškin’s title hero narrates the story of his daughter does not
coincide with the sentimental traveler who, as the narrated self, hears
the story and, as the narrating self, reports it many years later. The ad-
dressee is a mere projection of the stationmaster, and the latter cannot
know about his listener’s weakness for sentimental stories or have any
idea about sentimentalist literature. This is why it is hard to agree with
the distinction, made by Jedličková (1993), between the “fictive” and
“projected” addressee: any addressee of a fictive narrator is both pro-
jected and fictive.
To speak of a fictive reader or listener is meaningful only when a
secondary narrator addresses a recipient who appears as a reader or lis-
tener in the primary narrative. However, the secondary fictive addressee
coincides with this fictive recipient (the character in the primary narra-
tive) only materially and not functionally, since being an addressee and
being a recipient are separate functions. In Puškin’s tale, the station-
master’s fictive recipient is endowed with completely different traits
than he, the (secondary) narrator, can imagine in his addressee.
366 Wolf Schmid

Prince (1973: 183) assumes that the distinction between the “narra-
taire virtuel” and the “narrataire réel,” which he concedes could be
made, would not be very fruitful. In contrast, Schmid (2010: 84–88)
suggests that such a distinction in the concept of the narratee, often ne-
glected in communication models, ought to be made nonetheless. When
a narrator engages in dialogue with his counterpart, it is important to
determine whether his interlocutor is merely imagined or whether he
exists as an independent, autonomous character in an overarching story.
Only in the second case, when the counterpart possesses autonomy and
alterity, is it a true dialogue. In the former instance, we are dealing with
a dialogic narrative monologue which, e.g., organizes some of Dosto-
evskij’s works.

3.2 Appeal and Orientation as Indexical Signs of the Narratee

The markedness of the narratee depends to a decisive degree on the

markedness of the narrator: the more marked the narrator, the more
likely it is that he will evoke an image of the counterpart he addresses.
However, the presence of a marked narrator does not automatically im-
ply the presence of an addressee manifest to the same degree.
In principle, every narrative creates a fictive addressee (just as every
text creates an implied reader as assumed addressee or ideal recipient)
(Schmid → Implied Reader), since the indexical signs that point to his
existence, no matter how weak they may be, can never disappear com-
pletely (Prince 1973: 178, 1985: 302).
Particularly relevant for the representation of the addressee are two
indexical signs: appeal and orientation (Schmid [1973] 1986: 28).
Appeal is a cue, usually expressed implicitly, to adopt a particular
position in relation to the narrator, his narrative, the narrated world, or
some of its characters. In itself, appeal is a mode of expressing the
presence of an addressee. From its contents emerge the attitudes and
opinions which the narrator assumes in the addressee and those which
he considers possible. In principle, the appeal function can never reach
absolute zero, for it is present even in statements with a predominantly
referential function, even when in a minimal form: “Know that …” or
“I just want you to know that …”
One type of appeal is the impression. The narrator uses it to present
himself to his counterpart in a particular way, to elicit a reaction that
can take on either a positive form, such as admiration, or a negative
one, such as contempt. (An intentional negative impression is character-
istic of Dostoevskij’s paradoxical monologists, as in Notes from the
Underground.)
 Narratee 367

What is meant by orientation is the alignment of the narrator with

the addressee, without which no comprehensible communication can
occur. Clearly, orientation toward the addressee can be reconstructed
only to the extent that it is bound to the mode of representation.
Orientation refers, firstly, to the codes and norms it is presumed the
addressee shares, which can be linguistic, epistemological, ethical and
social. Conversely, the narrator need not share the norms assumed in
the addressee, but he cannot but use language comprehensible to the
addressee and must take into account the presumed scope of his
knowledge. It is to this extent that every narrative contains implicit in-
formation about the image that the narrator has of the abilities and
norms of his addressee.
Second, the orientation can consist in the anticipation of the imag-
ined addressee’s behavior. The narrator can imagine the addressee as a
passive listener and obedient executor of his appeals or, alternatively,
as an active interlocutor who independently judges what is narrated,
poses questions, expresses doubts and raises objections.
For no other author of Russian literature (and perhaps of any litera-
ture) does the narratee play so active a role as for Dostoevskij. In Notes
from the Underground, in the novel A Raw Youth, and in the tale “A
Gentle Spirit,” the narrator speaks literally every word “with a sidelong
glance” (Baxtin [1929] 1984: 195–198), i.e. aligned on the fictive lis-
tener or hearer. The narrator, who wants to win his addressee’s admira-
tion, leaves in the text traces of his appeal and of his orientation: he
wants to present himself in a positive or negative way to the reader or
listener (impression), pays attention to his counterpart’s reaction (orien-
tation), guesses his critical replies (orientation), anticipates them (im-
pression), attempts to rebut them (impression), and clearly recognizes
(orientation) that he does not succeed in doing so (cf. Schmid 2010:
84–88). This type of narrative, where the addressee is imagined as an
active interlocutor, is assigned by Baxtin, in his “metalinguistic” typol-
ogy of discourse (181–204), to the type “active double-voiced word”
(or “word with orientation toward someone else’s discourse”), i.e. a
word in which two contradictory evaluative positions can be recognized
simultaneously: that of the speaker and that of the anticipated evalua-
tive position of the addressee. In contrast to the “passive variety of the
double-voiced word,” where “the other person’s discourse is a com-
pletely passive tool in the hands of the speaker wielding it,” in the ac-
tive variety “the other’s words actively influence the speaker’s speech,
forcing it to alter itself accordingly under their influence” (197).
368 Wolf Schmid

3.3 History of the Concept and its Study

After the implicit discovery of the narratee in Baxtin’s ([1929] 1984)

“metalinguistic” model of voices, and before the advent of French
structuralism, the notion was described in Polish narratology. Starting
from German “Erzählforschung” (particularly Kayser 1956) and based
on Polish phenomenological philosophy (Ingarden [1931] 1973),
Jasińska (1965: 215–251) distinguished between the “real” reader and
the “epic” reader, the latter corresponding to the narratee. The distinc-
tion between implied reader and fictive addressee was anticipated by
Głowiński ([1967] 1975) when he contrasted a “recipient in the wider
sense” with a “recipient in the narrow sense.” In her five-level model of
roles in literary communication, Okopień-Sławińska ([1971] 1975:
125) associates the “author” with the “concrete reader,” the “transmitter
of the work” with the “recipient of the work” (identified with the “ideal
reader”), and the narrator with the “addressee of the narrative.”
The true narratological career of the narratee starts with Prince
(1971), when it takes on an English name. Shortly after this, the nar-
ratee appears in its French appellation in Genette ([1972] 1980), who
refers to Barthes’ “narrataire” (1966) and to Greimas’ “destinataire”
([1966] 1983) as his sources. In his influential article, Prince (1973)
discusses the “signaux du narrataire” insofar as these signals go beyond
the “degré zéro du narrataire.” This zero status was the object of such
fierce criticism by Pratt (1982) (cf. Prince 1985) that Prince (1982)
eventually renounced it. On the other hand, Prince (1985: 300) dismiss-
es as “trivial” another valid argument, notably that the supposed
“signaux du narrataire” could just as well be seen as the “characteristics
of the narrator” (Pratt 1982: 212). Most important in Prince (1973:
192–196) is the examination of the narratee’s functions: the narratee
constitutes a “relay station” between narrator and reader, helps deter-
mine the frame of the narration, serves as a means to characterize the
narrator, highlights certain themes, advances the plot and becomes the
spokesman of the work’s moral. In his Narratology, Prince (1982: 16–
26) examines the “signs of the ‘You’” and the “narratee-character,” dis-
cusses varying forms of the narratee’s “knowledge,” its representation
as a group, and the “hierarchy of narratees” in narratives in which there
is more than one narratee.
 Narratee 369

4 Topics for Further Research

Particularly interesting are active narratees whose real or imagined

presence exerts an influence on the narrator, leading to a double-voiced
narration in Baxtin’s sense. It would be tempting to trace existing influ-
ence lines in the genre of dialogic narrative monologue (similar to the
one examined by Głowiński {[1963] 1973} from Dostoevskij to Ca-
mus’ La Chute and from there to Polish postwar prose). It may be
worthwhile to observe the relationship of those narratees with the phi-
losophies of their authors, cultures, and epochs. Another topic for fur-
ther research would be the genre-specific manifestations of narratees in
poetry or in dramatic monologue.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Barthes, Roland (1966). “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits.” Communica-

tions 8, 1–27.
Baxtin, Mixail (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1929] 1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Bühler, Karl ([1934] 1990). Theory of Language. The Representational Function of
Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Głowiński, Michał ([1963] 1973). “Narracja jako monolog wypowiedziany.” M.
Głowiński. Gry powieściowe. Szkice z teorii i historii form narracyjnych. Wars-
zawa: PWN, 106–148.
– ([1967] 1975). “Der virtuelle Empfänger in der Struktur des poetischen Werkes.”
R. Fieguth (ed.). Literarische Kommunikation. Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor, 93–126.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien ([1966] 1983). Structural Semantics: An Attempt at Method.
U of Nebraska P.
Ingarden, Roman ([1931] 1973). The Literary Work of Art. Evanston: Northwestern UP.
Jasińska, Maria (1965). Narrator w powieści przedromantycznej (1776–1931). War-
szawa: PIW.
Jedličková, Alice (1993). Ke komu mluví vypravěč? Adresát v komunikační perspektivě
prózy. Praha: ÚČL AV ČR.
Kayser, Wolfgang (1956). “Das Problem des Erzählers im Roman.” The German Quar-
terly 29, 225–38.
Okopień-Sławińska, Aleksandra ([1971] 1975). “Die personalen Relationen in der
literarischen Kommunikation.” R. Fieguth (ed.). Literarische Kommunikation.
Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor, 127–147.
370 Wolf Schmid

Pratt, Mary Louise (1982). “Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations: On Anglo-

American Reader Response Criticism.” Boundary 2, 201–231.
Prince, Gerald (1971). “Notes toward a Characterization of Fictional Narratees.” Genre
4, 100–105.
– (1973). “Introduction à l’étude du narrataire.” Poétique 14, 178–196.
– (1982). Narratology. The Form and Functioning of Narrative. The Hague: Mou-
ton.
– (1985). “The Narratee Revisited.” Style 19, 299–303.
Schmid, Wolf ([1973] 1986). Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. With
an afterword: “Eine Antwort an die Kritiker”. Amsterdam: Grüner.
– (2007). “Textadressat.” Th. Anz (ed.). Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft I. Stutt-
gart: Metzler, S. 171–181.
– (2010). Narratology. An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.

5.2 Further Reading

Piwowarczyk, Mary (1976). “The Narratee and the Situation of Enunciation: A Recon-
sideration of Prince’s Theory.” Genre 9, 161–177.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin (1981). “Of Readers and Narratees: The Experience of Pame-
la.” L’Esprit Créateur 21, 89–97.
 Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse
Greta Olson

1 Definition

Narration plays a central role in legal discourse and permits law to be

communicated, adjudicative acts to be justified, and their principles to
be explained (Fludernik 2010). Documents such as charges of indict-
ment, formal disciplinary complaints, legal briefs, appellate judgments,
and legal commentaries contain narrative elements, as do orally trans-
mitted opening and closing statements, cross-examinations, and judges’
announcements of the sentence.
Legal narratives are moreover the subject of law; in common, civil,
and mixed legal systems, the re-construction of what happened to
whom or to what is central to a given sequence of events’ being ad-
judged in juristic terms. Applying an abstract legal norm to a particular
case in the civil law tradition requires that an interpretive process is
undertaken that involves recourse to methods of narrative analysis such
as differentiating between the frame of the telling, the telling, and the
told, naming functions of narrative structures, and identifying types of
tellers. Since the advent of “legal studies after the cultural turn” (Moran
2012), law has been regarded as narratively based and culturally em-
bedded, suggesting the benefits of a narratologically literate approach
to legal discourse.

2 Explication

“Narration” in legal discourse most commonly denotes the contest of

stories that transpires in adversarial or, with different actors, in inquisi-
torial trials. “Adversarial” refers to legal systems in which the prosecu-
tion and defense produce evidence that is evaluated during the course of
the trial; in inquisitorial systems, trials take place without juries and
judges play a larger role in determining the proceedings, examining the
witnesses, and adjudging cases’ outcomes. On the discourse level, the
act of narrating is central to legal proceedings: the facts of a case are
372 Greta Olson

related with varying rhetorical intensity depending on the type of trial

and legal system and the stage of the trial in which the narrational act
occurs. “Narrative” in legal discourse can also be used to describe a
legal concept’s or a statute’s development: from precedent to new
judgment in common law systems; in commentaries on legal concepts
and their jurisprudential developments in codified ones.
According to a leading proponent of a narrative approach to law:
“Law, one might say, needs a narratology” (Brooks [2005] 2008: 425).
Brooks argues that law perpetually attempts to hide its storytelling
qualities in the interest of preserving its autonomy from other disci-
plines and defending its seemingly exclusive reliance on abstract norms
and logical reasoning. Uncovering the narrative qualities of legal texts
and judgments, including their sequencing and causal presentation of
events as well as their investments in prescriptive assumptions about
correct behavior, is accordingly vital to understanding how law oper-
ates, under what premises, and with what contingencies.
The study of narration and narrative in legal discourse comprises
several subtypes. It includes investigations into legal narration as a con-
test of narratives (3.1.1), and examinations of law in narrative literature
or as rhetoric (3.1.2). Another approach juxtaposes personal accounts of
marginalized individuals with dominant legal narratives to advocate
rights and critique hegemonic legal practices (3.1.3). A fourth area of
study analyses the narrational qualities of legal discourse and interpre-
tation (3.1.4). Allowing for a more metaphorical definition of narrative,
the interface between legal and cultural narrative has gained critical
interest, and describing this field will reveal meta-level issues concern-
ing narrative studies of the law (3.2).

3 Aspects of the Phenomena

3.1 Subtypes of Research on Narration and Narrative

in Legal Discourse

3.1.1 Legal Narration as a Contestation of Narratives

The study of narration understood in the narrow sense as the act of tell-
ing a story centers on investigations of witness testimony and state-
ments by the prosecution and the defense and has primarily focused on
adversarial Anglo-American trials. Yet this research is also applicable
to codified law and civil law system procedures. Jackson (1988a,
1988b, 1990) points out that the pragmatics of how the micro-narratives
 Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse 373

that make up a given case are narrated, by whom, and under what au-
thority influences the outcome of adversarial trials. Like Brooks (1996),
Jackson describes the criminal courtroom’s “contest between compet-
ing narratives, which will be resolved on the criteria of relative similar-
ity to narrative typification” (1996: 28, original emphasis). Narrative
typification refers to evaluative judgments based on their perceived
likeness to collective, prototypical images of criminals (1996: 32–33),
as well as other narratively organized forms of social knowledge (Jack-
son n.d.). Such differentiations allow Jackson to distinguish between
the micro-narratives related within a trial and the macro-narrative of the
trial itself (1996: 33). The perceived completeness of stories recited in
trials and their apparent compliance with norms of legal reasoning de-
termine whether they will be regarded as plausible. In the common law
tradition, this involves the principle of stare decisis; in the civil law
tradition, plausibility is based on the perceived clarity, consistency, and
coherence with which the code is applied.
Brooks argues that law has implicitly recognized the power of story-
telling in the courtroom through “formulas by which the law attempts to
impose form and rule on stories” (1996: 19). Rules about what is con-
sidered to be relevant narration in the courtroom include the degree of
detail and presumed objectivity of witness testimony and prohibitions
concerning admissible narratives. Assumptions about what makes tes-
timony valid influence the telling and retelling of the events that trials
seek to narrate conclusively. Further, as Coombe points out, the contest
of narratives begins much earlier than in the dramatic setting of the jury
courtroom with the selection of evidence that contributes to the narra-
tives presented in courtrooms (2001: 46). Similarly, in inquisitorial sys-
tems, the state attorney’s assessment of the illegality of the accused’s
actions determines whether a case will be tried; her or his narration of
the facts in a dossier influences the judge’s “master narrative”
(Grunewald 2013: 382).
Courtroom exchanges are also subject to generic restrictions. Künzel
posits a preference for the norms of realist narratives, with their appear-
ance of verisimilitude, that may be detrimental to perceptions of vic-
tims’ testimony in rape trials. Due to the traumatic nature of their expe-
riences, victims may testify in an affective, non-linear, and dissociative
mode—qualities resembling norms of avant-garde or Modernist texts—
hence appearing suspect to those who adjudge these trials (2003: 249–
254). Other scholars have also conducted genre-based narrative interro-
gations of law. With recourse to Frye’s archetypal criticism, West com-
pares the “jurisprudential traditions [of] natural law, legal positivism,
liberalism, and statism” to the genres of “romance, irony, comedy, and
374 Greta Olson

tragedy,” respectively ([1954] 1993: 347); and Sarat (2002) diagnoses

the melodramatic elements that underlie US American trials and are
employed to justify capital punishment.
Although these differentiations might appear to pertain only to the
courtroom, Sternberg argues with recourse to biblical law that the legal
code represents a form of narration involving if-plots, ordering, and
turn-taking, and is infinitely generative of further storytelling: “law […]
incorporates the narrativities of repetition and quotation among its ma-
kings, workings, aids to processing and understanding” (2008: 38). Ac-
cordingly, the story of codified law consists of the reconstruction of
events and the filling-in of narrative gaps. Similarly, semiotic interpre-
tations of law suggest that “legal practice is a narrative endeavour” that
occurs “within legal discourse as a complex economy of signs”
(Broekman 2011: 3), regardless of whether it is practiced in a civil or
common law system.
The predominance of narrative studies concerning courtroom dis-
course may be explained by the adversarial trial’s dramatic structure
and the prosecution and defense’s reliance on conflicting arguments
about the alleged perpetrator’s actions. Thus courtroom discourse re-
sembles the structures of oral narratives (von Arnauld 2009; Fludernik
→ Conversational Narration – Oral Narration). Yet researchers’ em-
phasis on competing courtroom stories may also be due to the medial
dominance of representations of Anglo-American adversarial trials.
Discussions of how defense lawyers have to disrupt the prosecu-
tion’s narration of events recited in past tense with counter narratives
focusing on the present is typical of this type of research (Amsterdam
& Hertz 1992: 55). Since in civil law systems the judge or judges and
lay assessors determine the description of previous events on the basis
of accumulated evidence, witness questioning, and argument, the meta-
narrative of a case has to be reproduced in a written protocol of judg-
ment, which employs persuasive narrative strategies (Vismann 2011:
98–111).

3.1.2 Law and Literature, Law as Rhetoric

“Law and Literature” developed in a critical response to the law-as-

economics movement that predominated in US American legal training
during the 1970s and which sought to institutionalize a rational-choice
approach to adjudication (Kayman 2002; Peters 2005; Olson 2010,
2012). Law and Literature interfaces legal protocols with literary narra-
tives to demonstrate the contingent nature of justice. Accordingly, one
type of research, called “law-in-literature,” critiques legal processes
 Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse 375

using the alternative ethics that are suggested by literary texts; another
type, called “law as literature,” analyzes law as rhetoric and reads legal
texts using philological means.
One ethical-rhetorical approach dates from the work of White
(1973). For White (1995), adjudication is indivisible from rhetoric; ide-
ally, it transforms the communities into which it is received as did
Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela’s texts. White’s performative
legal rhetoric attempts to restore an ethics to law and legal education
through the imaginative and transformative use of language. Although
his work is more often associated with the trajectory of Law and Litera-
ture that examines how law is critiqued in “fictions about law” (Weis-
berg 2011: 50), Weisberg also looks for “textual standards of [legal]
conduct” in literature (1988: 145). He describes how “good code” can
be provided by law when it is interpreted by “good interpreters” (Weis-
berg 2011: 52), and “resentful code” can be combated by “just individ-
uals” (53); and both types can be illuminated using literary narrative.
Legal and literary rhetoric thus intersect with the ethics of interpreta-
tion.
Emerging out of a different tradition altogether, Postmodernist Ju-
risprudence combines semiotics, psychoanalysis, and rhetorical analysis
to demonstrate English law’s metaphoricity, narrativity, and literari-
ness. Goodrich’s (1987) rhetorical analysis of law is employed to high-
light law’s pretentions to rational authority. Most pertinently, in terms
of its potential for narratological research, Goodrich has argued that the
basis of law as a science and an autonomous discipline can be found in
the medieval philological interpretation and preservation of the Corpus
Iuris Civilis (1987: 33). In essence, the establishment of law as a sci-
ence involved a disregard for the context in which legal texts were cre-
ated.
Goodrich contends that the still dominant positivist approach to le-
gal interpretation, based on Kelsen’s and Hart’s work, has mirrored de-
velopments in structuralist approaches to language, thus suggesting that
the recent history of jurisprudence has followed developments in lin-
guistics: “The specific context of contemporary legal science, which is
to form the subject of the present chapter, is co-extensive with linguis-
tics itself” (1987: 34). This argument is not dissimilar from Fluder-
nik’s observation that narratology has developed in line with linguistics
([2005] 2008: 48). The critical rhetorical approach to law that Goodrich
advocates “begins by throwing the possibility and status of law into
question” (1987: 211), demonstrating law’s anything but unique discur-
siveness.
376 Greta Olson

3.1.3 Legal Narrative and the Recognition of Minoritarian Experience

Critical legal studies has brought the narrative qualities of law to the
fore in an effort to undermine law’s service to the entitled and to force
legal practitioners to acknowledge the experiences of the underrepre-
sented. Challenging law’s autonomy as a rational system, critical legal
studies has grown into a plurality of approaches that focus on law’s nar-
rativity and contingent relations to forms of subordination: this includes
critical race studies and storytelling, feminist jurisprudence, queer theo-
ry, and intersectional legal analysis.
Within the US American context, stories that display a high degree
of experientiality about being materially disadvantaged and institution-
ally excluded have provided counter-punctual arguments to the assump-
tion that the legal subject is a white, propertied man. In advocacy of this
type of storytelling, Delgado asserted that: “Many, but by no means all,
who have been telling legal stories are members of what could be loose-
ly described as outgroups, groups whose marginality defines the
boundaries of the mainstream, whose voice and perspective—whose
consciousness—has been suppressed, devalued, and abnormalized”
(1989: 2412). Delgado’s argument departs from the assumption that
reality and group identity are constructed and mediated through acts of
narration (cf. Bruner 1991) (Bamberg → Identity and Narration). Ac-
cordingly, one field of narrative legal scholarship concerns reciting al-
ternative stories to those related in hegemonic legal contexts. This has
included introducing literary narratives about race to the US legal class-
room, as in Derrick Bell’s fictions or Patricia Williams’ autobiograph-
ical writings. Feminist critique uncovers how acts of domestic abuse do
not cohere with legal models which assume that violence takes place
between men in public places, and how rape complaints are consistently
discredited if their stories do not comply with this model—if the assail-
ant was not a stranger, did not use a weapon, and did not attack a wom-
an outside her home.
This entails bringing attention to law’s lacunae. Personal testimonies
to experiences unattended to by legal code and legislation have become
vehicles for raising public notice of how rape and sexual slavery are
employed as systematic tools of oppression during wartime. The rights
of indigenous peoples have been rendered tangible through personal
narrative; and these narratives have contributed to challenging the legal
status quo. Commenting on how such narratives function as forces for
legal emancipation, Schaffer and Smith write: “Emergent in communi-
ties of identification marginalized within the nation, such movements
 Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse 377

embolden individual members to understand personal experience as a

ground of action and social change” (2004: 4).

3.1.4 Legal Narrative as Narration, and Narrative Issues

in Legal Interpretation

Somewhat underrepresented in narrative approaches to legal discourse

is research that invokes structuralist work on narration and deals specif-
ically with categories of temporality, tense, internality or externality,
and reliability. Legal decisions are often composed without a narrative
presence or an overt voice, thus belying the existence of a person or
persons behind the text, as in: “IT IS ORDERED that […] the law li-
cense of Brenda Gloria Christian, State Bar Card Number 04226500,
heretofore issued by the Court, be cancelled” (Supreme Court of Texas
1994: 1). In German statutes one finds similarly impersonal narration
about anonymous agents involved in a sequence of hypothetical ac-
tions, e.g.: “(1) By a purchase agreement, the seller of a thing is obliged
to deliver the thing to the buyer and to procure ownership of the thing
for the buyer. The seller must procure the thing for the buyer free from
material and legal defects” (Div. 8 Sec. 433 of the German Civil Code
[2012]). Depending on how wide or narrow their definition of narrative
is, some narratologists will argue that this law does not meet the mini-
mum requirements of experientiality, eventfulness, human-like agency,
etc.
This pattern differs considerably in preambles, where allusions are
made to political collectives as a strategy of legitimation (von Arnauld
2009: 13). Particularly in constitutions, narrative authority is evoked
through references to a common historical narrative, as in the US Con-
stitution’s “We the people” or in Art. 1 sub 2 of the Basic Law for the
Federal Republic of Germany: “The German people therefore
acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human right as the basis of eve-
ry human community, of peace and justice in the world” (2010). Noting
the rhetorical differences between impersonally and personally narrated
legal texts and their ideological effects can be achieved through atten-
tion to the specific narrative qualities of law.
Most pressingly, the issue of how to deal with narrative arises in le-
gal interpretation. This entails the application of codified law or prece-
dent judgments to the case at hand according to competing rules of ap-
plication and it raises issues of narrative intentionality. In the US,
debate continues about whether the Constitution should be interpreted
according to the presumptive original intentions of those who com-
posed it, the exact semantic meanings of the words at the time an act or
378 Greta Olson

amendment was enacted, or according to the general purpose of the en-

actment, which has to be viewed contextually. This debate has enduring
political consequences, as recent US Supreme Court decisions regard-
ing campaign financing and healthcare have amply shown.
Legal interpretation concerning European Community law functions
differently, as does the application of codified law in civil law systems.
On the basis of treaties, regulations and directives are issued and may
be enacted as laws by national legislatures; they are subsequently trans-
lated into the community’s twenty-three languages, rendering the issue
of lexical or ‘plain’ meaning of words moot (McLoughlin & Gardner
2007: 101). Decisions regarding the scope of EU legislation are made
by comparing the wording of the texts into which a law has been trans-
lated or through recourse to its “purposiveness,” the law’s coherence
with guiding principles of the union and its achievement of a desired
end (Rösler 2012). Further, “whenever one of the member states sub-
mits a proposal for new supranational legislation, it does so inescapably
from its own context” (Gaakeer 2012: 259). Thus recent efforts to
homogenize European law and rules of application interface with narra-
tological concerns, as methods of interpreting narrative texts may be
variously based on intrinsic textual signals, linguistic concerns, extra-
textual realities, or historical contingencies.

3.2 Legal Narrative as Cultural Narrative

The insight that legal discourse is not autonomous but inextricably

bound to its historical context can be attributed to many sources includ-
ing Friedman (1969), who argued that a legal system is indivisible from
the legal culture through which it is understood, and Cover (1983).
Cover contended that while law may give the appearance of autonomy
and rationality, it is never free from the narratives that lend it sense:
“No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narra-
tives that locate it and give it meaning. […] Once understood in the
context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a
system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live” (Cover
1983: 4–5). On the one hand, law is rendered comprehensible through
narrative. On the other hand, law is embedded in the cultural narratives
that frame it. Hence legal prescriptions cannot be separated from the
narratives that situate, explain, and legitimize their prerogative. As a
consequence, Cover argues that not only do trials represent contests
between narratives, but so do all legal texts as they are interpreted, re-
interpreted, and applied over time. Arguments for a given interpretation
 Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse 379

then rest on founding myths about whence the law derives its authority
to enact the state’s rule or violence (Cover 1986).
Narratives of law also extend into the future in normative projec-
tions of their effects. As Cover writes: “A nomos, as a world of law,
entails the application of human will to an extant state of affairs as well
as toward our visions of alternative futures” (1983: 7). Legal decisions
can represent corrective counterfactual readings of the present as in
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which deemed the regular prac-
tice of segregating school children on the basis of race unconstitutional.
Accordingly, the legal precept “separate but equal” that had authorized
segregation until Brown can be understood as part of the ongoing histo-
ry of US American race laws, extending from Colonialist prohibitions
of interracial unions to current disputes about the scope of affirmative
action and the protection of voting rights. Constructing the historical
narrative of a given body of law depends on the legal system in which it
transpires and on the sociocultural factors that inform its historicization.
Narrative approaches to law go beyond the courtroom to examine
histories of statutes and the developments of legal systems: social con-
tract theory can, for example, be understood as the study of the story
element that enables participants to understand how their legal collec-
tive came to be (Tait & Norris 2011). Foundational legal narratives le-
gitimate a given legal system’s normative status by establishing resem-
blances between themselves and other master plots in a process not
dissimilar from what Butler (1990) has called performativity.
Another form of narrative analysis investigates how literary narra-
tives and their forms participate in altering legal processes. This work
has concentrated mostly on the 18th and 19th centuries; it unites genre
investigations with narratology and historical investigations of legal
procedures. Thus Bender (1987) argues that the English novel antici-
pated the end of public executions; Grossman (2002) contends that fo-
rensic novels occasioned a new awareness of the courtroom as a site for
relating individual, clashing stories. Scholars such as Miller (1988),
Thomas (1987, 2007), and Gladfelder (1997) demonstrate how proto-
cols of law and citizenship have intersected with novelistic prose and its
representation of consciousness. Their work demonstrates that narrative
techniques overlap with changing procedures as well as readers’ no-
tions of self, corroborating Cover’s thesis that legal narratives are em-
bedded in cultural ones.
380 Greta Olson

4 Relevance for Narratology

While assuming that law has much to gain through the scrutiny of the
narrative principles that underlie its texts and procedures, Wolf’s
(2011) caveat about the dangers of narratology’s cannibalizing other
disciplines should be heeded: legal practitioners remain skeptical of
constructivist, sometimes poorly informed efforts of those who pursue
narrative inquiries into the law (Posner [1988] 2009). Further, a narra-
tologically informed investigation of law may alter the manner in which
narrative and narrativity are understood. Just as investigations of
games, visual phenomena, and music have demonstrated the limitations
of structuralist models, the analysis of narration and narrative in legal
discourse may expose some narratological concepts’ investments in
institutions and discourses of power.

5 Topics for Further Investigation

Narrative studies of legal discourse favor texts with overtly narrational

elements such as appellate and Supreme Court opinions. Yet the norms
transported through legal narratives are disseminated through symbols
and images as well as language. Thus the integration of narrative ap-
proaches to law with “Law and Semiotics” and “Law and Visual Cul-
ture” needs to occur.
From a narratological standpoint, open questions include: how does
the framing of legal narratives through interpretive schemata and gener-
ic conventions differ from that of other types of narratives? How do
legal hypotheticals and possible worlds theory relate? Might narrator
unreliability be better understood through recourse to assessments of
witness reliability? What differing narrative premises underlie various
legal systems’ justifications of judgments and interpretive procedures?
And will such premises change as legal systems become increasingly
hybridic?
 Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse 381

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6.2 Further Reading

Fludernik, Monika (2014). “A Narratology of the Law? Narratives in Legal Discourse.”

Critical Analysis of Law: Critical Analysis of Law and the New Interdisciplinari-
ty 1.1, 87–109.
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Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 192–221.
Reichman, Ravit (2010). “Narrative as Rhetoric.” A. Sarat et al. (eds). Law and the
Humanities: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 377–397.
Richland, Justin B. (2013). “Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language.” Annual Re-
view of Anthropology 42, 209–226.
 Narration in Film
Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

1 Definition

Film, in general, is a narrative medium, or, at least, a medium of many

narrative capacities. Nearly every film, except specific types of experi-
mental films and documentaries, includes at least a few basic narrative
structures. This applies especially, but not only, to feature films. If we
take the representation of a change of state as a basic necessary condi-
tion for narrativity—and thus follow a broad definition of narrativity—
moving pictures have at least two basic possibilities of narrative repre-
sentation: a) to represent motions (and therefore changes) within one
shot; b) to confront two (or more) comparable states through the com-
bination of shots into sequences (i.e. the process of editing or montage
in terms of classical film theory). Both modes of narrative representa-
tion have a visual and an auditive dimension, as virtually every sound
film has a visual and an auditory channel addressing the spectator’s
sense of vision and sense of hearing.
The general proposition of a narrow definition of narrativity that
there is no narrative without a narrator (Margolin → Narrator) poses
particular problems when applied to narration in feature films. Though
almost all feature films abound in storytelling capacities and thus be-
long to a predominantly narrative medium, their specific mode of plu-
rimedial presentation and their peculiar blending of temporal and spa-
tial elements set them apart from forms of narrative that are principally
language-based. The narratological inventory, when applied to cinema,
is bound to incorporate and combine a large number of “co-creative”
techniques “constructing the storyworld for specific effects” (Bordwell
1985: 12) and creating an overall meaning only in their totality. Instead
of a single, language-based narrator, the concept of a more complex
“visual” or “audiovisual narrative instance” was introduced (Deleyto
1996: 219; Kuhn 2009, 2011: 87–89), mediating the paradigms of
overtly cinematographic devices (elements relating to camera, editing,
sound) and the mise en scène (arranging and composing the scene in
front of the camera).
 Narration in Film 385

On the other hand, the most solid narrative link between verbal and
visual representation is sequentiality, since literary and filmic signs are
apprehended consecutively through time, mostly (though not always)
following a successive and causal order. It is this consecutiveness that
“gives rise to an unfolding structure, the diegetic whole” (Cohen 1979:
92). Both media, narrative literature and film, have a “double chronolo-
gy” or “double temporal logic,” i.e. an external movement (“the dura-
tion of the presentation of the novel, film […]”), and an internal move-
ment (“the duration of the sequence of events that constitute the plot”)
through time (Chatman 1990: 9). The main features of narrative strate-
gies in literature can also be found in film, although the characteristics
of these strategies differ significantly. In many cases, it seems to be
appropriate to speak of “analogies” between literary and filmic story-
telling. These analogies are far more complex than is suggested by any
mere “translation” or “adaptation” from one medium into another.

2 Explication

Broadly speaking, there are two different outlooks on cinema that di-
vide the main camps of narratological research. If the medium itself and
its unique laws of formal representation serve as a starting-point, many
of its parameters either transcend or obscure the categories that have
been gained in tracking narrative strategies of literary texts. Thus Metz
states that film is not a “language” but another kind of semiotic system
with “articulations” of its own (Chatman 1990: 124). Though some of
the analogies between literary and filmic narrative may be quite con-
vincing (the establishing shot of a panoramic view can be approximate-
ly equated with what Genette [1972] 1980 calls zero focalization),
many other parallels must necessarily abstract from a number of diverse
principles of aesthetic organization before stating similarities in the
perception of literature and film. Despite the fact that adapting literary
texts into movies has long since become a conventional practice, the
variability of cinematographic modes of narrative expression calls for
such a number of subcategories that the principle of generalization (in-
herent in any valid theory) becomes jeopardized.
If, however, narratological principles sensu stricto move to the fore
of analysis, the question of medial specificity seems to be less im-
portant. Narratologists of a strongly persistent stance regret that conno-
tations of visuality are dominant even in terms like point of view (Nie-
derhoff → Perspective – Point of View) and focalization (Niederhoff
→ Focalization), and they maintain that the greatest divide between
386 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

verbal and visual strategies is in literature, not in film (Brütsch 2011).

They further hold that narratological categories in film and literary
studies differ much less than most scholars would suggest. Since Ge-
nette’s ([1972] 1980) model presents a primarily narratological, trans-
literary concept (albeit close to novel studies), mediality is seen as af-
fecting “narrative in a number of important ways, but on a level of
specific representations only. In general, narrativity can be constituted
in equal measure in all textual and visual media” (Fludernik 1996: 353).
The two approaches depend on which scholarly perspective is pre-
ferred: either how far narrative principles can be limited to questions of
narrativity alone, or whether the affordabilities of the medium have
conclusive consequences for its narrative capacities. It is our view that
the position most suitable for a narrative theory of film lies in between
these approaches. Approaches that put their main focus on media-
unbound narrative strategies should be confronted with questions of
mediality. Furthermore, approaches that concentrate overwhelmingly
on questions of mediality should match their results with general narra-
tive theories. If, for example, we take established narratological con-
cepts such as focalization, order or diegetic level as a point of departure
to develop a systematic model for narratological film analysis, we have
to discuss the potentials and limitations of each category in terms of
mediality and modify these concepts accordingly (Kuhn 2011: 7–9).
Consistently, due to the hybrid and multimodal nature of film, an ap-
proach that examines narrative in film is per se more complex than a
theory of literary narration (9).

3 Development of Film Narration and History of the

Study of Film Narration

Film as a largely syncretistic, hybrid and multimodal form of aesthetic

communication and bears a number of generic characteristics which are
tied to the history and capacities of its narrative constituents.

3.1 Development of Film Narration

3.1.1 The Plurimedial Nature of Cinema

The conventional separation of “showing” and “telling” and (on a dif-

ferent level) of “seeing” and “reading” does not do justice to the plu-
rimedial organization of cinema. Earlier attempts at defining film ex-
clusively along the lines of visualization were meant to legitimize it as
 Narration in Film 387

an art form largely independent of the established arts. However much

meaning can be attributed to the visual track of the film, it would be
wrong to state that it is “narrated visually” and little else. Such ap-
proaches ignore the plurimedial nature of cinema which draws on mul-
tiple sources of temporal and spatial information and its reliance on the
visual and auditive senses. This peculiarity makes it difficult to sort out
the various categories that are operative in its narration. Like drama, it
seems to provide “direct perceptual access to space and characters”
(Grodal 2005: 168); it is “performed” within a similar frame of time
and experienced from a fixed position. Unlike drama, however, a film is
not produced in quasi-lifelike corporal circumstances; rather, its se-
quences are bound together in a technically unique process (“post-
production”) to conform to a very specific perceptual and cognitive
comprehension of the world (Grodal 2005: 169). Similar to literary nar-
ration, it can influence the viewing positions of the recipient and dis-
pose freely of location and temporal sequences as long as it contains
generic signals of shifts in time and space.

3.1.2 Technical Strategies of Storytelling

Films are generally made by a large group of people, aside from the
very few exceptions where the team is reduced to an extremely small
group (thus in Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons, 1978, the di-
rector is producer, camera operator, sound expert and actor all at the
same time). Film, in short, is the result of collective authorship (Gaut
1997; Sellors 2007; Kuhn 2011: 115–117). It derives its impact from a
number of technical, performative and aesthetic strategies that combine
in a syncretizing, largely hybrid medium, establishing interlocking con-
ventions of storytelling. As an industrial product, it also reflects the
historical state of technology in its narrative structure, whether it is a
silent film with intertitles or a film using high-resolution digital multi-
track sound, whether a static camera is turned on the scene or a modern
editing technique lends the images an overpowering kinetic energy, etc.
Not only the mode of production but also the reception of highly varied
formats in film history have altered narrative paradigms that had for-
merly seemed unchangeable. It has thus long been a rule that the speed
and the sequentiality of a film’s projection is mechanically fixed so that
the viewer has no possibility of interrupting the “reading” to “leaf”
back and forth through the scenes or of studying the composition of a
single shot for longer than the actual running time. In the auditorium-
space, the spectator lacks any manifest control over the screen-space. It
was with the introduction of video and DVD that the viewer could con-
388 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

trol speed variations, play the film backwards, view it frame by frame
and freeze it and (as in DVD and Blu-ray) use the digitalized space of
navigation to interact, select menus and “construct” a new film with
deleted scenes, an unused score and alternative endings (cf. Distelmey-
er 2012).

3.1.3 Narrative Modes in the History of Cinema

Silent movies from 1895 onward lacked not only verbal expression but
also narrative structures beyond the stringing together of stage effects,
arranged tableaux and sensationalist trick scenes. What was then per-
ceived as the only striking narrative device consisted in showing these
scenes within a framed space and against the common laws of temporal
continuity. But on the whole, these movies were still very much indebt-
ed to the 19th-century apparatus in which the process of seeing as a
perceptual and motoric element was closely connected with pre-
cinematic “spatial and bodily experiences” (Elsaesser 1990: 3).
This early “cinema of attractions” (Gunning 1986) gradually made
way for “narrativization” (233) from 1907 to about 1913, when films
began to move from funfair and vaudeville to the first nickelodeons and
Ladenkinos (Paech 1988: 25–27) through the process of structural or-
ganization of cinematic signifiers and the “creation of a self-enclosed
diegetic universe” (Gunning 1986: 233). The result, initiated by David
Wark Griffith in particular, was an “institutional mode of representa-
tion,” also known as “classical narration” (Schweinitz 1999: 74), “con-
tinuity editing” or “découpage classique.” The filmic discourse was to
create a coherence of vision without any jerks in time or space or other
dissonant and disruptive elements in the process of viewing. The basic
trajectory of the classical Hollywood ideal (also taken over by UFA and
other national film industries) involves establishing a cause-and-effect
logic, a clear subject-object relation, and a cohesive effect of visual and
auditive perception aimed at providing the story with an “organic”
meaning, however different the shots that are sliced together might be.
A “seamless” and consecutive style serves to hide “all marks of arti-
fice” (Chatman 1990: 154) and to give the narrative the appearance of a
natural observing position. The “real” of the cinema is founded at least
as much on the real-image quality of its photography as it is on the sys-
tem of representation that shows analogies to the viewer’s capacity to
combine visual impressions with a “story.” The reason for the latter is
that by watching films the spectator becomes more and more used to
conventions of classical narration and genre-stereotypes.
 Narration in Film 389

Modernist cinema and non-canonical art films, especially after 1945,

repudiate the hegemonic story regime of classical Hollywood cinema
by laying open the conditions of mediality and artificiality or by em-
ploying literary strategies not as an empathetic but as an alienating or
decidedly modern factor of storytelling. They disrupt the narrative con-
tinuum and convert the principle of succession into one of simultaneity
by means of iteration, frequency (Kurosawa’s Rashômon, 1950, repeat-
ing the same event from different angles) and dislocation of the tradi-
tional modes of temporal and spatial representation (Resnais’ L’année
dernière à Marienbad, 1961). In each of these films, there is an ever-
widening gap between story and discourse. Modern cinema also made
possible the flash-forward as the cinematographic equivalent of the pro-
lepsis (Losey’s The Go-Between, 1970); it used jump cuts (Godard’s À
bout de souffle, 1960) and non-linear collage, blurred the borders be-
tween “objective” diegetic reality and subjective perception (Polanski’s
Le locataire, 1976) or reality and dream (Dead of Night, 1945, diverse
directors), broke with the narrative convention of character continuity,
as when a central protagonist disappears in the course of events (Anto-
nioni’s L’Avventura, 1960) or used ironic forms of interplay of verbal
and audiovisual narration (Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, 1962). All of these
assaults on traditional narration nevertheless “depend upon narrativity”
(or our assumptions about it) and “could not function without it”
(Scholes 1985: 396). Even within the context of Hollywood cinema
one can find more complex forms of narration, partly, but not exclu-
sively due to influences and directors from Europe, as in the classical
period of film noir (Siodmak’s The Killers, 1946; Dassin’s The Naked
City, 1948), in the work of Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, 1941; The
Touch of Evil, 1958), or in films that are ascribed to New Hollywood in
a broader sense (Nichols’ The Graduate, 1967; Scorsese’s Taxi Driver,
1976).
Postclassical cinema, responding to growing globalization in its
world-wide distribution and reception, enhances the aesthetics of visual
and auditory effects by means of digitalization, computerized cutting
techniques, and a strategy of immediacy that signals a shift from linear
discourse to a renewed interest in spectacular incidents (see chap. 3.5).

3.1.4 Editing as a Narrative Device

Editing is one of the decisive cinematographic processes for the narra-

tive organization of a film: it connects montage (e.g. the splitting, com-
bining and reassembling of visual segments) with the mix of sound el-
ements and the choice of strategic points in space (angle, perspective).
390 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

The most prominent examples in the early history of filmic narrativiza-

tion are as follows: (a) the simple cut from one scene to another, thus
eliminating dead time by splitting the actual footage (ellipsis); (b)
cross-cutting, which alternates between shots of two spaces, as in pur-
suit scenes; (c) parallel montage to accentuate similarity and opposi-
tion; (d) the shot-reverse-shot between two persons talking to each oth-
er; (e) the “cut-in,” which magnifies a significant detail or grotesquely
distorts certain objects of everyday life.
Continuity editing aims primarily at facilitating orientation during
transitions in time and space. One basic rule consists in never letting the
camera cross the line of action (180-degree rule), thus respecting geo-
metrical orientation within a given space. Whereas continuity editing
presupposes a holistic unity in a world which is temporarily in conflict
but finally homogenized, Ėjzenštejn’s collision editing accentuates
stark formal and perceptual contrasts to create new meanings or unusual
metaphorical links (Grodal 2005: 171). For other directors (e.g. Pudov-
kin), narration in film concentrates not on events being strung together
in chronological sequence but on the construction of powerful situa-
tions and significant details presented in an antithetical manner of asso-
ciation. “Internal editing,” as advocated by André Bazin, avoids visible
cuts and creates deep focus (depth of field), making foreground, middle
ground and background equally sharp and thus establishing continuity
in the very same take, as is the case in the work of Orson Welles (e.g.
Citizen Kane, 1941).

3.1.5 Time and Space in Cinema

To evoke a sense of the “real,” film creates a temporal and spatial con-
tinuum whose components can be separated only for heuristic purposes.
“[I]n their succession and fusion they [images] permit the appearance of
temporally extended events in their total concrete development”
(Ingarden [1931] 1973: 324). The temporally organized combination of
visual and acoustic signs corresponds to the unmediated rendering of
space, albeit on a two-dimensional screen. The realization of a posi-
tioned space lies in movement, which imposes a temporal vector upon
the spatial dimension (Lothe 2000: 62). Panofsky describes the result as
“a speeding up of space” and a “spatialization of time” ([1937] 1993:
22). This also explains the inherent dialectic of film as the medium that
appears closest to our perception of the real world, and yet deviating
from real-life experience by its manifold means of mediating and estab-
lishing a “second world” of fantasy, dream and wish fulfillment. Time
can be either stretched out in slow motion or compressed in fast motion;
 Narration in Film 391

different spaces may be fused by double exposure or by a permanent

tension between external and internal time sequences. Thus narration in
cinema has to deal both with the representational realism of its images
and its technical devices in order to integrate or dissociate time and
space, image and sound, depending on the artistic and emotional effect
that is to be achieved.

3.1.6 Narrative Functions of Sound

Fulton emphasizes the role of sound in film: “[It] is one of the most
versatile signifiers, since it contributes to field, tenor and mode as a
powerful creator of meaning, mood and textuality” (Fulton 2005: 108).
It amplifies the diegetic space (thus Bordwell [1985: 119] speaks of
“sound perspective”) and emphasizes modulation of the visual impact
through creating a sonic décor or sonic space. Language, noises, elec-
tronic sounds and music, whether diegetic or (like most musical com-
positions) non-diegetic, help not only to define the tonality, volume,
tempo and texture of successive situations but also to orchestrate and
manipulate emotions and heighten the suggestive expressivity of the
story. Sound can range from descriptive passages to climactic underlin-
ing and counterpointing what is seen. Again, what was once considered
as a complete break with narrative rules has become a convention, so
that when off-camera sounds are used before the scene they are related
to, they serve as a “springboard” between sequences.
As Elsaesser and Hagener point out, there is a potential dissociation
between body and voice as well as between viewing and hearing which
can be used for comic purposes, but which also stands “in the service of
narration” (2007: 172–173). A voice may have a specific source in the
diegetic space, although separate from the images we see (“voice-off”),
or it can be heard beyond the diegetic limits (“voice-over”) (Kuhn
2011: 187–189). Irritating effects can be achieved when the interplay of
voice and vision is used in an unconventional way, as when in a long
narrative passage in mainstream cinema the words of an (extra- or in-
tradiegetic) voice are not supported by images at all. Thus Chion, for
example, speaks of a “specifically cinematic” event “when the screen
doesn’t show what the words evoke, and instead the camera remains
exclusively with the talking face of the storyteller and the reactions of
onscreen listeners” (2009: 399–400, original emphasis). New technolo-
gies such as multi-track sound with high digital resolution (e.g. Dolby
Surround) negate the directional coherence of screen and sound source,
thus leading to tension between the aural and the visual. While the im-
392 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

age can be fixed, sound comes into existence from the moment it is per-
ceived.

3.2 The Narrating Agency in Cinema

One of the most controversial issues in film narratology concerns the

role of the narrator as an instrument of narrative mediation. This re-
flects the difficulty of specifying the narrative process in general and,
more than any other question, reveals the limits of literary narrativity
when applied to film studies.

3.2.1 Film as Sign System

With the exception of the character narrator and the cinematic device of
the voice-over, the traces of a narrating agency are virtually invisible,
so that the term “film narrator” is employed as hardly more than a met-
aphor. Disagreements over terminology sprung up from the beginnings
of film theory. Thus the term “film language,” if not used for a system
of signs as was done by the formalists, bore the implication that there
must also be a “speaker” of such a language. Modeling cinema after
literature in this way, however, runs counter to cinema as an independ-
ent art form. For this reason, Ėjxenbaum transferred the structuring of
cinematographic meaning to “new conditions of perceptions”: it is the
viewer who moves “to the construction of internal speech” ([1926]
1973: 123).
The first systematic interest in narratology came from the semiotic
turn of film theory starting in the 1960s, notably with Metz’s construct
of the grande syntagmatique (1966). In order to overcome the re-
striction to small semiotic units (e.g. the single shot in cinema), the
concept of “code” was used to encompass more extensive syntagmata
in film such as sequences and the whole of the narration. In Metz’s
phenomenology of narrative, film is “a complex system of successive,
encoded signs” (Lothe 2000: 12). Metz’s position was criticized by
Heath (1986), who saw in it a neglect of the central role of the viewer
in making meaning (Schweinitz 1999: 79). By excluding the subject
position of the spectator, a predominantly formalistic approach over-
looks the potentially decisive impact of affectivity and subconscious
processes. For this reason, psychoanalytic theories concentrated on the
similarities that exist between film and dream, hallucination and desire,
as important undercurrents of the realist surface. Feminist theories dealt
with the gendered gaze that is applied not only in the film itself, but
also cast on the film by the viewer, thus creating a conflict between vo-
 Narration in Film 393

yeurism and subjugation to the power of images. Studies of popular

culture, finally, examined the functioning of cinematic discourse within
a wider cultural communicative process which is conveyed by a host of
visual signs.

3.2.2 The Act of Audiovisual Narration

Whether one follows the notion of film narrator or not, and whether or
not one emphasizes the role of the spectator in the process of making
meaning, the act of audiovisual narration is to be described as an inter-
play of different visual, auditive and language-based sign systems or
codes. Not only the moving picture within one shot (i.e. the process of
selection, perspective and accentuation by the camera, or cinematog-
raphy), but also the combination of shots into sequences (through the
process of editing) is of crucial importance for the act of audiovisual
narration. When cinematic narration is realized through showing, there
is no categorical separation between what the camera shows within a
shot and what the editing reveals through the combination of various
shots. Quite often the difference from one shot to another is the only
indication of a change of state. However, aspects of the mise en scène
are also part of the act of narration. Camera parameters as well as pa-
rameters of the montage mediate the narrative events and the mise en
scène. Thus shot composition, lighting and set design can contribute
significantly to audiovisual narration. The same holds true for all ele-
ments of sound (see chap. 3.1.7).
The same change of state (e.g. a collapsing building) can be repre-
sented within one shot (hence mediated through the parameters of the
camera) or through a combination of two (or more) edited shots (hence
mediated through the process of montage). This extends to more com-
plex chains of events. The normal case is a combination of camera and
montage supported by other auditive and visual elements of the mise en
scène (Lohmeier 1996: 37; Kuhn 2011: 72–74). Coherent actions and
events are often, but not always, separated into different shots, as in
shot-reverse-shot sequences to represent a conversation or in cross-
cutting sequences to represent a car chase (see chap. 3.1.5), although
there is no necessity to do so. Many events, such as movements of
characters within space or even highly eventful incidents like a murder,
can be represented within one shot. Complex camera movements can
show many connected or episodic actions within one single shot, as in
long-lasting sequence shots like the famous opening of Welles’ Touch
of Evil (1958), or in forms of “internal montage” (see chap. 3.1.5). Ex-
treme sequence shots can be found in movies that consist of only one or
394 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

very few shots, like Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) or Sokurov’s Russkij

kovcheg (2002). In contrast, a conventional feature film usually has
more than 300 shots. This explains why any approach that takes the
camera as narrator—as in the so called invisible-observer models—is as
one-sided as the opposite position that overestimates the role of mon-
tage or editing in the act of audiovisual narration.

3.2.3 Film Narration―Film Narrator

In the 1980s, the more systematic narrative discourse of the Wisconsin

School resorted to a cognitive and constructivist approach, defining the
narrative scheme as an optional “redescription of data under epistemo-
logical restraint” (Branigan 1992: 112). Its main interest lies in a strict-
ly rational and logical explication of narrative and in mental processes
that render perceptual data intelligible. Whereas Chatman’s concept of
narration is still anchored in literary theory (Booth, Todorov), seeing
the visual concreteness of cinema as its basic mark of distinction from
literature, Branigan and Bordwell abandon straightaway the idea of a
cinematic narrator or a narrative voice. They hold that the construct of
the narrator is wrapped up in the “activity of narration” itself, which is
performed on various levels: “To give every film a narrator or implied
author is to indulge in an anthropomorphic fiction” (Bordwell 1985:
62). The author as an “essential subject” who is in possession of psy-
chological properties or of a human voice is replaced by the notion of
narration understood as a process or an activity in comparison to narra-
tive and which is defined as “the organization of a set of cues for the
construction of a story” (62) presupposing an active perceiver of a mes-
sage but no sender. According to Bordwell and Branigan, cinemato-
graphic narratives cannot be understood within a general semiotic sys-
tem of narrative but only in terms of historically variant narrative
structures that are perceived in the act of viewing. It follows from this
that certain prerequisites of filmic narration are not “natural” or taken
from literary models, but have been conventionalized: such is the case
when a character’s walk from A to B is shortened to the points of de-
parture and arrival with a sharp cut in between, or when a flashback
bridges vast leaps of time, or when non-diegetic music forms no part of
the story proper even though it may reflect the inner state of a character
or establish a certain mood. The same holds true for the almost imper-
ceptibly varying amount of information that is shared by characters and
audience alike.
The effacement of the narrator and the idea that film seems to “nar-
rate itself” stand in contrast to the impression that all visual and audi-
 Narration in Film 395

tive modes impart an authorial presence or an “enunciator,” however

impersonal. Many different terms and theoretical constructs have been
introduced to overcome the logical impasse of having a narration with-
out a narrator in the narrow sense (cf. Griem & Voigts-Virchow 2002:
162; Steinke 2007: 64): “camera,” “camera eye,” “invisible observer”
(cf. Bordwell 1985: 9–11); “intrinsic narrator” (Black 1986); “ultimate
narratorial agency” or “supra-narrator” (Tomasulo 1986: 46); “cinemat-
ic narrator” (Chatman 1990: 124–126); “‘camera’” in a metaphoric
sense (Schlickers 1997); “film narrator” (Lothe 2000: 27–29); “mega-
narrator” (Gaudreault 2009: 81–83); “audiovisual/visual narrative in-
stance” (Kuhn 2011: 83–85), etc. Kuhn (ibid.) suggests, as a heuristic
step in the process of analyzing the narrative structure of feature films,
differentiating between “(audio)visual narrative instances” and “verbal
narrative instances,” preceding a description of their interplay in the
process of audiovisual narration.
What is common to most definitions is the existence of some overall
control of visual and sonic registers where the camera functions as an
intermediator of visual and acoustic information. The invisible observer
theory even maintains that it is the camera that narrates (the French di-
rector Alexandre Astruc coined the famous phrase “caméra stylo”).
This view, however, ignores the impact of editing, non-diegetic sound
and aspects of the mise en scène to the act of audiovisual narration (cf.
chap. 3.2.2). The few experimental films that construct events “through
the eyes” of the main character (e.g. Montgomery’s The Lady in the
Lake, 1947), thus creating an unmediated presence by means of internal
ocularization (cf. chap. 3.3.1), make the viewer painfully aware of the
impersonal and subjectless apparatus of the camera which alienates
them from the character rather than drawing them into his ways of see-
ing and feeling. In recent years there have been more convincing exam-
ples for “point-of-view-camera films” that ground the limitations of the
apparatus in a specific thematic constellation, as when the subjective
camera is to represent the subjective perception of a locked-in syn-
drome patient (Schnabel’s Le scaphandre et le papillon, 2007) or the
perception of a disembodied consciousness (Sokurov’s Russkij
kovcheg, 2002) (see Kuhn 2011: 177–179).

3.2.4 Unreliability of Film Narration

Though there are filmic devices to give a scene the appearance of unre-
liability or deception, the “visual narrator” in film cannot tell a down-
right lie that is visualized at the very same moment unless the veracity
of the photographic image is put into question (cf. the fabricated, hence
396 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

“untrue” flashback in Stage Fright, 1950, which director Alfred Hitch-

cock considered a failure). However, there can be various types of fic-
tional contracts with the audience that transcend the postulate of narra-
tive verisimilitude, allowing even a dead person to tell his story as a
“character narrator” (Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, 1950; Mendes’ Amer-
ican Beauty, 1999), or when a film is built around a puzzle, putting into
question any form of reliable narration (a summary of “unreliable situa-
tions” in cinema is given in Liptay & Wolf eds. 2005, passim; Helbig
ed. 2006, passim; Laass 2008, passim; Shen → Unreliability). Recent
cinema has seen a variety of forms that can be subsumed under the term
of unreliability in a broad sense, e.g. films that make use of the tension
between verbal and visual narration, between what Genette calls inter-
nal and zero focalization or between different diegetic levels in order to
achieve different effects of unreliability. Very often such films get
along without misreporting in terms of “lying pictures” (i.e. pictures
that provide erroneous information about the storyworld) by using
forms of irritating, ambivalent or misleading editing or different types
of underreporting. However, nowadays one can also find forms of un-
reliable narration that contain “lying pictures” such as those used by
Hitchcock in Stage Fright but that are embedded in more complex nar-
rative structures, such as the multi-level flashback structure of The
Usual Suspects that creates a tension between what Kuhn (2011) calls
intradiegetic, homodiegetic verbal and extradiegetic, heterodiegetic
visual narration.

3.3 Point of View

Point of view (POV) clearly becomes the prime starting point for narra-
tology when applied to film. Although it has been defined as “a con-
crete perceptual fact linked to the camera position” (Grodal 2005: 168),
its actual functions in narrative can be far more flexible and multifari-
ous than this definition suggests. As Branigan states, point of view can
best be understood as organizing meaning through a combination of
various levels of narration which are defined by a “dialectical site of
seeing and seen” or, more specifically, the “mediator and the object of
our gaze” (1984: 47). Branigan offers a model of seven “levels of narra-
tion” which allows for constant oscillation between these levels, from
extra-/heterodiegetic and omniscient narration to adapting the highly
subjective perception of a character. Fulton speaks of a “multiple focal-
isation” that is “realized by different camera angles that position us to
see the action from a number of different viewpoints” (2005: 114). Yet
there are many more focusing strategies which select and control our
 Narration in Film 397

perception as well as our emotional involvement such as deep-focus,

the length and scale of a shot, specific lighting, etc. The prerequisite for
any POV analysis, however, is the recognition that everything in cine-
ma consists of “looks”: the viewer looks at characters who look at each
other; or s/he looks at them, adopting their perspective of the diegetic
world, while the camera frames a special field of seeing; or the viewer
is privileged to look at something out of the line of vision of any of the
characters. Thus the very question “Who sees?” involves a categoriza-
tion of different forms of POV that organize and orient the narrative
from a visual and spatial standpoint and that also include cognitive pro-
cesses based on a number of presuppositions about a proper perspec-
tive, not to speak of auditory information. Therefore, in almost every
narratological model of focalization and narrative perspective, the cam-
era perspective (in a technical sense) is not understood as the only fac-
tor for determining focalization and/or narrative perspective (focaliza-
tion/narrative perspective ≠ camera perspective). To analyze
focalization, one has at least to take into account the complex interplay
between camera parameters, montage and auditive elements. The ques-
tion of focalization in film becomes even more sophisticated in the case
of voice-over narration, as there is the possibility of different forms of
interaction and/or tension between verbal and audiovisual narration.

3.3.1 Focalization and Ocularization

POV has been understood as an optical paradigm or, quite literally, as

visual point (or “eyepoint”): it is “ocularization” that is believed to de-
termine both the position of the camera and the “look” of a character.
Schlickers speaks in this respect of a “double perspectivation” (2009).
In many cases it seems almost impossible to come to a clear conclusion
whether the camera imitates the eyepoint of a character (i.e. the literal
viewpoint as realized in “eye-line matches”) or whether it observes
“from outside” in the sense of narrative mediation. So we may see
something “with the eyes” of a character whose back is visibly turned
to us (“over-shoulder shot”) or of a character who tries to grasp a tangi-
ble object that dissolves in the air like a hallucination, as is the case in
Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) when the Nibelung treasure appears to
Siegfried on a rock. Jost suggests distinguishing between internal focal-
ization and zero focalization ([1987] 1989: 157) whereas Bal differenti-
ates between focalization on “perceptible” objects and focalization on
“imperceptible” objects ([1985] 1997: 153). Both alternatives, however,
neglect the possibility of the blurring of the two types of focalization.
Moreover, it makes a difference whether we are to gain an impression
398 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

of what a character feels and thinks or whether the film seeks to present
“objective” correlatives of the mental and emotional dispositions of a
protagonist. The possible mingling of “real” and mental aspects makes
it difficult to differentiate. Focalization can shift all around its diegetic
world (Fulton 2005: 111) without any noticeable breaks in the narration
or any unconventional narrative techniques. Though narratology pos-
sesses tools for analyzing these shifts, the categories used for film anal-
ysis seem to be far more complicated than those employed for literary
narration. Kuhn (2011) developed a model for fine-grained analysis of
focalization, ocularization and auricularization on the macro- and mi-
cro-levels. He understands focalization in terms of knowledge, i.e. the
relation of knowledge between (audiovisual and verbal) narrative in-
stance and character, and separates it from questions regarding percep-
tion in a narrower sense. In the context of the visual aspects of percep-
tion (seeing), he uses the term ocularization, and for the auditory
aspects (hearing), the term auricularization. Based on the models by
Jost ([1987] 1989) and Schlickers (1997), but with more differentiated
categories, Kuhn (2011: 122–124) defines each internal, external and
zero focalization, ocularization and auricularization, describes the main
types that can be found in feature films and relates different forms of
internal ocularization to Branigans model of point of view structures
(Branigan 1984: 103ff.; Kuhn 2011: 140–142). To reveal the capacities
to represent subjectivity and mental processes in film, i.e. the possibil-
ity of character introspection in film, Kuhn identifies several forms of
“mindscreen” and proposes categories such as mental metadiegesis,
mental projection, mental overlay and mental metalepsis as heuristic
tools (149–151).

3.4 The Interplay between Audiovisual and Verbal Narration

Films and audiovisual artifacts such as Fassbinder’s epilogue to Berlin

Alexanderplatz (1980) are characterized by a complex interplay of dif-
ferent audiovisual and verbal narratives or, in terms of a communica-
tion model, by an interplay of different narrative instances or agents.
Next to visual narration, various verbal narratives are employed on the
extradiegetic level (in the form of various voice-overs, intertitles, and
text captions). Every extradiegetic verbal narrative instance can be ei-
ther heterodiegetic or homodiegetic in its relation to the diegetic world.
Each of them can focalize differently and be in opposition to the audio-
visual focalization.
There is, in general, no categorical relation of dominance between
visual and verbal narration in film, no primacy of the image. The verbal
 Narration in Film 399

narrative is not automatically superior to the visual narrative or vice

versa. A bulk of different relations is possible: the reliable extra-
heterodiegetic visual narrative instance can, for example, uncover the
unreliable extra-homodiegetic verbal narrative instances (Mankiewicz’s
All about Eve, 1950). However, the visual narrative instance might also
be unreliable (Fincher’s Fight Club, 1999), or its reliability can be
called into question with the help of verbal narrative instances (Kuro-
sawa’s Rashômon, 1950). An extradiegetic verbal narrative instance
possibly dominates the visual narrative instance and reduces it to an
illustrating function (the opening of Anderson’s Magnolia, 1999); how-
ever, it can also just serve to structure what the visual narrative instance
shows, order it in time and space or summarize the back story (exposi-
tory voice-overs, intertitles indicating the action’s setting in silent mov-
ies). The relation can be alternating and ironical, as in Truffaut’s Jules
et Jim (1962), or ambivalent, as in Resnais’ L’année dernière à Mari-
enbad (1961). In silent movies this interplay is also encapsulated in a
complex way because of different methods of speech representation,
such as reports by a narrator or quoted direct speech in intertitles.
To illustrate the interplay of verbal narration and visual images in
film, Kozloff (1988: 103) suggests “a continuous graph” comprising
three areas: “disparate,” “complementary,” “overlapping.” She does not
introduce either binary or clearly delimited categories, speaks rather of
the “degree of correspondence between narration and images”—a rea-
sonable proposal because distinct boundaries cannot be drawn. Kuhn
(2009: 265–266; 2011: 98–100) has suggested some new and useful
modifications to Kozloff’s categories so as to develop a model for de-
scribing the dynamic relations between visual and verbal narrative in-
stances as contradictory, disparate, complementary, meshing, polariz-
ing, illustrating or paraphrasing.

3.5 Complex Forms of Narration in Contemporary Feature Films

Since the mid-1990s an increasing number of popular mainstream films

have made use of several special devices of audiovisual narration in
order to achieve dense and complex narratives and/or create suspense
through narrative discourse rather than through their storylines: the
conventions of classical filmic narration are subverted and/or become
the subject of a self- and media-reflexive game through the use of mul-
tiple narrative levels (Amenábar’s Abre los ojos, 1997; Jonze’s Adapta-
tion, 2002), different forms of narrative unreliability (Singer’s The
Usual Suspects, 1995), sudden final twists (Shyamalan’s The Sixth
Sense, 1999), creative use of genre conventions (Tarantino’s Pulp Fic-
400 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

tion, 1994); and/or intertwined film-in-film and narrative-in-narrative

structures (Almodóvar’s La mala educación, 2004), etc. Encapsulated
and fast-changing processes of focalization are used to build puzzle and
mystery structures (Marcks’ 11:14, 2003) or to deceive the recipient
(Colombani’s À la folie … pas du tout, 2002). A “real” diegetic charac-
ter turns out to be a mental metalepsis at the end of the film (Fincher’s
Fight Club, 1999; Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, 2001); two diegetic lev-
els (realty vs. dream) are being reappraised during the film
(Amenábar’s Los otros, 2001); the circumstances of production are
simulated within the film in a self-reflexive manner (Kraume’s Keine
Lieder über Liebe, 2005).
When discussing these forms of narration in feature films of the
1990s and 2000s, one should not forget that movies with self-reflexive,
paradoxical and ambivalent narrative structures are not entirely new (cf.
§ 3.1.3). However, the frequency with which many of these narrative
experiments are found in popular feature films nowadays—and also
increasingly in popular TV series (Lost, Breaking Bad)—cannot be de-
nied (Helbig 2005: 144).

3.6 Toward a Historical Film Narratology

What is pointed out in the previous section also holds true for many
narrative phenomena that can be regarded as trends in recent cinema
and TV. For instance, we can find the phenomenon of metalepsis in
films like McTiernan’s Last Action Hero (1993), where a character of
the diegetic storyworld happens to get into a metadiegetic action film
and returns back to diegetic reality accompanied by the action hero of
this film-within-a-film, or in Gary Ross’s Pleasantville (1998), where
characters of a contemporary diegetic world get lost in a metadiegetic
black-and-white TV series of the 1950s. These kinds of structures have
forerunners in film history: as early as 1924, in Buster Keaton’s Sher-
lock Jr., the main character, a film projectionist, “dreams himself into”
the movie he projects. In Allen’s classic The Purple Rose of Cairo
(1985), a metadiegetic character jumps out of the screen to live within
the diegetic world (Pier → Metalepsis). The same applies to phenome-
na of mental representations (“mindscreen,” mental projections, mental
metadiegeses, etc.). Creative forms of representations of subjectivity
that nowadays appear in the micro-structure of movies like Jeunet’s Le
fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) or in the macro-structure of
movies like Nolan’s Inception (2010) can be compared with examples
throughout film history: in Murnau’s classic Der letzte Mann (1924)
one can trace specific forms of representing dreams and hallucinations
 Narration in Film 401

due to heavy use of alcohol; memory and dream sequences are as typi-
cal of Bergman’s Smultronstället (1957) as hallucinatory sequences of
Liebeneiner’s Liebe 47 (1949) or ambivalent delusions of Polanski’s Le
locataire (1976).
Given these and (many) other examples, hypotheses on narrative
“trends” in recent cinema and TV should be modified with regard to
historical development. A historical film narratology will seek to identi-
fy these narrative forms and devices throughout the history of the film
on the basis of existing systematizations and classifications and de-
scribe their geneses. The international influence of classical Hollywood
cinema (Bordwell et al. 1985) was one of the main reasons that for
quite a long time of film history, narrative experiments that are regard-
ed as innovative even today could hardly be found in US-American and
European mainstream cinema. On the one hand, many prototypes of
experimental and complex narration, as used in recent feature films,
also appear in earlier periods of film history beyond the Hollywood
cinema (even quite early in the history of the feature film). On the other
hand, however, there are numerous new possibilities for achieving nar-
rative effects with the help of film and computer technology, notably
the creation of visual effects using digital devices. Digital effects are
more than just a surprising “gimmick” when being functionalized for
different aspects of narration (cf. Kuhn 2012a). This is not the only rea-
son why more innovative narrative forms have come to be regarded as
verisimilar; another reason is the increasing speed and flexibility of re-
cent filmic narration, which is currently a major trend. Due to develop-
ments in media convergence, transmedia storytelling, digital cinema
and so-called quality or complex TV, the narrative capacities of film
and audiovisual media are by no means exhausted.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) Film portrays a story unfolding in time according to the possibilities

and constraints of the medium. Various levels of structuring, perception
and cognition, many of them rooted in convention, are related to a logic
of combination which determines the basic qualities of filmic narration.
This paves the way for two approaches which should be tried in fruitful
competition. Either the complexity of paradigms can be reduced to a
model of abstraction, which makes it possible to compare narrative pro-
cesses in literature, film, and other media; or there must be an attempt
to analyzethe multiple forms of interplay that stem from the mediality
of filmic narration, the double vantage points of seeing and being seen,
402 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

sight and sound, spatial and temporal elements, moving images and
movement within the images.
(b) If narrative is a fundamental issue in filmic signification, its log-
ic must be re-examined with new ways of storytelling in cinema that
play games or lead the viewer into a maze of ontological uncertainties.
Narrativity, spectator engagement and inventive techniques of presenta-
tion combine to produce a “filmic discourse” which a synchronic for-
mal analysis of narrative strategies can grasp only up to a certain point.
A diachronic approach should discuss current forms of filmic narrative
against the background of the historical developments of film narration,
inseparably interwoven with the achievements and capacities of the
medium (cf. chap. 3.6).
(c) Film is not bound to cinema, at least since TV became popular
enough to reach a mass audience. Nowadays one finds audiovisual
forms of narration in many different kinds of distribution (videotape,
DVD, online-stream, Blu-ray; cf. chap. 3.1.2) embedded into different
media environments (homepages, YouTube and other video platforms,
Facebook, etc.). New, genuine online-based forms of audiovisual narra-
tion are being developed such as specific YouTube genres or web series
(see Kuhn 2012b). Accompanying the proliferation of user-generated
content, numerous creative audiovisual micro-narratives have been pub-
lished (e.g. mash up clips on video platforms that narrate in a dense and
highly intermedial way). Computer games increasingly make use of
audiovisual sequences (so called cutscenes as in Heavy Rain). Not least,
filmic forms are essential elements of huge transmedial storyworlds in
which the central storylines are not developed within one but across
multiple media (this is, for example, the case of the web series Lost:
Missing Pieces that complements the transmedial storyworld of the TV
series Lost, surrounded by a vast storytelling universe encompassing
different media).

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

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Wide Angle 8.3–4, 19–26.
 Narration in Film 403

Bordwell, David (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P.

– et al. (1985). The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production
to 1960. New York: Columbia UP.
Branigan, Edward R. (1984). Point of View in the Cinema. A Theory of Narration and
Subjectivity in Classical Film. Berlin: Mouton.
– (1992). Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge.
Brütsch, Matthias (2011). Traumbühne Kino. Der Traum als filmtheoretische Metapher
und narratives Model. Marburg: Schüren.
Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Chion, Michel (2009). Film, a Sound Art. New York: Columbia UP.
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UP.
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Landa (eds.). Narratology. London: Longman, 217–233.
Distelmeyer, Jan (2012). Das flexible Kino: Ästhetik und Dispositiv der DVD & Blu-
ray. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer.
Ėjxenbaum, Boris (Eikhenbaum) ([1926] 1973). “Literature and Cinema.” St. Bann &
J. Bowlt (eds.). Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Trans-
lation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 122–127.
Elsaesser, Thomas (1990). “Film Form: Introduction.” Th. Elsaesser (ed.). Early Cine-
ma: Space―Frame―Narrative. London: BFI, 11–30.
– & Malte Hagener (2007). Filmtheorie zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Fulton, Helen (2005). “Film Narrative and Visual Cohesion.” H. Fulton et al. (eds.).
Narrative and Media. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 108–122.
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erature and Cinema. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
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Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon P, 149–172.
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nell UP.
Griem, Julika & Eckhart Voigts-Virchow (2002). “Filmnarratologie: Grundlagen, Ten-
denzen und Beispielanalysen.” V. Nünning & A. Nünning (eds.). Erzähltheorie
transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT, 155–183.
Grodal, Torben (2005). “Film Narrative.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclo-
pedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 168–172.
Gunning, Tom (1986). “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the
Avant-Garde.” Ph. Rosen (ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory
Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 229–235.
Heath, Stephen (1986). “Narrative Space.” Ph. Rosen (ed.). Narrative, Apparatus, Ide-
ology. A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 379–420.
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sigkeit im Film. Trier: WVT.
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404 Markus Kuhn & Johann N. Schmidt

Jost, François ([1987] 1989). L’œil-caméra. Entre film et roman. Lyon: PU de Lyon.
Kozloff, Sarah (1988). Invisible Storytellers. Voice-over Narration in American Fiction
Film. Berkeley: U of California P.
Kuhn, Markus (2009). “Film Narratology: Who Tells? Who Shows? Who Focalizes?
Narrative Mediation in Self-Reflexive Fiction Films.” P. Hühn et al. (eds.). Point
of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediacy in Narrative. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 259–278.
– (2011). Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin: de
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– (2012a). “Digitales Erzählen? Zur Funktionalisierung digitaler Effekte im Er-
zählkino.” H. Segeberg (ed.). Film im Zeitalter Neuer Medien II: Digitalität und
Kino. München/Paderborn: Fink, 283–321.
– (2012b). “Zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Lokalkolorit: Der Einfluss der Medie-
numgebung auf die narrative Struktur von Webserien und Ansätze zu einer Klas-
sifizierung.” A. Nünning et al. (eds.). Narrative Genres im Internet. Theoretische
Bezugsrahmen, Mediengattungstypologie und Funktionen. Trier: WVT, 51–92.
Laass, Eva (2008). Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths. Forms and Functions of Unreli-
able Narration in Contemporary American Cinema. A Contribution to Film Nar-
ratology. Trier: WVT.
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Erzählen in Literatur und Film. München: edition text + kritik.
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er.
Lothe, Jakob (2000). Narrative in Fiction and Film. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Metz, Christian (1966). “La grande syntagmatique du film narratif.” Communications
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Paech, Joachim (1988). Literatur und Film. Stuttgart: Metzler.
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& Stil und Medium im Film. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus.
Schlickers, Sabine (1997). Verfilmtes Erzählen: Narratologisch-komparative Untersu-
chung zu ‘El beso de la mujer araña’ (Manuel Puig/Héctor Babenco) und
‘Crónica de una muerte anunciada’ (Gabriel Garcia Márquez/Fraqncesco Rosi).
Frankfurt a. M.: Vervuert.
– (2009). “Focalization, Ocularization and Auricularization in Film and Literature.”
P. Hühn et al. (eds.). Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling
Mediacy in Narrative. Berlin: de Gruyter, 243–258.
Scholes, Robert (1985). “Narration and Narrativity in Film.” G. Mast et al. (eds.). Film
Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 390–403.
Schweinitz, Jörg (1999). “Zur Erzählforschung in der Filmwissenschaft.” E. Lämmert
(ed.). Die erzählerische Dimension: eine Gemeinsamkeit der Künste. Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 73–87.
Sellors, Paul C. (2007). “Collective Authorship in Film.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
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Gegenwart. Trier: WVT.
 Narration in Film 405

Tomasulo, Frank P. (1986). “Narrate and Describe? Point of View and Narrative Voice
in Citizen Kane’s Thatcher Sequence.” Wild Angle 8.3/4, 45–52.

5.2 Further Reading

Bach, Manuela (1999). “Dead Men―Dead Narrators: Überlegungen zu Erzählern und

Subjektivität im Film.” W. Grünzweig & A. Solbach (eds.). Grenzüberschreitun-
gen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in
Context. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 231–246.
Burgoyne, Robert (1990). “The Cinematic Narrator: The Logic and Pragmatics of Im-
personal Narration.” Journal of Film and Video 42, 3–16.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Cordes, Stefan (1997). Filmerzählung und Filmerlebnis: Zur rezeptionsorientierten
Analyse narrativer Konstruktionsformen im Spielfilm. Münster: Lit Verlag.
Fleishman, Avrom (1992). Narrated Films. Storytelling Situations in Cinema History.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Hurst, Matthias (1996). Erzählsituationen in Literatur und Film. Ein Modell zur ver-
gleichenden Analyse von literarischen Texten und filmischen Adaptionen. Tübin-
gen: Niemeyer.
– (2001). “Mittelbarkeit, Perspektive, Subjektivität: Über das narrative Potential
des Spielfilms.” J. Helbig (ed.). “Camera doesn’t lie”: Spielarten erzählerischer
Unzuverlässigkeit im Film. Trier: WVT, 233–253.
Metz, Christian ([1968] 1974). Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York:
Oxford UP.
Ryan, Marie Laure (2005). “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratolo-
gy.” J. Ch. Meister (ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality, Dis-
ciplinarity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–23.
Tolton, C. D. E. (1984). “Narration in Film and Prose Fiction: A Mise au point.” Uni-
versity of Toronto Quarterly 53, 264–282.
Wilson, George M. ([1988] 1992). Narration in Light. Studies in Cinematic Point of
View. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
 Narration in Medicine
Rishi Goyal

1 Definition

Narration in medicine is concerned with the function and analysis of the

multiple narratives produced in the context of clinical care and the heal-
ing of illness. The study of medicine and narrative can be described
along three general lines: narration in the medical case history as an
epistemological basis for medical cognition and clinical care; formal
analysis of patient narratives of illness; research on the uses of narrative
as a clinical treatment or model for medical care.

2 Explication

The medical case history (the physician’s account of a patient’s dis-

ease) and the illness narrative (usually a patient’s first-person account
of his or her illness experience) are the two forms of discourse most
relevant to the study of medicine and narration. The medical case histo-
ry inscribes a patient’s story of illness within a framework of patho-
physiologic processes, contextualizes current symptoms in a broader
health history, interprets data from the physical exam and laboratory
studies, and narrates a diagnostic process. This case history represents
the process of clinical reasoning as a narrative of discovery and justifies
a particular prognosis and treatment strategy. Specific elements of the
case history suggest that narrative can be seen as central to the ways
that physicians think about disease, make diagnoses and offer treat-
ments that take into account patients’ expectations and individual
needs.
Illness narratives and their study have become more prominent in
recent years. Illness constitutes a disruption, sometimes temporary,
sometimes permanent, in an ongoing life. Illness narratives most often
represent this disruption as a threat to the integrity of the self and iden-
tity. They are usually written by patients and sometimes by family
members or even physicians, but unlike medical case histories, they are
 Narration in Medicine 407

generally concerned with the experience of suffering as opposed to the

biomedical concept of disease. Illness narratives attempt to convey an
intimate knowledge of suffering, to make sense of illness in the context
of a larger life history, to offer integration of an identity, especially in
the case of chronic illnesses, and to connect the sufferer with others
who have the same or similar illness.
Besides the analysis of illness narratives and medical case histories,
the study of medicine and narration has led to direct clinical interven-
tions. Narrative medicine suggests that the therapeutic relationship be-
tween doctor and patient may be improved by urging a form of the en-
counter that is more narratively engaged and competent. Through a
series of procedures or movements (attention, representation and affilia-
tion), a physician trained in narrative competency will deliver care that
is more effective and humane. And the very act of writing or telling a
story can be healing in certain cases. While this has a long tradition in
psychoanalysis, recent research suggests that this work may have
broader applications in somatic illnesses such as ameliorating the ef-
fects of chronic pain (Brown et al. 2010) or in providing a continuous
narrative of the self after brain trauma (Morris 2004).

3 Dimensions of Narration in Medicine

3.1 Narration and the Medical Case History

The standard medical case history, or anamnesis (chief complaint, his-

tory of present illness, past medical history, past surgical history, aller-
gies, family history, social history, review of symptoms, physical exam,
assessment and plan), has had a relatively stable form for at least a cen-
tury (Klemperer [1898] 2010). The written case history typically fol-
lows a medical interview, which can take place in an outpatient clinic, a
physician’s office, an emergency room or a hospital bed. The patient
recounts what led him or her to seek medical attention (the ‘chief com-
plaint’), narrating the sequence of events and experiences that consti-
tute his or her illness (some histories, as in the case of a comatose or
non-communicative patient, will be heteroanamnestic, i.e. narrated by a
person other than the patient). The first part of this ‘history’ is the most
overtly narrative and can be elicited through questioning, both open-
ended (e.g., “What is wrong?”) and close-ended (e.g., “How long has it
been hurting?”). Following the history of the present illness, the physi-
cian asks a series of questions aimed at understanding the patient’s
global health history (past medical history, past surgical history, aller-
408 Rishi Goyal

gies, etc.). The medical interview ends with the physical exam, during
which the physician examines the patient, laying particular emphasis on
specific systems that correlate with symptoms.
The physician then records the encounter, transforming the patient’s
story of illness and physical examination into a medical case history. In
formulating an assessment, diagnosis and treatment strategy, the physi-
cian ideally engages in two complementary but distinct modes of
thought, as described by Bruner (1986): the paradigmatic or logico-
scientific, and the narrative. The paradigmatic is the mode of science
and deals in generalities, principles, hypothesis testing, and it ultimately
rests on the empirical verifiability of its concepts. Physicians clearly
rely on non-narrative data like vital signs and laboratory values as well
as on pathophysiologic principles to support a diagnosis and treatment
plan that leads to a positive outcome in the world of the patient. But
they also engage in Bruner’s narrative mode, which deals in unique
human intentions, contingencies and vicissitudes, constructing a believ-
able as well as a verifiable account. The physician’s diagnosis depends
heavily on the story he or she hears from the patient, since it relates to a
temporal structure and a change of state (usually from health to sick-
ness). A ‘good‘ medical story (one that makes causal connections clear,
includes relevant information and interests the listener) makes diagnosis
easier by eliciting the physician’s empathy: recent research suggests
that clinical empathy may actually be an important determinant of di-
agnostic accuracy (Halpern 2012). The patient’s story must also capti-
vate the physician’s curiosity (curiosity, not generally considered a cru-
cial attribute of the physician, is one of Sternberg’s three ‘master
forces’ of narrative [1978] and may be clinically relevant [Fitzgerald
1999]). An appropriate and acceptable treatment plan will often have to
take account of a patient’s life experiences and history, the nature of his
or her individual suffering and the ways that individuals imbue their
illness with meaning.
Drawing on empirical data, rhetorical argumentation and narrative
elements, the physician considers biomedical principles and compares
the case at hand to a store of prior cases in order to reach a diagnosis
and plan, a process described by Sebeok as a “[g]estalt-yielding compo-
site of reported (subjective) symptoms and observed (objective) signs”
(1991). In order to make sense of signs and symptoms, the case history
must incorporate objective material data and descriptions while relying
considerably on the patient’s unique narrative of illness. It is a means of
communication (most often with other physicians and healthcare work-
ers), an anamnestic reconstruction of the patient’s experience of illness
in terms of a biomedical model of disease, a cognitive tool for the inter-
 Narration in Medicine 409

pretation of symptoms and signs, and a hypothesis-generating formula-

tion of diagnosis, prognosis and therapy that suggests certain future-
directed actions.

3.1.1 Perspective, Voice, and the Medical Interview

Perspective describes the narrator’s position in relation to the narrative

(to what he narrates, the content, etc.) as it is told; it is the way the rep-
resentation is influenced by the narrator’s position, assumptions and
interests. Theoretical writing on perspective in narration has under-
scored the complexity of the term, with an emphasis on questions of
‘voice’ (first-person versus third-person) and knowledge (omniscience
versus camera mode), although more recent work has also been con-
cerned with ideology and the narrators’ social and psychological posi-
tioning (Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of View). In the medical
case history, the perspective or point of view adopted is most thorough-
ly that of the physician or scientist while the object viewed is the pa-
tient or the disease. In addition to this spatial or topographic fact of dis-
tance, this situation also implies a figurative distance based on
interpretation and evaluation.
In his analysis of the medical interview, sociolinguist Mishler
(1984) offers a critique of biomedicine in terms of a limited definition
of perspective, what he distinguishes as the ‘voice of medicine’ and the
‘voice of the lifeworld’. For Mishler, ‘voice’ is both a literal and a fig-
urative term. Literally, ‘voices’ refer to the voices of patients and phy-
sicians that Mishler transcribes from recorded medical interviews. More
figuratively, voices refer both to a perspective and to a normative order.
Mishler does not, however, distinguish between ‘voice’ and ‘perspec-
tive’, but treats them as interchangeable, regarding perspective as ideo-
logical position.
Borrowing from Silverman and Torode (1980), Mishler defines
voice as a “particular assumption about the relationship between ap-
pearance, reality and language, or more generally, a ‘voice’ represents a
specific normative order” (63). In Mishler’s terms, the ‘voice of medi-
cine’ represents the perspective of a physician as “applied bioscientist”
with a technical bioscience orientation (10), while the ‘voice of the
lifeworld’ is defined as “the patient’s contextually-grounded experienc-
es of events and problems in her life […] expressed from the perspec-
tive of a ‘natural attitude’” (104). Analyzing a corpus of medical inter-
views, Mishler argues that the selection, strategic placement, form and
order of questions reinforce the physician’s control and the dominance
of the ‘voice of medicine’ over the ‘voice of the lifeworld.’ However,
410 Rishi Goyal

these are matters more of argumentation and rhetoric than they are of
voice.
Perspective in the medical case history is more than just a question
of ideology and should be pursued in future research. While the case
history, especially the history of present illness which recounts the pa-
tient’s story, is written in the third person, the ‘chief complaint’ is often
written in the patient’s own words, suggesting a variable point of view.
This is further complicated by the reality that the medical case history
is often one document among many in a medical chart. The plurality of
voices in the form of consults, case histories, social work notes, nursing
assessments, and even occasionally the patient’s words represents the
diversity of “social speech types” (Baxtin [1934/35] 1981: 262) and
may reflect the unique concerns and competencies of distinct profes-
sional groups (Poirier & Brauner 1990).

3.1.2 Story and Discourse

Most theories of narrative discriminate between ‘story’, a sequence of

actions or events independent of their discursive presentation, and ‘dis-
course’, the particular narrative representation of these events (Genette
[1972] 1980). This distinction appears crucial to an understanding of
the practice of medicine in that the purpose of the case history is to re-
construct a temporal sequence of events from a patient’s narrative.
However, both the patient’s narrative account elicited through the med-
ical interview and the medical case history are narrated discourse. Both
accounts already order, select, and present events in narration.
The distinction between story and discourse allows the case history
to be posited as a provisional form. In the case of a young woman pre-
senting either to a clinic or to an emergency room (the place or context
will influence the kind of narratives developed) with right flank and
upper abdominal pain, it can be assumed that there is a true medical
condition that causes her symptoms and that should be treated. But
whether or not the physician arrives at the most effective treatment will
be determined by which story elements he highlights (e.g., “the pain
started after I ate lunch today”) and which he intentionally chooses to
under-emphasize (e.g., “I have been urinating more frequently for the
last two weeks”).
While the diagnostic evaluation suggested by the medical case histo-
ry is predicated on the assumption that prior events have occurred, it is
also itself deterministic of those events. This may be seen as a case of
what Culler calls the “double logic” of narrative: on the one hand, the
priority of events determines their signification, while on the other it is
 Narration in Medicine 411

structures of signification that determine events (1981: 178). The case

history attempts to reconstruct an original sequence of events that will
lead to a diagnosis, but that diagnosis is determined by the specific nar-
rative case history. The case history is a teleological form that attempts
to point to a particular diagnosis or diagnostic and treatment strategy. It
hopes to make the particular end chosen seem inevitable. Different nar-
ratives will be constructed by dilating certain events, deleting others
and suggesting specific causal chronologies. Whether the young woman
with abdominal pain has cholecystitis or pyelonephritis will not be de-
termined by the presentation of the case history, but the particular case
history will determine the specific diagnostic evaluation.

3.1.3 Sequence and Causality

Hunter also distinguishes between “events and the order of their tell-
ing” in medical narration, but she uses the terms ‘story’ and ‘plot’ to
refer respectively to the patient’s subjective account of symptoms and
the medical case history (1991: 61–62). While she acknowledges the
constructedness of the patient’s account (patients often suggest circum-
stantial etiologies and offer interpretations of their symptoms), she is
more interested in the ways that physicians reorder and reconstruct the
patient’s story of illness to plot a medical narrative of causality, discov-
ery and treatment for a specifically medical audience. From the pa-
tient’s story of illness, the physician reorders details to construct a sec-
ond narrative of causality. The case history is not merely a vehicle for
the truth-out-there, but a formal and generic structure that that makes
clinical reasoning possible: the physician must interpret signs and
symptoms and fit them into the patient’s account of illness so as to form
a coherent plot.
The medical case history, unlike a conventional biography, does not
begin at the beginning, but with the patient’s request for medical care.
It then pursues a retrospective account of the illness until it is contermi-
nous with the extended present. The life events in the patient’s story
and the medical case history are experienced as differing chronologies.
The patient’s presentation for medical care occurs in the midst of an
ongoing life and is a central event in a chronological sequence begin-
ning with the onset of an illness and preceding through diagnosis and
treatment. In the medical plot, the initial presentation subordinates both
past and future, while represented time is the “plotted time of medical
discovery” (1991: 65). The medical case history is then a narrative both
of the medical detection process and the patient’s story of illness.
412 Rishi Goyal

Hunter compares the work of the physician with that of Sherlock

Holmes who also begins at the end, with a crime or a puzzle, and must
work backwards to construct a parsimonious narrative embodiment of
causality. Like a detective story, the plot is at once a revelation and a
narrative of that revelation in a causal sequence. One of the tasks of the
physician is to differentiate between what Barthes called the confusion
between consecutiveness and consequence or the logical fallacy of post
hoc, ergo propter hoc (Barthes [1966] 1975: 248; cf. Pier 2008: 109–
140). The physician distinguishes between ‘kernels’ and ‘satellites’
(Chatman 1978: 53–56), i.e. between elements that are critical to a par-
ticular plot and those that are not, and rearranges the patient’s story to
provide a narrative logic of causality that fits other such stories and
pathophysiologic principles. Unlike fictional plots, however, the physi-
cian’s plot of a particular illness story must result in diagnosis, therapy
and resolution of suffering—processes facilitated and enabled by the
presentation of illness in narrative.

3.1.4 Schemata and Scripts

Schemata, and the related terms, frames, scripts and scenarios, offer
another way to approach medical case histories (Emmott & Alexander
→ Schemata; Herman → Cognitive Narratology). Although schemata
are commonly employed in medicine, they are rarely explicitly taken
into account. A schema is a mental structure appropriate for represent-
ing generic concepts as opposed to facts (Stein & Trabasso 1982).
Schemata allow a vast amount of information to be stored in memory,
organized and made easily retrievable. Most experienced physicians
have multiple patient schemata at their disposal such as ‘a young wom-
an who presents in a coma’ or ‘an old man with shortness of breath’.
Schemata provide a template that allows for rapid evaluation and diag-
nosis, a consideration of exceptions, causes and prognoses. For the ‘old
man with shortness of breath,’ specific questions like smoking history
or heart disease, the presence or absence of a fever, and the particular
appearance of a chest x-ray would allow a rapid diagnosis that dispens-
es with a complete consideration of all pathophysiologic principles.
These generic templates are built up from a store of experience and the
reading or hearing of similar cases. They are usually stable over time
and shared among a group.
When a schema offers a specific time-sequence, it is referred to as a
script. Feltovich and Barrows (1984) describe illness script theory in
terms of a general or abstract ‘illness script’ made up of an enabling
condition, a fault and a consequence. Enabling conditions are contex-
 Narration in Medicine 413

tual and patient-dependent factors, while the fault is a pathophysiologic

process which results in the consequences or complaints, signs and
symptoms that bring the patient to medical attention. The difference
between case history and illness script is that while case histories are
specific and individualized instances, illness scripts are general and ab-
stract. Case histories can be compared against scripts, allowing for
missing or omitted information to be filled in and re-ordered.
In addition to their use in clinical care, scripts and schemata play a
potent pedagogical role, serving as mnemonic devices and potential
educational constructs that allow the typical course or plot of an illness
to be remembered and compared to the particular instance at hand.

3.2 Illness Narratives

Efforts to recontextualize the meaning of health and sickness in patient-

specific terms are the basis for what Greenhalgh and Hurwitz (1998)
call Narrative Based Medicine. The contextualization of medical dis-
course has generated an interest in patients’ accounts of illness that has
often been framed in narrative terms. The increasing visibility of patient
narratives (Broyard 1992; Mairs 1993; Brookes 1994), what Frank calls
the “self-stories that proliferate in post-modern times” (1995: 68), not-
ing their use as teaching vehicles in medical schools (Kumagi 2008),
seems to parallel recent interests in memoir, autobiography and life-
writing (Bamberg → Identity and Narration).
Hawkins has resurrected Freud’s term “pathography” to define the
genre of narrative descriptions of illness, most often now used to desig-
nate patients’ first-person accounts (1984: 232). For Hawkins, the con-
struction of a pathography is an interpretive and narrative act that gives
coherence, unity and form to an event or experience that never had it to
begin with. Authors of illness narratives use a kind of fictional tech-
nique to select and arrange material from the life world or from lived
experience to give meaning and value to their illness. They use estab-
lished forms, genres and narrative strategies to make their illnesses nar-
ratively visible. Tracing the sociocultural metaphors that invade and
consecrate medical narrative, Hawkins argues that these personal and
public metaphors enable patients to achieve ‘transcendence’ over their
illness. Hawkins explicitly compares illness narratives to spiritual auto-
biographies, although the ‘transcendence’ envisioned by the latter is
hardly achievable in the context of embodied illness.
Hawkins’ pathographies can be described in Frank’s terms as quest
narratives in which the hero gains a special insight as a result of the
trials of his or her illness (1995: 115–136); however, they are not the
414 Rishi Goyal

only kinds of illness narratives told. In addition to the quest narrative,

Frank describes two other kinds: the restitution narrative (75–96) and
the chaos narrative (97–114). The restitution narrative focuses on the
restoration of health while the chaos narrative describes an experience
of illness that is incomprehensible, unpredictable and almost untellable.
The differing storylines also suggest an important aspect of the self in
relation to illness. In the restitution narrative, the illness is a temporary
alteration or impairment, and the self remains intact and unchanged. By
contrast, the self in the chaos storyline is fragmented as identity is
threatened and disrupted by illness. Finally, the quest narrative depicts
an identity that has been altered, usually positively, by the experience
of illness.
Illness narratives can also have other purposes and motivations. In
some cases, they serve to express anger, either at the illness or at socie-
ty or at the medical establishment for its perceived failures. Some ill-
ness narratives are pedagogical, motivated by an attempt to help others
in a similar situation. Finally, illness narratives are most often testimo-
nial, attempts to bear witness to an experience and to come to terms
with change and suffering (McLellan 1997: 618)

3.3 Narrative as a Clinical and Therapeutic Mode

Starting from prior analytical work, internist and literary scholar Char-
on defined narrative medicine as the “competence to recognize, absorb,
interpret and be moved by stories” (2006: vii). Charon shifts the focus
from the narrative analysis of medicine to a practice of medicine that is
narratively engaged and competent. By understanding how narratives
are built, transmitted, received and function in the world, Charon argues
that we will be able to deliver healthcare which is more humane, empa-
thetic, respectful and sensitive.
Narrative medicine derives its mandate from an ethical and imagina-
tive impulse to inhabit and be with the other through the movements of
attention, representation and affiliation (Charon 2005: 263). Specifical-
ly, Charon suggests that in listening to patients’ narratives of illness,
physicians should attend to questions of temporality, singularity, plot
and perspective. Listening is then followed by representation, usually in
the case of writing the medial case history. The fact of bearing witness
implicit in the attention paid to medical stories of illness combined with
its representational reconstruction in medical narratives results in the
final movement: affiliation. Affiliation registers the ethical impulse to
act on the patient’s behalf generated by the narrative competencies ex-
pected of attention and representation.
 Narration in Medicine 415

The narrative work of recounting stories of illness might itself result

in healing in certain cases (Brody 1988). That telling one’s story of his
or her sickness to a trained witness can result in the resolution of symp-
toms is the cornerstone of Freud’s ‘talking cure’ (Redekur; Breuer &
Freud [1895] 1955). The “storying” of illness provides a truth claim
about its reality that purges the psychological fears of uncertainty and
ambiguity; and knowing that the story is told to someone who will un-
dertake actions to remedy one’s condition and relieve pain can alleviate
distress. Mattingly (1998) contends that narratives can be especially
helpful in occupational therapy as a way for patients with disabilities to
understand their experience and for therapists to connect their interven-
tions with what outcome patients most desire. Finally, Hunter (1991)
argues that for the narrative act to be truly therapeutic, the medical re-
construction or story must be returned to the patient, not just in terms of
diagnosis and therapy, but as a mixed narrative that accounts for both
the patient’s and the physician’s understanding of illness and recontex-
ualizes it in the whole of the patient’s life, which is never just the story
of disease (1991: 13).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Future research in the field of narration and medicine may want to take
up the relation between narrative accounts and non-narrative data in the
arena of the clinical case history. How are the two distinguished and
how are they combined in the formulation of a treatment plan and strat-
egy? What are their respective contributions to the actual diagnosis?
Are certain medical specialties more narrative-friendly than others? Fu-
ture research should investigate the typology of medical narratives with
respect to narrativity, i.e. some medical narratives such as ‘case histo-
ries’ have low degrees of narrativity while others such as ‘illness narra-
tives’ may have a high degree of narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity).
Population-based research, which has often eschewed local and an-
ecdotal experience, has been a dominant framework for medical diag-
nostics and therapeutics, but advances in genome-based medicine sug-
gest that medical care may be beginning to target the particular and
individual biological realities and destinies of unique patients. As the
risk of contracting an illness becomes almost synonymous with having
an illness, research into narratives that precede the specific medical
event of becoming or feeling ill (Wexler 1996) may provide valuable
insights.
416 Rishi Goyal

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Baxtin, Mixail M. (Bakhtin, Mikhail M.) ([1934/35] 1981). The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays. M. Holquist (ed.). Austin: U of Texas P.
Barthes, Roland ([1966] 1975). “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narra-
tive.” New Literary History 6.2, 237–272.
Breuer, Joseph & Sigmund Freud ([1895] 1955). Studies on Hysteria. Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. II. London: Ho-
garth Press.
Brody, Howard (1988). Stories of Sickness. New Haven: Yale UP.
Brookes, Tim (1994). Catching my Breath: An Asthmatic Explores his Illness. New
York: Times Books.
Brown, Cary A. et al. (2010). “How do you write pain? A preliminary study of narra-
tive therapy for people with chronic pain.” Diversity in Health and Care 7.1, 43–
56.
Broyard, Analtole (1992). Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and
Death. New York: Fawcett Columbine.
Bruner, Jerome (1986). “Two Modes of Thought.” Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 11–43.
Charon, Rita (2005). “Narrative Medicine: Attention, Affiliation, Representation.”
Narrative 13.3, 261–270.
– (2006). Narrative Medicine. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Culler, Jonathan (1981). “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative.” The Pur-
suit of Signs. Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 169–187.
Feltovich, Paul J., & Howard S. Barrows (1984). “Issues of generality in medical prob-
lem solving.” H. G. Schmidt & M. L. de Volder (eds.). Tutorials in problem-
based learning: New directions in training for the health professions. Assen, The
Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 128–142.
Fitzgerald, Faith T. (1999). “On Being a Doctor: Curiosity.” Annals of Internal Medi-
cine 130.1, 70–72.
Frank, Arthur (1995). The Wounded Storyteller. Chicago: Chicago UP.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Greenhalgh, Trisha & Brain Hurwitz (1998). “Why Study Narrative?” Narrative Based
Medicine. T. Greenhalgh & B. Hurwitz (eds.). London: BMJ Books, 3–16.
Halpern, Jodi (2012). “Gathering the Patient’s Story and Clinical Empathy.” The Per-
manente Journal 16.1, 52–54.
Hawkins, Anne (1984). “Two Pathographies: A study in Illness and Literature.” The
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 9, 231–252.
Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery (1991). Doctor’s Stories: The Narrative Structure of
Medical Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton UP.
 Narration in Medicine 417

Klemperer, George ([1898] 2010). The Elements of Clinical Diagnosis. Charleston, SC:
Nabu Press.
Kumagi, Arno (2008). “A Conceptual Framework for the Use of Illness Narratives in
Medical Education.” Academic Medicine 83.7, 653–658.
Mairs, Nancy (1993). Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Mattingly, Cheryl (1998). Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure
of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
McLellan, M. Faith (1997). “Literature and Medicine: Narratives of Physical Illness.”
Lancet 349, 618–620.
Mishler, Elliot (1984). The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews.
Norwood: Ablex.
Morris, S. Daniel (2004). “Rebuilding Identity through Narrative Following Traumatic
Brain Injury.” Journal of Cognitive Rehabilitation 22.2, 15–21.
Pier, John (2008). “After this, therefore because of this.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa
(eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 109–140.
Poirier, Suzanne & Daniel J. Brauner (1990). “The Voice of the Medical Record.” The-
oretical Medicine 11, 29–39.
Sebeok, Thomas (1991). “Vital Signs.” Semiotics in the United States. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 119–138.
Silverman, David & Brian Torode (1980). The Material World. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Stein, Nancy L. & Thomas R. Trabasso (1982). “What’s in a Story: An Approach to
Comprehension and Instruction.” Advances in the Psychology of Instruction.
Volume 2. R. Glaser (ed.). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 213–268.
Sternberg, Meir (1978). Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins UP.
Wexler, Alice (1996). Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk and Genetic Research.
Berkeley: U of California P.

5.2 Further Reading

Cassell, Eric J. (1976). The Healer’s Art: A New Approach to the Doctor-Patient Rela-
tionship. New York: Lippincott.
Davis, Lennard J. (1995). Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body.
New York: Verso.
Herman, David (2003). “Stories as a Tool for Thinking.” Narrative Theory and the
Cognitive Sciences. D. Herman (ed.). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language
and Information (CSLI), 163–192.
Hydén, Lars-Christer (2005). “Medicine and Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 293–297.
Jurecic, Ann (2012). Illness as Narrative. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P.
King, Lester S. (1982). Medical Thinking: A Historical Preface. Princeton: Princeton
UP.
418 Rishi Goyal

Kleinman, Arthur (1988). The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human
Condition. New York: Basic Books.
Leder, Drew (1990). “Clinical Interpretation: The Hermeneutics of Medicine.” Theoret-
ical Medicine 11, 9–24.
Lembert-Heidenreich, Alexandra & Jamila Mildorf, eds. (2013). The Writing Cure:
Literature and Medicine in Context. Münster: LIT Verlag.
 Narration in Poetry and Drama
Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

1 Definition

Narration as a communicative act in which a chain of happenings is

meaningfully structured and transmitted in a particular medium and
from a particular point of view underlies not only narrative fiction
proper but also poems and plays in that they, too, represent temporally
organized sequences and thus relate “stories,” albeit with certain genre-
specific differences, necessarily mediating them in the manner of
presentation. Lyric poetry in the strict sense (and not only obviously
narrative poetry like ballads or verse romances) typically features
strings of primarily mental or psychological happenings perceived
through the consciousness of single speakers and articulated from their
position. Drama enacts strings of happenings with actors in live per-
formance, the presentation of which, though typically devoid of any
overt presenting agency, is mediated e.g. through selection, segmenta-
tion and arrangement. Thanks to these features characteristic of narra-
tive, lyric poems as well as plays performed on the stage can be profit-
ably analyzed with the transgeneric application of narratological
categories, though with poetry the applicability of the notion of story
and with drama that of mediation seems to be in question.

2 Explication

Transgeneric narratology proceeds from the assumption that narratolo-

gy’s highly differentiated system of categories can be applied to the
analysis of both poems and plays, possibly opening the way to a more
precise definition of their respective generic specificity, even though
(lyric) poems do not seem to tell stories and stories in dramas do not
seem to be mediated (but presented directly). As far as poetry is con-
cerned, the following argument concentrates on lyric poetry in the nar-
row sense: that narratological categories are generally applicable to
narrative verse is obvious.
420 Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

If narration is defined as the representation of chains of happenings

in a medium by a mediating agent, then the three traditional genres,
prose fiction, poetry (Schönert 2004) and drama, can be differentiated
semiotically by the extent to which they utilize the range of possible
modes and levels of mediation. While novels, short stories, etc. typical-
ly make use of all available levels and modes of mediation (superordi-
nate narrator, subordinate character’s utterance, various modes of focal-
ization), lyric and dramatic texts can be reconstructed as reduced forms
in which the range of instances of mediation varies in each case. Seen
in this way, lyric texts in the narrower sense (i.e. not just verse narra-
tives or ballads) are distinguished by a characteristic variability in the
extent to which they use the range of levels and modes of mediation.
Like prose narratives, they can instantiate the two fundamental constit-
uents of the narrative process, temporal sequentiality and mediation,
equally well. Similarly to the enacted utterances of characters in dra-
matic texts, however, they can also seemingly efface the narrator’s level
and create the impression of performative immediacy of speaking. As a
result, the speaker’s voice is felt to emanate from simultaneously occur-
ring experience and speech. What a narratological approach to poetry is
able to provide are a specific method of analyzing the sequential struc-
ture as well as a more precise instrument for differentiating the levels
and modes of mediation in lyric poems (both of which in conventional
manuals of poetry analysis are usually lacking).
In dramatic texts in performance, on the other hand, the sequence of
happenings is presented directly, corporeally, in the form of live char-
acters interacting and communicating on stage, without an overt media-
tor (such as a narrator (Margolin → Narrator)) and seemingly without
any mediation whatsoever. Nevertheless, selection, segmentation, com-
bination and focus of the scenes presented imply the existence of a su-
perordinate mediating instance (Jahn 2001; Weidle 2009) or, in other
terms, of the abstract author (Schmid → Implied Author). In addition,
narrative elements and structures do normally occur at the intradiegetic
level of the characters’ utterances, but can also be introduced at the ex-
tradiegetic level, such as prologues and epilogues and comments by
stage managers or overt narrators. A narratological approach to drama
can systematically account for the use of such narrative devices and
offer new perspectives on the relationship between dialogue and stage
directions and the status of the secondary text (Fludernik 2008; Nün-
ning & Sommer 2008).
A transgeneric narratology is, however, by no means restricted to
applying narrative theories and terminologies to other genres for analyt-
ical purposes. This approach may have repercussions on classical narra-
 Narration in Poetry and Drama 421

tology itself in that it highlights the need to reconsider current theories

of narrative with their traditional focus on narrative fiction by empha-
sizing the performative aspects of storytelling, the realization or trans-
mission of narrative content in different media, and the cognitive activi-
ties involved in narrative comprehension.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Dimensions of the Transgeneric Approach to Poetry

The following survey focuses specifically on lyric rather than on narra-

tive poetry such as ballads, verse narratives or verse romances. The lat-
ter lend themselves readily to the concepts generally employed for
prose fiction, albeit with certain differences like the added structuring
device of versification (Kinney 1992; McHale 2005, 2010). A
transgeneric application of narratology to lyric poetry is of relatively
recent vintage, the earliest examples dating back only to the 1980s. For
the following discussion, such approaches will be ordered according to
the dimension(s) of the poem qua narrative text to which narratological
categories are applied. These basic dimensions are the levels of the
happenings and of their mediation in the form of the poetic text, in par-
ticular the modality of its mediation and the organization of its sequen-
tial structure, as well as the act and process of articulation.
According to a traditional view, which remains widespread even to-
day, the generic specificity of lyric poetry as distinct from the epic and
dramatic genres is grounded in its particular form of representation or
mediation: its supposedly unmediated quality—direct, unfiltered com-
munication of experience by an author identified with a speaker as the
subject of this experience. It is this traditional notion of poetic immedi-
ate subjectivity that several early narratological approaches to lyric po-
etry address and try to remedy. Bernhart (1993: 366–368) draws on
Stanzel’s distinction between dramatized and withdrawn narrators (i.e.
between overt and covert narration) to describe two degrees of the per-
ceptibility of mediation in poetry, the effect of which is either to fore-
ground mediation or to background the mediator and produce the illu-
sion of immediacy. The merit of Bernhart’s argument is its insistence
on the ineluctably mediate quality of poetry and on the existence, as in
fiction, of an organizing and shaping consciousness, whether visible or
invisible. Owing to his adoption of Stanzel’s one-dimensional modeling
of mediacy, however, Bernhart refers merely to the variable perceptibil-
ity of the narrator, neglecting other modes of mediating such as the var-
422 Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

ious facets of focalization (e.g. perceptual, psychological or ideologi-

cal). Seemann (1984: 535–538), likewise rejecting the notion of poetic
immediacy, derives a much more differentiated hierarchy of levels of
mediation from narrative and drama theory. He distinguishes five “lev-
els of communication”: (a) characters; (b) narrator/speaker; (c) implied
author; (d) author as the creator of the work in question; (e) author as a
biographical person. He points out that the “lowest” level, the utteranc-
es of characters, is often unrealized in poetry and that the “highest” lev-
el, the real author, is usually irrelevant for understanding a work. Of
particular interest is his distinction between speaker and implied author,
based on textual signals in the composition of the work, opening the
way to clearer differentiations in the analysis of perspective, not only in
satiric verse and dramatic monologues, but more generally, even in cas-
es where these levels appear to collapse into one another. In a similar
manner, Kraan (1991) distinguishes empirical author, implied author
and what he calls “lyric subject,” stressing the historical variability in
the distinctness of these three mediators, e.g. their implicit identity in
Romanticism or clear differentiation in modernism (222–223).
Subsequent and more comprehensive proposals add further specifi-
cations to such approaches to modeling mediation in lyric poetry by
drawing more extensively on the particularly elaborate inventory of
terms offered by narrative theory. Dismissing conventional views of the
all-embracing emotionality and self-contained artificiality of poetry that
preclude rational analysis, Müller-Zettelmann (2002: 130–131) pro-
grammatically advocates a systematic transfer of the results of narratol-
ogy to raise the theoretical level both of reflection on poetry and of po-
etry criticism (139−148). As for the dimension of mediation, she
concentrates on one singular aspect of lyric poetry: its generic subjec-
tivity (142–144), which she identifies as part of the larger phenomenon
of “aesthetic illusion” and analyzes (drawing on Wolf 1998) as the in-
tended effect of various techniques simulating the general position-
boundedness of human experience as manifest in the spatial, temporal,
cognitive, emotional and ideological restriction of perception and con-
sciousness. This effect of aesthetic illusion, she argues, is further
heightened by self-referential artificiality in poems where the speaker
presents himself as a creative poet. In Genette’s terms, this phenome-
non could be classified as the coincidence of speaker’s voice with in-
ternal focalization and simultaneous narration. Despite her initial com-
prehensive claim, Müller-Zettelmann refrains from exploring the wide
range of poetic mediation with the various possible constellations of
voice, focalization and time of narration, singling out one special albeit
significant case: generic subjectivity.
 Narration in Poetry and Drama 423

A systematic all-encompassing application of narratology, differen-

tiating two basic aspects of mediation, agents or instances and levels of
mediation and types of perspective, is outlined by Hühn and Schönert
(2002: 295−298) and Hühn (2004: 147−151). Firstly, the four agents
located on four hierarchical levels largely coincide with those named by
Seemann and Kraan: biographical author; abstract (or implied) author;
speaker/narrator; protagonist or character in the happenings. Secondly,
the two types or modes of perspective are voice (a narrator’s or a char-
acter’s verbal utterance, their language) and focalization (the position
that determines perception and cognition, the deictic center of the per-
ceptual, cognitive, psychological and ideological focus on the happen-
ings). For the notoriously tricky problem of distinguishing speaker and
abstract author and of relating focalization to agent (e.g. whether to
speaker or character), they introduce the operation of “attribution” per-
formed by the reader in accordance with his particular understanding of
the text. These two sets of differential categories, in conjunction with
the operation of attribution, allow for a more precise analysis of lyric
poems in their individual, historical and cultural variations than do tra-
ditional methods. Hence the seemingly unmediated self-expression of
the poet in a simultaneously ongoing experience characteristic of many
Romantic poems, for example, can be re-described as the manipulated
collapse of the agents/instances and levels of protagonist, speaker and
author as well as the contrived congruence of voice and focalization,
thus creating the effect of unmediated subjectivity. A special aspect of
mediation in lyric poetry concerns the unreliability of the speaker (Shen
→ Unreliability), a problem frequently discussed with respect to narra-
tive fiction since Booth ([1961] 1983) introduced the term, but rarely
taken up in the analysis of poetry. Hühn (1998) offers an early system-
atic description of the problem arguing that any first-person speaker in
lyric poetry is―because of human situatedness―ineluctably limited
and biased in his perspective on the world and on himself, which causes
partial self-intransparency as to his own motives, desires, and anxieties.
Unreliable speaker-narrators are specifically characteristic of the “dra-
matic monologue” as invented and practised by Victorian poets. In her
comprehensive study of this poetic sub-genre Rohwer-Happe (2011)
analyzes unreliability as the dissociation or discrepancy between two
instances of poetic mediation―those of the speaker and an external
superior perspective, often circumscribed as the “implied author”
(Booth ([1961] 1983)), a construct rejected by Rohwer-Happe in favor
of a combination of textual signals and the reader’s frame of reference.
The other dimension of the poetic text, sequentiality, has hitherto
been widely neglected in traditional approaches to poetry analysis, even
424 Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

though it constitutes a central part of a poem’s meaning. For the

transgeneric approach to poetry, investigation of this dimension in its
temporal organization is essential, since it forms the basis for the appli-
cation of narratology in the first place. Contrary to mediation with the
highly differentiated system of relevant categories already developed
by narratology, the dimension of sequentiality lacks a broadly accepted
narratological terminology. Because of this, critics are left to develop
categories of their own or to draw on a variety of sources from else-
where.
Stillinger (1985: 98–99) sketches five concrete types of plot in Ro-
mantic poetry: conflict between binary forces (mostly of a mental kind)
and its resolution; journeys or quests; confrontation between imagina-
tion and reality with resultant disillusionment; violation and its conse-
quences; competition between spatial divisions. From these he abstracts
two general patterns: (a) progress from a state of equilibrium to disturb-
ance to a final resolution; (b) encounter of a protagonist’s desire or goal
with resistance and its resolution. This is an early and rudimentary at-
tempt, loosely inspired by action models applied to prose fiction
(Propp, Bremond), in need of further refinement and adaptation.
Weststeijn (1989), in another early proposal, advocates application of
the concept of plot to lyric poems and provides a demonstration, high-
lighting two features specific to poetry: the preference for mental ac-
tions and the omission (deliberate or not) of the social, spatial and tem-
poral particulars of situation, character and action. Müller-Zettelmann
(2002: 133–135), in a programmatic plea for the general transfer of nar-
ratological categories to poetry analysis, also mentions these two fea-
tures, but without further specification, merely referring to the applica-
bility of frame (or schema) theory (149–150). This same concept was
earlier proposed by Semino (1995) as a practical instrument for the de-
tailed analysis of poetry, without, however, linking it to narrative.
Schema theory, derived from cognitive psychology, explains the read-
er’s comprehension of texts as an operation of activating and applying
relevant prior knowledge. According to this theory, knowledge is
shown to be organized into patterns called schemata: flexible and dy-
namic structures which texts may confirm or modify in the course of
“schema reinforcement” and “schema refreshment” respectively (85–
87). The concept of schema facilitates precise description of the se-
quential dimension of poetic texts.
A systematic approach to modeling sequentiality combining schema
theory with Lotman’s concept of sujet (in the sense of transgression of
a boundary or deviation from a norm) is put forward by Hühn and
Schönert (2002), Hühn (2004, 2005) and Hühn and Kiefer (2005). The
 Narration in Poetry and Drama 425

notion of cognitive schemata, especially in the further distinction be-

tween frames (stereotypical knowledge about settings, situations and
themes) and scripts (knowledge about stereotyped series of actions and
processes), allows for differentiated analysis of the sequential structure
of poems and their thematic significance with direct reference to the
cultural, social and historical context, since such schemata (Emmott &
Alexander → Schemata) are always formed by and dependent on expe-
rience within a particular society and culture. Because of the poetic
convention of brevity, abstractness and situational and personal inde-
terminacy, poems are usually less circumstantial than prose fiction in
presenting textual triggers for activating frames and scripts, thus requir-
ing greater effort on the reader’s part to infer the relevant schemata.
Combining schema theory with Lotman’s model provides a means for
identifying the turning point in a poem, a decisive or merely inferable
change from one state (attitude, view, emotion, etc.) to another signaled
by deviation from the conventional and predictable pattern of one or
more schemata which constitutes the “point” of the text, its raison
d’être (Baroni → Tellability). Events are ascribed to a figure, an agent
who undergoes a decisive change. According to the level of the poetic
text at which the figure is located and at which the decisive turn takes
place, three basic event types or planes of eventfulness can be distin-
guished (Hühn & Kiefer 2005: 7, 246–251): (a) “events in the happen-
ings,” ascribed to storyworld incidents with the protagonist or persona
as agent; (b) “presentation events,” located at the discourse level with
the speaker/narrator as agent enacting a “story of narration”; in addi-
tion, “mediation events” can be marked off as exceptional variants of
the presentation event in cases where the decisive change is brought
about by a shift in the manner of mediation, e.g. by modification or re-
placement of schemata, attributable not to the speaker but to the ab-
stract author (as when the speaker’s lament about his artistic sterility is
mediated in the form of a perfect poem); (c) “reception events,” which
take place during the reading process with the reader as agent in cases
when neither the protagonist nor the speaker is willing or able to under-
go a (necessary or desirable) change, an event the reader is meant to
perform vicariously, as in dramatic monologues (Hühn → Event and
Eventfulness). Simon (2004) has proposed a rhetorical approach to se-
quentiality in poems, on the basis of applying rhetoric as action theory.
He construes the progression of a lyric poem as an intention-driven ac-
tion, in which rhetorical tropes, figures and their concatenation function
as sequence patterns. While narratological analyses link the poetic “sto-
ry” to an agent or patient, Simon’s rhetorical approach locates the ac-
tion within the text itself. One problematic aspect of this approach con-
426 Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

cerns the form in which tropes and figures are metaphorically translated
into actional moves and extracted from the text in a largely intuitive
manner. An analytic model for the practical analysis of sequentiality on
the basis of Propp’s and Todorov’s action theories has been developed
by Kafalenos (2006: 157–178), more elaborate and systematic than
Stillinger (1985). Kafalenos analyzes the moment, event or situation
represented in a lyric in terms of “functions,” i.e. with respect to its po-
sition within a progressive chain of implied causes and possible conse-
quences. The model allows for a distinction between the textual signals
and the reader’s interpretations by laying out the successive moves in
the reconstruction of the narrative sequence of antecedents and future
actions as ascribed to the persona. This approach presents a valuable
new contribution to the practical analysis of narrative sequentiality in
lyric poetry despite the (untenable) restriction of the temporal dimen-
sion of poems to one single moment (in analogy to pictures), a
restriction, which ultimately does not affect the applicability of the
model.
A final dimension in which narratological approaches to poetry
analysis promise new insights concerns the poetic specificity of narra-
tive in lyric poems. Two aspects may be distinguished: First, as to the
influence of poetic devices on the mediation of narrative. Such tech-
niques generally lack inherent meaning and become meaningful only by
interacting with the semantic dimension. McHale (2009, 2010) equates
poetry with versification and identifies its constitutive feature as seg-
mentivity, i.e. sub-division into smaller units, which offer “affordanc-
es” in interaction with the narrative, varying between concordance and
discordance and thereby structuring the development of the story.
Though broadly valid for verse texts in general, this approach also of-
fers first suggestions for the analysis of the impact of prosodic features
on narrative elements in lyric poems. More specific semantic effects
have been pointed out by Hühn and Kiefer (2005: 255–256) and
Schönert et al. (2007: 327) on the basis of detailed analyses of particu-
lar poems, e.g. emphasizing the emotional reaction to a cognitive in-
sight in the course of a reflective process; supporting the eventful shift
from the level of the happenings to the poetic text as a way of overcom-
ing problems in the narrated story-world through aestheticization or wit
in the form of a presentation event. Second, as to generically specific
forms and functions of narrative in lyric poems. Hühn (2005: 167–168),
Hühn and Kiefer (2005: 233–235) and Schönert et al. (2007: 311–313)
have pointed to characteristic tendencies in which narration in lyric po-
ems tends to differ from that in novels and stories. One such tendency
concerns the preference for stories in which simultaneous (performative
 Narration in Poetry and Drama 427

or mimetic) narration moves towards a decisive turn, either achieving

this presentation event at the very end of the poem or, more typically,
breaking off before it is achieved, because of external or internal re-
sistance. To negotiate this problematic transition, the speaker often em-
ploys prospective narration (cf. e.g. Hühn 2005: 167). This typically
lyric phenomenon is also described, from a less explicitly narratological
angle, by Dubrow (2006) under the term of “anticipatory amalgam.”
In conclusion, the claim formulated in some programmatic state-
ments that the transfer of narratological concepts to poetry will contrib-
ute to a differentiated theory of poetry (Müller-Zettelmann 2000: 4;
Hühn & Schönert 2002: 287–288) has yet to bear its full fruit. Even so,
this transgeneric thrust is already enriching the analysis of poetry and
facilitating investigation of the specific relations between poems and
their cultural and historical contexts.

3.2 Dimensions of the Transgeneric Approach to Drama

Most categories commonly used for the analysis of narrative fiction can
equally be applied to drama, as Richardson (2007: 142–151) argues
convincingly. This is valid for representations of character, plot, begin-
nings and endings, time and space as well as for fictional causality (de-
fined by Richardson as the “canon of probability” [150] to which plays
and novels adhere), narrative framing and narration. Whereas plot, be-
ginnings and endings and character also belong to the traditional cate-
gories of drama criticism, the relevance of concepts of narrative media-
tion and their applicability in a transgeneric context is currently under
debate.
Narratological approaches to drama routinely focus on choric
speeches, prologues and messengers, onstage audiences and commenta-
tors, instances of character narration and of epic narrators such as the
stage manager in Wilder’s Our Town, on frame narratives and embed-
ded narratives, monologues, soliloquies, asides, audience address, self-
reflective or meta-dramatic comments, instances of metalepsis (Pier →
Metalepsis) as well as on self-referential techniques such as the play-
within-the-play. Recent research also suggests a distinction between
mimetic and diegetic narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity; Nünning &
Sommer 2008: 337–339) and combines the analysis of narration in
drama with performative approaches to the study of discourse in narra-
tive fiction (Fludernik 2008: 367–369).
Historically, there has been a tendency in drama criticism to regard
epic elements and violation of the Aristotelian unities which frequently
went along with them as “undramatic” and to consider them merely as a
428 Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

way to overcome the technical limitations of stage design (Delius

1877). This view was challenged radically by 20th-century playwrights
such as Beckett and, of course, Brecht’s programmatic use of alienating
techniques―frequently narrative or meta-dramatic in nature―which
defined his internationally acclaimed notion of an epic theater.
Throughout the 20th century, narrative experiments in drama have con-
tributed to the emergence of a canon of plays (including Brecht’s Cau-
casian Chalk Circle, Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Shaffer’s
Amadeus) routinely quoted in narratological accounts of drama. The
development of drama and theater in the second half of the 20th centu-
ry, however, should not be reduced to an increased awareness of its nar-
rativity or to self-reflective games with narrative and dramatic conven-
tions: there is a broad variety of new developments including
improvised forms of performance, the fusion of theater with other gen-
res, media and technologies, and the emergence of a “post-dramatic”
theater which abandons conventional story-based and character-
oriented dramaturgy (Lehmann 1999).
The frequent occurrence of narrative or epic elements in performed
or presented narratives (theater or film) led Chatman (1990) to question
the strict separation of mimesis and diegesis favored by Genette. In-
stead of identifying the former with showing and preserving the latter
for the verbal mediation of narrative content, Chatman points to the fact
that both modes (showing and telling) can be used to transmit a story.
Thus, a narrator might present a story “through a teller or a shower or
some combination of both” (113). In order to avoid terminological con-
fusion, Chatman suggests the new umbrella term “presenter” to desig-
nate his broader conception of narrator which subsumes both the narra-
tor in Genette’s narrower sense of verbal narration by anthropomorphic
narrating instances (a notion compatible with Stanzel’s definition of
mediacy as the sine qua non of fictional narration), on the one hand,
and “a kind of narration that is not performed by a recognizably human
agency” (115), on the other. The latter type of narrator may be said to
“tell” (or “show” or “present”) the majority of enacted stories on stage
and screen. Chatman’s main argument in favor of his approach (besides
terminological clarity) is theoretical consistency: “Once we define nar-
rative as the composite of story and discourse (on the basis of its unique
double chronology), then logically, at least, narratives can be said to be
actualizable on the stage or in other iconic media” (114).
This idea is further developed by Jahn (2001), who emphasizes the
diegetic nature of stage directions and compares the multiple levels of
communication within dramatic texts with narrative embedding in the
novel. He also modifies Chatman’s taxonomy of text types (1990: 115)
 Narration in Poetry and Drama 429

by introducing a “playscript mode” (to which he assigns all utterances

belonging to the “secondary text”) and by replacing Chatman’s subdi-
vision of “diegetic” and “mimetic” with the distinction between “writ-
ten/printed” and “performed” narratives. More recently, Nünning and
Sommer (2008) have argued that plays make acts of (intradiegetic) sto-
rytelling theatrical by representing acts of character narration, leading
them to propose a distinction between different degrees of diegetic nar-
rativity in narratives that extend across the traditional generic bounda-
ries (thus a memory play may have a high degree of diegetic narrativity,
while modernist novels preoccupied with the representation of con-
sciousness and processes of perception may be said to have a low de-
gree of either mimetic or diegetic narrativity). Another direction is tak-
en by Fludernik (2008), whose notion of experientiality paves the way
for a cognitive narratological approach to drama. She revises the stand-
ard narratological model of communication in fictional narrative (based
on the distinction between story level and discourse level) by adding a
third level, corresponding to performance or enactment in order to high-
light the specific circumstances in which storytelling occurs: “In drama,
there is a real performance involving actors; in a performance of narra-
tive, the performer and audience ‘take over’ the roles of narrator and
narratee. What the model allows one to argue is that in drama, the nar-
ratorial level is optional and the performative level is constitutive,
whereas in epic narrative, it is the performance level that is optional”
(365).
Whereas narratologists from Chatman and Richardson to Jahn and
Fludernik have repeatedly emphasized the narrativity of drama from a
variety of perspectives, there are also critical voices rejecting the idea
of a narratology of drama (or at least parts of it). Referring to Stanzel’s
notion of mediacy, Rajewsky (2007: 58) insists on the distinction be-
tween narrative communication in the novel and non-mediated commu-
nication in drama, thus excluding the possibility of heterodiegetic nar-
ration on the stage (where, she argues, discourse is always produced by
participants of the storyworld). This view is supported by Schenk-
Haupt (2007: 30), who maintains that “extradiegetic narration is impos-
sible in dramatic writing.”
Proponents of a narratology of drama, however, generally agree that
both Genette’s notion of diegetic narration as a verbal transmission of
narrative content and Stanzel’s insistence on mediacy as a prerequisite
of narrative are too restrictive, proceeding, as they do, from the norma-
tive assumption (based on normative genre theory) that there is no nar-
rative discourse in drama. There are several more recent (and more
convincing) alternatives to Genette’s and Stanzel’s definitions of narra-
430 Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

tive available, including Chatman’s revision of Genette’s concept and

Jahn’s subsequent modification of Chatman, Ryan’s transgeneric and
transmedial definitions of narrative as a “cognitive template” (Ryan
2005; Nünning & Sommer 2008: 333), or Fludernik’s “natural” narra-
tology, based on her definitions of narrativity and experientiality.
Therefore, attempts to prove transgeneric narratology wrong by point-
ing out its incompatibility with Genette (Schenk-Haupt 2007: 31–32) or
Stanzel (Rajewsky 2007: 58) can hardly be convincing. Schenk-
Haupt’s conclusion that there “is no direct extradiegetic communication
in dramatic writing―authorial characters, embedded stories, epic de-
vices, and the quirky expansion of stage directions merely create the
aesthetic illusion of an extradiegetic agent speaking” (2007: 37) is valid
for all narratological concepts: they all refer to effects produced by ver-
bal, visual or auditive signs.
Rajewsky (2007) further suggests that a transgeneric and transmedi-
al narratology should not try to level the differences between the vari-
ous media in which stories can be transmitted. For this reason, she re-
jects Jahn’s argument that unperformable, unrealizable stage directions
can be regarded as evidence of a heterodiegetic narrating instance: since
they cannot be performed, they highlight generic conventions and em-
phasize the distinctions between narrative fiction and narrative drama
which transgeneric narratology seeks to overcome (61). Schenk-Haupt
(2007) offers a similar argument: “If we accepted that [...] the second-
ary text took over a narrative, mediating function, this would eventually
lead to a confusion of generic boundaries” (36). The disagreement
seems to be partly due to the fact that the discussion of the relationship
between primary and secondary text is merged with the text vs. perfor-
mance debate and/or with generic issues.
Ultimately, the existence (or absence) of a narrating instance in
drama is a matter of perspective: it depends both on the critic’s chosen
theoretical framework (Genette/Stanzel vs. Chatman /Jahn/ Ryan/
Fludernik) and on his or her main research interests (narrative vs. gen-
res/media). Admittedly, narratology sometimes tends to produce coun-
ter-intuitive concepts, and a play’s “superordinate narrative agent”
(Jahn 2001: 672) or “superordinate narrative system” (Weidle 2009)
may easily fall into that category for critics more concerned with per-
formance and performativity. Transgeneric narratology is still in its in-
fancy, however, and if the current cognitive approaches are pursued
further, a truly transmedial and interdisciplinary theory of storytelling
and narrative comprehension might be developed which would not only
help to solve some of the problems in classical genre theory, but also
 Narration in Poetry and Drama 431

allow for a better understanding of the anthropological function of nar-

rative in literary and in non-literary discourses.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

4.1 Topics for Further Investigation: Poetry

The relation of the various event types with different historical epochs
and with different cultures and cultural traditions; comparison between
poetry and prose fiction in their various genres with respect to the
schemata used, event types and the degree of realization of events.

4.2 Topics for Further Investigation: Drama

The compatibility or mutual dependency of transgeneric and transmedi-

al theories of narrative; a comparative discussion of diegetic narrativity
in dramas, play texts and performances; a revision of structuralist narra-
tological approaches to drama from a cognitive and pragmatic/semantic
perspective.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited: Poetry

Bernhart, Wolfgang (1993). “Überlegungen zur Lyriktheorie aus erzähltheoretischer

Sicht.” H. Foltinek et al. (eds.). Tales and ‘their telling difference’: Festschrift für
Franz K. Stanzel. Heidelberg: Winter, 359–375.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago UP.
Dubrow, Heather (2006). “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Coop-
eration, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam.” Narrative 14, 254–271.
Hühn, Peter (1998). “Watching the Speaker Speak: Self-Observation and Self-
Intransparency in Lyric Poetry.” M. Jeffreys (ed.). New Definitions of Lyric. The-
ory, Technology, and Culture. New York: Garland, 215–244.
– (2004). “Transgeneric Narratology: Applications to Lyric Poetry.” J. Pier (ed.).
The Dynamics of Narrative Form. Berlin: de Gruyter, 139–158.
– (2005). “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry.” E. Müller-Zettelmann
& M. Rubik (eds.). Theory into Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 147–172.
– & Jens Kiefer (2005). The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in
English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century. Berlin: de Gruyter.
– & Jörg Schönert (2002). “Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik.” Poetica 34,
287–305.
432 Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

Kafalenos, Emma (2006). Narrative Causalities. Columbus: Ohio State UP.

Kinney, Clare R. (1992). Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton,
Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Kraan, Menno (1991). “Towards a Model of Lyric Communication: Some Historical
and Theoretical Remarks.” Russian Literature 30, 199–230.
McHale, Brian (2005). “Narrative in Poetry.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Ency-
clopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 356−58.
– (2009). "Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry." Narrative 17, 11−27.
– (2010). "Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry." Literator
(Potchefstroom, SA) 31: 3, 49−60.
Müller-Zettelmann, Eva (2000). Lyrik und Metalyrik: Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer
Selbstbespiegelung anhand von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutschsprachi-
gen Dichtkunst. Heidelberg: Winter.
– (2002). “Lyrik und Narratologie.” A. Nünning & V. Nünning (eds.). Erzähltheo-
rie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT, 129–153.
Rohwer-Happe, Gislind (2011). Unreliable Narration im dramatischen Monolog des
Viktorianismus. Konzepte und Funktionen. Göttingen: V&R unipress, Bonn UP.
Schönert, Jörg (2004). “Normative Vorgaben als ‘Theorie der Lyrik’? Vorschläge zu
einer texttheoretischen Revision.” G. Frank & W. Lukas (eds.). Norm
―Grenze―Abweichung. Kultursemiotische Studien zu Literatur, Medien und
Wirtschaft. Michael Titzmann zum 60. Geburtstag. Passau: Stutz, 303–318.
– et al. (2007). Lyrik und Narratologie: Text-Analysen zu deutschsprachigen Ge-
dichten vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Seemann, Klaus Dieter (1984). “Die Kommunikationsstruktur im lyrischen Gedicht.”
W. Schmid & R. Döring-Smirnov (eds.). Text, Symbol, Weltmodell: Johannes
Holthusen zum 60. Geburtstag. München: Sager, 533–554.
Semino, Elena (1995). “Schema theory and the analysis of text worlds in poetry.” Lan-
guage and Literature 4, 79–108.
Simon, Ralf (2004). "Handlungstheorie des Lyrischen." Rhetorik: Ein internationales
Jahrbuch. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 23, 50–80.
Stillinger, Jack (1985). “The Plots of Romantic Poetry.” College Literature 12, 95–112.
Weststeijn, Willem G. (1989). “Plot Structure in Lyric Poetry: An Analysis of Three
Exile Poems by Aleksandr Puškin.” Russian Literature 26, 509–522.
Wolf, Werner (1998). “Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry?” Poetica 30, 18−56.

5.2 Further Reading: Poetry

Adam, Jean-Michel (2002). “Conditions et degrés de narrativation du poème.” Degrés:

Revue de Synthèse à Orientation Sémiologique 111, a 1–a 26.
Müller-Zettelmann, Eva (2011). "Poetry, Narratology, Meta-Cognition." G. Olson
(ed.). Current Trends in Narratology. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 232–253.
Schönert, Jörg (2008). “Auteur empirique, auteur implicite et moi lyrique.” J. Pier
(ed.). Théorie du récit. L’apport de la recherche allemande. Villeneuve d’Asqc:
Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 84–96.
Semino, Elena (1997). Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. Lon-
don: Longman.
 Narration in Poetry and Drama 433

Simon, Ralf (2004). “Handlungstheorie des Lyrischen: mit Analysen zu Hölderlins

Heidelberg, Mörikes Die schöne Buche und Georges Wir werden heute nicht zum
garten gehen.” Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch 23, 50−80.
Steffen, Jorge (2010). Das perspektiverzeugende Medium in der 'Confessional Poetry'
am Beispiel von Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell und John Berryman.
Saarbrücken: Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften (zugl. Diss. TU
Berlin 2008).

5.3 Works Cited: Drama

Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Delius, Nikolaus (1877). “Die epischen Elemente in Shakespeare’s Dramen.” Shake-
speare-Jahrbuch 12, 1–28.
Fludernik, Monika (2008). “Narrative and Drama.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa (eds.).
Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 353–381.
Jahn, Manfred (2001). “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratolo-
gy of Drama.” New Literary History 32, 659–679.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2001). Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt a.M.: Ver-
lag der Autoren.
Nünning, Ansgar & Roy Sommer (2008). “Diegetic and Mimetic Narrativity: Some
Further Steps towards a Narratology of Drama.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa
(eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 329–352.
Rajewsky, Irina O. (2007). “Von Erzählern, die (nichts) vermitteln: Überlegungen zu
grundlegenden Annahmen der Dramentheorie im Kontext einer transmedialen
Narratologie.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 117, 25–68.
Richardson, Brian (2007). “Drama and Narrative.” D. Herman (ed.). The Cambridge
Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 142–155.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2005). “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratolo-
gy.” J. Ch. Meister (ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Dis-
ciplinarity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–23.
Schenk-Haupt, Stefan (2007). “Narrativity in Dramatic Writing: Towards a General
Theory of Genres.” Anglistik 18.2, 25–42.
Weidle, Roland (2009). “Organizing the Perspectives: Focalization and the Superordinate
Narrative System in Drama.” P. Hühn et al. (eds.). Point of View, Perspective, and
Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Narrative. Berlin: de Gruyter, 221–242.

5.4 Further Reading: Drama

Elam, Keir (1980). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen.
Garner, Stanton B. (1989). The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater.
Urbana: U of Illinois P.
Hauthal, Janine (2008). Metadrama und (Text-)Theatralität: (Selbst-)Reflexionen einer
intermedialen literarischen Gattung am Beispiel englischer und nordamerikani-
scher Meta- und Postdramatik. Trier: WVT.
434 Peter Hühn & Roy Sommer

Jong, Irene J. F. de (1991). Narrative in Drama: The Art of the Euripidean Messenger
Speech. Leiden: Brill.
Korthals, Holger (2003). Zwischen Drama und Erzählung: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie
geschehensdarstellender Literatur. Berlin: Schmidt.
Morrison, Kristin (1983). Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of
Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Pavel, Thomas G. (1985). The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Dra-
ma. Manchester: Manchester UP.
Pfister, Manfred ([1977] 1988). The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. (2004). Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytell-
ing. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Sommer, Roy (2005). “Drama and Narrative.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge En-
cyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 119–124.
 Narration in Religious Discourse
(The Example of Christianity)
Sönke Finnern

1 Definition

Narratives of various kinds can be found in religious discourse, consti-

tuted by a religious content or at least by a religious context. A reli-
gious content can appear in one or more of the following forms: 1) a
character presented directly or indirectly as religious or non-religious in
regard to his/her identity, character traits, opinions, experiences, emo-
tions, behavior, personal appearance, social context, knowledge, duties,
wishes or intentions (e.g. a monk, an atheist, a believer); 2) a “super-
natural” being (related to a religious belief system) as part of the narra-
tive world; 3) direct or indirect references to religious texts, beliefs,
rituals, places or buildings within character or narrator discourse. A
religious context in communication is conveyed through sender, mes-
sage and receiver: 1) religious context of the sender: s/he is a believer
or has a religious background; 2) message: the narrative is used to con-
vey a religious message; 3) (intended, historical, empirical) receiver:
s/he is a believer or a skeptic.

2 Explication

Either a religious content or a religious context must be established to

define religious discourse whereas the latter criterion is more general.
“Narration in religious discourse” does not necessarily refer to a narra-
tive with a religious content such as supernatural beings, as might be
thought. Empirically speaking, those narratives are a small part of the
corpus. Much narration in religious discourse has no religious content
but is constituted only by its religious context (religious sender, appli-
cation or receiver). Narratives like Jesus telling the parable of the Good
Samaritan (Luke 10:30–35) or a pastor telling a joke in a sermon are
secular even though they form part of religious discourse. Therefore,
“narration in religious discourse” ranges from biblical narratives to a
436 Sönke Finnern

story that a church member tells his pastor at a birthday visit. Accord-
ingly, there are no literary features that are typical for all kinds of reli-
gious narration.
Nevertheless, common sorts of religious narration can be grouped
together. One sort of religious narration concentrates on a specific event
(e.g. conversion narrative, miracle story; see event II in Hühn → Event
and Eventfulness) which is often interpreted as an act of God; another
frequent kind of religious narration focuses on application, as when a
character serves as a role model for good or bad behavior, belief in
God, etc. (e.g. parables, many biblical narratives, saints’ lives). To con-
sider the context is crucial to add some of these narratives to religious
narration. An outstanding example for this is the biblical book of Es-
ther, which does not mention God a single time but effectively cele-
brates God’s providence when being read by an informed audience. For
an overview of important religious narrative genres, see Mauz (2009a)
on conversion narrative, narration in sermons, prayers and Gospel nar-
ratives.

3 History of Narration in Christianity and its Study

This article concentrates on the study of religious narration as studied

by several sub-disciplines of academic Christian theology: Biblical
Studies, Systematic Theology and Practical Theology. These three
fields of study encompass a historical, thematic and empirical/contem-
porary approach to narration in Christianity. (For narratology in Islamic
studies, see e.g. Conermann ed. 2009; for narratology in the science of
religion, see e.g. Brahier & Johannsen eds. 2013; in the Jewish religion,
e.g. Sternberg 1985.)

3.1 Narratives in Biblical and Related Writings and their Study

3.1.1 Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

Roughly speaking, more than half of the Hebrew Bible consists of nar-
ration: Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, Moses and the exodus from
Egypt, etc. It is not possible to describe Old Testament (OT) narration
in general. However, some narrative techniques are rather typical: in
OT narratives, biblical characters often serve as role models in regard to
belief, behavior and experiences. Character perspective and direct dis-
course are used widely. Through the use of these techniques, the narra-
tor builds up empathy even for sinners like Cain, David or Jonah. By
 Narration in Religious Discourse 437

adopting the main character’s perspective, the reader becomes im-

mersed in the story and witnesses God’s grace or punishment. The nar-
rator is nearly invisible and normally does not comment directly on the
behavior of the characters (except in Judges and 1–2 Chronicles, for
example), which is therefore left to the reader (see Judges 19:30) who is
told the consequences of this behavior. In some passages, God is pre-
sented as speaking to single characters like Abraham, Moses, Elijah and
other prophets. Belief in God and a life according to God’s command-
ments leads to God’s blessing in the form of victory over enemies, se-
curity and wealth. Suspense and surprise are therefore mainly generated
by the unpredictable behavior of the characters, not by God. Only in the
book of Job is the connection between deeds and consequences severed.
Fantastic narration instilling suspense and awe of God is also found in
OT narrative, but remains marginal in relation to the full corpus. Most
stories are assumed to be received by the reader as factual narration. In
general, the main intent of OT religious narration is to encourage the
reader to live according to God’s commandments. A fundamental chal-
lenge for OT narration is how to relate human deeds and God’s will.
God’s providence does not determine the sequence of events fully, but
leaves ample space for surprising behavior and sins committed by the
characters. But in the end the reader learns that through human behav-
ior God has acted out his will and fulfilled his promises (see Genesis
50:20 as an emblem for all patriarchal stories).
Regarding the study of OT books, classical scholarly research con-
centrated on textual criticism, source criticism, tradition history, form
criticism and redaction criticism (the so-called historical-critical meth-
od). Since the 1970s, hermeneutical approaches from other textual sci-
ences have stirred up controversy. Some scholars dismiss the source
questions and insist on asking what the “final,” canonical text means.
Most OT scholars, however, are not familiar with narratological theory
(see the critical analysis of narrative research on the books of Samuel
by Andersson 2009). Even so, the interdisciplinary bridge is taking
form. Thus Sternberg (1985) presents a broad study of point of view,
gap-filling, temporal discontinuities, proleptic portraits of characters
and repetition in the Hebrew Bible while some newer studies of OT
texts apply the narratological categories of Bal or Genette. Schmitz
(2008), for example, describes perspective and narrative voice in 1
Kings 13 and 22, showing that OT authors can create complex effects
through the use of perspective that leave it to the reader to determine
which of the opposing characters’ points of view are true. General nar-
ratological theory can also be found in several studies (see the research
438 Sönke Finnern

report in Vette 2010 and the online bibliography compiled by

RRENAB 2013).

3.1.2 New Testament

The canonical books of the New Testament (NT) include the narrative
of the life of Jesus (the “Gospel”) in four versions (the Gospels of Mat-
thew, Mark, Luke and John in which Jesus often acts as an intradiegetic
narrator, as in the parables; the book of Acts, which narrates the history
of early Christianity, especially Paul’s travels; and the Apocalypse of
John, a proleptic narrative of the heavenly realm and forthcoming
events.
The unknown authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are usu-
ally seen as redactors of the Gospel of Mark using an additional source
of Jesus’s sayings, named “Q.” The Gospel of John relates much spe-
cial material. Religious narration in the Gospels serves as an example of
the biography of a religious founder. The rendering of this biographical
story employs various narrative categories and devices. Regarding plot,
the Gospels can be described as tragedy in which the main conflict be-
tween Jesus and the Jewish authorities from the very beginning (see e.g.
Mark 2) escalates into the crucifixion of the protagonist at the end. The
speed of narration slows down noticeably as the crucifixion approaches
(the Gospels have thus been described as “passion narratives with an
extended introduction”; see Kähler 1892: 33). Only the resurrection
does not fit into the tragedy pattern. The Gospels also add reports of the
protagonist’s birth giving the life of Jesus an adequate beginning and
echoing ancient biographical narration. – As to the temporal perspec-
tive, there is some proleptic narration in that Jesus predicts his own
death and resurrection three times.
With regard to the order of events, the Gospels differ (see Luke 1:3,
which nonetheless insists on the factuality of the narrated) because
scenes are often grouped thematically by the redactor. Many scenes can
be understood without their literary context as a result of oral transmis-
sion over decades prior to being committed to writing. A typical Gospel
scene consists of four steps: 1) Jesus travels and encounters a person; 2)
action or question of the person; 3) miracle or saying of Jesus; 4) reac-
tion of the people. Knowing this formula, the religious reader thus an-
ticipates an outstanding event after step 2 (e.g. a miracle by Jesus), but
s/he is curious as to how the miracle will be accomplished. In this
sense, the Gospels’ eventfulness is not created by the fact that God is
acting (which meets the reader’s expectation), but by uncertainty as to
how and when God will act.
 Narration in Religious Discourse 439

Regarding perspective, there are only a few inside views of the pro-
tagonist Jesus (e.g. Matthew 9:36; Luke 9:44). More important is that
the reader’s empathy is focused on the disciples who accompany Jesus
and that the reader will identify with them. Adopting the point of view
of the disciples, the reader witnesses the sayings, conflicts and miracles
of their master. By choosing the “disciple perspective” (the Gospel of
John also includes the perspective of minor characters, see Culpepper
1983), the Gospel authors intend for the reader to believe in Jesus as the
Son of God (explicitly John 20:30–31) in the same way the disciples
did.
More specific studies of NT narration began in the 1970s. Some of
these early studies adopted linguistic, structuralist and semiotic theories
such as the theories of Propp and Greimas (e.g. Patte & Patte 1978). In
contrast, the “New Literary Criticism” opposed historical criticism, be-
ing mostly a paraphrase of the NT in its final, canonical form in accord
with the practice of “close reading.” The first adaptions of narratology
to NT narration in a stricter sense were Rhoads and Michie (1982),
Culpepper (1983) and Kingsbury ([1986] 1988). Culpepper (1983) dis-
cusses point of view, narrative time, plot development and character
(Jesus, God the Father, the disciples, the Jews and minor characters) as
well as irony and symbolism in the Gospel of John. These books estab-
lished a relatively solid methodological approach within Gospel re-
search and have had a wide influence in English-speaking scholarship.
This narratological approach has been coined “narrative criticism” by
analogy with the other exegetical methods of interpretation.
Interestingly, narrative criticism did not find its way into German-
speaking scholarship. In the 1990s, reception aesthetics (esp. the works
of Iser) came into vogue among German biblical scholars. NT parable
study adopted literary studies early in the 1970s. Since the turn of the
millennium, there have been several studies on the Gospels and Acts
from a more decidedly narratological approach (e.g. Rose 2007 on
Mark 1, based on Genette) describing the “new” approach of narratolo-
gy for use in NT interpretation (e.g. Eisen 2006 on the book of Acts;
Finnern 2010 on Matthew 28). Aside from Ebner and Heininger (2005:
57–130), there are few textbooks in German NT exegesis that include
narratological categories. Although not a textbook in the strict sense,
Finnern (2010) aims at serving as “handbook for narratological biblical
interpretation” (440). It concentrates on a broad range of narratological
issues in both literary and biblical studies with regard to the analysis of
setting, plot, characters, point of view and intended reception of a nar-
rative.
440 Sönke Finnern

3.1.3 Other Early Jewish and Early Christian Writings

In addition to narration in the canonical Hebrew Bible/Septuagint and

NT texts, there are other narratives of a similar religious and cultural
origin which normally refer to biblical narratives and amplify them
freely. This sort of paraphrase often uses a narrative gap within the bib-
lical story for dealing with actual theological and ethical questions of
the addressees. Regarding Hebrew Bible/Septuagint texts, these are e.g.
the Book of Jubilees, Ascension of Isaiah, Life of Adam and Eve, 1
Henoch, Joseph and Aseneth, or Liber antiquitatum biblicarum.
Narration subsequent to the NT is vast, which can be seen from the
manuscripts that have survived including apocryphal Gospels, apocry-
phal Acts and apocryphal apocalypses. They are intended to fill narra-
tive gaps, legitimate (Gnostic) theological positions and satisfy a crav-
ing for sensation. For example, the Gospel of Peter (probably 2nd cent.
AD) describes the passion and resurrection of Jesus in a more dramatic
way, speaking through the first-person narrator Peter. In regard to
pseudonymous religious narration, there is a question as to whether the
ancient author sought to deceive his addressees about his identity or
took on the guise of an unreliable narrator, a well-established practice
in literary narration. The second possibility is that these apocryphal
writings are a form of fantastic and even grotesque narration aimed at
entertaining the reader (e.g. little Jesus creating birds from clay in the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas). Although there is a broad range of this
kind of religious narration, very few studies of these texts from a narra-
tological point of view exist. (For an overview of early Christian narra-
tives after the NT, see Markschies & Schröter eds. 2012.)

3.2 Narratives and their Study in Systematic Theology

The interest Christian theology (“dogmatics”) has taken in narratology

is less practical—biblical exegesis is concerned mainly with its useful-
ness for text analysis—than theoretical: what does it mean for human
existence and theological language about God and revelation that reli-
gious interpretations of life are mainly narrated? Of special importance
is the term “narrative theology,” coined by Weinrich (1973) in refer-
ence to “the crisis of religious language.” Its main thesis is that Christi-
anity “lost its narrative innocence” when it encountered the Hellenistic
world (1973: 331) and began to prefer argument (“Logos”) over myth,
even though from its origins, Christianity has been a “narrative com-
munity.” For the purposes of theological discourse, narration is thus in
need of being rediscovered. For a good overview of the debate on “nar-
 Narration in Religious Discourse 441

rative theology” in German protestant theology, see Mauz (2009b). Al-

so in this context, the emerging discussion about “narrative ethics” in
theology must be mentioned (e.g. Hofheinz et al., eds. 2009). More re-
cently, Schneider-Flume (2005) has sought to renew the practice of
“narrating dogmatics.” It raises once again the age-old question as to
what form is appropriate for speaking about God: by narration or by
arguments and abstract concepts such as sin, justification, providence?
To further this discussion, it may be helpful to look at specific narrative
texts to determine how they convey theology and ethics. In this sense,
Rose (2007) presents his investigation of “theology as narration” in the
Gospel according to Mark. Finnern (2010: 224–242, 429–438) shows
how a reader’s theology (i.e. his/her mental model of God or, more
generally, beliefs about theological topics) and ethics (i.e. attitudes to-
ward persons and attitudes toward narrated qualities and behavior) are
shaped by narratives, based on the narrator’s beliefs and attitudes
(2010: 179–183, 378–389). On this basis, it is possible to draw corre-
spondences between theological notions and narratological concepts:
e.g. the concept of providence corresponds to “finally motivated” narra-
tion or to a coincidence plot. This may be due to the fact that it com-
forts the reader to know that there is direction in life. “Sin” as a concept
is illustrated by a narrative where a specific behavior of a character is
finally punished by God. Alternatively, the character is accused by God
or by a prophet guided by the spirit of God (and therefore has the same
evaluative point of view): e.g. the anger of Moses about the Golden
Calf (Exodus 32). “Justification” is narrated paradigmatically, as in the
Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32), where the reader’s empa-
thy for the second son during the progress of the story enables him to
share his final relief when experiencing the unwavering love of the fa-
ther.

3.3 Narratives and their Study in Practical Theology

Practical Theology is concerned with current forms of Christian reli-

gious practice. As a field of study, it includes the following: 1) Chris-
tian education; 2) Christian preaching (“homiletics”); 3) Christian
counseling (“pastoral care”); 4) church services (“liturgics”). To these
classical fields of research can be added 5) everyday Christian living
and 6) Christianity and (mass) media. In all of these fields, narration
plays a crucial role, as it will become clear below.
1) Christian Education. Narration in religious education is very
widespread. Especially younger children need stories to understand.
Biblical stories are re-narrated by teachers but also in teaching materials
442 Sönke Finnern

such as illustrated Bibles for children. Here, the selection, presentation

and ethics of biblical stories is interesting to analyze. Despite the enor-
mous potential of narratology for the study and practice of religious
education, references to narratological theory in Christian pedagogy are
rare. Yet some studies do adopt narratological theory such as Scholz
and Eisenlauer (2010), which integrates Labov and Waletzky’s model
into Bible didactics. They show that classifying biblical texts into ab-
stract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation and coda
helps to understand the text and initiate discussion among students.
2) Christian Preaching. A sermon is a special type of discourse with
a religious content, normally referring to a biblical text and usually de-
livered during church services. Sermons are a highly institutionalized
form of discourse and have a long history of study. There are three as-
pects of preaching that relate to narration: a) preaching about (biblical)
narratives; b) preaching as narrative, i.e. re-narrating a biblical text em-
ploying first-person narration, internal focalization, direct discours, free
indirect discourse, etc.; c) narratives within preaching (“sermon exam-
ples”). However, the theory of preaching in Christian theology (“homi-
letics”) has no specific tradition of studying narration or narrative theo-
ry. There are some small passages on narration in the better-known
volumes on preaching. Recently, a new approach to homiletics has
emerged known as “dramaturgical homiletics” (Nicol [2002] 2005).
This approach argues for the necessity of narration and draws parallels
between sermons and movies. Meinhard (2003) is one of the rare voices
in homiletics who adopts categories such as focalization for analyzing
narrative sermons.
3) Christian Counseling. Narratives in Christian counseling can be
found on both sides of communication: narratives of the client and nar-
ratives of the counselor. Narratives of the client include religious biog-
raphy, accounts of traumatizing events, reporting of experiences be-
tween two sessions, etc. The counselor narrates his own experiences or
other (possibly biblical) narratives which run parallel to the client’s sit-
uation and offer another view of the world, of oneself, of others, of God
or of potential actions (see Peseschkian 1979). A special case of reli-
gious narration is a funeral sermon when the life of a deceased person is
recounted by a pastor, priest or deacon together with “comforting
words.” There is a good deal of empirical research within pastoral care
studies on Christian counseling discourse, including narration (e.g.
Hauschild 1996). Some researchers thematize narration on the side of
the client (i.e. biographical aspects) while others focus on how helpful
the counselor’s narration might be. But in general, research in pastoral
care and Christian counseling is only seldom concerned with narration.
 Narration in Religious Discourse 443

4) Church Services as Theater. Liturgy employs narration in the

form of theater characterized by dramatic events, a setting such as a
medieval church, characters/actors (pastor, priest, altar servers) and the
audience (the congregation). Consequently, character constellations,
movements on the “stage” or triggering of the congregants’ expecta-
tions, emotions, suspense, etc. can be analyzed as theater. Moreover,
liturgy refers to narration by evoking the Christmas story, the story of
the passion, etc. in accordance with the liturgical year as well as various
events commemorated during regional feast days. All in all, it can be
said that liturgy is inseparable from narration. The study of church ser-
vices (“liturgics”) has not embraced narratology yet in its stricter sense
although there is near unanimity in current scholarship that church ser-
vices resemble theater performances (see the overview of Meyer-
Blanck 2011: 374–387).
5) Narratives in Everyday Christian Religious Discourse. In addi-
tion to education, sermons, church services and counseling there is also
religious narration in daily life. Many classifications of religious topics
in everyday narration are possible according to the type of narrative
(biographical events, news events, etc.), typical communication situa-
tions or intent (to evangelize, demonstrate, seek appreciation, etc.).
Among the four main forms of oral narration (Fludernik → Conversa-
tional Narration – Oral Narration), spontaneous oral narration is most
relevant in this context. With the empirical turn brought in by practical
theology, everyday life has also come into the focus of research in re-
cent years. Practical theology has been reconceptualized as the “theory
of lived religion” understood as perception, examination and formation
of religion in everyday life (Streib 1998). There has also been some
influential research on religious milieus. However, these studies do not
deal specifically with everyday narratives or with narratology.
6) Narratives in the Media Relating to Christian Belief. In addition
to individual religious narration is mass media religious narration. Be-
sides televangelism, numerous TV series, movies, novels, comics, etc.
are characterized by religious contents, references or contexts. These
works, with their religious aspects, are mainly studied by the respective
scholarly disciplines. In addition, Christian religious communication in
the mass media has been analyzed (Schultze & Woods eds. 2008). In
conclusion, while there is a broad range of studies on contemporary
mass media narration with religious aspects, a bridge between this re-
search field of practical theology and narratological methods has still to
be built.
444 Sönke Finnern

4 Topics for Further Research

(a) Religious narration in biblical and related writings: Although

awareness of narrative techniques and narratological analysis is grow-
ing quickly within OT scholarship, there remain numerous gaps in re-
search. Perhaps due to the lack of an accepted method of narrative
analysis, research on single OT books has been isolated. A comprehen-
sive narratological analysis of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament narration,
including the “writings” and deuterocanonical books, with regard to
setting, plot, characters, perspective and reception is still missing. The
same is true for NT research. Further work is required in the area of
methodology to formulate commonly shared methods for textual analy-
sis.
(b) Religious narration in systematic theology: In systematic theolo-
gy, narratological analysis of religious texts and narratological reformu-
lation of theological terms could help to clarify discussion about “narra-
tive theology.”
(c) Religious narration in practical theology: To date, practical the-
ology in general is unfamiliar with narratology although researchers do
deal with the study of narration in various forms. One example is reli-
gious education: here, narratology could be helpful for the critical study
and development of narrative teaching materials so as to analyze the
morals of children’s bibles, for example. Second, the question as to
how freely a biblical story can be re-narrated could be answered more
specifically from a narratological point of view. Third, the many forms
of involving children in stories such as “godly play,” “bible theater” or
“bibliologue” can be evaluated. Fourth, biographical narration by chil-
dren could come into focus on a methodical basis. Fifth, research about
moral education through narratives could be enriched by narratology
(Phelan → Narrative Ethics).

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Andersson, Greger (2009). Untamable Texts. Literary Studies and Narrative Theory in
the Books of Samuel. New York: T. & T. Clark.
Brahier, Gabriela & Dirk Johannsen, eds. (2013). Konstruktionsgeschichten. Narrati-
onsbezogene Ansätze in der Religionsforschung. Würzburg: Ergon.
Conermann, Stephan, ed. (2009). Modi des Erzählens in nicht-abendländischen Texten.
Narratio Aliena? Berlin: EB-Verlag.
 Narration in Religious Discourse 445

Culpepper, R. Alan (1983). Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress P.

Ebner, Martin & Bernhard Heininger (2005). Exegese des Neuen Testaments. Ein Ar-
beitsbuch für Lehre und Praxis. Paderborn: Schöningh.
Eisen, Ute E. (2006). Die Poetik der Apostelgeschichte. Eine narratologische Studie.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Finnern, Sönke (2010). Narratologie und biblische Exegese. Eine integrative Methode
der Erzählanalyse und ihr Ertrag am Beispiel von Matthäus 28. Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck.
Hauschild, Eberhard (1996). Alltagsseelsorge. Eine sozio-linguistische Analyse des
pastoralen Geburtstagsbesuches. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Hofheinz, Marco & Frank Mathwig et al., eds. (2009). Ethik und Erzählung. Theologi-
sche und philosophische Beiträge zur narrativen Ethik. Zürich: Theologischer
Verlag.
Kähler, Martin (1892). Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, bibli-
sche Christus. Leipzig: Deichert.
Kingsbury, Jack Dean ([1986] 1988). Matthew as Story. Philadelphia: Fortress P.
Markschies, Christoph & Jens Schröter, eds. (2012). Antike christliche Apokryphen in
deutscher Übersetzung. 1. Band: Evangelien und Verwandtes (2 Teilbände). 7.
Aufl. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Mauz, Andreas (2009a). “In Gottesgeschichten verstrickt. Erzählen im christlich-
religiösen Diskurs.” Ch. Klein & M. Martínez (eds.). Wirklichkeitserzählungen.
Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens. Stuttgart: Metzler,
192–216.
– (2009b). “Theology and Narration. Reflections on the ‘Narrative Theology’–
Debate and Beyond.” S. Heinen & R. Sommer (eds.). Narratology in the Age of
Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Berlin: de Gruyter, 261–285.
Meinhard, Isolde (2003). Ideologie und Imagination im Predigtprozess. Zur homileti-
schen Rezeption der kritischen Narratologie. Leipzig: Evang. Verlagsanstalt.
Meyer-Blanck, Michael (2011). Gottesdienstlehre. Neue theologische Grundrisse. Tü-
bingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Nicol, Martin ([2002] 2005). Einander ins Bild setzen. Dramaturgische Homiletik.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Patte, Daniel & Aline Patte (1978). Structural Exegesis. From Theory to Practice. Exe-
gesis of Mark 15 and 16. Hermeneutical Implications. Philadelphia: Fortress P.
Peseschkian, Nossrat (1979). Der Kaufmann und der Papagei. Orientalische Geschich-
ten in der Positiven Psychotherapie. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer.
Rhoads, David & Donald Michie (1982). Mark as Story. An Introduction to the Narra-
tive of a Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress P.
Rose, Christian (2007). Theologie als Erzählung im Markusevangelium. Eine narrato-
logisch-rezeptionsästhetische Untersuchung zu Mk 1,1–15. Tübingen: Mohr Sie-
beck.
RRENAB [Réseau de Recherche en Narratologie et Bible]. Bibliographie du
RRENAB. http://www2.unil.ch/rrenab/bibliographie.html [Accessed 31 Oct.
2013].
Schmitz, Barbara (2008). Prophetie und Königtum. Eine narratologisch-historische
Methodologie entwickelt an den Königsbüchern. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
446 Sönke Finnern

Schneider-Flume, Gunda (2005). “Dogmatik erzählen? Ein Plädoyer für biblische The-
ologie.” G. Schneider-Flume & D. Hiller (eds.). Dogmatik erzählen? Die Bedeu-
tung des Erzählens für eine biblisch orientierte Dogmatik. Neukirchen-Vluyn:
Neukirchener, 3–18.
Scholz, Stefan & Volker Eisenlauer (2010). “Narrativität und Bibeldidaktik.” Prakti-
sche Theologie 45, 46–56.
Schultze, Quentin J. & Robert H. Woods, eds. (2008). Understanding Evangelical Me-
dia. The Changing Face of Christian Communication. Downers Grove: InterVar-
sity P.
Sternberg, Meir (1985). The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Ideological Literature and
the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Streib, Heinz (1998). “Alltagsreligion oder: Wie religiös ist der Alltag? Zur lebenswelt-
lichen Verortung von Religion in praktisch-theologischem Interesse.” Internatio-
nal Journal of Practical Theology 2, 23–51.
Vette, Joachim (2010). “Narrative Poetics and Hebrew Narrative: A Survey.” H. Liss &
M. Oeming (eds.). Literary Construction of Identity in the Ancient World.
Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 19–61.
Weinrich, Harald (1973). “Narrative Theologie.” Concilium (D) 9, 329–334.

5.2 Further Reading

Marguerat, Daniel & Yvan Bourquin (1999). How to Read Bible Stories. An Introduc-
tion to Narrative Criticism. London: SCM P.
Zumstein, Jean (1996). “Narrative Analyse und neutestamentliche Exegese in der fran-
kophonen Welt.” Verkündigung und Forschung 41, 5–27.
 Narration in Various Disciplines
Norbert Meuter

1 Definition

Whenever we discuss the meaning and function of narrative in the aca-

demic disciplines, we need to distinguish between two main aspects. On
the one hand, narratives are the subject area, or at least an important
issue among others, in many disciplines, without this being explicitly
thematized in every case. Here, one would have to distinguish whether
these disciplines find their “narrative objects” more or less ready-made,
or whether they themselves create these totally or at least partially. On
the other hand, implicit references to narratives have sparked a growing
tendency towards explicit reflection upon various aspects of narration.
In conjunction with this reflection, the phenomenon of narrativity
(Abbott → Narrativity) itself is thematized, and with it content- or
methodology-oriented concepts of narrativity are developed within the
varied frameworks of the disciplines in question.

2 Explication

Narrative as a phenomenon has a pivotal role in literary studies and his-

tory, for narratives have always formed a key subject of these disci-
plines. In the field of literature, narrative objects are fully formed from
the outset (at least if one excludes interpretation and historical contex-
tualization from the concept of the literary text), whereas the historical
disciplines need to construct these objects, if not completely, then at
least to a large extent. Accordingly, it is in these two disciplines that we
find the first fundamental theoretical discussions of the concept of nar-
rativity, making them the leading disciplines in the study of narrativity.
Further important impulses have come from psychology, philosophy
and the philosophy of science. Even beyond these disciplines, we not
only find narrative objects which are to a large extent unspecified, but
also explicit content- and methodology-oriented discussions of narra-
tive in sociology, theology, pedagogy, ethics, psychoanalysis, art, and
448 Norbert Meuter

art history as well as law studies (Mitchell ed. 1981; Polkinghorne

1988; Nash ed. 1990; Müller-Funk 2002). It is therefore justified to
speak of a “narrative turn” (Kreiswirth 2005) with its underlying as-
sumption that the narrative paradigm may serve to reformulate the sci-
entific and rational nature specific to the humanities (Meuter 2004).
Today, the varied approaches to the theory of narrative in the humani-
ties constitute the interdisciplinary study of narratology (Prince 1997;
Phelan & Rabinowitz eds. 2005; Herman et al., eds. 2005; Kindt &
Müller eds. 2003). In the natural sciences, however, the study of narra-
tology (Meister → Narratology) remains to a large extent a desidera-
tum. So far, it is only in medicine that rudimentary attempts have been
made; however, these concern aspects of the doctor-patient relationship
rather than the core problems of narrative. Systems theory might prove
an innovative approach in that it presupposes such a high level of ab-
straction as to enable a shared sphere of reflection for both the natural
sciences and the humanities.

3 Concepts and their History

3.1 Literary Studies

Literary studies deserve to be called the leading discipline in the study

of narrative, with Aristotle’s Poetics constituting a seminal source. The
triadic structure of classical tragedy, based on the terms “beginning,”
“middle” and “end,” can be applied to any kind of narratable material
(Straub 1998). Significant beginning- and end-markers make the totali-
ty (holos) of the story emerge from the sequence of experiences. A sto-
ry only becomes meaningful through the selection and combination of
happenings and actions (mythos). These do not follow one upon the
other in a random sequence or simply “one after the other” (meta), but
rather “one out of the other” (dia), so that an intrinsic connection is
made between them. Seen as a whole, there emerges a suspenseful tra-
jectory or development from beginning to end with one or more disrup-
tions and moderate or radical changes in direction (peripeteia). For Ar-
istotle, a narrative is constituted by establishing a meaningful, cohesive,
probable, and possibly even necessary order out of dissonant, fragment-
ed, merely episodic, accidental or contingent elements (Halliwell 1987;
Ricœur [1983/85] 1984/88). Thus, any sequence of actions and happen-
ings which is discernible as a unit and has a temporal organization as
well as being perceived as meaningful can be called a narrative.
 Narration in Various Disciplines 449

In the 20th century, the German hermeneutic tradition, harking back

to Aristotle, formulates “elements of narration” (Bauformen des Erzäh-
lens, Lämmert [1955] 1991) which are then reformulated as a general
“theory of narration” (Theorie des Erzählens, Stanzel [1979] 1984).
The focus is on the relationship between narration and temporality, on
the significance and function of the narrator (Margolin → Narrator),
and on inquiries into the elements and structures of the narrative (Mar-
tínez & Scheffel [1999] 2007). (Regarding other traditions, e.g. formal-
ist or structuralist, cf. Herman 1999; Nünning 2003.)
In the course of this development, narrative theorists in literary stud-
ies have increasingly had to grapple with the fact that the authors of
Modernism and Postmodernism tend to break down the classic Aristo-
telian structures in order to construct “anti-narratives.” This tendency
manifests itself for example in the refusal to meet such structural re-
quirements as including a beginning and an end except on a purely
formal level and, more importantly, in the destruction of a suspenseful
fable (plot, story, intrigue) with a clear climax or anti-climax. In the
wake of this development, the sovereignty of the narrator, even of the
author (Schönert → Author) (Foucault [1969] 1987), is regarded as in-
creasingly problematic. Still, much controversy surrounds the debate as
to whether the postmodern practice of narration really constitutes the
demise of the Aristotelian theoretical tradition or whether it is simply an
extension and reformation of this tradition (Gibson 1996; Currie 1998).

3.2 The Arts

In the context of the arts, the study of narrativity can turn to Lessing’s
famous Laocoön ([1766] 1984). According to the definition proposed
by this essay for demarcating the fine arts from the literary arts (Ryan
→ Narration in Various Media), painting and sculpture are marked by
spatiality and synchronicity, whereas temporality and diachronicity are
the features of poetry. The simultaneous arrangement of shapes and
colors depicts objects or bodies, while the successive arrangement of
articulated sounds results in the narration of actions. The visual arts can
mediate actions only indirectly through the depiction of bodies, where-
as in poetry a body can be portrayed only through the narration of ac-
tions. According to Lessing, the painter or sculptor must therefore find
the “pregnant moment” that condenses the temporal movement in con-
trast to the poet, who must integrate the “defining trait” of a body into
narration of the action. Moving beyond Lessing, other narrative means
that allow the visual arts to depict temporal sequences might be taken
into account (Pochat 1996).
450 Norbert Meuter

3.3 The Historical Sciences

Traditionally, the literary and historical disciplines are distinguished

from each other on the basis of the different relationships of their sub-
ject area with the reality of what is represented. Aristotle’s Poetics
(Halliwell 1987) already formulates the assumption that the role of fic-
tion―in contrast to historiography―is not to convey what really hap-
pened, but rather what, under the given circumstances, could happen.
At the same time, fiction has a generalizable, representative quality: the
“actual” (ta genomena) of history vs. the “possible” (ta dynata) of fic-
tion. Still, the question remains whether it is actually possible to differ-
entiate clearly between historical or factual and literary or fictional nar-
ratives (Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narration). Goethe’s
categories, poetry and truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit), might well be
more closely linked than they appear to be at first glance. As for philo-
sophical contributions to this debate (Ricœur [1983/85] 1984/88), they
presuppose an ontological and epistemological cross-over relationship
between history and fiction (cf. also Danto 1965; Veyne [1971] 1984).
Any methodology of the historical sciences must therefore also ex-
amine the question of how and to what extent its object can or must be
represented by narrative means. Many authors contend that narratives
are a suitable and even necessary medium for recording, describing, and
explaining historical developments (Rüsen 1986, 1990). Others suggest
a type of “historical argumentation” that in logical terms is independent
of any form of narrative (Kocka [1980] 1989), an argument supported
by the positions of the Ecole des Annales (cf. Ricœur [1983/85]
1984/88). White (1973) formulated the critical position that the great
historians of the 19th century modeled their works on the pattern of
certain narrative genres (romance, comedy, tragedy, satire). According
to White, the real events of the past are molded into an artificial narra-
tive form, giving them a certain meaning they did not inherently pos-
sess. Since every narrative form inevitably transports certain normative
statements and value judgments, White (1987) regards this molding of
reality to create narrative patterns of meaning as a potentially totalitari-
an act.
It cannot be denied that grands récits (Lyotard [1979] 2003) are po-
tential instruments of power. However, any critique of history as narra-
tive from the position of ideological criticism as a principle is a ques-
tionable exercise (Straub 2001). Such is the case especially if this
critique relies on a contestable dualism between “artificial forms” and
“real events,” as argued by White and others (Mink 1978) who posit
that human experience and actions do not have inherent narrative quali-
 Narration in Various Disciplines 451

ties but are reshaped through narrative after the event. Consequently,
the concept of narrativity should be limited to explicit forms of (oral or
written) narration, such that the existence of “untold stories” is negated:
stories are never lived, but told. Life itself is seen as without beginning,
middle and end, nor is it tragic, amusing, suspenseful, etc.
Other authors (MacIntyre [1981] 2007; Carr 1986; Bruner 1990;
Gergen 1998) take a diametrically opposed view. For them, narrative
structures are not the product of literary writers or historians. On the
contrary, stories are already formed in actions and life cycles: stories
are lived before they are told. Therefore, narrativity is not primarily an
aesthetic category, but is rooted in practice. This means that the histori-
cal sciences are not merely allowed to resort to narration, but are re-
quired to do so if they are to do their subject matter justice. A simple
chronicle in which events are simply linked together by dates may be
more objective, but this cannot generate understanding because such
understanding can be achieved only if a specifically narrative connec-
tion is established between the recorded dates.
The configuration of this connection―and the selective process be-
hind it―will inevitably be influenced by the “master plots” (Schwem-
mer 1987) of the cultural environment in which it is created as well as
by the individual personality of the historian and the scope of his
knowledge, interests, etc. White seems justified in his contention that
narrativization of historical events comes at the expense of objectivity,
but one has to take into account that historical events fundamentally
differ from the natural events that occur in physics, for example, since
such events possess no ontological or epistemological objectivity out-
side of a frame of reference. A historical narrative and its portrayal of a
sequence of events do not form a mimetic relationship but a “metaphor-
ical relationship” (Ricœur [1983/85] 1984/88): narrative makes visible
something that would otherwise remain unperceived (cf. also Jaeger
2002).

3.4 Psychology

The concept of narrativity is increasingly being used as a key not only

in the historical and literary disciplines, but also in (hermeneutically-
oriented) psychology. Narrative psychology has emerged as an inde-
pendent discipline, emphasizing―in contrast to the dominant objectiv-
ist and positivist orientation in the field―the significance of forms
which are meaningful for human experience and actions (Sarbin ed.
1986; Polkinghorne 1988). Narrative psychology regards narrative
forms as a genuine focus for psychological research in so far as the
452 Norbert Meuter

cognitive and emotional processes of consciousness are generated on

the basis of and through these forms.
Bruner (1990) has influenced the debate with his distinction be-
tween paradigmatic and narrative modes of thought. In the paradigmatic
mode, individual events or objects are linked with conceptual catego-
ries during the thought process, while in the narrative mode, events are
perceived as elements of a story which contribute to its development.
This concerns the cognitive ability to configure diverse events and ac-
tions into larger temporal and meaningful units—a capacity for narra-
tive structuring (emplotment) which is obviously one of the fundamen-
tal capabilities of human consciousness. Bruner also examines the
question of whether this ability is genetic and universal or acquired and
learnt, i.e. shaped in different ways by the cultural environment. His
position is one of compromise: according to him, we all have an innate
predisposition for telling and understanding stories, but this must be
developed through cultural models and social interaction into an active
competence.
A number of studies in developmental psychology on the formation
of narrative competence have been published (e.g. Wolf 2001). These
studies examine the ability to perceive a range of temporally disparate
events as a meaningful and progressive series and also the ability to
construct such a meaningful series (Hühn → Event and Eventfulness).
The focal point here is not well-constructed literary tales, but simple
everyday stories. In such studies, the Aristotelian “middle” represents
the turning point of the story in which something surprising, unex-
pected or interesting constitutes the center around which other happen-
ings are grouped. Empirical studies show that children generally ac-
quire the competence that enables mastery of this basic narrative model
between the ages of seven and ten. This is preceded by a development
which begins with the ability to string together events in a merely linear
fashion, followed by an increasing use of temporal and logical or con-
tent-based links and meaningful grouping into episodes until the stage
is reached where genuine narrative plots are understood and actively
mastered.
One specific focus of psychological studies bearing on narrative is
the significance of narrative forms for the understanding of emotions.
In these studies, emotions are not regarded as isolated and disjointed
phenomena but as situationally and socially contextualized. We are able
to understand emotions only if we can relate them to our own behavior
and experience and to that of the people we interact with within a narra-
tive frame of reference (Sarbin 1989; Gergen 1998), a finding that ap-
pears to be a cultural universal (Hogan 2003). Emotions are made un-
 Narration in Various Disciplines 453

derstandable through stories and in turn, stories also generate emotions,

making us feel angry, sad, happy, etc. This is due to the fact that stories
are “presentative symbolizations” (Langer 1948). Even though they
rely on the discursive medium of language, stories speak to us on a far
deeper emotional level than discursive symbolizations such as abstract
argumentation or scientific theories can ever do.

3.5 Psychoanalysis

The realization of the importance of narrative in the field of psychology

has generated therapeutic, and especially psychoanalytical, concepts
which interpret the therapeutic process in its entirety with the help of
narrative categories (Boothe 1994). Accordingly, neurotic conditions
are rooted in untold, repressed stories, which in the course of analysis
need to be transformed into an explicit story in order for the subject to
come to terms with past events (Schafer 1992). This being the case,
narratives have not only an informative function, but also a presenta-
tional one. The analyst must thus take note not just of what is told but
also how it is told, taking into account both the content and the style of
narrative self-presentation and its performative or theatrical manifesta-
tions (Lorenzer [1973] 1995, [1979] 1997), since this is precisely the
area where the patient’s unconscious identity and personality traits are
articulated. There appear to be increasing discussions of the active role
of the analyst during this process. Initially, the analyst must record the
free associations of the patient with “evenly-hovering attention” (Freud
[1912] 1975), after which this material is condensed into narratives
thanks to the focus provided by the analyst. These narratives in turn can
become paradigmatic case studies and, as a possibly problematic result,
may influence the analyst’s focusing acts (Thomä & Kächele 2006).

3.6 Philosophy

Plato refers to stories and myths that serve as a point of departure and
exemplification for his abstract teachings, a tradition that continues in
philosophy even today. Underlying this practice is the idea that the
function of narrative is to provide concrete examples in support of con-
ceptual arguments. Hegel formulates the insight that philosophical con-
cepts can themselves only be understood as the end result of their own
story (Plotnitsky 2005a).
Husserl’s disciple Schapp ([1953] 1985) was the first to develop a
distinctive “philosophy of stories.” According to his main thesis, the
human being is not the autonomous subject of his own constructions of
454 Norbert Meuter

meaning, but throughout his life is inextricably “entangled in stories”

which are the prerequisite for the formation of his identity and subjec-
tivity. Since, according to Schapp, stories are the fundamental medium
without which we would not be able to perceive meaning, one is justi-
fied―with reference to Heidegger―in speaking of a “narrative being-
in-the-world.”
This philosophical point of departure raises questions concerning the
constructive character of narrative. Explicitly told stories are symbolic
constructions. The question is whether, and in what way, these con-
structions are connected with the experience and behavior of the indi-
viduals concerned. From a philosophical perspective, an assumed dual-
ism of artificial form and real events (cf. 2.2 above) appears equally
contestable. Human experience and behavior do not show well-
organized narrative patterns comparable to the careful compositions of
fiction and history writing. Rather, the identifying and shaping of a nar-
rative structure of a certain complexity, with a clear point of view, an
individual line of suspense, a characteristic peripeties, etc., is always
the result of an active endeavor. On the other hand, experience and be-
havior cannot exist without some kind of structure. If, for example, one
presupposes that to act means (at least partly) to follow a project, this
already constitutes a complex achievement, even on the level of action.
There is constant interference in and interruption of the project in hand
by other experiences, actions and projects. In addition, it is often not
clear from the beginning whether one is actually engaged in a project at
all. Without at least a rudimentary narrative structure, it would not be
possible to find one’s way even on the level of action (Danto 1965;
Carr 1986). The idea of a single act seen in isolation is therefore a false
abstraction, and for this reason, the concept of story is as fundamental a
philosophical term as the concept of action (MacIntyre [1981] 2007;
Schwemmer 1987).
With Ricœur, who has put forth what is perhaps the most compre-
hensive philosophical theory of narrativity ([1983/85] 1984/88), it is
possible to argue a case for a kind of compromise. Ricœur draws on the
classic philosophers that are relevant here (Aristotle, Augustine,
Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Schapp) as well as on literary and histori-
cal theory, integrating them into a comprehensive narratological her-
meneutics. Its key theoretical concept is the three-part mimesis, the as-
pects of which are not seen in a hierarchical relationship, but in an
integrative one. Accordingly, the composition of an explicit story (Mi-
mesis II) is always a creative act that provides a new and unique view
of reality, but at the same time, this always follows on from something
that has gone before this process. Every story points to a “before.” The
 Narration in Various Disciplines 455

referent in this relation (Mimesis I) is the “lived world,” which is itself

already organized as narrative, at least in part. Because of their symbol-
ic and temporal aspects, real-life actions have an inherently pre-
narrative structure. Every explicit story, on the other hand, meets its
intended target only when it is perceived by a recipient (Mimesis III).
Reception is made possible because of the inherent openness of the ex-
plicit stories in general terms. These stories―regardless of how precise-
ly and concretely they might be told―contain no truly individual
events, but simply schematized conceptions that have to be concretized
by the recipient. The three types of mimesis form a temporal unit as a
circular cultural process that is constantly evolving: through reception,
the explicit narrative configuration once again becomes part of the real-
life experience of the experiencing and acting recipient who can ex-
pand, confirm or vary the pre-existing pre-narrative structures. Such a
newly and differently (re-)configured real-life situation in turn forms
the basis for the next explicit configuration. Narrative therefore in-
volves mediation between common cultural standards and exceptional
deviations from these standards, hence a complex interplay of tradition
and innovation (Alber & Fludernik → Mediacy and Narrative Media-
tion).
In this model, the narrative “seeing-things-together” (prendre-
ensemble) can be understood as the construction and establishment of a
meaningful and more or less coherent or probable order created out of
dissonant, scattered or random elements. The important point is the on-
tological distinction between event and incident (Ricœur [1965] 2007).
An incident is defined by its complete contingency, as something that
occurs in a certain manner but could equally occur in a different man-
ner, or not at all. A story transforms a series of heterogeneous incidents
into meaningful events within a diachronic structure. The composition
of a story is a process that organizes various components into a whole
in order to produce a single meaningful effect. The narrative seeing-
things-together transforms the irrational contingency of non-con-
textualized incidents into an intelligible contingency of events. In the
tradition of Kant, this seeing-things-together can be described as a
“synthesis of the heterogeneous.”
Inquiry into the personal identity of the individual is a further philo-
sophical area of research in the field of narrativity. Narrative approach-
es to this issue (Ricœur [1983/85] 1984/88, [1990] 1992; Kerby 1991;
Meuter 1995; Brockmeier & Carbough eds. 2001; for further discus-
sion, see Strawson 2004) assume that personal identity is formed and
stabilized only through the telling of stories (Bamberg → Identity and
Narration). The identity of the individual person differs fundamentally
456 Norbert Meuter

from the numerical identity of individual objects. Personal identity rests

upon a self-image that is physical, emotional, mental as well as practi-
cal, and this self-image is internally reflected and externally communi-
cated in the narrative process. Corresponding to these two forms of us-
age, it is possible to distinguish two types of identity (Ricœur [1983/85]
1984/88, [1990] 1992): on the one hand, identity as “sameness” (Ger-
man: Selbigkeit; Latin: idem; French: mêmeté); on the other hand, iden-
tity as “selfhood” (German: Selbstheit; Latin: ipse; French: ipséité).
Narrative identities are invariably ipse-identities which are constantly
reconfigured through the telling of stories.

3.7 Ethics

The concept of narrative identities has a genuine moral or ethical di-

mension (Korthals Altes 2005). In relation to neo-Aristotelian concepts,
authors such as Taylor (1989) and MacIntyre ([1981] 2007) examine
narrative identities in connection with the search for the “good life.”
The writings of Nussbaum (1990) highlight this aspect in that they em-
phasize the significance of narrative fiction in the formation of values
and, generally speaking, moral awareness. The stories of the literary
canon provide a rich source of alternative forms of the “good life.” But
there is an even deeper structural interrelation between narrative identi-
ty formation and the moral dimension of human existence. The for-
mation of narrative identities is identical with the development of a set
of values that are independent of any given situation and which lend a
whole life―or at least certain stages of a life―moral meaning and sta-
bility. This is a genuinely social process in the sense of interaction with
others to accomplish shared projects. Thus the narrative process also
serves to generate forms and expressions of mutual respect. In this con-
text, Ricœur ([1990] 1992) speaks of the “complementary dialectics” of
identity formation and respect for others. The other individual repre-
sents the moral imperative to take responsibility for his potential suffer-
ing. However, in order to be able to reflect critically on the relationship
with the other, the self must define its own position. Forms of “self
love,” or at least of “self esteem,” are thus essential for moral behavior
with regard to the other, and these constitute the reflexive moment in
the orientation towards a good life. This dialectic of identity formation
and respect takes place in and with the stories we live through and tell
each other (Meuter 2007).
 Narration in Various Disciplines 457

3.8 Sociology

Studies on narrative in the field of sociology (Morrison 2005) also fo-

cus on the problem of personal identity. In the sociology of knowledge
(Luhmann 1989), this problem is regarded as a feature of the modern
functionally differentiated society which, unlike pre-modern societies,
no longer ascribes a fixed identity to its members on the basis of birth,
class, etc. Identity thus becomes an accomplishment for which the indi-
vidual himself is responsible. Society no longer provides an answer to
the question “who am I?”, but leaves it to the individual to find his or
her own answer. To do so, the modern individual must have a very
clear idea of which of his behavioral traits are relevant to his participa-
tion in the various sectors of society (politics, academia, education, the
economy, the arts, etc.). Nowadays, the necessity of having multi-
layered identities that enable participation in various social environ-
ments is a given. Consequently, the modern individual can only resolve
the problem of his (all-embracing) identity by adopting a self-image as
an “individual individual,” i.e. an individual with a unique, distinctively
individual life story whose decisive meaning resides in its distinctive-
ness from other life stories (Meuter 2002). Accordingly, the modern
concept of the identity of the individual is articulated mainly through
narrative. Narrative forms, with their inherent structures of temporality
and meaning, indeed appear to lend themselves particularly well to
questions concerning one’s own (individual) identity: it is possible in a
story for one to change, develop, and integrate sudden changes (peripe-
teia) while somehow remaining “the same.”
The question is, though, whether and to what extent concepts of
identity based on an idea of the narrative unity of human life can be
upheld under the social conditions of late modern and postmodern
times (Kraus 1996; cf. Salmon 2007). Critics regard such categories as
continuity, consistency, and coherence, which are inherent in narrative
and biographical identity, as a fundamentally totalitarian coercion into
regarding one’s own life as an integral unity which must be realized.
They claim that the way of life of the individual in postmodern socie-
ties can no longer be adequately described in the classical narrative
sense as “I-identity,” but at best within the conceptual framework of a
“patchwork-identity” (Keupp 1996).

3.8 Theology

All religions rely on narrative myths of foundation which have subse-

quently acquired canonical status. Theological studies with a narrato-
458 Norbert Meuter

logical orientation (Goldberg 1982; Sternberg 1987; Hauerwas & Jones

eds. 1989; Cornils 2005) have picked up on this connection and can be
understood as reflections on the narrative practices of religion. It must
be borne in mind that theology has always been rooted in narrative
practices with which it is inextricably linked (in the sense of Schapp
[1953] 1985). There is no isolated plane of pure theological abstraction,
since theological discourse has always been a part of religious practice.
On this basis, the matter in hand is the development of a theology
through narration which defines the genuinely narrative dimension of
religious belief (Wenzel 1997). However, the question remains as to
whether there are inherent limits to a narrative theology, since theology
centers on faith which, by its nature, cannot be narrated. Even so, narra-
tive has an immense significance for theology with respect to ethics.
Christian ethics in particular must be seen as rooted within a specific
religious community, the church. This community derives its identity
from the fact that all of its members see themselves as part of a shared
narrated story: the story of God’s relationship with the beings he has
created (Hauerwas 1983).

3.10 Pedagogy

Narrative pedagogy implicitly criticizes the abstract structural analysis

of institutions, systemic constraints and patterns of interaction, focusing
instead on the concrete situations in which teaching and learning take
place. Gaining insight into the real-life experience of learning from sto-
ries is the point of departure for an inquiry into the narrative sources of
pedagogical knowledge (Baacke & Schulze eds. [1979] 1997). Where
this is applied to concrete didactic problems, school lessons and the
teaching of content-oriented knowledge can be analyzed with regard to
narrative forms (Krummheuer 1997). Narrating in this context means
describing a specific phenomenon in everyday classroom communica-
tion. Narrative pedagogy is focused in particular on the argumentative
content of narrative-based learning and teaching processes: a story-
oriented argumentation will invariably appear more realistic and con-
vincing than the presentation of purely theoretical knowledge. In order
to understand experience, and particularly the experience of the self and
its identity, pedagogy requires narrative elements that supplement aca-
demic knowledge with narrative knowledge. The inclusion of narrative
paths to the acquisition of knowledge is a prerequisite for the processes
of identification that are necessary for an effective learning experience
(Neubert 1998).
 Narration in Various Disciplines 459

3.11 Law Studies

Law studies have a strong affinity with the concept of narrativity, espe-
cially in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of “case law” based on precedent
(Lüderssen 1996; van Roermund 1997; Bruner 2002). All laws can be
understood as abstractions of individual cases. Individual cases, in turn,
enter the legal system by way of narrations. The prosecutor, defendant,
defense counsel, counsel for the prosecution, witnesses, and experts tell
the court their version of events relevant to the case. Judge and jury
then select―or adequately transform―the one version that in their
judgment corresponds to what really happened, a procedure that pre-
supposes a high degree of narrative competence. In particular, this in-
volves the ability to actively employ and analyze as well as to criticize
the rhetorical devices and narrative strategies resorted to by the witness
in order to lend plausibility to his version of events (Brooks & Gerwitz
eds. 1996). Another characteristic central to narrative competence in
legal contexts is the ability to compare and evaluate stories in view of
their legal relevance. Here, the legal sciences can resort to literary ren-
derings of legal problems (Gearey 2005; Brooks 2005; Sternberg 2008),
a connection that represents one aspect of the “law and literature
movement.”

3.12 Medicine

In the field of medicine, questions relating to narrative have been ex-

plicitly thematized for some time now (Greenhalgh & Hurwitz eds.
2005). This results from an understanding of medicine that regards the
discipline not primarily as a natural science, but as a behavioral science:
scientific knowledge of the human being is necessary, but in the end it
only serves to enable the medical practitioner to heal the patient or pro-
vide palliation for his ailment. Stories are generally a central factor in
the doctor-patient relationship, particularly where anamnesis is con-
cerned. Before a doctor can begin treating the patient, he must learn as
much as possible about his supposed condition on the basis of what the
patient tells him. In this situation, linguistic, empathetic and interpreta-
tive faculties are required. The doctor needs to “translate” the stories
told by the patient into narratives with a medical focus without moving
too far beyond the sphere of the patient’s real-life experience, but at the
same time providing a structural basis for the next steps in the profes-
sional-medical treatment (Hydén 2005). The doctor’s medical training,
however, will in no way have prepared him to meet these requirements.
As a medical student, he will have been confronted with a number of
460 Norbert Meuter

significant case studies, but at present there is a lack of systematic so-

cio-cultural training of narrative competence. This is relevant because
such stories provide the meaning, context and perspective for the spe-
cific problematics of an individual patient’s case. Stories explain how
and why someone has fallen ill. By evoking as many subjective aspects
of the illness as possible, they make possible a holistic approach to di-
agnosis and therapy. Periods of sickness are important peripeties in life
and often figure prominently in life stories.

3.13 Philosophy of Science

Starting with Danto (1965), the concept of “narrative explanation”

(Roth 1989) in the philosophy of science has emerged as a critical posi-
tion that challenges the influence of positivism and logical empiricism
on the philosophy of science in the humanities. According to the posi-
tivist-nomological position, the humanities, too, are governed by a pro-
cess of logical deduction whereby individual events must be explained,
i.e. the event to be explained (the explanandum) is deduced from cer-
tain a priori conditions and empirical laws which, together, constitute
the explanans. A critique of this model hinges mainly on the concept of
“cultural laws,” although these laws are not to be understood as analo-
gous to the laws of nature. In the humanities we do not expect explana-
tions to be founded on laws, but on motives, reasons and aims, in other
words, on the intentions of persons who take part in given scenarios.
Furthermore, there are many other factors that lead to cultural events
taking place such as the behavior of other people, circumstances and
coincidences, etc. Still, the question remains as to whether one is justi-
fied at all, and if so, to what extent, in speaking of intentions in relation
to actions that are manifest before and independent of the process of
their realization. It is therefore clearly insufficient to explain ac-
tion―and even more so, complex cultural processes―solely, or even
predominantly, on the basis of the intentions of acting subjects
(Schwemmer 1987; Meuter 2000). Instead, it is necessary to reconstruct
the individual story of which the action in question forms a part.
Furthermore, the purely nomological philosophy of science ignores
the fact that the explanandum does not constitute just an event, but a
transformation. It is therefore wrong to regard the former state, in the
sense of initial conditions, as part of the explanans. On the contrary, the
beginning and the end of a process of transformation both form part of
the explanandum. On this basis, it is possible to construct the basic
formula for a narrative explanation (Danto 1965): a narrative explana-
tion is arrived at by filling in the middle between the temporal starting
 Narration in Various Disciplines 461

and ending points of a transformation. A story is the explanation of

how a transformation took place from beginning to end:

(a) x is F in t-1;
(b) H happens in conjunction with x in t-2;
(c) x is G in t-3.

(a) and (c) form the explanandum, and (b) the explanans of the narra-
tive explanation. Together, the three steps delineate the relevant trans-
formation in keeping with the triadic structure: the explanation has a
beginning (a), a middle (b), and an end (c). One must bear in mind,
though, that this basic schema is an oversimplification. Many transfor-
mations, especially those which the historical sciences seek to explain,
are far more complex and incorporate numerous factors that have to be
integrated into the narrative explanation. The complexity of factual
processes cannot serve as an argument against narrative explanations
per se. On the contrary, a narrative, by definition, is a symbolic form of
representation that is flexible and malleable enough to make possible
the integration of (relevant) complex factors into the explanation. In
any case, the specific rationality and scientific nature of explanations in
cultural studies are directly linked with the narrative formula. In cultur-
al studies, narratives are not regarded as a deficiency―something that
one has to fall back on in the absence of alternatives due to a lack of
insight into “cultural laws,” for example―but rather a genuine means
for formulating insights and research findings.

4 Topics for Further Research

4.1 Natural Sciences

Despite the fact that on occasion narrative elements are used in expla-
nations in the natural sciences (e.g. the narrative of “Schroedinger’s
cat”; cf. Plotnitsky 2005b) and that certain narrative backgrounds exist
(e.g. in the term “natural history” in the theory of evolution and in
paleontology), a specifically narratological inquiry in the natural sci-
ences remains a desideratum. In the philosophy of science, this involves
the concept of meaning and the related classic dichotomy of “explain-
ing” and “understanding”: the world of nature is devoid of meaning and
must be explained through laws and the establishment of causal connec-
tions; by contrast, the world of culture and human understanding is ren-
dered meaningful and can be understood through stories (among other
462 Norbert Meuter

means). An application of the concepts of narrative would therefore

presuppose a revision of fundamental precepts in the natural sciences: it
would be necessary to understand nature as something that is not (or at
least not entirely) governed by laws and causal connections, but primar-
ily constitutes a dynamic and creative process. This calls for philosoph-
ical paradigm shifts, the beginnings of which can be found in White-
head’s ([1929] 1978) cosmology. In the tradition of Aristotelian
physics, being is conceived as a complex interplay of processes of be-
coming, each having their own structure. Every occurrence in nature
begins with an event which becomes part of a creative process oriented
towards the final outcome. From this point of view, it seems possible to
describe processes in nature with narrative categories (Lachmann &
Meuter 2011).

4.2 Systems Theory

A systems theoretical approach, which encompasses the difference be-

tween nature and culture, might prove productive with regard to poten-
tial studies on the role of narrative in the natural sciences. Independent
of this, however, systems theory has the benefit―in contrast to the
classic theories of behavior, for example―of reaching a level of ab-
straction that makes possible a discussion of all areas of culture in a
single unified theory. As a first step, a narrative can be understood as
the “systemic self-organization of meaning and time” (Meuter 2004).
Traditional approaches posit that meaning comes into the world
through subjects who act intentionally; systems theory, by contrast, ar-
gues that the identity of subjects and actions is formed first of all
through processes that produce meaning by means of selective reduc-
tions.
From a phenomenological perspective, these processes of meaning
appear in the form of stories. A narration is not the realization of a plan,
but rather a dynamic series of events that follows its own logic, and
because of its peripeties cannot be mastered from without. Subjects are
therefore not the sovereign masters of their own stories, but―similar to
their actions―must be regarded as their effects. The systems theoretical
term “self-organization” lends itself to describing precisely this situa-
tion.
The decisive factor for a narrative-oriented systems theory is the
high improbability of factual events. The reason why a certain event
takes place instead of another, equally probable one can only be ex-
plained if one regards events as elements in a meaningful systemic pro-
cess. From a systems theoretical perspective, any experiential meaning
 Narration in Various Disciplines 463

is based on the difference between actuality and potentiality: only one

possibility can ever be realized out of an abundant potentiality. Under
this condition, meaning is by nature experienced as a reduction of com-
plexity, as an inescapable necessity for selection. Here, one has to take
into consideration that it is a specific characteristic of a system operat-
ing with meaning that it not only reacts to the selections that have de
facto just taken place, but also to the selectivity of these selections.
Meaning is therefore inextricably linked with the experience of contin-
gency: systems of meaning select differently due to the experience of
being able to select. A systemic process, therefore, is not just a formal
“row” or “chain” where identical parts are simply lined up according to
a never-changing principle. Rather, every part of the process “leaves its
legacy” of selectivity to the one following it, and in the course of this
process, ever greater improbabilities accumulate through recursive
loops. Phenomenologically speaking, this, too, manifests itself in narra-
tive form: whenever one is entangled in a story, one quickly―after on-
ly very few peripeties―finds that one has arrived at a point that initial-
ly one would never have thought possible. Thus, narrations explain
reality to us, or at the very least, they can help us understand why
something is the way it is, even if it is improbable and not created by
subjects: what is, is the result of a self-organizing systemic process.

(Translated by Nina Stedman)

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 Narration in Various Media
Marie-Laure Ryan

1 Definition

The term of medium (plural: media) covers a wide variety of phenome-

na: (a) TV, radio, and the internet (especially the WWW) as the media
of mass communication; (b) music, painting, film, the theater and litera-
ture as the media of art; (c) language, the image and sound as the media
of expression (and by implication as the media of artistic expression);
(d) writing and orality as the media of language; (e) handwriting, print-
ing, the book, and the computer as the media of writing. The definition
provided by Webster’s dictionary puts relative order in this diversity by
proposing two distinct definitions: (1) Medium as a channel or system
of communication, information, or entertainment; (2) Medium as a ma-
terial or technical means of expression (including artistic expression).

2 Explication

The first definition regards media as conduits for the transmission of

information, while the second describes them as “languages” that shape
this information (Meyrowitz 1993). (The use of quotation marks in this
entry will distinguish “language” as a collection of expressive devices
from language as the semiotic code that forms the object of linguistics.)
The relevance of the concept of medium for narratology is much more
evident for type 2 than for type 1. Ong (1982) has objected to a concep-
tion of media that reduces them to “pipelines for the transfer of a mate-
rial called information.” If indeed conduit-type media were nothing
more than hollow pipes for the transmission of artifacts realized in a
medium of type 2 (e.g. a film broadcast on TV, a painting digitized on
the WWW, a musical performance recorded and played on a phono-
graph), they would bear little narratological interest. But the shape of
the pipe affects the kind of information that can be transmitted, alters
the conditions of reception, and often leads to the creation of works
tailor-made for the medium (cf. films made for TV). For the narratolo-
 Narration in Various Media 469

gist, channel-type media are only interesting to the extent that they in-
volve “differences that make a narrative difference”—in other words, to
the extent that they function as both conduits and “languages.” Among
technologies, TV, radio, film, and the internet have clearly developed
unique storytelling capabilities, but it would be hard to find reasons to
regard Xerox copy machines or phonographs as possessing their own
narrative “language.”

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Historical Background

In Western thought, reflection on how narrative is conditioned by the

medium in which it is realized—what we may call its mediality—can
be traced as far back as Plato’s distinction between a diegetic and a
mimetic mode of narration. According to Plato, in diegetic narration the
poet speaks in his own voice (or rather, in the case of fiction, in the
voice of a narrator), while in mimetic narration, he speaks through the
characters. Both modes occur in epic poetry, but while diegetic narra-
tion, interpreted as reporting, remains dependent on language, mimetic
narration, interpreted as showing, has become the dominant mode of
presentation in multi-channel performing arts, such as drama, film, the
opera, mime, and ballet. In these last two cases, as well as in silent film,
mimetic narration becomes emancipated from language.
It was left to Aristotle to acknowledge medium as a distinctive prop-
erty of art. After defining poetry as imitation (in the sense of represen-
tation), Aristotle mentions three ways of distinguishing various types of
imitation: through medium, object and mode. Under medium, he classi-
fies expressive resources such as color, shape, rhythm, melody, and
voice. The notion of object (or content) creates a generic distinction
between imitations that share the same medium: for instance, tragedy
deals with people of higher standing, while comedy represents people
of lower social stature. “Mode,” finally, covers Plato’s distinction be-
tween diegetic and mimetic presentation, but it is recast as an opposi-
tion between narration and impersonation: “It is possible to imitate the
same objects in the same medium sometimes by narrating (either using
a different persona, as in Homer’s poetry, or as the same person without
variations), or else with all the imitators as agents and engaged in activ-
ity” (1996: 2.2). Here Aristotle regards narration and impersonation as
instances of the same medium because both are made of language; but
if we make a pragmatic distinction between enacting and reporting and
470 Marie-Laure Ryan

regard this distinction as constitutive of medium, then their difference

in “mode” marks epic poetry and drama as distinct narrative media in
the modern sense of the word despite their common semiotic support.
Another landmark in the study of narrative mediality is Lessing’s
distinction between spatial and temporal forms of art. Reacting to the
18th-century philosophy of art, which was captured by the saying of
Simonides of Ceos, “painting is mute poetry, and poetry is speaking
painting,” Lessing insisted on the sensory and spatio-temporal dimen-
sions of the two media: painting speaks to the sense of sight, poetry to
the imagination; painting extends in space, poetry extends in time.
These differences predispose the two art forms to the representation of
different subject matters: “signs existing in space can only represent
objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one an-
other can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive”
([1766] 1984: 78). While the strength of painting lies in the representa-
tion of beauty, which resides in a relation between the parts of an ob-
ject, poetry excels at the representation of action because action devel-
ops in time. Painting is in essence a descriptive medium, and poetry a
narrative one. But Lessing does not exclude the possibility of stretching
each medium in the direction of the other. Poetry can dramatize the ev-
ocation of static objects by transforming spatial vision into temporal
action, as Homer does when he describes Juno’s chariot by recounting
how Hebe put it together piece by piece. The spatial arts, conversely,
can overcome their narrative deficiency by selecting a so-called “preg-
nant moment” that offers a window on the preceding and following ac-
tions. Lessing’s example is the famous Greek sculpture of Laocoön,
which shows the Trojan priest and his sons in the last moments of a
hopeless struggle against a sea serpent.
While we can extract observations relevant to what we now call me-
dium in earlier periods, it wasn’t until the 20th century, when techno-
logical inventions such as photography, film, the phonograph, radio,
and television expanded the repertory of channels of communication
and means of representation that the concept of medium emerged as an
autonomous topic of inquiry. McLuhan, an inspiring but somewhat
mercurial thinker, popularized the concept with his characterization of
media as “extension of man,” his claim that media are “forms that shape
and reshape our perceptions,” and his oft-quoted but variably interpret-
ed slogan “the medium is the message” (1996), which puts self-
reference at the center of media studies. He was also instrumental in
breaking down the barrier between elite and popular culture, a move
which lead to the emancipation of media studies from literature, philos-
ophy, and poetics. For McLuhan, comic strips, advertisements or the
 Narration in Various Media 471

composition of the newspaper front page were as worthy of attention as

works of high literature. But it was his disciple, Ong (1982), who broke
the ground for the study of narrative in media other than written litera-
ture with a systematic explorations of the forms of narrative in oral and
chirographic cultures (=cultures based on handwriting).
In France, the structuralist/semiotic movement gave legitimacy to
the study of non-verbal forms of representation (advertisement and pho-
tography for Barthes [1980] 1981, cinema for Deleuze [1983] 1986,
[1985] 1989 and Metz [1968] 1974, TV and mass communication for
Baudrillard [1981] 1994). However, structuralism sometimes hampered
the understanding of media due to its insistence on regarding Saus-
sure’s linguistic theory as the model of all semiotic systems. Visual rep-
resentations, in particular, cannot be divided into discrete units compa-
rable to the morphemes and phonemes of language, and the doctrine of
the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign cannot account for the iconic sig-
nification of painting and film. In the long run, Peircian semiotics, with
its tripartite division of signs into symbols, icons and indices, has
proved more fruitful for media studies.
The founding fathers of narratology recognized from the very be-
ginning the medium-transcending nature of narrative: according to
Bremond (1973), stories can be realized in media as diverse as litera-
ture, stage, ballet, and film. Mixing genres (Hühn & Sommer → Narra-
tion in Poetry and Drama) and media, Barthes ([1966] 1977) expands
the list to include myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic history, drama,
mime, painting, stained glass window, cinema, comics, news items,
conversation, etc. Were he alive today, he would add blogs, hypertext,
and video games. Barthes’ and Bremond’s wish to open up narratology
to media other than literature went unfulfilled for years. Under the in-
fluence of Genette, narratology developed as a project almost exclu-
sively devoted to literary fiction. Media representing the mimetic mode,
such as drama and film, were largely ignored, and because of their ab-
sence of narrator, sometimes not even recognized as narratives, despite
the similarity of their content with the plots of diegetic narration. But
this situation changed dramatically in the late 20th century with the so-
called “narrative turn” in the humanities. In the past twenty years, the
study of non-literary or non-verbal forms of narrative has extended to
conversational narrative (Labov 1972), film (Bordwell 1985; Chatman
1978), comic strips (McCloud 1994), painting (Bal 1991; Steiner
[1988] 2004), photography (Hirsch 1997), opera (Hutcheon & Hutch-
eon 1999), television (Kozloff 1992; Thompson 2003), dance (Foster
1996), and music (Abbate 1989; Grabócz 1999, 2007: 231–298; Tarasti
2004; Seaton 2005).
472 Marie-Laure Ryan

Media studies took a theoretical turn in the 1990s. In the U.S., Bolter
and Grusin (1999) proposed the concept of “remediation” to explain the
relations between different media. In their view, every new technology-
based medium must be understood, in the context of other media, as an
attempt to “remediate” their limitations and get closer to the elusive
goal of “achieving the real.” Video games, for instance, remediate film
by incorporating narrative techniques commonly used in cinema within
an interactive environment; digital photography remediates analogue
photography by making images easier to manipulate; analogue photog-
raphy remediates painting by being more faithful to its object; and the
Internet remediates all other media by encoding them digitally in order
to facilitate their transmission. In its narratological applications, “reme-
diation” directs attention to how narrative texts may create networks of
connections between different media. But the claim that every new me-
dium constitutes an improvement over an old one cannot be sustained
from a narratological and aesthetic point of view, for every gain in ex-
presseness comes at a cost, and new media do not necessarily produce
better narratives than old ones.
The concept of “intermediality,” now widely adopted in Europe, is
more narrowly focused on art forms than remediation, and it avoids the
meliorism inherent in this term. As Wolf (2008) observes, intermediali-
ty can be conceived in a narrow and in a broad sense. In a broad sense,
it is the medial equivalent of intertextuality and covers any transgres-
sion of boundaries between different media. In a narrow sense, it refers
to the participation of more than one medium—or sensory channel—in
a given work. The opera, for instance, is intermedial through its use of
gestures, language, music, and visual stage setting. If intermediality is
interpreted in a wide sense, other terms must be forged to differentiate
its diverse forms, including a new term for the narrow sense. Wolf
(2005) suggests “plurimediality” for artistic objects that include many
semiotic systems; “transmediality” for phenomena, such as narrative
itself, whose manifestation is not bound to a particular medium; “inter-
medial transposition” for adaptations from one medium to another; and
“intermedial reference” for texts that thematize other media (e.g. a nov-
el devoted to the career of a painter or composer), quote them (insertion
of text in a painting), describe them (representation of a painting
through ekphrasis in a novel), or formally imitate them (a novel struc-
tured as a fugue).
In recent years, under the influence of Günther Kress and Theo van
Leeuwen (2001), the term of “multimodality” has become established
for works that combine several types of signs, such as images and text.
In this new terminology, language, image and sound are regarded as
 Narration in Various Media 473

“modes” rather than as “media,” as they would be when one adheres to

the second of Webster’s definitions, but Kress and van Leeuwen’s ter-
minology raises the problem of how to draw the line between modes
and media.

3.2 The Nature of Media

The variety of the phenomena subsumed under the concept of medium

stems not only from the two distinct functions mentioned by Webster’s
definition—transmitting information or forming the support of infor-
mation—but also from the nature of the criteria that differentiate indi-
vidual media. These criteria belong to three conceptual domains: semi-
otic, material-technological, and cultural, each of which can be linked
to different approaches to narrative.
As a semiotic category, a medium is characterized by the codes and
sensory channels upon which it relies. The semiotic approach tends to
distinguish three broad media families: verbal, visual, and aural. The
groupings yielded by this taxonomy broadly correspond to art types,
namely literature, painting, and music. This rudimentary typology must
be expanded in order to account for an art like dance, which is based on
the movements of the body, or for an activity like video games, whose
distinctive feature is the pragmatic notion of active user participation.
Insofar as signs extend in time or space, the semiotic analysis of media
should also take into consideration their spatio-temporal dimensions.
Media can be temporal and dynamic (music, oral language transmitted
through radio or telephone), temporal and static (i.e. relying on sequen-
tially ordered signs but freezing them through inscription, as in written
literature); they can be purely spatial (painting, photography, sculpture,
architecture) or spatio-temporal; the spatio-temporal in turn can be a
static combination of temporal language and spatial image or inscrip-
tion (comics, written literature that exploits the two-dimensionality of
the page), or include a kinetic dimension that controls the duration of
the receptive act (film, drama, mime, dance, and oral narrative accom-
panied by gestures). A semiotic approach to media focused on narrative
will ask about the storytelling abilities and limitations of the signs of
the medium under consideration. For instance: How can images suggest
time? How can gestures express causality? What is the meaning of the
graphic layout? How do the various types of signs contribute to narra-
tive meaning in plurimedial art forms?
To bring further refinement to semiotic media families, we must ask
about the material support of their individual members. Material sup-
port can be either a raw substance, such as clay for pottery, stone for
474 Marie-Laure Ryan

sculpture, the human body for dance, and the human vocal apparatus
for singing and oral storytelling, or a technological invention such as
writing (subdivided into manuscript, print, and electronic form), indi-
vidual musical instruments, photography, film, television, the tele-
phone, and digital technology. (As a meta-medium that encodes all oth-
er media, digital technology would be a pure conduit, but by adding
interactivity to these media, it reaches the status of “language.”) For the
narratologist, the importance of technology lies in its ability to improve
or modify the expressive power of purely semiotic media. A case in
point is the well-documented and deep-reaching impact of the invention
of writing, and later of print technology, on the form, use and content of
narrative. According to Ong (1982), the influence of writing is felt in
the rising and falling contour of the dramatic plot (for Western drama,
even though performed orally, relies on a written text), in the develop-
ment of psychologically complex characters, in the epistemological fo-
cus of the detective story, and in the self-referentiality of the postmod-
ern novel.
Not all phenomena regarded as media can be distinguished on the
basis of technological and semiotic properties alone. Newspapers, for
instance, rely on the same semiotic dimensions and printing technology
as books, but “the press” is widely regarded by sociologists as a medi-
um in its own right because it fulfills a unique cultural role in the “me-
dia ecology.” It is also to cultural practice that we can attribute the
grouping of semiotic dimensions into multi-channel media such as
drama, the opera, and comic books, or, with the help of a technological
support, into film, television, and computer games. The properties of
narratives produced in a certain medium are often due to a combination
of cultural, technological, and semiotic factors. The prevalence of
shooting in American computer games could for instance be explained
culturally by the importance of guns in American society (Japanese
games are much less violent), as well as by the fact that the computer-
game industry targets an audience of young males. But it is also moti-
vated semiotically by the presence of a sound track (shooting is pri-
marily manifested through noise) as well as technologically facilitated
by the fact that the action of shooting is easily simulated by the ma-
nipulation of controls (hitting a key is reasonably similar to releasing a
trigger). By far the majority of media studies have been devoted to the
cultural use of medium-specific narratives. Possible topics for this ap-
proach include the rhetoric of TV news or the social impact of such
phenomena as computer games, Internet pornography, and film vio-
lence.
 Narration in Various Media 475

3.3 The Primacy of Language as Narrative Medium

Though we lack documents about the earliest manifestations of narra-

tive among higher primates, it is reasonable to assume that language
capacities, storytelling abilities, and human cultures co-evolved in
symbiotic relation with each other. Dautenhahn (2003) attributes the
need to tell stories to the complex social organizations of humans, com-
pared to that of apes, while Turner (1996) argues that humans did not
start telling stories as the result of developing language, but rather that
language was developed in response to the need to tell stories. In these
accounts of the social and cognitive foundations of storytelling, natural
language is presented as the original narrative medium. The innate af-
finity of narrative and language can be explained by the fact that narra-
tive is not something that is perceived by the senses: it is constructed by
the mind, either out of data provided by life or out of invented materi-
als. Similarly, as a mode of representation, language speaks to the mind
rather than to the senses, though it is of course through the senses that
its signs are perceived. Thanks to its semantic nature and its power of
articulation, language is the only semiotic system (besides formal nota-
tion systems) in which it is possible to formulate propositions. Stories
are about characters placed in a changing world, and narration is cru-
cially dependent on the ability of a medium to single out existents and
attribute properties to them. Neither images nor pure sound possesses
this intrinsic ability: sound has no meaning, and pictures can show, but
they cannot refer (Worth 1981). This makes it difficult for them to
foreground specific properties of objects out of the background of their
global visual appearance.
If we look at the constitutive features of narrative, we see other rea-
sons why natural language is its medium of choice. Narrative is widely
regarded by scholars as a discourse that conveys a story; story, in turn,
has been defined as a mental image formed by four types of constitu-
ents (Ryan 2007): (1) a spatial constituent consisting of a world (the
setting) populated by individuated existents (characters and objects);
(2) a temporal constituent, by which this world undergoes significant
changes caused by non-habitual events (Hühn → Event and Eventful-
ness); (3) a mental constituent, specifying that the events must involve
intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the
states of the world (or to the mental states of other agents); (4) a formal
and pragmatic constituent, advocating closure and a meaningful mes-
sage.
The first and fourth of these conditions are not particularly depend-
ent on language. Closure and meaningfulness can be achieved in any
476 Marie-Laure Ryan

semiotic system, and images are more efficient than words at represent-
ing a world populated by existents because of the spatial extension and
visual appearance of concrete objects. But the second and third features
of narrative are highly language-dependent. As Lessing observed, the
temporality of language is naturally suited to represent events that suc-
ceed each other in time. With its combination of dynamic unfolding and
visuality, film may be as efficient as words at representing a succession
of events such as “the king died and then the queen died,” but only
words can say “the king died and then the queen died of grief” because
only language is able to make relations of causality explicit. In a film
(and even more so in a static image), causal relations between events
must be left to the spectator’s interpretation, and without a voice-over
narration (Kuhn & Schmidt → Narration in Film), we can never be
completely sure that it was grief and not illness that killed the queen.
Language-based narratives may admittedly choose to be highly elliptic
in their presentation of causal relations: nothing would be more tedious
than a story that left nothing to infer, but if all causal relations had to be
guessed, this would place serious limitations on the repertory of stories
that can be told by a medium. However, it is with condition 3 that lan-
guage displays its true narrative superiority over other semiotic media.
In language, we can express emotions and intents unambiguously by
saying “x was scared,” “x was upset,” “x was in love,” or “x decided to
take revenge.” Language can dwell at length on the mental life of char-
acters, on their considerations of multiple possible courses of actions,
on their philosophy of life, on their hopes and fears, on their daydreams
and fantasies, because mental life can be represented as a kind of inner
discourse, structured in the same way as language. Cognitive science
may tell us that not all thinking is verbal, but the translation of private
thought into language is one of the most powerful and widespread nar-
rative devices. Most importantly, only language can represent the most
common type of social interaction between intelligent agents, namely
verbal exchanges, for the very simple reason that only language can
represent language. The narrative power and diversity of film, drama
and the opera is mainly due to the presence of a language track. This
track, traditionally, has been limited by the conventions of realism to
what an observer looking through an imaginary fourth wall can hear,
namely dialogue. But phenomena such as the chorus of Greek tragedy,
the written signs of epic theater, the asides to the audience of modern
drama, and the voice-over narration of film represent an attempt to use
language not only to imitate the speech of characters, but also to com-
ment on the action, as it does so often in diegetic narrative. The story-
 Narration in Various Media 477

telling potential of a medium is directly proportional to the importance

and versatility of its language component.

3.4 Narrating without Language

The independence of narrative from language is a matter of degree. In

its strictest interpretation, “narrating without language” means that a
story unknown to the appreciator is evoked by the purely sensory, non-
semantic resources of image or sound. (Taste, touch, and smell are far
less developed senses, and they do not seem to have any narrative po-
tential.) In a slightly weaker form of non-verbal narrativity (Abbott →
Narrativity), the work tells a story new to the user, but it uses a lan-
guage-based title to suggest a narrative interpretation. In the loosest
interpretation, a narrative without language is a work that illustrates a
story already known to the user (Varga 1988), and its narrativity is par-
asitic on the narrativity of the original text, which, most likely, will be
known through language. This illustrative function is by far the most
common occurrence in non-verbal narration.

3.4.1 Pictorial Narrative

To achieve narrativity, pictures must capture the temporal unfolding of

a story through a static frame. Wolf (2005) distinguishes three kinds of
pictorial narratives: monophase works that evoke one moment in a sto-
ry through a single image; polyphase works that capture several distinct
moments within the same image; and series of pictures that capture a
sequence of events.
The monophase work presents the greatest narrative challenge be-
cause it must compress the entire narrative arc into a single scene. For
an image to suggest a narrative interpretation, it must not only represent
a frozen moment in a dynamic action, but must also arouse curiosity
about the motivation of the agent. From very early on, the visual arts
have shown man in action, but the hunting scenes or everyday activities
depicted in cave paintings or on Egyptian scrolls do not fully qualify as
narratives because they represent repetitive events with an unproblem-
atic life-maintenance function. Similarly, the scenes of 17th-century
Dutch genre painting are low in narrativity, or more specifically in
eventfulness, because they rely almost entirely on familiar scripts and
schemata for their interpretation. A truly narrative image must depict
one-of-a-kind events that cause a significant change of state for the par-
ticipants: not baking bread but stealing a loaf; not hunting animals for
food, but killing a dragon to save a princess; not making music as a
478 Marie-Laure Ryan

group, but secretly fondling a fellow musician (cf. Hühn’s distinction

between event I and event II in the present encyclopedia (Hühn →
Event and Eventfulness)). To read a picture narratively is to ask: Who
are the characters shown in the picture? What are their interpersonal
relations? What have they done before? What are they doing? What are
their reasons for acting? What change of state will the action bring?
How will the characters react to the event? Pictures cannot answer these
questions directly because they are limited to the representation of vis-
ual properties. Not only do images lack a temporal dimension, they are
also unable to represent language and thought, causal relations, counter-
factuality, and multiple possibilities. Other limitations include the ina-
bility to make comments, provide explanations, and create suspense and
surprise, two effects which depend on a time-bound disclosure of in-
formation. Even so, the narrative incompleteness of images is a power-
ful generator of curiosity. As Wolf (2005) has shown, reading a picture
narratively necessitates a far more elaborate gap-filling activity than
reading a language-based story. Monophase pictorial narratives are ei-
ther illustrative or indeterminate in their content. An indeterminate pic-
ture opens a small window on time through the technique of the preg-
nant moment, but many different narrative arcs can pass through this
window, corresponding to the multiple ways of imagining the long-
term past and future that expand the content of the window into a com-
plete story. Perhaps the only type of monophase pictures that tells a
determinate story is the humorous single-frame, caption-less cartoon,
for humor lies in a narrowly defined feature that people either get or
miss.
Yet still pictures also have their narrative strengths, when compared
to language: they can give a far better idea of the spatial configuration
of the storyworld; they can suggest emotions through facial expressions
and body language; and they can show beauty directly, rather than nam-
ing the property and leaving its specific representation to the reader’s
imagination. Though they lack operators of mental activity, they can
develop visual conventions, such as the thought balloon, to “derealize”
events and represent objects as mental images formed by characters.
They often make up for their inability to name characters by using tra-
ditional attributes (keys for Saint Peter, horns for the devil), and they
can suggest abstract ideas through conventional visual symbols: lilies
for purity, pomegranates for lust, a skull for death. When purely visual
means fail, they can internalize language by showing intra-diegetic ob-
jects bearing inscriptions, such as signs or letters (cf. the very readable
letter from Charlotte Corday held by the dead Marat in Jacques-Louis
 Narration in Various Media 479

David’s “Marat Assassinated”). Because pictures stand still, the specta-

tor has ample time to inspect them for narratively significant details.
In polyphase pictures, the narrative arc is much more determinate
because it is plotted through several distinct scenes within the same
global frame. These scenes are often separated by architectural features:
for instance, in Benozzo Gozzoli’s “The Dance of Salome and the Be-
heading of St John the Baptist” (cf. Steiner [1988] 2004), an arched
wall separates the beheading scene from the dancing scene, and Salome
presents the head of the saint to her mother Herodiad in an alcove of the
room where the dancing scene takes place. The space of the pictures
may or may not be used as an indicator of temporal sequence: in “The
Dance of Salome,” the eye does not read the story told by the painting
linearly (i.e. left to right or right to left), but follows a circular path,
from the right to the left to the center. This path must be discovered by
detecting relations of causality which parallel the direction of time. But
the narrative gaps between the individual scenes are so great in this par-
ticular painting that a spectator unfamiliar with the biblical story would
be unable to decode its narrative logic. Themes such as reward and re-
venge, crucial to the Salome story, involve mental constructs far too
complex for visual representation.
It takes a series of pictures to tell a story that is both reasonably de-
terminate and new to the reader. Serial pictures can narrate in two ways.
The first, illustrated by William Hogarth’s painting series A Rake’s
Progress and Marriage à la Mode (Wolf 2005), consists of devoting
each picture to one episode in the life of a character by resorting to the
techniques of the monophase pictures. The individual paintings depict
self-contained mini-narratives separated from each other by significant
time gaps, but the various scenes are connected by weak causal rela-
tions: each painting represents a step in the downfall of the hero, a
young man who rises from poverty through inheritance, engages in a
life of debauch and dishonesty, gambles his fortune away, is impris-
oned and ends up in a mental asylum. Narrative content is suggested on
the level of the individual images by their reliance on familiar scripts,
such as the gambling-house or the prison script, and on the global level
by the recurrence of the same character (identified by constant visual
features), as well as by the chronological sequence indicated by the spa-
tial arrangement of the pictures. The other technique, common in word-
less comic strips, associates every image with one moment in a contin-
uous action as if it were a frozen frame in a silent film. While in the
first technique narrativity exists on both the macro- and the micro-level,
here it is limited to the macro-level. The individual images are separat-
ed by smaller time spans than in the first type, but they are linked to-
480 Marie-Laure Ryan

gether by stronger causal relations. An example of this technique is a

sketchbook titled “Pipe Dreams” by the French artist Jean-Jacques
Sempé, published in The New Yorker on November 20, 2000. “Pipe
Dreams” tells the story of a lion who fantasizes loving a unicorn. But
since unicorns do not exist, he marries a mare and tries unsuccessfully
to turn her into a unicorn by putting an ice cream cone on her forehead.
The upset bride runs away from him, and he ends up on a psychiatrist’s
couch. Through the use of speech and thought balloons, the narrative is
able to perform a rare feat in wordless storytelling: a disruption of the
chronological order. After an opening frame that shows the lion dream-
ing of a unicorn, the next five frames (out of fourteen) represent the
lion on the couch, and his personal experience is shown as images with-
in a speech balloon, suggesting that it is being told to the psychiatrist.
When the lion’s story escapes from the balloon and fills the entire
frame, the storytelling act disappears from sight, and the reader is
transported back to the time of the narrated events. The embedded se-
quence of the past catches up in the last frame with the embedding se-
quence of the present when the lion is shown knocking on the psychia-
trist’s door. Thanks to the visual conventions of the modern comic strip,
“Pipe Dreams” remediates many of the limitations of the purely mimet-
ic image without using a single word: even the title is not indicative of
narrative content.

3.4.2 Narrating through Gestures

As ballet, pantomime, and the movies of the silent area demonstrate, it

is possible to tell a story through the kinetic means of gestures and faci-
al expression. But ballet either fulfills an illustrative function (cf. for
this aspect also 3.4.3 on music) with respect to the story referred to by
its title (“Cinderella,” “The Nutcracker”) or relies on a summary in the
program, while silent movies use music and subtitles to suggest a narra-
tive interpretation. Can body movement tell a story that is new to the
spectator without external help? The answer is yes, but the repertory is
very limited. A pantomime could for instance tell the story of a scorned
lover who becomes depressed and attempts suicide, but suddenly re-
gains his lust for life when an attractive woman walks by. Narrative is
about evolving networks of human relations; and gestures and move-
ment, by varying the distance between bodies, are reasonably good at
representing the evolution of interpersonal relations, as long as mental
life can be translated into visible body language. But even though ges-
tures add a kinetic element to serial still pictures, this does not result in
a significant increase in narrative power. On the contrary: it is much
 Narration in Various Media 481

more difficult to narrate through continuous gestures than it is through

discrete pictures frames. The chronological rearrangements of the
Sempé cartoon would be impossible in a pantomime because gestural
narration unfolds entirely in the present. It also operates in a simula-
crum of real time that largely limits the narrated time to the time of nar-
ration. This real time dimension predisposes gestural narration to the
representation of short sketches. Serial pictures, by contrast, break the
continuity of action into distinct frames, and the frames are separated
by variable time spans: from a fraction of a second when cartoons re-
produce continuous action to a lengthy period of time when frames in-
troduce new episodes. Gestural narration could admittedly signal breaks
between episodes by making the actors disappear from the stage and
reappear. But in contrast to still pictures, language, and film, the live
performance of gestural narration is incapable of skipping a moderate
period of time. It is only when gestures are recorded through film and
the footage put together through montage that it becomes possible to
create ellipses of any length in the development of a narrative action
(e.g. Bordwell & Thompson 2008: 229–231).

3.4.3 Musical Narratives

Music has a long history of being paired with language for narrative
effects (sung poetry, “texted” music, opera, sound track of film and
computer games), but it may seem paradoxical to even mention the pos-
sibility of telling stories through pure sounds. As a semiotic substance,
sound possesses neither the conventional meaning nor the iconic value
that allow words and images to create a concrete world and bring to
mind individuated characters. Music cannot imitate speech, represent
thought, narrate actions, or express causal relations. Its mimetic abilities
are limited to the imitation of aural phenomena: the gurgling of a brook,
the song of birds, or the rumbling of thunder. Yet in the 19th century,
composers frequently attempted to tell stories through music by pattern-
ing their works according to what musicologists call a “narrative pro-
gram.” These programs, expressed in words, instruct the listener’s im-
agination to look for a precise theme in each part of the composition:
for instance, “Awakening of joyful sensations on arrival in the country”
and “Scenes at a brook” as the titles of movements in Beethoven’s Pas-
toral symphony. More recently, a school of musicology has postulated
the existence of a “deep narrativity” inherent to all music (or at least, to
all music of the classical Western tradition). To tease out this deep nar-
rativity, scholars resort to well-known narratological models such as
Greimas’ semiotic square and Propp’s functions (Tarasti 2004),
482 Marie-Laure Ryan

Ricœur’s theory of narrative temporality (Grabócz 1999), or the classi-

cal plot schema of equilibrium, conflict and resolution (Seaton 2005).
Comparisons have also been made with diegetic and mimetic modes of
storytelling (Abbate 1989), leading to the conclusion that music is a
mimetic mode when it stands by itself, but fulfills a diegetic function
when it is used in plurimedial works such as film and musicals (Rab-
inowitz 2004). In mimetic modes, according to the narrative school,
music itself counts as narrative action, while in diegetic modes, it
comments upon the enacted events.
The appeal of the concept of narrative to both composers and musi-
cologists can be explained by the temporal dimension of music. Narra-
tive lives from a succession of events that brings transformations to the
state of the storyworld, while music lives from a succession of sounds
that creates melody and harmony through transformations in pitch,
rhythm, and loudness. The term “line” is used to describe the develop-
ment of both plot and melody, and in each case, this line controls atten-
tion, builds expectations, and creates effects of suspense, curiosity, and
surprise (Sternberg 1992). But unlike verbal narrative, music does not
suggest the passing of time by showing its effects on concrete existents:
it captures time in its pure form, as a forward movement, a desire-for-
something-to-come, a tension calling for a resolution. In music as in
narrative, the appreciator may have a powerful sense that a dénouement
is imminent (perhaps more so in music, for in literature the coming end
is often signaled not by narrative devices, but by the number of pages
left to be read). Through its modest descriptive abilities, music can
sometimes sketch a setting (cf. Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony), and
in what amounts to creating its own conventional “language,” it can
individuate characters by linking them to a specific instrument or to a
leitmotiv. It also possesses an ability unequalled among semiotic media
to represent and induce emotions. But these features are not sufficient
to tell specific stories. In contrast to the narrativity of language-based
texts, the narrativity of music is neither determinate nor literal. It is in-
determinate because narrative content is something that is read into a
composition rather than read from it (Wolf 2005). Even when music
instructs the listener to associate the composition with a certain story,
every listener fills in the general pattern in a highly personal way (Nat-
tiez 1990), and many listeners will appreciate the composition without
giving any thought to a narrative interpretation. This would be unthink-
able with a language-based story. Meanwhile, from the point of view of
the musicologist who uses narratological models to analyze particular
compositions, the alleged narrativity of music is the product of a meta-
phor based on a structural analogy. Music and language-based stories
 Narration in Various Media 483

present similar formal patterns, but these patterns are filled with vastly
different substance: intrinsically meaningless sound in the case of mu-
sic (though of course musical arrangement creates its own type of
meaning), concrete semantic content in the case of language-based sto-
ries. As the focus of interest of a scholarly approach, the narrativity of
music is a purely analytical construct situated, cognitively, on a very
different level than the narrativity of language, film, or even pictures
because it can exercise its power without being consciously recognized.

3.5 Combining Sensory and Semantic Dimensions into

Plurimedial Texts

Given the overwhelming storytelling superiority of language, one may

wonder why mankind ever bothered to develop other narrative media.
The limited narrative power of non-verbal media does not mean, how-
ever, that they cannot make original contributions to the formation of
narrative meaning. The affordances of language, pictures, movement,
and music complement each other, and when they are used together in
multi-modal media, each of them builds a different facet of the total
imaginative experience: language narrates through its logic and its abil-
ity to model the human mind, pictures through their immersive spatiali-
ty and visuality, movement through its dynamic temporality, and music
through its atmosphere-creating, tension building and emotional power.
The ultimate goal of art is to involve the whole of the embodied
mind, the intellect as well as the senses. To achieve this wholeness,
sensorial art forms must be coaxed into conveying messages, while lan-
guage-based art forms must be taught to appeal to the senses. Through
narrativization, sensorial arts acquire a sharper mental dimension, and
through collaboration with sensorial signs, language-based narrative
allows a fuller experience of the storyworld. In multi-modal media, the
appreciator can directly see, hear, and maybe even interact with objects,
and the imagination, relieved from the cognitive burden of simulating
sensory data, can more easily immerse itself in the story. But this does
not mean that multi-modal media are automatically superior to litera-
ture in narrative power because every gain in the visual, aural or even
interactive domain may bring a loss of attention to the language channel
(e.g. for the relation between audiovisual and voice-over narration in
film Kozloff 1988: 8–22).
484 Marie-Laure Ryan

4 Recent Trends

Research concerning the relations between media and narrative has re-
cently taken two major directions. The first is an increased interest in
multimodality. Narrative forms combining a variety of semiotic chan-
nels have existed since the dawn of civilization, if one thinks of the in-
herent multimodality of oral storytelling (voice + gestures), but every
new technology of communication inspires novel combinations: print-
ing allowed the wide distribution of illustrated books, and later of com-
ics; photography gave birth to photonovels; cinema integrated animated
images, music, spoken language and occasionally written text, and digi-
tal technology added interactivity to the many modes of film. The cur-
rent interest in multimodality has led to a reappraisal of some easily
overlooked modes, such as the gestures of oral storytelling, the sound
track of film, or the choreography of actor movements on stage. It has
also focused attention on the increasingly common insertion within
novels of a variety of non-verbal documents, such as photos, handwrit-
ten notes, graphs, and maps (Hallett 2014)—a list that could extend to
video clips and animation for Web-based texts.
The other new research area focuses on the spreading of narrative
content across multiple media platforms. Widely known as “trans-
media” or “transmedial” narration, and first described by Henry Jenkins
(2006; see also Dena 2009 and Mittell 2014), this important trend in
contemporary culture comes in two types. The first could be called the
“snowball effect”: a certain story enjoys so much popularity, or be-
comes culturally so prominent, that it spontaneously generates a variety
of either same-medium or cross-media prequels, sequels, fan fiction and
adaptations. In this case there is a central text that functions as common
reference for all the other texts. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are
good examples of the snowball effect: they started out in the medium of
the novel, created by a single author, and they expanded to film and
computer games by popular demand. In the other type of transmedial
narration, illustrated by the commercial “franchise” of The Matrix,
which comprises films, computer games and comics, a certain story is
conceived from the very beginning as a project that develops over many
different media platforms (Ryan 2013). The phenomenon of transmedi-
al storytelling raises important theoretical questions, such as: are the
component of the system autonomous, or do they presuppose
knowledge of other members of the network; how do the storyworlds of
the various texts relate to each other (i.e. can they be regarded as re-
gions of the same global world or are they logically incompatible?);
what elements must be present for audiences to assume that, despite
 Narration in Various Media 485

additions or modifications, texts of different media refer to the same

storyworld; and what kind of stories inspire transmedial developments.

5 Topics for Further Investigation

(1) What is the range of applicability of narratological concepts with

respect to media (i.e. which ones apply to all media capable of narra-
tivity, which ones are medium-specific, and which ones can be used for
several media but not for all of them?) (2) How are certain constitutive
dimensions of story, such as subjectivity, temporal sequence, or cau-
sality, or certain discourse strategies, such as focalization, represented
in non-verbal media (Thon 2014; Horstkotte & Pedri 2011); (3) How
do newly developed media progressively free themselves from the in-
fluence of older media and discover their own narrative “language”? (4)
What social practices are generated by the “cult narratives” of mass
media (e.g. practices such as the creation of fan communities on the
Internet, fan fiction, spoiling, online discussions of plots)? (5) In which
media, besides language, does fictionality exist? (6) What forms does
(or will) narrative take in interactive environments?

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Abbate, Carolyn (1989). “What the Sorcerer Said.” 19th-Century Music 12, 221–230.
Aristotle (1996). Poetics. Tr. & intr. M. Heath. London: Penguin Books.
Bal, Mieke (1991). Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. New
York: Cambridge UP.
Barthes, Roland ([1966] 1977). “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.”
Image Music Text. New York: Hill & Wang, 79–124.
– ([1980] 1981). Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill &
Wang.
Baudrillard, Jean ([1981] 1994). Simulacra and Simulations. Ann Arbor: U of Michi-
gan P.
Bolter, Jay David & Richard Grusin (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge: MIT P.
Bordwell, David (1985). Narrative in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P.
– & Kristin Thompson (2008). Film Art. An Introduction. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Bremond, Claude (1973). Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil.
486 Marie-Laure Ryan

Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Dautenhahn, Kirsten (2003). “Stories of Lemurs and Robots: The Social Origin of Sto-
ry-Telling.” M. Mateas & Ph. Sengers (eds.). Narrative Intelligence. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 63–90; also on WWW at <http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~com-
qkd/kdnarrative.pdf>.
Deleuze, Gilles ([1983] 1986). Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P.
– ([1985] 1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Dena, Christy (2009) Transmedia Fictions: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a
Fictional World across Distinct Media and Enviroments. Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of Sidney.
Foster, Susan Leigh (1996). Choreography and Narrative. Bloomington: U of Indiana
P.
Grabócz, Márta (1999). “Paul Ricœur’s Theories of Narrative and Their Relevance for
Musical Narrativity.” Indiana Theory Review 20, 19–40.
– (2007). Sens et signification en musique. Paris: Hermann.
Hallet, Wolfgang (2014). “The Rise of the Multimodal Novel: Generic Change and ist
Narratological Implications.” M.-L. Ryan & J.-N. Thon (eds.). Storyworlds
Across Media. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Hirsch, Marianne (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.
Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Horstkotte, Silke & Nancy Pedri (2011). "Focalization in Graphic Narrative." Narrative
19.3, 330–357.
Hutcheon, Linda & Michael Hutcheon (1999). Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New
York: New York UP.
Kozloff, Sarah (1988). Invisible Storytellers. Voice-Over Narration in American Fic-
tion Film. Berkeley: U of California P.
– (1992). “Narrative Theory and Television.” R. C. Allen (ed.). Channels of Dis-
course, Reassembled. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 43–71.
Kress, Günther & Theo van Leeuwen (2001). Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and
Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
Labov, William (1972). Language in the Inner City. Studies in the Black English Ver-
nacular. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim ([1766] 1984). Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting
and Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
McCloud, Scott (1994). Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennials.
McLuhan, Marshall (1996). E. McLuhan & F. Zingrone (eds.). Essential McLuhan.
New York: Basic Books.
Metz, Christian ([1968] 1974). Film Language. A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York:
Oxford UP.
Meyrowitz, Joshua (1993). “Images of Media: Hidden Ferment—and Harmony—in the
Field.” Journal of Communications 43, 55–66.
 Narration in Various Media 487

Mittell, Jason (2014). “Strategies of Storytelling on Transmedia Television.” M.-L.

Ryan & J.-N. Thon (eds.). Storyworlds Across Media. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London:
Methuen.
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1990). “Can one Speak of Narrativity in Music?” Journal of the
Royal Musical Association 115, 240–257.
Rabinowitz, Peter (2004). “Music, Genre, and Narrative Theory.” M.-L. Ryan (ed.).
Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 305–328.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2007). “Toward a Definition of Narrative.” D. Herman (ed.). The
Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 22–35.
– (2013). “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today 34.3,
361–388.
Seaton, Douglas (2005). “Narrative in Music: The Case of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ So-
nata.” J. Ch. Meister (ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality,
Disciplinarity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 65–82.
Steiner, Wendy ([1988] 2004). “Pictorial Narrativity.” M.-L. Ryan (ed.). Narrative
across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 145–
177.
Sternberg, Meir (1992). “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity.”
Poetics Today 13, 463–541.
Tarasti, Eero (2004). “Music as Narrative Art.” M.-L. Ryan (ed.). Narrative across
Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 283–304.
Thompson, Kristin (2003). Storytelling in Film and Television. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Thon, Jan-Noël (forthcoming). “Subjectivity across Media: On Transmedial Strategies
of Subjective Representation in Contemporary Graphic Novels, Feature Films,
and Computer Games.” M.-L. Ryan & J.-N. Thon (eds.). Storyworlds Across Me-
dia. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Turner, Mark (1996). The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford UP.
Varga, A. Kibédi (1988). “Stories Told by Pictures.” Style 22, 194–208.
Wolf, Werner (2005). “Intermediality”; “Music and Narrative”; and “Pictorial Narrativ-
ity.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.
London: Routledge, 252–256, 324–329, and 431–435.
– (2008). “The Relevance of ‘Mediality’ and ‘Intermediality’ to Academic Studies
of English Literature.” M. Heusser et al. (eds.). Mediality / Intermediality. Göt-
tingen: Narr, 15–43.
Worth, Sol (1981). “Pictures Can’t Say Ain’t.” S. W. Studying Visual Communication.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 162–184.

6.2 Further Reading

Kafalenos, Emma (2001). “Reading Visual Art, Making—and Forgetting—Fabulas.”

Narrative 9.2, 138–145.
– (2004). “Overview of the Music and Narrative Field.” M.-L. Ryan (ed.). Narra-
tive across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
275–282.
488 Marie-Laure Ryan

Nünning, Vera & Ansgar Nünning, eds. (2002). Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, interme-
dial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2005). “On the Theoretical Foundation of Transmedial Narratolo-
gy.” J. Ch. Meister (ed.). Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality, Dis-
ciplinarity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–23.
– (2006). Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
– & J.-N. Thon, eds. (2014). Storyworlds Across Media. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Wolf, Werner (2002). “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, Bildender Kunst und
Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer Intermedialen Erzähltheorie.” V. Nünning & A.
Nünning (eds.). Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier:
WVT, 23–104.
 Narrative Acquisition in Educational Research
and Didactics
Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

1 Definition

This article takes as its subject the approaches adopted and results gath-
ered by research into narration by children under the age of ten, focus-
ing on two aspects: (1) the acquisition and development of productive
and receptive narrative ability; (2) possible means of cultivating pro-
ductive and receptive narrative ability in school, along with criteria for
evaluating these abilities. Special attention is paid to the difference be-
tween factual and fictional as well as between oral and written forms of
narration.
Research in this field is concerned chiefly with three facets of narra-
tive proficiency selected as being of particular significance for its de-
velopment in the outside world and its cultivation in school: (1) experi-
entiality as the preferred frame of reference for the content of narratives
(children assimilate and produce stories in connection with their own
experience in real life and in stories); (2) tellability as a criterion for
determining the pertinence of what is being told (up to the first years of
school, children are not always able to judge the tellability of stories
without the support of an adult); (3) story repertoires, contents, struc-
tures and traditional and modern media, the use of which can develop
and cultivate narrative competence.

2 Explication

Experientiality, “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’,”

is deemed by Fludernik (1996: 12) to be an essential characteristic of
narratives. Children, both in their understanding and production of sto-
ries, refer back to their own experience of reality. If an adult and a child
look at a book together, or if the adult reads or tells a story, the child
connects what he sees and hears to his own experiences (Wieler 1997).
He imagines something, remembers, participates in the portrayed reali-
490 Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

ty, and in doing so affirms a sense of self. Taking experientiality as the

basis on which narration emerges is, in the field of narratology, one
approach among others to the definition of narrativity: “to characterize
the purpose and function of the storytelling as a process that captures
the narrator’s past experience, reproduces it in a vivid manner […]”
(Fludernik 2003: 245). The category of experientiality is also central in
developmental psychology and educational science. Bruner speaks
about “the narrative construal of reality” (1996: chap. 7), stating else-
where that “we organize our experience and memory of human happen-
ings mainly in form of narrative” (Bruner 1991: 4). Stories told and
read by others, whether fictional or factual, offer children alternative
experiences that they can apply to confirm or alter their models of the
world, representing and evoking experientiality at the same time.
Therefore, almost from the time a child first begins to talk, narrative
serves as a mediator between “the canonical world of culture and the
more idiosyncratic world of beliefs, desires, hopes” (Bruner 1990: 52).
Whatever is being narrated must be of interest to someone, whether
the narrator or the listener/viewer. Tellability (Labov 1972) depends on
evaluation. Labov and Waletzky (1967) differentiate two functions of
narration, the referential and the evaluative. The evaluative function
consists in “the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the
narrative, its raison d’être: why it was told, and what the narrator is get-
ting at” (Labov 1972: 366). This evaluation forestalls a “so what?” re-
action from the audience. Whether a narration is tellable depends on the
context. Thus, picture books that show quotidian events from children’s
lives are highly tellable because children, as they are growing up, see
themselves as affirmed by scripts and want to see and hear them again
and again. This early stage is concerned primarily not with eventfulness
as the breach of expectation, but with affirmation of the familiar. Also
potentially tellable—as in “braided” narration, i.e. dialogic narration
with an open structure (Wagner 1986)—are shared experiences that
narration can bring to mind for everyone present. This phenomenon
corresponds to Lotman’s ([1970] 1977: 290–294) distinction between
an “aesthetic of identity” and the expectation-breaching “aesthetic of
opposition”. In this case, tellability is tied to the memory of a personal-
ly significant experience, and not to a break with expectation. Whether
founded on surprise, memory or affirmation, personal significance can
be seen as a central criterion for tellability (Fludernik 2003: 245).
According to the definition by Labov and Waletzky, generating tell-
ability is the task of the speaker. Whether he succeeds, however, de-
pends also on the listener and how he, in his specific context, takes in
what is narrated. This means that the story’s success relates above all to
 Narrative Acquisition in Educational Research and Didactics 491

its relevance to its addressee. “Tellability […] is dependent on the na-

ture of specific incidents judged by storytellers to be significant or sur-
prising and worthy of being reported in specific contexts, thus confer-
ring a ‘point’ on the story” (Baroni → Tellability). Children find it
difficult until well after they have begun school to bring out what is
tellable in their narrations. In processes of learning and teaching, this
initially requires above all that the adult cull from a child’s statement
(e.g. “I have yellow wellies”) what it is that is tellable and help the
child understand it (e.g. “Are they new? / Oh, they’re lovely! / Were the
old ones broken? / Did you choose the color yourself?”). By finding out
what has prompted the statement, the adult addressee can locate the
tellability attached to the statement’s personal significance to the child
(and his audience). A “so what?”, on the other hand, whether verbally
or merely as a gesture, would not encourage the child to further narra-
tion. Tellability is a central consideration for teaching methods in pri-
mary school, because it is often first generated and affirmed in interac-
tion with adults, while it is only gradually that children learn to express
it for themselves.
Narration draws on story repertoires of heard, read or seen stories, of
character groups, plot models, and patterns of text and genre. Propp
([1928] 1968) described a repertoire of characters and functions limited
to a corpus of 100 Russian fairy tales. For children, the limit to the
number of such functions, as Propp delineated them (e.g. hero, villain,
magical agent or helper), and the way they can be applied to other types
of fictional text helps them to learn. If a child aged three-and-half can
have a Christmas story read to him from a picture book and say at the
end, “There’s no baddie in it,” that shows just how early childhood at-
tention can pertinently direct itself to such models—in this case, char-
acters—and draw lessons from them, assuming, of course, that the child
has the opportunity to learn this kind of “story repertoire.” Such a rep-
ertoire comprises oral and written narratives as well as films.
In this repertoire of structural story-models, the prime position is
given in school to the so-called ‘climactic narrative’ (Hühn → Event
and Eventfulness). Its structure corresponds to the oral narratives pro-
duced by adults that Labov and Waletzky studied in response to the
question, “Were you ever in a situation where you thought you were in
serious danger of being killed?” (1967: 14). This structural model com-
prises five stages: abstract, orientation, complication, resolution, coda
(Labov & Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972). Infants and children—even
those already of school age—have difficulties in employing this struc-
ture. Particularly with regard to orientation and sequencing, they are
reliant on interaction with adults—on their interest, their follow-up
492 Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

questions and thus (as with tellability) on “scaffolding” (Bruner 1986).

One reason for favoring climactic narratives in school may be the ease
of assessing children’s efforts against that yardstick.

3 Dimensions of the Concept and History of its Study

3.1 The Function of Narration in Child Development

The narrative framing of experience starts early in childhood: it is the

primary means by which children make sense of those experiences
(Hymes 1982). Infants and young children do so by forming cognitive
models or scripts of events they take part in or that they observe at
mealtimes or bedtimes, for instance. These scripts are at first rather
fragmented. Through interaction with adults, they gradually become
coherent narrative models of everyday experience (Nelson 1996: 341).
At the age of about four, children not only start to put the perspectives
of other people into clearer focus, they also begin to reflect increasingly
on their own internal states (Nelson 1999: 248). They begin to develop
a theory of mind and to gain an understanding of other people’s inten-
tions. This becomes “obvious in their use and comprehension of mental
terms such as think, remember, wish, hope and want” (Wellmann 1988:
86).
The stories a child hears and tells about himself, about others and
about the world, help him understand who he is and who others are,
enabling him to find his own identity (Bamberg → Identity and Narra-
tion). Cognitive narratologists emphasize the similarity between the
process of becoming conscious of one’s own experiences and a form of
narrative that establishes a connection between single situations and
events. By either receptively or productively drawing on a repertoire of
stories, one can become conscious of one’s own experiences. From an
educational perspective, and in the context of new learning cultures,
narrative is a medium for the generation and transfer of knowledge
(Fahrenwald 2011). The underlying concept is that identity emerges out
of an intersubjective and narrative process of self-construction, a pro-
cess that, in the main, takes place dialogically (2011: 203; cf. Dehn &
Dehn 1980).
 Narrative Acquisition in Educational Research and Didactics 493

3.2 The Acquisition of Narrative

3.2.1 Overview of Research

Studies on the acquisition of narrative pursue differing aims and pro-

ceed with highly diverse methods as regards the categories of experien-
tiality, tellability and repertoires of stories.
Some researchers refer to Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) structural
model of the story, i.e. the climactic narrative. They use phased models
to investigate how children appropriate climactic narratives and what
role is played here by discourse between child and adults, also factoring
in various genres of child narration (Boueke et al. 1995; Hausendorf &
Quasthoff 1996; Becker [2001] 2011; Ohlhus & Quasthoff 2005; Augst
et al. 2007). Experientiality, particularly in studies that posit an event
that is the same for everyone, is defined more strongly as a characteris-
tic of the event than it is by the person’s subjective experience of it (on
changes to narrative behavior when a child is actively involved, see
Hausendorf & Quasthoff 1996: 8, 55). Tellability, too, is regarded as a
characteristic of a given situation. It is thus equated with the “abnor-
mality of the narrated” and regarded as a parallel with Labov and
Waletzky’s “setting” (Kern et al. 2012: 1–2). For adults, the question of
how then to construct a story also has a prototypical solution, namely to
precisely reproduce the sequence of happenings and highlight the cli-
max. In several studies, children’s narratives are assessed on how close-
ly they approximate this prototype. The focus on the climactic narrative
as a type of structure limits consideration and analysis of child narration
as regards children’s interest in the content of what they are narrating.
Others have explored the effect that the appropriation of stories has
on the content and language of the child’s narration, and thus investi-
gate child narration in the context of the available story repertoires
(Wardetzky 1992; Dehn 1999, 2002, 2005; Weinhold 2000, 2005;
Wieler 2011). In studies that analyze children’s stories in the context of
story repertoires (by using stories or paintings as prompts), the connec-
tion to the children’s own experiences and to what they consider worth
telling is at least suggested: in that they have to remember; in that their
imaginative development is tested; in that they can be selective; in that
they have to decide themselves what to focus their narration on; and in
that they have opportunity to transfer what moves them, as a means of
narrative self-affirmation, to focus on the people and happenings of
their stories. Because children place emphases differently and so tell
widely differing stories, their interest in the rest of the group’s stories
can be assumed, since stories told by others contain new accentuations
494 Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

and interpretations. There is quite distinctly not a prototypical “best”

solution for the story. The group’s interest is directed equally to the
content and the narrative forms. One shortcoming of these studies is
that they have so far been rather narrow as regards comparisons be-
tween age groups, and insufficiently differentiated as regards the forms
in which acquisition occurs.
The following studies address the relationship between acquisition
of factual and fictional narrative as well as that between acquisition of
oral and written narrative.

3.2.2 Factual and Fictional Narration

Factual narration refers to individual experiences, to shared community

experiences or to knowledge (Fahrenwald 2011). Fictional narration
encompasses the “fantasy story,” carrying on from a story beginning,
narration in response to single or moving pictures from art and the me-
dia, re-narration of stories and narration in response to stories. Over and
above the various approaches to research, there is agreement that the
acquisition of factual narrative proceeds much more slowly than fic-
tional narrative (cf. Becker [2001] 2011; Andresen 2011; Weinhold
2010; Wieler 2011).
That the narration of real-life events develops more slowly than that
of fantasy, and of re-narration, has to do with the way memory works in
young children. For the first three years, they primarily remember expe-
riences that recur frequently, taking on the form of scripts. It is only
when autobiographical memory emerges, which Nelson (1996) places
in the fifth year, that children become able to connect themselves ver-
bally with the events they have experienced. The development of narra-
tive is therefore directly bound up with cognitive processes and, by the
same token, with the structuring of memory processes.
Of interest to narratology are the following findings: whereas Beck-
er ([2001] 2011: 189) observed that five-year-olds mix fantasy and real-
ity in narrative and concluded that children of that age are not yet able
to securely separate fictive and real elements, Andresen (2011) shows
by means of her investigations into the spontaneous oral narratives of
four- to six-year-olds that four-year-olds are quite able to distinguish
between fictive and real; five-year-olds then mix the forms, especially
in real-life narratives, and can reliably separate these forms again only
as six-year-olds. One conclusion that suggests itself is that playing with
the boundary between fiction and non-fiction by literary texts has, inter
alia, an anthropological basis.
 Narrative Acquisition in Educational Research and Didactics 495

Wordless picture strips are, in comparison with other narrative

forms, the ones that children find hardest to cope with (Becker [2001]
2011). On the one hand, this is astonishing because the sequence, so
difficult to acquire, is already provided. On the other hand, there are a
number of explanations for this finding, first among them being that the
picture strip appears to be fictional and factual at the same time. The
happenings portrayed do not make a claim to “referential truthfulness”
(Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narration) and so can be seen as fic-
tional; but they also appear to observing children as an extra-linguistic
referent, i.e. factual. Secondly, narrating to a series of pictures is a form
relevant exclusively to school in which what children produce is meas-
ured against a prototypical solution. Experientiality is present at most
implicitly; and even if the examiner has already looked at the picture
strip with the child (Boueke et al. 1995), the child feels scant motiva-
tion for narrating. Tellability loses its communicative function and be-
comes a merely formal aspect.
Appropriating narratives that are bodied forth as climactic narratives
has been broken down into a sequence of stages. The various findings
about these developmental stages resemble one another. For the narra-
tive acquisition of picture stories, Boueke et al. (1995) distinguish isolat-
ed-enumerative, linear-sequential, contrastive-discontinuous, evaluative-
involving/narrative. Augst et al. (2007) also identify four stages and,
for writing to a single picture, set up as an end-point for this develop-
ment the significance of a break in the scheme, bringing out a “point,”
framing by means of a coda, dramaturgy of speech and reply and final-
ly, achieving a “narrative tone” (51–52). Of course, climactic narratives
do form part of the repertoires of stories, but limiting the definition of
narrative competence to the ability to keep to a structural schema does
not do justice to the complexity of the repertoires of stories available.
Fictional narration develops far more rapidly than factual. To what
degree and in what ways this is so can be seen by the following finding.
At the end of their first year (aged 7), and within a few days, children
wrote stories both about their experiences and in response to a picture
book. The task was not to re-tell the story portrayed by the picture book
but rather to write about what was important to them. While in their
real-life narratives they mostly named only a single event or formulated
several in a row, forcing the reader to ferret out the tellability of the
story for himself (“At the circus. I went to the circus on Saturday and
with my parents”), a clear majority of the same children came out with
complete stories when writing to a picture book (cf. Dehn et al. 2011:
8–10; 176–178). These stories contained narrative models from the pic-
ture book but also from other texts appropriated by the child such as for
496 Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

temporal organization (“once upon a time”; “one day”), for intensifica-

tion (“very…”; “above all”; “went and went”). These are often not cli-
mactic narratives in a strict sense even though the turning point of the
story may be marked by use of the adversative conjunction “but.” The
children figured out the need that motivated the character to set off and
almost always brought the story of his quest to a happy ending.
In their play between what is provided and what is brought forth, be-
tween reception and production, these kinds of narrative display rhetor-
ical figures, metaphor construction and genre patterns, e.g. the crime
story or the serial with patterns such as “material of transformation”
(Dehn 2005: 52; on structural characteristics in narrative texts from
learner writers to literary and media figures, see Weinhold 2005, 2010).
Becker (2002: 32), too, shows that fantasy narratives contain formulaic
expressions as early as in the first year of school (age 6), especially for
the end of the story.
One reason for the differences in appropriation of the two narrative
forms is that thanks to their experiences with heard (and seen) stories,
children have more phraseological and textual models of structure to
draw on in fantasy narrative (as shown by Andresen 2011), starting as
early as at the age of four in oral narrative (cf. Fox 1993; in reference
particularly to the variability in evaluative functions in five-year-olds,
cf. Griffin et al. 2004: 128). The appropriation of narrative models is
thus not bound to literacy.
The significance for narrative acquisition of the connection between
personal experience and access to repertoires of stories is underlined by
Lesemann et al. (2007): “talking with the child about personal experi-
ences, memories, stories, and about topics of general interest, on the
one hand, and reading narrative books, picture books, and information
books to the child, on the other hand,” (340) has a positive effect not
only on lexis and textual comprehension, but also on their own capacity
for narration, and especially re-narration. For continuations of fairytale-
like story beginnings in grades 2 to 4 (age 7 to 9), Wardetzky, with ref-
erence to Propp ([1928] 1968), investigated the stories’ motifs, figures
and symbols. She shows that the stories are not reproductions but “I-
centered mental games played with received material” (208). She sees
the results of this study as having been confirmed by narrative experi-
ments in schools and concludes that a child achieves “narrative compe-
tence” when he can orient himself in relation to examples. “Traditional
motifs, character groups and pictures are transformed into imagined
worlds of their own, open to all the sources by which the imaginations
of today’s children are nourished” (2011: 41).
 Narrative Acquisition in Educational Research and Didactics 497

“Collective narrative processes—individual stories” (Dehn 2002).

How these go together and the fact that models from the media appear
in children’s narratives is demonstrated by Erlinger (2001), drawing on
more than a hundred stories written by children in response to the TV
series “Siebenstein.” Analyses of fantasy narratives (here from grade 8,
age 14) display forms of “visualizing narrative” (Fix & Jost 2004: 168–
169), which is not only shown in the use of single models but is inher-
ent to the text on a conceptual level as regards cuts, shots and zooms.
Hoffmann and Lüth (2007) investigate how narratives in response to a
computer game in grades 3 and 4 (age 9 to 10) have their perspectives
determined by an altered picture-perception. Game situations and
played stories oscillate between factuality and fictionality. The avatar is
both a protagonist of the narrated story (i.e. fictional) and the game-
character with whom the player moves the narrative forward (i.e. factu-
al). In nearly half of the stories, the pupils take in several perspectives
simultaneously: their own as players and the avatar’s, whom they write
about sometimes as “I,” sometimes as “he,” sometimes as “we” (260).
These findings about narrative acquisition demonstrate the close
connection between experientiality, tellability and access to story reper-
toires. Children draw ever more deeply on these repertoires and so wid-
en their access to the world, narrative being “a central hinge between
culture and mind” (Brockmeier & Carbaugh 2001: 10). McCabe shows
how the acquisition of narrative ability is anchored in a culture’s narra-
tive traditions (cf. McCabe 1997 for an overview). This also applies to
experientiality and tellability. Narrative traditions exert a great influ-
ence not only on how children comprehend and remember stories (In-
vernizzi & Abouzeid 1995) but also on how they tell stories of their
own.
With explicit reference to Herman’s (2009) concept of “storyworld”
in the sense of available repertoires of stories, Spinner (2013: 171), ana-
lyzing the case of a spontaneous monological narrative by a seven-year-
old girl without any addressee present, explains in detail how biograph-
ical narration of urgent experiences is permeated by transformations of
narratives from a children’s book. The case study makes clear the exis-
tential significance of narration for self-affirmation. People feel an urge
to put what they feel and imagine into some form. One of these forms is
narration, even if, as Gertrude Stein had it, the interlocutor may not un-
derstand the narrative: “It is a well-known fact that no human being can
really stand not being able to tell some one something, you can see an
audience not understanding does not make any difference as long as
any one can tell any one something” (1935: 56).
498 Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

This emphasis on the significance of narrating, rather than on being

heard, does not mean that scaffolding is not also important in processes
of appropriation and transfer. This has been investigated for both factu-
al and fictional narration:
Hausendorf and Quasthoff (1996) not only tease out what children
have to do (demonstrate the relevance of content and/or form, bring out
themes, elaborate and/or dramatize, conclude, segue), but they also
show that references by adults to the story’s content foster the child’s
narrative ability. McCabe (1997) also shows that the type of input pro-
vided by an adult exerts considerable influence on real-life narratives
and that children narrate for longer and with greater structural complex-
ity the more highly elaborated that input is. Of particular interest in ed-
ucational contexts is the observation that children whose parents did
more to extend the topic during parent-child reminiscing resorted more
frequently to evaluating the narratives they structured themselves, indi-
cating that parental interest in a child’s past experience supports the
development of evaluative elements more than does specific parental
attention to evaluation (Peterson & McCabe 2004: 41). That not only
narrative development but also scaffolding displays genre-specific
characteristics is shown by Kern and Quasthoff (2005), using the ex-
amples of fantasy-stories and real-life narratives. This is further attested
by Pramling and Ødegaard’s (2011) study of scaffolding by pre-school
teachers for one- to four-year-old nursery children in the shared devel-
opment of a story in response to various picture cards, or in the gradual
reconstruction of a child’s narrative of a sibling’s baptism. In fictional
narration, the teachers need only remind the children of familiar formu-
lae for openings and endings, since the children already know them.
The upshot, which is directed above all at the equalizing of socio-
cultural difference in such settings, is that “Learning to narrate means
appropriating a cultural mould for sense-making and communication,
through which we learn and make sense of the fantastic […] as well as
the ordinary […], ourselves and each other” (32). Other forms of this
type of scaffolding are prompts for fictional narration in books or pic-
ture-books, a teacher’s narrative (cf. Wardetzky) or a computer game as
a mixture of fictional and factual narration.

3.2.3 Oral and Written Narration

Narrating a story means that the narrator places himself at a distance

from the momentary situation, regardless of whether he is narrating fac-
tually or fictionally or of whether this is orally or in writing. This ab-
straction from the situation is an essential characteristic of conceptual
 Narrative Acquisition in Educational Research and Didactics 499

writtenness in Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1985) sense, i.e. of decontex-

tualized use of language. In this sense, narration is an excellent medium
for the full education of a person. This applies to written narration even
more than to schoolchildren’s oral narration. The transition to writing
has been investigated by Merklinger (2011), who discovered that pre-
school children and those just starting school (at age 6) dictate their
ideas for a written response to a picture book. In speaking and then in
seeing how the words are written down before their eyes, the children
gain the experience of a writing situation. This changes not only the
way they articulate (speaking more slowly, pronouncing case endings)
but also how they phrase their stories. In this way, dictation can be a
bridge to written narration.
In reference to fairytales, Wardetzky and Weigel (2008) showed
how children’s narration can be stimulated by the narratives of profes-
sional story-tellers who, every week for two years, told classes from 16
schools (with children from 27 nations) fairytales from around the
world without simplifying the language. This oral narration, in which
voice, gesture and facial expression are central, is clearly distinguished
from everyday narratives or from such institutionalized narrative forms
as the “What I did at the weekend” type in schools. Children become
familiar with pictures, motifs and conflict groupings which they can
apply to their own experiences, imagine and transform, first through
oral re-telling, re-making, invention of their own fairytales, and later
through written narration. Wardetzky sees this narration as an “incuba-
tion period of the oral” (2010: 46). In this project of cultural language
help, therefore, oral expression provides a basis for written expression.
Wieler examines teaching methods (lesson reports and the children’s
work) and shows that the written narratives of multi-lingual children in
grades 1 and 2 (age 6 to 7) in response to a wordless picture book (The
Snowman) are far more diverse than their contributions to discussion in
class. This applies to the portrayal of temporal structure and relation-
ships as “integrated dialogic sequences” and, above all, to attempts to
convey the perspective of the characters in the story (2011: 140). Writ-
ing allows the children to “give expression to the experiences relevant
to them” in their engagement with the book (144). Wieler sees the rea-
sons for this higher diversity as “freedom from the communicative
pressure of class discussion” and a longer time allowed for planning to
write (140). Becker (2002) compared oral and written fantasy and real-
life narratives from the end of first year. She shows that written narra-
tives of both types contain considerably more emotional markers and
that fantasy narratives already contain “genre schemes” (36; cf. Wein-
hold 2005). Writing frees up to a higher degree the narrative resources
500 Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

that children have gathered through contact with stories. In that sense, it
is also plausible that the supportive interaction of an adult is more nec-
essary in real-life narratives than in fantasy ones (Becker 2005; Kern &
Quasthoff 2005; Ohlhus & Quasthoff 2005).

3.3 Teaching

Since the beginning of the 20th century, written real-life narratives have
stood on center stage in primary school writing lessons, long based on
the introduction—climax—conclusion template. As early as 1968,
Geißler pointed out that this could lead to “sensationalism” and that
personal “experience” (in Dilthey’s sense), which is centered around a
core, could not be evaluated. Geißler thus argued that “free, fictional
narrative, so-called fantasy narrative, should be taken into greater ac-
count” (112). Up till the “communicative turn” in the teaching of Ger-
man in the 1970s, this form remained dominant as part of a quartet with
depicting, reporting and describing. Even with the extension of writing
practice to such types as giving instructions and arguing and with the
abandonment of description, narrative retained its dominant position in
scholastic practice on the assumption that it was the basis of the other
types of text. However, that these forms do in fact develop inde-
pendently of one another has been emphatically shown by Augst et al.
(2007) in their long-term study.
The findings from research suggest that today’s teaching ought to
place greater emphasis on fiction as a means to imagining one’s own
concerns in an unfamiliar story (in reception) and to bringing them to
expression (in production), rather than on real-life narratives and the
everyday stories told in school. This also goes for written narratives
based on narrative prompts, including oral ones, rather than on the chil-
dren’s oral narratives.

3.3.1 Experientiality und Tellability

Narration in an institutional framework, particularly in school, is a sen-

sitive topic, because the object of the lesson bears on the whole person
far more than other types of discourse do. If the narrating of a story be-
comes too standardized, experientiality and tellability are at risk of be-
ing lost, thus limiting narration to forms “relevant in school” such as
wordless picture strips or climactic narratives.
In schools, whose educational mandate is bound up with evaluation
of performance and selection, it is particularly the criterion of experien-
tiality that requires a sensitive approach. If, as in a morning story circle,
 Narrative Acquisition in Educational Research and Didactics 501

personal experiences or shared class experiences such as braid narrative

(Wagner 1986) become part of the lesson, this can even potentially fos-
ter the development of a shared class identity. However, this situation
places a high demand on teachers not to pass judgment on children’s
expression of experientiality. It seems more advantageous to allow pu-
pils to transform their experiences within the “protection” of a fictional
story. This has been confirmed by the results of research into fantasy
narratives. Teaching narration can play a central role both in language
development and in the wider sense of a rounded education, especially
for pupils who have little opportunity in their domestic environment to
experience, whether by listening, reading or narrating, how narration
can function as a means of constructing identity.
Of decisive importance is the teachers’ attitude. If they assume that
what their pupils are narrating necessarily is worth telling, then they
can accompany the story with reactions that bring tellability to the sur-
face through a combination of questions and comments (cf. McCabe
1997: 466; see also the concept of a “resource-oriented narrative didac-
tics” in Ohlhus & Stude 2009: 480).

3.3.2 Story Repertoires

Studies that examine child narration in the context of the available story
repertoires contain many examples of implicit learning. Appropriating
and playing with rhetorical figures and models of text and genre takes
place first operatively, not declaratively, without the learners being able
to say what is going on. This implicit learning mode appears “above all
in circumstances of high complexity” and is more successful in these
circumstances than explicitly directed learning (Neuweg 2000: 203). It
is specifically the high complexity of narration that invites implicit
learning processes. “If the system in use is too simple, or if the code can
be broken by conscious effort, then one will not see implicit processes”
(Reber 1989: 220, in reference to artificial grammars). From this per-
spective, it is no longer entirely up to the teachers to determine precise-
ly what is to be taught and, above all, what is to be learned. It is far
more about conceiving stimuli and challenges for implicit learning pro-
cesses, thus extending children’s resources. As regards narration in the
institutional framework of school, it must be considered whether the
explicit teaching of structural characteristics is not more advisable for
other types of text such as reporting or instruction, which do not bear
on the individual in the same way as real-life narratives.
Taking experientiality, tellability and story repertoires into account
when planning lessons means, above all, searching for answers to the
502 Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

following questions: Do pupils have the opportunity to receptively and

productively construct story repertoires so as to become conscious of
their own experiences, to process them and so also gain a distance from
them? Do pupils have the opportunity to choose for themselves what
they consider worth telling? Can pupils extend their repertoires of cul-
turally pre-formed stories in the lesson? Many children develop these
kinds of story repertoires from pictures and modern media.
In narratology (Ryan → Narration in Various Media; Kuhn &
Schmidt → Narration in Film), in art pedagogy (e.g. Sowa 2012) and in
(native) language didactics (e.g. Maiwald 2012), interest has widened
in the past decades to encompass narration with and in response to
(moving) pictures (Dehn 2007; Dehn et al. 2011; Dehn et al. 2004;
Abraham & Sowa 2012; Schüler 2013). In lessons, however, these
forms do not yet play a central role. It is a question that comes down to
the “connection between narrative imagination and pictorial representa-
tion” (Sowa 2012: 358), to “making pictures/images talk” (Maiwald
2012: 38).
If pupils become familiar with numerous varieties of culturally
based narratives, both verbal and visual, and if they are given the op-
portunity to transform what they have heard and seen into words, pic-
tures and figures and to bring their experience to a narrative form of
expression as well as to exchange their views about this experience
with others, then identity can be constructed in social contexts and story
repertoires are developed on which the pupils can draw when they tell a
story themselves.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

To the best of our knowledge, no research has been carried out as to

how the reception of scripts develops in early childhood relative to the
reception of stories where a breach of expectation occurs. The findings
on child narration in the context of story repertoires require differentia-
tion and specification in both institutional and familial contexts. The
narration of fictional stories deserves particular attention.
a) How does model formation develop in fictional narration (oral
and written) in pre-school and school (as a controlled long-term study)?
b) How can fictional stories (narration by professional storytellers,
teachers’ narratives, reading of narrative literature and use of children’s
media in pre-school, school and at home) foster narrative acquisition: in
reference to model formation and decontexualization of language use,
both oral and written? c) What function do pictorial forms of narration
 Narrative Acquisition in Educational Research and Didactics 503

have in verbal narration and vice versa? And how can this be observed
in children’s narratives? d) How can explicit teaching (e.g. the analysis
of plot structure and forms of representation) encourage fictional narra-
tion? e) What forms of scaffolding and task assignment prove benefi-
cial, especially for the beginnings of factual and fictional narration?

(Translated by Alexander Starritt)

5 Bibliography

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gogische Theorie, Praxis und Forschung im Bereich einbildender Wahrnehmung
und Darstellung. Bd. I. Oberhausen: Athena, 357–361.
Spinner, Kaspar (2013). “Narrative Selbstvergewisserung—Wie ein Kind literarische
und eigene biographische Erfahrung verbindet.” T. Becker & P. Wieler (eds.).
Erzählforschung und Erzähldidaktik heute. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 165–174.
506 Mechthild Dehn, Daniela Merklinger & Lis Schüler

Stein, Gertrude (1935). Narration. Four Lectures. Chicago: Chicago UP.

Wagner, Klaus R. (1986). “Erzähl-Erwerb und Erzählungs-Typen.” Wirkendes Wort
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Frankfurt a.M.: Lang.
– (2010). “Schwimmen lernen. Vom Zuhören über das Erzählen zum Schreiben.“
Die Grundschulzeitschrift 24.231, 44–47.
– (2011). “Eine weltweit aufblühende Kunst. Die Kraft des professionellen Erzäh-
lens in der Schule.” Informationen zur Deutschdidaktik 35.3, 35–44.
– & Christiane Weigel (2008). Sprachlos? Erzählen im interkulturellen Kontext.
Erfahrungen aus einer Grundschule. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider.
Weinhold, Swantje (2000). Text als Herausforderung. Zur Textkompetenz am Schulan-
fang. Freiburg: Fillibach.
Weinhold, Swantje (2005). “Narrative Strukturen als Sprungbrett in die Schriftlich-
keit?” P. Wieler (ed.). Narratives Lernen in medialen und anderen Kontexten.
Freiburg: Fillibach, 69–84.
– (2010). “Vom Sinn des Erzählens für das Schreibenlernen.” C. Albes & A. Saupe
(eds.). Vom Sinn des Erzählens. Geschichte, Theorie und Didaktik. Frankfurt:
Lang, 179–191.
Wellmann, Henry M. (1988). “First steps in the child’s theorizing of the mind.” J.
Astington, P. Harris & D. Olson (eds.). Developing Theories of Mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 64–92.
Wieler, Petra (1997). Vorlesen in der Familie. Fallstudien zur literarisch-kulturellen
Sozialisation von Vierjährigen. München: Juventa.
– (2011). “‘Denn sie erkannten nicht die Gefahr’—bildungssprachliche Aspekte in
Gesprächen und Texten von Kindern im Deutschunterricht der Grundschule und
darüber hinaus.” P. Hüttis-Graff & P. Wieler (eds.). Übergänge zwischen Münd-
lichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Vor- und Grundschulalter. Freiburg: Fillibach,
123–148.

5.2 Further Reading

Becker, Tabea (2011). “Erzählkompetenz.” M. Martínez (ed.). Handbuch Erzähllitera-

tur. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler, 58–63.
– & Petra Wieler, eds. (2013). Erzählforschung und Erzähldidaktik heute. Tübin-
gen: Stauffenburg.
Birkle, Sonja (2011). Erwerb von Textmusterkenntnis durch Vorlesen. Eine empirische
Studie in der Grundschule. Freiburg: Fillibach.
Cook-Gumperz, Jenny & Amy Kyratzis (2005). “Children’s Storytelling.” D. Hermann
et al. (eds.). Routlegde Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge,
60–62.
Feilke, Helmuth (2013). “Erzählen gestalten – Erzählungen schreiben.” Praxis Deutsch
40, Nr. 239, 4–12.
 Narrative Constitution
Michael Scheffel

1 Definition

In general terms, the term “narrative constitution” refers to the compo-

sition of narratives. In a narrower sense, it involves structural models
with two or more tiers that, following the tradition of formalism and
structuralism, divide the narrative work into various levels and treat it
as the product of a series of transformations (understood in a more or
less formal sense) of a set of happenings. In a wider sense, though, the
concept touches on the basic questions attached to the construction of
narratological models in any form. It concerns, in fact, the theoretical
modeling—which can differ widely depending on the methodological
approach taken—of both the relationship between happenings and nar-
rative and the relationship between literary and non-literary narration.

2 Explication

Building on corresponding formulations associated with Russian for-

malism, Schmid introduced the expression “narrative constitution” into
narratological discussion and has retained the term in a prominent piece
of recent work (1982, 1984, 2005: 223–272). Schmid uses narrative
constitution to refer to the structural models of narrative that have
emerged in the tradition of formalism and structuralism and been de-
veloped with reference to works of literary, i.e. fictional narrative. The
work is understood here as an object sui generis and divided into indi-
vidual levels (understood as tiers of its constitution); in the process,
certain narrative operations are paired with the transformations that lead
from the natural order of the narrated happenings (the ordo naturalis of
rhetoric) to the artificial arrangement of the narrative (the ordo artifi-
cialis). Various binary oppositions have been put forward, such as fabu-
la/sujet (e.g. Tomaševskij [1925] 1965), histoire/discours (e.g. Todorov
[1966] 1980; story/discourse), and story/plot (e.g. Forster [1927] 1972),
as have multileveled models such as Geschehen/Geschichte/Text der
508 Michael Scheffel

Geschichte (Stierle [1971] 1973; happenings/story/text of the story),

histoire/récit/narration (Genette [1972] 1980, [1983] 1988; story/nar-
rative/narrating), and Geschehen/Geschichte/Erzählung/Präsentation
der Erzählung (Schmid 1982; happenings/story/narration/presentation
of the narration). These distinctions provide a framework in which the
approaches involved attempt to grasp the construction of narrative
works in a theoretical manner and represent it as the transformation of a
set of happenings in a generative manner in the sense of an abstract
model of production. Where the modeling of the relationship between
happenings and narrative is concerned, these approaches can be said to
make the happenings logically antecedent to the narrative itself. In the
sense of the distinction between the “two principles of narrative” eluci-
dated by Culler, in other words, they assume a theoretical “priority of
events” posited in the case of fictional narrative (1981: esp. 179, 186–
187). Even if we subscribe to the theoretical premises of approaches
with a text-internal or formalist orientation, the practicality of such
models is affected not least by the fact that their authors, though sharing
the idea that narrative works can be decomposed into levels or compo-
nents, often have very different starting points and sometimes even as-
sociate significantly different meanings and concepts with a particular
term (Martínez & Scheffel [1999] 2007: 26, for a comparative table of
the basic terms used by nineteen theorists from Propp to Schmid).
In actual fact, the study of narrative composition should be confined
neither to a text-internal perspective nor to works of literary narrative.
Thus, against the background of a newly developed interest in narration
as one of the fundamental forms of human cultural activity, more recent
narratological approaches have adopted a broader understanding of the
concept of narrative constitution, in the context of which they take into
consideration the problem of the relationship between narrative and
reality in general (Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narration). The
historiographical theorist White took a crucial step in this direction
when, in the 1970s, he developed several theses regarding the fiction of
the factual. These theses have been taken up repeatedly in the context
of post-structuralism. They are based on a multileveled, originally ab-
stract model of production in the tradition of formalism and structural-
ism, and transfer this model of the narrative constitution of fictional
narratives to the at first sight non-fictional narratives of historiography
and their relationship to historical reality (Meuter → Narration in Vari-
ous Disciplines). On this basis, White set out a theory of “emplotment”:
this theory takes the form of a typology of how meaning is generated
through narrative and treats the transformation of happenings into sto-
ries as, at base, a process that gives rise to literature (in this case, the set
 Narrative Constitution 509

of happenings presents itself as a product of the narrative, creating an

unbridgeable gap between historical reality and all narratives of any
kind). White’s concept of emplotment has been cited many times in the
context of the narrative turn in cultural studies. Ricœur takes an analo-
gous approach when he writes about how a reality that is in and of itself
contingent is subjected to a fundamental reshaping by a process of mise
en intrigue (rendered as “emplotment” by his translators) that is bound
up with narrative. In his far more complex concept of a narrative her-
meneutics, however, Ricœur—unlike White—takes as his starting point
the idea that there is a mutual relationship between narrative and human
activity, and that the concept of narrative constitution applies to essen-
tial parts of the reality of human life in general.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Russian Formalism and the Opposition between Fabula and Sujet

The beginning of systematic interest in the composition of narrative

works belongs to a time when the attention of literary scholars came to
be directed toward the question of literariness and with it the problem
of the characteristic form of literature. Against this historical back-
ground in the first quarter of the 20th century, one model emerged that
was to have a greater influence than any other on subsequent literary
research. This model was developed in the context of Russian formal-
ism. The model, which has two tiers, is based on the opposition gener-
ally described using the terms fabula and sujet. Where details are con-
cerned, though, Ėjxenbaum, Šklovskij, Tomaševskij, Tynjanov,
Vygotskij, and other theorists proceed from markedly different starting
points, using the corresponding terms with different, sometimes even
opposing meanings in each case (for detailed reconstructions, see e.g.
Volek 1977; García Landa 1998: 32–48; Schmid 2005: 224–236).
From a historical perspective, the use of the terms fabula and sujet
in the manner of a binary opposition can be seen to begin with Šklov-
skij. The locus classicus for their definition is to be found in an essay in
which, at the end of a detailed consideration of the idiosyncratic narra-
tive form of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Šklovskij points out the chrono-
logical differences between chains of events in “actual life” and in art.
In this context, he stresses that the “aesthetic laws” of artistic narrative
can be grasped only if we distinguish between sujet and fabula. In the
process, Šklovskij explains that the fabula should be understood as the
“material for sujet formation” and the sujet as the material of the fabula
510 Michael Scheffel

in artistic form ([1925] 1991: 170; Schmid 2009). It is clear here and in
other contexts that Šklovskij, like most other Russian formalists after
him, does not associate the fabula with a neutral, given phenomenon.
Instead, in contrast to the sujet, which is understood as bearing the lit-
erariness of the narrative work, he sees the fabula as something subor-
dinate that is overcome, so to speak, in the work of art (in the same his-
torical context, the opposite is the case in the work of Propp [1928]
1968 which, with its model of actants and functions, was concerned
solely with the plot structure of narrative works, and more precisely
with the rules governing constitution of the fabula).
Numerous Russian formalists took up the pair of terms during the
1920s and put what were at times very different slants on it. Tomašev-
skij used and popularized the fabula/sujet distinction in a way that re-
tained at least something of Šklovskij’s understanding of it. In the first
edition of his textbook-like Teorija literatury ([1925] 1965, revised
1928), which found a relatively wide readership in Western European
literary studies, a footnote deleted from later editions contains the con-
cise, much-quoted formulation that “in short, the fabula is that ‘which
really was,’ the sujet that ‘how the reader has learnt about it’” ([1925]
1991: 137). In the main text of the work, on the other hand, Tomašev-
skij provides a more nuanced definition of the fabula as “the totality of
motifs in their logical causal-temporal chain” and the sujet as “the total-
ity of the same motifs in that sequence and connectivity in which they
are presented in the work” (Černov 1977: 40). Thus, here and in other
passages of his Teorija literatury, Tomaševskij—in contrast to Šklov-
skij—associates the fabula with the property of causally connected mo-
tifs (in the sense of events). To this extent, it contains more than the
aesthetically indifferent, preliterary happenings, and is, even if
Tomaševskij himself does not say so directly, already part of the artistic
fashioning of the work.

3.2 Story and Plot in the Work of E. M. Forster and other

English-speaking Scholars of the 1920s to the 1940s

Roughly contemporaneously with the Russian formalists, Forster

([1927] 1972) outlined a two-tiered model based on the terms “story”
and “plot.” Forster sees the story as “the lowest and simplest of literary
organisms,” explaining that “it is a narrative of events arranged in their
time sequence—dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday,
decay after death, and so on” ([1927] 1972: 35). As for plot, the follow-
ing comment in the book was soon to become famous: “We have de-
fined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A
 Narrative Constitution 511

plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The

king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then
the queen died of grief,’ is a plot” (93). For Forster, then, the crucial
difference between story and plot lies in the move from simple chro-
nology to causality—in the establishment of a causal relationship be-
tween individual events. If we consider the fabula/sujet opposition of
the formalists with this in mind, it becomes clear that Forster’s model
should not be understood as straightforwardly analogous to the two
terms of Russian origin (Volek 1977: 147–148; Sternberg 1978: 8–14,
for a detailed description of the terms and concepts involved, and Pier
2003: 77–78, for a discussion of the issue of translating Russian fabula
and sujet into English). The concept of sujet has no direct equivalent in
Forster’s work; what Forster refers to with “plot” would seem to corre-
spond to the meaning fabula has for Tomaševskij; and Forster’s con-
cept of story corresponds to what the formalists either consider part of
the fabula but do not name or, like Tomaševskij, say, distinguish from
the fabula and call xronika (“chronicle”; Tomaševskij [1925] 1965:
215).
If we exclude the case of Muir, who refers to plot and story but uses
the terms imprecisely and at times synonymously (e.g. [1928] 1979:
16–17), it was above all the term “plot,” frequently associated with the
Aristotelian concept of muthos, that was soon taken up by other schol-
ars in the English-speaking countries. From the 1930s onward, they
used it as a central category in work on the composition of narrative
works (reconstructions of this process can be found in e.g. García Lan-
da 1998: 48–60). Brooks & Warren provided a widely known defini-
tion: “Plot, we may say, is the structure of an action as it is presented in
a piece of fiction. It is not, we shall note, the structure of an action as
we happen to find it out in the world, but the structure within a story. It
is, in other words, what the teller of the story has done to the action in
order to present it to us” ([1943] 1959: 77).

3.3 Histoire and Discours in French Structuralism and

Classical Narratology

The reception of the texts of Russian formalism in Western Europe be-

gan around the middle of the 20th century. As part of this process,
French structuralism picked up the terms fabula and sujet and replaced
them in the 1960s with the binary oppositions of récit/narration
(Barthes (1966) 1977) and histoire/discours (Todorov [1966] 1980).
The two-layered model of histoire and discours has spread far beyond
the boundaries of French structuralism and stands out as highly suc-
512 Michael Scheffel

cessful from a present-day point of view. It was developed, building on

Tomaševskij ([1925] 1965), by Todorov, a Bulgarian whose academic
background lay in Slavonic studies in Sofia (in fact, Todorov drew the
terms histoire and discours from a model developed by the linguist
Benveniste, who actually uses them to mean something different, name-
ly the contrast to be found in the tense system of French between forms
of narration with and without a clearly apparent speaking entity, dis-
cours and histoire respectively; Benveniste [1959] 1971). Todorov’s
formulation is still potentially compatible with Tomaševskij when he
writes: “At the most general level, the literary work has two aspects: it
is at the same time a story [histoire] and a discourse [discours]. It is
story, in the sense that it evokes a certain reality […]. But the work is at
the same time discourse […]. At this level, it is not the events reported
which count but the manner in which the narrator makes them known to
us” ([1966] 1980: 5).
These same words, though, also suggest that the terms histoire and
discours are not simply translations of fabula and sujet. Apart from var-
ious studies of narrative grammar by Bremond and others (see for ex-
ample Bremond 1964; Greimas [1967] 1970; Todorov 1969), which
stand in the tradition of Propp and concentrate entirely on the constitu-
tion of the histoire, the subsequent use of the terms histoire and dis-
cours in French structuralism and its successors confirms that both the
extension of the two terms and the theoretical framework involved have
been altered in certain ways.
Unlike Šklovskij, say, who associates the sujet with the dynamic na-
ture and special quality of a principle of literary composition, the
French structuralists take discours to mean primarily the result, as it
presents itself in the individual narrative work, of a certain way of me-
diating the set of happenings. Indeed, in contrast to the Russian formal-
ists, histoire and discours are explicitly treated as having equal status:
“the two aspects, the story [histoire] and the discourse [discours], are
both equally literary” (Todorov [1966] 1980: 5). Neither of the two
components has priority over the other, which accords well with the
fact that writers such as Barthes and Genette drew up their narratologi-
cal models against the background of the theory of the linguistic sign
developed by Saussure. They treat the relationship between histoire and
discours as analogous to the dichotomy between signifier and signified.
The two terms are openly understood as having a greater extension,
though. Tomaševskij’s sujet, for example, relates primarily to the order
of events in their literary representation; yet as early as Todorov, dis-
cours subsumes the literary mediation of a set of happenings in its en-
tirety (not just the sequence of events, that is to say, but also such fea-
 Narrative Constitution 513

tures as perspective, style, mode, and so on). And unlike Tomaševskij’s

fabula, which consists only of those parts of the narrated world of rele-
vance to the plot, Todorov’s histoire explicitly contains not just the set
of happenings itself, but also the overarching continuum of the narrated
world, the continuum within which the set of happenings unfolds.
Finally, we may mention Chatman. Building on the development
from Russian formalism to French structuralism just described, he has
concisely described the canonical view of the two-tier model of histoire
and discours in classical narratology as follows: “each narrative has
two parts: a story (histoire), the content or chain of events (actions,
happenings), plus what may be called the existents (characters, items of
setting); and a discourse (discours), that is, the expression, the means
by which the content is communicated. In simple terms, the story is the
what in a narrative that is depicted, discourse the how” (1978: 19; ital-
ics in original). This form of the two-tiered model, upheld in similar
fashion by Prince (1982), was adopted most recently by Martínez and
Scheffel ([1999] 2007). Martínez and Scheffel distinguish between a
level of wie, or “how,” and a level of was, or “what.” The wie, known
as the Darstellung (representation), has two aspects: Erzählung (narra-
tive) and Erzählen (narration). The was is made up of the Handlung
(plot) and erzählte Welt (narrated world). In the field of Handlung,
Martínez and Scheffel distinguish further between Ereignis (event),
Geschehen (happenings), Geschichte (story), and Handlungsschema
(plot schema).

3.4 Three- and Four-Tier Models

Even in the context of French structuralism itself, extensions of or re-

finements to the binary opposition between fabula/histoire on the one
hand and sujet/discours on the other were already being put forward.
For example, Genette ([1972] 1980) outlined a three-part framework to
which he returned in ([1983] 1988). On the one hand, he retains the
term histoire, which he defines as “the signified or narrative content.”
On the other side of the dichotomy, though, Genette replaces discours,
which he criticizes for being heterogeneous, with the terms récit and
narration. By récit, Genette means “the signifier, statement, discourse
or narrative text itself”; by narration, in contrast, he means “the pro-
ducing narrative action and, by extension, the whole of the real or fic-
tional situation in which that action takes place” ([1972] 1980: 27). Ge-
nette’s triad of histoire/récit/narration reappears in the guise of
different terms, but essentially unchanged with respect to content, as
story/text/narration in Rimmon-Kenan ([1983] 2002; similar also is sto-
514 Michael Scheffel

ry/plot/narration in Abbott [2002] 2008). Bal (1977: 6), though, points

out correctly that Genette’s concept of narration operates on a different
logical level from that of the two other concepts: it refers to the activity
of utterance, whereas récit and histoire refer to the result of this activity
(from a theoretical point of view, indeed, Genette did not apply his tri-
adic system consistently: he treats the narration under the heading of
voice as part of the discours; for an alternative model that takes account
of the special features of fictional narration, see Scheffel 1997: 49–54).
Bal ([1985] 1997) seeks to resolve this problem by means of a tripartite
division fabula/story/text in which text refers to the signifiers or surface
structure of the story, which itself refers to the signifiers or surface
structure of the fabula.
Adopting a similar approach to Bal and Volek, who refers in Ger-
man to the triad Fabula/Sujet/Text (Volek 1977: 165), García Landa
distinguishes between three levels of the narrative work in a monograph
that has been influential in the Spanish-speaking countries. These lev-
els, essentially of equal importance, are arranged above one another in
tiers or nested within one another. They are acción (plot), relato (narra-
tive), and discurso narrativo (narrative discourse). By acción, García
Landa means the sequence of narrated events; by relato the presenta-
tion (representación) of the narrated events (i.e. tense and mood in Ge-
nette’s sense; Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of View); and by dis-
curso the presentation of the relato, the transformation of the relato,
that is to say, into a sign system in conjunction with the act of utterance
that is the narración (‘narration’). In this latter level García Landa in-
cludes what Genette covers under voice as well as pragmatic aspects
such as the communication between author and reader (García Landa
1998: esp. 20–21; Alber & Fludernik → Mediacy and Narrative Media-
tion). Unlike Genette and Rimmon-Kenan, who take distinctions in the
field of the discours as the basis for their tripartite models, García Lan-
da’s relato is situated in a borderline region between discours and his-
toire, and he himself treats it as a kind of intersection (a “terreno
commún”) between acción and discurso.
Stierle, meanwhile, makes clear that his proposed triad of Gescheh-
en/Geschichte/Text der Geschichte is grounded in the field of the fabu-
la. Here, Geschehen is the aesthetically neutral narrative material im-
plied by the Geschichte, which is understood as the result of artistic
operations that generate meaning. Text der Geschichte, on the other
hand, resembles the discours of, for example, Todorov in that it in-
cludes both the arrangement of the events as well as the Geschichte as
manifested in a medium (Stierle [1971] 1973).
 Narrative Constitution 515

The concepts of Genette and others on the one hand and those of
Stierle on the other are based on distinctions in the field of the discours
and the fabula, respectively. They are developed further, or indeed in a
sense synthesized, in Schmid’s four-tiered model of Geschehen/Ge-
schichte/Erzählung/Präsentation der Erzählung. Schmid developed his
model at the beginning of the 1980s and has defended it again in the
recent past (1982, 1984, 2005, 2007). According to this framework,
Geschehen is the “implied raw material” for selections whose output
constitutes the Geschichte, understood in the sense of Tomaševskij’s
fabula and Todorov’s histoire (selected happenings in ordo naturalis).
Erzählung, on the other hand, is “the result of the ‘composition’ that
arranges the happenings in an ordo artificialis,” and Präsentation der
Erzählung means the representation of the Geschichte in a particular
medium (the result, that is, of the elocutio; cf. 2005: 241–272). Schmid
treats the Präsentation der Erzählung as a pheno-level, the only level
accessible to empirical observation, whereas the three other levels are
geno-levels that can be arrived at only by means of abstraction. In addi-
tion, Schmid’s model assumes that the four levels can be identified
from changing angles, specifically from the producer’s or recipient’s
side of the narrative work. If we move in an upward direction, an ab-
stract perspective on production takes shape, extending from the Ges-
chehen to the Präsentation der Erzählung; if we move in the opposite
direction, namely downward, a semiotic perspective, the beginnings of
which can also be found in Bal and others, takes shape. Seen from this
latter perspective, the Präsentation der Erzählung is a signifier denot-
ing the signified Erzählung, which itself is a signifier pointing to the
Geschichte as a third level, and so on.

3.5 Narrative Constitution in Historiographical and

Philosophical Theory

In the 1970s, White (1973) adopted the model of narrative constitution

in the formalist and structuralist tradition and applied it to the descrip-
tion of historiographical texts. So, something originally concerned with
literary texts and meant as an abstract model of production—one ab-
stracting away from the actual process by which narratives are made—
is openly applied to non-fictional narratives, their actual genesis, and
their relationship to historical reality. White uses the terms “historical
field,” “chronicle,” “story,” and “emplotment” to describe the genesis
of a historiographical work as follows. Historians are presented with
their material, the elements of the historical field, in the form of events.
The first step involves arranging these events into a chronologically
516 Michael Scheffel

ordered chronicle. The second step involves transforming this chrono-

logical sequence of events into a structured unity in the guise of a story
with beginning, middle, and end; in the process, individual events ac-
quire the function of initial motifs, transitional motifs, and the like.
There then remains the question of the story’s meaning. According to
White, this question involves the problem of explaining the set of hap-
penings in the sense of grasping “the structure of the entire set of events
considered as a completed story” (1973: 7; italics in original). This is
where emplotment comes in, a concept much quoted in the context of
the narrative turn in cultural studies but used somewhat vaguely by
White himself. There is a famous passage in which White defines it
thus: “Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of sto-
ry that has been told is called explanation by emplotment” (1973: 7;
italics in original). For White, then, who does not make a precise theo-
retical distinction between the acts of production and reception, the
meaning of a story takes shape as the historian shapes or discerns a plot
in the story formed on the basis of the chronicle: the events arranged
into a story, that is to say, are subsumed into a particular plot schema
(Emmott & Alexander → Schemata) (“Thus, in telling a story, the his-
torian necessarily reveals a plot;” 1978: 52). Drawing on Frye (1957),
White assumes further that there is a limited number of archetypal
“modes of emplotment” (mythoi in the sense of Frye’s Poetics-based
terminology) that can provide a story with meaning, irrespective of
whether it is a case of literary or non-literary narration. Specifically,
White believes there are four such modes of emplotment: romance,
tragedy, comedy, and satire.
If we recall now the origins of the two-tiered model for works of lit-
erary narrative in Russian formalism, it becomes clear that White in his
Metahistory employs an essentially comparable model of narrative con-
stitution with precisely the opposite objective. Šklovskij develops the
concept of a sujet that should be distinguished from the fabula, and
does so in order to set a certain emphasis by treating the fact of being
artificial as an essential quality of a particular form of narration, specif-
ically literary narration (with Šklovskij seeing the function of this form
of narration as being “to return sensation to our limbs” [(1925) 1991:
6]). White, on the other hand, uses the idea of emplotment, situated on a
level between fabula and sujet, to show that the transformation of hap-
penings into stories necessarily involves a process of making literature;
the signs are that this process is understood as one of fictionalization
(accordingly in this respect, White describes historiographical narration
as “essentially a literary, that is to say fiction-making operation”; 1978:
85).
 Narrative Constitution 517

Ricœur takes an analogous approach to White when, in discussing

narratives, he writes about how a reality that is in and of itself contin-
gent is subjected to a fundamental reshaping by a “synthesis of the het-
erogeneous” in the form of a process of mise en intrigue (rendered as
“emplotment” by his translators). By this, Ricœur means “the operation
that draws a configuration out of a simple succession” ([1983/85]
1984/88, vol. 1: 5); configuration here, similarly to White’s emplot-
ment, is linked to the Aristotelian concept of muthos, a story, that is to
say, in the sense of a whole with beginning, middle, and end. Thus, for
Ricœur, too, it is a fundamental fact that narratives of every kind have
the nature of creative constructions. In the context of the “narrative
hermeneutics” (Meuter 1994) outlined by Ricœur, though, the relation-
ship between happenings and narrative should be conceived of not
simply in the sense of an unbridgeable gap but, in so far as the happen-
ings are concerned with human action, in the sense of a special kind of
mutual relationship. The following ideas from Ricœur’s complex theo-
retical approach are significant where the issue of narrative constitution
is concerned. Ricœur links the principle of configuration to the Aristo-
telian concept of mimesis and distinguishes between three levels, which
he identifies as mimesis I, mimesis II, and mimesis III. Mimesis II re-
fers to the structure and medium of the narrative, ultimately, that is, to
Todorov’s discours or Schmid’s Erzählung and Präsentation der Er-
zählung. Mimesis I and mimesis III, on the other hand, involve that on
which the narrative depends and that to which it gives rise. Roughly
speaking, in other words, mimesis I (prefiguration) concerns the world
in which people act and the models for their actions; mimesis II (con-
figuration) relates more or less directly to that world; and mimesis III
(refiguration) concerns the recipient’s realization of the mise en intrigue
manifested in mimesis II. The recipient here is himself influenced more
or less directly in his activity (including the models that determine his
image of himself and of the world in which people act) by the reception
of mimesis II.
Thus, in contrast to the structural models of narrative constitution
belonging to the formalist and structuralist tradition, Ricœur’s idea of a
narrative hermeneutics does far more than identify the formal construc-
tion of narratives. Furthermore, his perspective on the question of nar-
rative constitution, widened as it is by the idea of interplay between
experience and narrative, reveals new angles of research for a context-
based narratology with an interest in the pragmatics of narrative: “For a
semiotic theory, the only operative concept is that of the literary text.
Hermeneutics, however, is concerned with reconstructing the entire arc
of operations by which practical experience provides itself with works,
518 Michael Scheffel

authors, and readers. […] What is at stake, therefore, is the process by

which the textual configuration mediates between the prefiguration of
the practical field and its refiguration through the reception of the
work” ([1983/85] 1984/88, vol. 1: 53).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The place of voice as a text- and fiction-internal pragmatic dimen-

sion of the narrative in models of narrative constitution has not to date
been properly described where fictional narration is concerned. (b) If
we follow Ricœur in considering the problem of narrative constitution
in the broader sense of a narrative hermeneutics, we are presented with
a wide range of questions to be tackled both by empirical studies of the
interplay between human experience and narrative and by work on its
theoretical foundations.

(Translated by Alastair Matthews)

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 Narrative Empathy
Suzanne Keen

1 Definition

Narrative empathy is the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking in-

duced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of anoth-
er’s situation and condition. Narrative empathy plays a role in the aes-
thetics of production when authors experience it (Taylor et al. 2002–03:
361, 376–377), in mental simulation during reading, in the aesthetics of
reception when readers experience it, and in the narrative poetics of
texts when formal strategies invite it. Narrative empathy overarches
narratological categories, involving actants, narrative situation, matters
of pace and duration, and storyworld features such as settings. The di-
versity of the narratological concepts involved (addressed in more de-
tail below) suggests that narrative empathy should not simply be equat-
ed with character identification nor exclusively verified by readers’
reports of identification. (Character identification may invite narrative
empathy; alternatively, spontaneous empathy with a fictional character
may precede identification; Keen 2007: 169.) Empathetic effects of nar-
rative have been theorized by literary critics, philosophers, and psy-
chologists, and they have been evaluated by means of experiments in
discourse processing, empirical approaches to narrative impact, and
through introspection.

2 Explication

Nonfictional narrative genres may involve narrative empathy, but most

of the published commentary and theorizing on narrative empathy cen-
ters on fictional narratives, especially novels and film fiction, and to a
lesser degree, drama. Brecht’s disdain for the evocation of audience
empathy in favor of estrangement effects has had a lasting legacy, de-
pressing the theorizing of reception in performance studies. Individual
dramatists, directors, and actors may nonetheless draw on empathy in
the form of motor mimicry; some spectators experience the transactions
522 Suzanne Keen

of feeling states involved in empathy, including real-world motor mim-

icry and emotional contagion (Zillman 1995). Individual readers testify
to greater or lesser intensities of emotional fusion with nonfictional
subjects of autobiography, memoir, and history, contrasted with fiction-
al characters. Whether non-fiction arouses greater or lesser empathy in
individuals and in larger populations of readers and viewers is a ques-
tion for future empirical work. The remainder of this entry focuses on
narrative fiction, since empathy is most often discussed in relation to
the impact of fictional worlds on readers.
Narrative empathy differs from two related but distinct phenomena:
sympathy and the empathetic aversion that psychologists label personal
distress. Sympathy refers to an emotion felt for a target that relates to
but does not match the target’s feeling. (“I feel for you” rather than “I
feel with you.”) Sometimes called empathetic concern, sympathy may
or may not follow on an experience of narrative empathy. While in
readers’ narrative empathy shared feeling enables a living reader to
catch the emotions and sensations of a representation (in other-directed
attention), personal distress caused by unpleasant discordant empathetic
sharing results in an aversive reaction (self-directed focus) (Eisenberg
2005). Extreme personal distress in response to narrative usually inter-
rupts and sometimes terminates the narrative transaction: the distressed
responder puts the book down, leaves the theater, or turns off the
transmission.
The psychologists who study narrative empathy in laboratory set-
tings have identified key features of narrative fictional texts, including
high levels of imagery inviting mental simulation and immersion, that
dispose readers to making subjective reports of being transported or of
“having left the real world behind while visiting narrative worlds”
(Gerrig 1993: 157). The phenomenology of transportation is taken to be
a fact of readers’ immersion; Miall explicitly links empathy with im-
mersion (Miall 2009: 240–244). Mar and Oatley argue that “imagined
settings and characters evoked by fiction literature likely engage the
same areas of the brain as those used during the performance of parallel
actions and perceptions” (Mar & Oatley 2008: 180), an argument that
has received experimental support from research in cognitive neurosci-
ence on mirror neurons.
Since narrative empathy involves sharing feelings as well as sensa-
tions of immersion, it is reasonable to inquire into the status of emo-
tions involved in fiction. The evocation of real emotions by fictional
narratives, a topic of controversy in philosophy (Yanal 1999), raises the
question of the status of “fictional emotions” as opposed to the drivers
of narrativity: curiosity, suspense, and surprise (Sternberg 1992: 529).
 Narrative Empathy 523

Dewey lays the groundwork for discussion of fictional emotions in his

broader statement (about all the arts) that “esthetic emotion is native
emotion transformed through the objective material to which is has
committed its development and consummation” (Dewey 1985: 85).
This definition of esthetic emotion allows for a range of feelings, not
limited to aesthetic pleasure in form and catharsis. As Yanal later
writes, “Whether we are purged, pleasured, or made flexible from emo-
tions matters little. […] Some emoters may aim at catharsis in seeking
out fiction, some at affective flexibility, others at pleasurable stimula-
tion. Any of these counts as an end that renders emotion coherent”
(1999: 30). The “paradox of fiction” questions whether genuine emo-
tion can be felt in response to a fictitious character or event (Dadlez
1997; Hjort & Laver 1997). Readers do often become emotionally in-
volved or immersed in fictional worlds, even when they are aware of
the illusion of fictionality (Yanal 1999: 11). Some modes of fiction,
such as postmodern novels, employ devices such as metalepsis deliber-
ately to disrupt readers’ immersion, but belief in an aesthetic illusion, or
realistic representation, is not required for empathy to occur.
Gerrig (1993) argues that readers naturally experience narrative in-
formation as continuous with information gleaned from real experience
and thus must exert themselves consciously to regard fictive narratives
as fictional. In a follow-up study, Gerrig and Rapp (2004) suggest that
real readers must make an active effort to disbelieve the reality of fic-
tive narratives, in contradistinction from Coleridge’s willing suspension
of disbelief. Narrative empathy evidences Gerrig’s contention despite
the paradox of fictional emotions, for narrative empathy transacts feel-
ings through narrative representations. Readers and viewers can block
feeling responses to fiction by reminding themselves of its unreality,
but it takes an effort, according to Gerrig and Rapp.
Narrative empathy can be situated in both authors and readers. Au-
thors’ empathy bears on fictional worldmaking and character creation.
It may influence writers’ choices about narrative techniques, evincing a
desire to evoke an empathetic response in the narrative audience, even
though exercise of these choices does not necessarily imply didactic
intentions or a bid for an altruistic response in the real world. That fic-
tion- writers as a group exhibit fantasy empathy (as measured by Da-
vis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index [Davis 1980]) and test higher for
empathy than the general population has been demonstrated by Taylor
(Taylor et al. 2002–03). At the creative end of the narrative transaction,
authors’ empathy is likely a core element of the narrative imagination,
though much remains to be discovered about narrative artists’ personal-
ities and practices. Authors’ empathy does not directly correspond to
524 Suzanne Keen

readers’ empathy, arising from, receiving, or co-creating narratives.

That is, while authors show signs of engaging in fantasy empathy (Da-
vis 1980: 10, 85) when in the process of creating fictional worlds, read-
ers of the resultant narrative may respond with fantasy empathy for
their own reasons, not necessarily matching authors’ strategic narrative
empathizing (Keen 2008: 478–479). As empirical research in discourse
processing reveals, individual readers respond variously to narrative
texts, depending on their identities, situations, experiences, and temper-
aments (Keen 2011b).
Because empathy is a feeling experienced by real people, narrative
empathy arises in the process of narrative dynamics, or the movement
from beginning to end of the discourse (Richardson 2002: 1). Character
identification of readers with fictional characters, within and across
boundaries of group identification, may influence their experiences of
narrative empathy, though it may also precede subsequent character
identification (Keen 2007: 169). Some of the techniques thought to
evoke empathetic responses have been described in narratological terms
(e.g., free indirect speech, narrative situations, etc.; Keen 2007: 92–99),
though caution should be taken not to oversimplify predictions about
the effects of particular narrative techniques, which are protean (cf.
Sternberg 1982). The empathetic dispositions that readers bring to the
text have an impact on the efficacy of particular techniques. For in-
stance, empathetic individuals tend to better grasp the causal relations
between narrated events in fiction (Bourg 1996) than those testing low
in empathy.
Specific narrative techniques of fiction and film narrative have been
associated with empathetic effects (Keen 2006: 216). These techniques
include manipulations of narrative situation to channel perspective or
person of the narration and representation of fictional characters’ con-
sciousness (Schneider 2001), point of view (Andringa et al. 2001), and
paratexts of fictionality (Keen 2007: 88–89). Other elements thought to
be involved in readers’ empathy include vivid use of settings and trav-
ersing of boundaries (Friedman 1998), metalepsis, serial repetition of
narratives set in a stable storyworld (Warhol 2003), lengthiness (Nuss-
baum 1990), encouraging immersion or transportation of readers (Nell
1988), generic conventions (Jameson 1981), metanarrative interjections
(Fludernik 2003; Nünning 2001, 2004), and devices such as fore-
grounding (Miall 1989), disorder, or defamiliarization that slow reading
pace (Zillman 1991). Most of the existing empirical research on empa-
thetic effects in narration concerns film (Tan 1996; Zillman 1991) alt-
hough a number of researchers are investigating potentially empathy-
inducing techniques using short fiction. Novels and stage drama are
 Narrative Empathy 525

least studied empirically (though often theorized about), their length

and performance conditions being, respectively, at odds with the cur-
rent modes of empirical verification.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

“Empathy” has often been conflated with its subset, “narrative empa-
thy.” After a brief discussion on empathy, this account focuses on nar-
rative empathy. For a history of the idea under the term empathy (the
English translation of Einfühlung, or “feeling into”), emerging out of
late 19th-century German psychological aesthetics, see Wispé (1987).
The projected feeling of empathy involves responses not only to sen-
tient beings, but also to inanimate objects and landscape features. It
separates aspects of motor mimicry, emotional contagion, and fusion of
feelings from the older term sympathy, “feeling for” or compassion.
The literary implications of sympathy have been contested throughout
the centuries (Keen 2007: 37–64). In contemporary philosophy and
psychology (Batson 2011), as well as in popular usage, the definitions
of empathy and sympathy remain entangled.
Narrative empathy is often thematized in texts through direct repre-
sentation of mind-reading “empaths” (Star Trek’s Deanna Troi [Rod-
denberry 1987–94], Octavia Butler’s Lauren Olamina [1993]) or dis-
cussion of successes or failures of empathy on the part of fictional
characters (e.g., the contrast between Ender and Valentine in Orson
Scott Card’s Ender’s Game [1985]). Most usage of the term “empathy”
in relation to narrative occurs in 20th-century works of literary criticism
(e.g., Hogan 2001), especially in reference to Victorian, postcolonial,
ethnic, and woman-authored fiction. Commentators on narrative ethics
have often linked fictional representation of empathy (or failures of
empathy) with empathy experienced by real readers. The situation of an
individual reader with respect to authors’ strategic empathizing depends
in part on aspects of identity and narration. When readers’ attitudes al-
ter, or when they receive tacit or explicit encouragement to undertake
altruistic action on behalf of represented others for whom they feel nar-
rative empathy, the impact can be considered an aspect of ethics in nar-
rative discourse.
Nussbaum (1990) argues that narrative empathy resulting from nov-
el reading forms good world citizens. Further, it has been suggested by
philosophers and developmental psychologists that experiences of nar-
rative empathy contribute to readers’ moral development (Hoffman
2000). Some commentators assume that the empathy-altruism hypothe-
526 Suzanne Keen

sis regarding real-life human empathy and pro-social behavior (Batson

et al. 2009) applies to narrative empathy, especially as it helps readers
overcome bias (Harrison 2008, 2011). Keen criticizes accounts of nar-
rative empathy that insist on moral efficacy as an outcome of reading,
arguing that narrative empathy does not often lead to documented altru-
istic action (Keen 2007: 145). Patrick Colm Hogan argues that empathy
for characters is inseparable from literary reading experiences and sug-
gests that Keen holds narrative empathy to an unreasonably high stand-
ard of “moral heroism” (Hogan 2010: 267). However, Keen does not
introduce the standard, deriving it rather from the discussions of Nuss-
baum, Hoffman, and others. Even so, empathy may be strategically em-
ployed in narrative for purposes of ideological manipulation. The
Machiavellian use of empathy is well documented in real life as well as
in fictions such as Ender’s Game.
A contribution to rhetorical narratology, Keen’s theory of narrative
empathy elaborates the uses to which real authors/narrative artists put
their human empathy to work in imaginative character-creation and in
other aspects of worldmaking, as well as theorizing readers’ responses
(Keen 2006). Rhetorical narratology takes an interest in effects on read-
ers, especially with regards to persuasion. While no narrative text con-
sistently inspires empathy in all its readers, who vary in dispositional
empathy (Keen 2007: 89) and in their official and unofficial positions
with respect to the text (Goffman 1956), study of the responses of read-
ers belonging to different audiences reveals narrative empathy in ac-
tion. A subset of narrative empathy, readers’ empathy leads to differen-
tiation in terms of belonging (Keen 2011a). Bounded strategic empathy
addresses members of in-groups. Ambassadorial strategic empathy ad-
dresses members of more temporally, spatially, or culturally remote
audiences. Broadcast strategic empathy calls upon all readers to experi-
ence emotional fusion through empathetic representations of universal
human experiences and generalizable responses to particular situations
(Keen 2008). Narrative empathy designates an affective element of the
operations investigated by cognitive narratology. A subset of narrative
empathy, readers’ empathy leads to differentiation of readers in terms
of their belonging to in-groups addressed directly by authors hoping to
evoke empathy.
Empirical verification of claims made by narratologists about narra-
tive empathy have been investigated in collaboration with specialists in
discourse processing (Miall 2006) and psychologists who study persua-
sion and impact (Mazzocco et al. 2010). Research into narrative empa-
thy in cognitive science has investigated the role of emotions, including
empathy, in narrative processing (Mar & Oatley et al. 2011). Narrative
 Narrative Empathy 527

empathy has also been studied in relation to experientiality (Fludernik

1996), immersion (Ryan 2001), mental imaging, and altruism (Johnson
2011).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Keen (2007: 169–171) lists twenty-seven hypotheses about narrative

empathy that could be further theorized and, in some cases, tested em-
pirically in collaboration with psychologists, social neuroscientists, and
experts in discourse processing. Comparison of narrative empathy elic-
ited by drama, film, and non-fiction could supplement existing research
on narrative empathy and prose fiction. If a long-term study could be
undertaken, longitudinal and comparative studies of groups of real
readers would supplement the existing research on the impact of narra-
tive empathy on beliefs and prosocial behavior. In any case, further re-
search into narrative empathy will be best served by cross-disciplinary
conversation and interdisciplinary collaboration.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Andringa, Els et al. (2001). “Point of View and Viewer Empathy in Film.” W. van Peer
& S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY
P, 83–99.
Batson, C. Daniel (2011). “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct
Phenomena.” J. Decety & William Ickes (eds.). The Social Neuroscience of Em-
pathy. Cambridge: MIT P, 3–15.
– et al. (2009). “Empathy and Altruism.” C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (eds.). Oxford
Handbook of Positive Psychology, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 417–426.
Bourg, Tammy (1996). “The Role of Emotion, Empathy, and Text Structure in Chil-
dren’s and Adults’ Narrative Text Comprehension.” R. Kreuz & M. S. MacNealy
(eds.). Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics. Norwood: Ablex,
241–260.
Butler, Octavia (1993). Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
Card, Orson Scott (1985). Ender ’s Game. New York: Tor Books.
Dadlez, E. M. (1997). What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions.
University Park: Pennsylvania State UP.
Davis, Mark H. (1980). “A Multidimensional Approach to Individual Differences in
Empathy.” JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology 10, 85.
528 Suzanne Keen

Dewey, John (1985). Art as Experience. The Later Works. Vol. 10. J. A. Boydston
(ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.
Eisenberg, Nancy (2005). “The Development of Empathy-Related Responding.” G.
Carlo & C. P. Edwards (eds.). Moral Motivation through the Life Span. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P, 73–117.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
– (2003). “Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscusivity to
Metanarration and Metafiction.” Poetica 35, 1–39.
Friedman, Susan Stanford (1998). Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies
of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Gerrig, Richard J. (1993). Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activ-
ities of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP.
– & David N. Rapp (2004).“Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact.”
Poetics Today 25, 265–281.
Goffman, Erving (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: U of
Edinburgh P.
Harrison, Mary-Catherine (2008). “The Paradox of Fiction and the Ethics of Empathy:
Reconceiving Dickens’s Realism.” Narrative 16, 256–278.
Harrison, Mary-Catherine (2011). “How Narrative Relationships Overcome Empathic
Bias: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Empathy Across Social Difference.” Poetics Today 32,
255–288.
Hjort, Mette & Sue Laver (eds.) (1997). Emotion and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Hoffman, Martin (2000). Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring
and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Hogan, Patrick Colm (2001). “The Epilogue of Suffering: Heroism, Empathy, Ethics.”
SubStance 30, 119–143.
– (2010). What Literature Teaches us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Jameson, Frederic (1981). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Johnson, Dan (2011). “Transportation into a Story Increases Empathy, Prosocial Be-
havior, and Perceptual Bias Toward Fearful Expressions.” Personality and Indi-
vidual Differences 52: 150–155.
Keen, Suzanne (2006). “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative 14, 209–236.
– (2007). Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP.
– (2008). “Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and
Broadcast Strategic Empathy.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissen-
schaft und Geistesgeschichte 82, 477–493.
– (2011a). “Empathetic Hardy: Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies
of Narrative Empathy.“ Poetics Today 32, 349–389.
Keen, Suzanne (2011b). “Readers’ Temperament and Fictional Character.” New Liter-
ary History 42, 295–314.
Mar, Raymond A. & Keith Oatley (2008). “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction
and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3,
173–192.
– et al. (2011). “Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before, dur-
ing, and after reading.” Cognition & Emotion 25, 818–833.
 Narrative Empathy 529

Mazzocco, Philip et al. (2010). “‘This story is not for everyone’: Transportability and
narrative persuasion.” Social Psychology and Personality Science 1, 36–68.
Miall, David S. (1989). “Beyond the Schema Given: Affective Comprehension of Lit-
erary Narratives.” Cognition and Emotion 3, 55–78.
– (2006). Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies. New York: Lang.
– (2009). “Neuroaesthetics of Literary Reading.” M. Skov & O. Vartanian (eds.).
Neuroaesthetics. Amityville: Baywood Publishing, 233–247.
Nell, Victor (1988). Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. New
Haven: Yale UP.
Nünning, Ansgar (2001). “Mimesis des Erzählens: Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsäs-
thetik, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte des Akts des Erzählens und der Me-
tanarration.” J. Helbig (ed.). Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert:
Narratologische Studien aus Anlass des 65. Geburtstags von Wilhelm Füger.
Heidelberg: Winter, 13–47.
– (2004). “On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology and an Outline of
the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary.” J. Pier (ed.). The Dynamics of Nar-
rative Form. Studies in Anglo-American Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter, 11–57.
Nussbaum, Martha C. (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
Richardson, Brian (2002). “General Introduction.” B. Richardson (ed.). Narrative Dy-
namics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Columbus: Ohio State UP,
1–7.
Roddenberry, Gene (1987–94). “Troi, Deanna.” Star Trek: The Next Generation.
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/troi. Accessed 20 December 2011.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in
Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Schneider, Ralf (2001). “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dy-
namics of Mental-Model Construction.” Style 35, 607–642.
Sternberg, Meir (1982). “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Re-
ported Discourse,” Poetics Today 3, 107–156.
– (1992). “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity.” Poetics To-
day 13, 463–541.
Tan, Ed S. (1996). Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion
Machine. Hilldale: Erlbaum.
Taylor, Marjorie et al. (2002–03). “The illusion of independent agency: Do adult fic-
tion writers experience their characters as having minds of their own?” Imagina-
tion, Cognition & Personality 22, 361–380.
Warhol, Robyn (2003). Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture
Forms. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Wispé, Lauren (1987). “History of the Concept of Empathy.” N. Eisenberg & J. Strayer
(eds.). Empathy and its Development. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 17–37.
Yanal, Robert J. (1999). The Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction. University Park:
Pennsylvania State UP, 9–11.
530 Suzanne Keen

Zillman, Dolf (1991). “Empathy: Affect from Bearing Witness to the Emotions of Oth-
ers.” D. Zillman & J. B. Bryant (eds.). Responding to the Screen: Reception and
Reaction Processes. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 135–167.
– (1995). “Mechanisms of Emotional Involvement with Drama.” Poetics 23, 33–51.

5.2 Further Reading

Breger, Claudia & Fritz Breithaupt, eds. (2010). Empathie und Erzählung. Freiburg:
Rombach.
Breithaupt, Fritz (2009). Kulturen der Empathie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Coplan, Amy & Peter Goldie, eds. (2011). Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological
Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Decety, Jean & William Ickes, eds. (2011). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy.
Cambridge: MIT P.
Keen, Suzanne (2011). “Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions.” Special Issue, Nar-
rative and the Emotions. Poetics Today 32, 1–53.
Oatley, Keith (1994). “A Taxonomy of the Emotions of Literary Response and a Theo-
ry of Identification in Fictional Narrative.” Poetics 23, 53–74.
 Narrative Ethics
James Phelan

1 Definition

Narrative ethics explores the intersections between the domain of sto-

ries and storytelling and that of moral values. Narrative ethics regards
moral values as an integral part of stories and storytelling because nar-
ratives themselves implicitly or explicitly ask the question, “How
should one think, judge, and act—as author, narrator, character, or au-
dience—for the greater good?”

2 Explication

2.1 Characteristic Questions and Positions

Investigations into narrative ethics have been diverse and wide-ranging,

but they can be usefully understood as focused on one or more of four
issues: (1) the ethics of the told; (2) the ethics of the telling; (3) the eth-
ics of writing/producing; and (4) the ethics of reading/reception.
Questions about the ethics of the told focus on characters and
events. Sample questions: What are the ethical dimensions of charac-
ters’ actions, especially the conflicts they face and the choices they
make about those conflicts? What are the ethical dimensions of any one
character’s interactions with other characters? How does a narrative’s
plot signal its stance on the ethical issues faced by its characters?
Questions about the ethics of the telling focus on text-internal mat-
ters involving implied authors, narrators, and audiences. Sample ques-
tions: What are the ethical responsibilities, if any, of storytellers to their
audiences? What are the ethical dimensions of the narrative’s tech-
niques? How does the use of these techniques imply and convey the
values underlying the relations of the storytellers (implied authors and
narrators) to their materials (events and characters) and their audiences
(narratees, implied readers, actual audiences)? (Schmid → Implied Au-
532 James Phelan

thor; Margolin → Narrator; Schmid → Narratee; Schmid → Implied

Reader)
Questions about the ethics of writing/producing focus on text-
external matters involving actual authors, film directors, or other con-
structing agents. Sample questions: What, if any, are the ethical obliga-
tions of the constructive agents of the narrative to its materials? For
example, what obligations, if any, does a memoir writer have to other
people whose experiences s/he narrates? What responsibilities, if any,
does a filmmaker adapting a novel have to that novel and its author?
What are the ethical implications of choosing to tell one kind of story
rather than another in a given historical context? For example, what are
the ethics of a fiction writer living under a repressive regime refusing to
write about those socio-political conditions? Does developing a narra-
tive about one’s own life help one become a better, more ethically
sound person?
Questions about the ethics of reading/reception focus on issues
about audiences and the consequences of their engagements with narra-
tives. Sample questions: What, if any, are the ethical obligations of the
audience to the narrative itself, to its materials, and to its author? What,
if any, are the consequences of an audience’s success or failure in meet-
ing those obligations? Does reading narrative help one become a better,
more ethically sound, person? (Prince → Reader)
These four kinds of questions roughly correspond to four ethical po-
sitions occupied by the main agents involved in stories and storytelling
(and again individual investigations vary in how many of these posi-
tions they focus on and which ones they make most important): (1)
those of characters in relation to each other and to the situations they
face; (2) those of the narrator(s) in relation to the characters and to the
narratee(s); (3) those of the implied author in relation to the characters,
the narrator(s), and the implied and actual audiences; (4) those of actual
audience members (and the ethical beliefs they bring to the reading ex-
perience) in response to the first three ethical positions.
These questions and positions shed light on the common claim by
ethical critics that their investigations are different from “reading for
the moral message,” since such reading has as its goal extracting a neat-
ly packaged lesson from the ethics of the told (e.g. Macbeth teaches us
about the evils of ambition). Attending to these four kinds of question
and these four positions opens up the multi-layered intersections of nar-
rative and moral values, even in narratives such as John Bunyan’s Pil-
grim’s Progress and George Orwell’s Animal Farm that offer clear an-
swers to questions about the ethics of the told.
 Narrative Ethics 533

2.2 Literary Ethics and Narrative Ethics

Where literary ethics is broadly concerned with the relation between

literature and moral values, narrative ethics is specifically concerned
with the intersection between various formal aspects of narrative and
moral values. Thus, narrative ethics is both broader (including in its
domain nonliterary narrative) and narrower (excluding from its domain
nonnarrative texts) than literary ethics. At the same time, narrative eth-
ics can be usefully seen as a recent development in the larger trajectory
of literary ethics, one beginning in the late 1980s (cf. chap. 3 below).

2.3 Narrative Ethics in Relation to Politics and Aesthetics

The four questions and positions of narrative ethics shed light on how
inquiries into narrative ethics can overlap with or be distinct from in-
quiries in two related domains, the politics of narrative and the aesthet-
ics of narrative. Where ethics is concerned with moral values, politics is
concerned with power, especially as it is acquired, exercised, and re-
sponded to by governments, institutions, social groups, and individuals.
Since, in any given acquisition or deployment of power, moral values
will inevitably come into play, ethics can be a lens through which some
aspects of politics get examined. In addition, since an individual’s or a
group’s application of moral values in any given situation may well be
influenced by issues of power, politics can be a lens through which
(some aspects of) ethical behavior are examined. In narrative ethics,
then, all four categories of questions can include (but are not limited to)
questions about the politics of narrative. For example, in Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice, the ethics of the told include Darcy’s struggle be-
tween his love for Elizabeth and his knowledge that her family is so-
cially inferior to his; the ethics of the telling include Austen’s decision
to convey the action largely through the consciousness of her young
female protagonist rather than, say, through the older, wealthier, and
more socially powerful Darcy. The ethics of writing include Austen’s
focusing on the adventures of the Bennet sisters in the marriage market
rather than on the actions of, say, male characters involved in the delib-
erations of Parliament; and the ethics of reading/reception include
whether and how readers can legitimately claim Austen as a feminist. In
terms of positions, the fourth one is where the overlap between ethics
and politics will be most immediately evident, as, for example, when an
individual reader’s political stance against marriage as an instrument of
patriarchy would lead her to find fault with the ethics of the told in
Austen’s novel.
534 James Phelan

Aesthetics is concerned with beauty, or, more generally, the excel-

lence of an art work (or, indeed, of any human construction). The fre-
quent overlap between narrative ethics and narrative aesthetics becomes
evident when ethical deficiencies in the told or the telling mar the ex-
cellence of a narrative. For example, when in the final chapters of Ad-
ventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain has Huck go along with
Tom Sawyer’s “Evasion” and the various ways it dehumanizes Jim,
Twain introduces a deficiency that is simultaneously ethical and aes-
thetic. The Huck who has come to recognize and respect Jim’s humani-
ty ought not to condone Jim’s dehumanization. Because Twain does not
signal anything but approval for Huck’s behavior, this section of the
novel introduces deficiencies in both the ethics of the told and of the
telling. These deficiencies simultaneously weaken the aesthetics of the
novel because they erode the power of the narrative’s climactic moment
(Huck’s decision to go to hell) and verge on making Huck an incoher-
ent character.
Nevertheless, the overlap between narrative ethics and narrative aes-
thetics is not complete, as becomes evident in cases where ethics seem
deficient but aesthetics do not. For example, many readers find the eth-
ics of the told in Nabokov’s Lolita to be abhorrent even as they admire
the beauty of the novel’s style.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Literary Ethics in Antiquity

Although narrative ethics emerged as a clearly identified realm of study

only in the 1980s, the interest in literature’s capacity to influence its
audience for good or for ill goes back to Plato and Aristotle. Neither
philosopher explicitly uses the term ethics in his discussion of litera-
ture, but each implicitly recognizes ethics as a substantial part of its
appeal to audiences. In addition, the commentaries of the two philoso-
phers provide striking examples of how ethics and aesthetics may over-
lap and of how a theorist’s understanding of ethics is often part and
parcel of a broader philosophical vision. In The Republic, Plato (1998a:
Book X) explains the defects of poetry (by poetry is meant lyric, epic,
and drama) from the perspective of his ontological theory of forms, but
that perspective has implications for the ethics of the told. Plato claims
that poetry is twice removed from the truth: poetry imitates objects in
the actual world, but these objects are themselves imitations of the ideal
forms. A republic that welcomed such imitations would be doing its
 Narrative Ethics 535

citizens an ethical disservice. In Ion (1998b), Plato contends that poetry

has inherent deficiencies in the ethics of the telling that can lead to de-
ficiencies in the ethics of the told: because poetry appeals to its audi-
ence’s emotions more than their reason, it can lead its audience to erro-
neous conclusions about what is good.
Although Aristotle devoted a separate treatise to Ethics (actually,
two treatises, the Eudemian Ethics (1952) and the Nicomachean Ethics
(2002), the second a revision of the first), he also implicitly assigned
ethics an important role in the Poetics (1920). He defined tragedy with
reference to its emotional effect on the audience: a representation of an
action that arouses pity and fear and culminates in catharsis, i.e. the
purging of those emotions. Aristotle’s thinking about each part of trag-
edy follows from this conception of its overall nature, and that thinking
often includes an understanding of the intertwining of aesthetics and
ethics, especially the ethics of the told. His discussion of character of-
fers a clear example. The optimal tragic protagonist is a man who is
neither extraordinarily virtuous nor extraordinarily immoral and who
comes to misfortune not through some major moral failing but as a re-
sult of misjudgment. Such a protagonist will evoke fear (because he is
like us) and pity (because his misfortune is greater than his ethical
character warrants). In this way, Aristotle indicates that the aesthetic
quality of tragedy is dependent on the ethical character of the protago-
nist.

3.2 Literary Ethics before “The Theory Revolution” of the 1970s

After Plato and Aristotle and before the rise of formal criticism in the
20th century, treatises on literature most often focused on the relation
of text to world, as commentators continually returned to the concept of
imitation. But many treatises, beginning with Horace’s Ars Poetica
(1998), and its dictum that the purpose of literature is to instruct and to
delight, also found a place for ethics. By linking the two purposes, Hor-
ace emphasized the interaction of the ethics of the told (and its role in
instruction) and the ethics of the telling (and its role in delight). To take
just two more examples in this tradition, Sidney ([1595] 1998) put eth-
ics front and center, as he argued that literature is superior to both histo-
ry and philosophy because it has the greater capacity to lead its audi-
ences to virtuous action. And Arnold ([1880] 1998) contended that
poetry would one day take the place of religion and philosophy because
the best poetry skillfully intertwines aesthetics and ethics.
During the first sixty-plus years of the 20th century, three of the four
prominent formalisms—Russian formalism, the New Criticism, and
536 James Phelan

French narratology—moved ethics into the background of literary theo-

ry/narrative theory, as they highlighted questions about either the dis-
tinctiveness of literature (Russian formalism and New Criticism) or
about narrative as a system of signification. The fourth formalism, Chi-
cago neo-Aristotelianism, is a notable exception, as will be discussed
below. For the Russian formalists, the distinctiveness of literature re-
sides in its ability to sharpen perceptions by defamiliarizing literature’s
represented objects. As Šklovskij ([1925] 1990: 5) put it, “Automatiza-
tion eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at fear
of war. [I]n order to return sensation to our limbs, to make us feel ob-
jects, to make a stone stony, man has been given the tool of art.” Litera-
ture is the art that defamiliarizes through its distinctive uses of language
and through other formal innovations.
The New Critics, whose program became the dominant paradigm in
the Anglo-American context between the end of World War II and the
late 1960s, identified literariness as inherent in literary language with
its capacity for generating complex meanings. More generally, the New
Critics conceived of the literary text as an autonomous structure of lan-
guage, independent of authorial intention and reader response, and they
regarded the successful work as a verbal icon whose beauty arises from
the balance achieved by artful juxtapositions of linguistic ambiguities
and ironies (cf. Wimsatt & Beardsley [1946a] 1954a, [1946b] 1954b);
Brooks 1947; Wellek & Warren [1949] 1956). Such balance, the New
Critics argued, captures truths overlooked by the denotative language of
the sciences.
Although neither school explicitly addressed questions of ethics,
their programs imply some concern with the ethics of the told and the
ethics of the telling—and another illustration of overlap between aes-
thetics and ethics. The effects of defamiliarization—moving readers
from automatization to fresh perceptions of the world—clearly have an
ethical dimension, and since those effects depend on techniques of var-
ious kinds, this aesthetic program also implies an interest in the ethics
of the telling. The New Critics’ emphasis on the complex truths con-
veyed by literary language implies a similar double interest in the ethics
of the told and the ethics of the telling.
The French narratologists of the 1960s and 1970s were concerned
with neither aesthetics nor ethics, but, as heirs to the Russian formalists,
with narrative “as an autonomous object of inquiry” (Ryan 2005: 344).
Working within the scope of Saussurean semiology and adopting struc-
tural linguistics as a “pilot-science,” they sought to explore the modes
of signification of narrative in all its forms as an international, transhis-
 Narrative Ethics 537

torical and transcultural phenomenon (cf. Barthes [1966] 1977: 20;

Meister → Narratology).
Not surprisingly, the Chicago neo-Aristotelians followed Aristotle in
making ethics an important implicit part of their approach. Dissatisfied
with what they saw as the limitations of the New Critical conception of
literature as a special kind of language, they looked back to the Poetics
and asked how it would have to be revised in order to account for the
very different kinds of literary works that had been written since Aristo-
tle’s day. Retaining Aristotle’s interest in the affective components of
form, they implicitly gave ethical judgments, arising from the ethics of
the told and of the telling and how they positioned the audience in rela-
tion to characters, a significant role in the trajectory of emotional re-
sponses generated by plots. Thus, Crane (1952) shows how readers’
expectations and desires in Tom Jones are a function of multiple factors
(including Fielding’s careful control of the disclosure of the truth about
Tom’s parentage), the general pattern of the action (Tom repeatedly
gets in and out of increasingly serious scrapes), and the ethical judg-
ments Fielding builds into his representation of his characters. Through
these means, Fielding generates the “comic analogue” of fear before
fulfilling the audience’s desires and bringing the ethically admirable
Tom to his happy union with the similarly admirable Sophia Western.
Building on Crane’s work and putting even more emphasis on the posi-
tions of authors and readers in relation to each other, Booth ([1961]
1983) began to make the ethical consequences of the neo-Aristotelian
approach more explicit. In The Company We Keep (1988), Booth revis-
ited and greatly expanded this early effort (cf. chap. 3.4).

3.3 The Theory Revolution as Preparation for the Ethical Turn

In the 1960s the hegemony of the New Criticism began to wane for
both intradisciplinary and extradisciplinary reasons with the result that
literary criticism became more interdisciplinary. Critics began to chafe
under the limitations of the New Critical commitment to the autonomy
of the text, a response reinforced by the political upheavals of the dec-
ade. As scholars began to connect literature with multiple aspects of the
extratextual world, they brought relevant insights of theoretical work in
other disciplines to the work of interpretation. Two aspects of these de-
velopments helped prepare the way for the ethical turn of the late
1980s.
(1) The rise of poststructuralism and its critique of what Derrida
([1967] 1978: 261) called the “metaphysics of presence,” or the effort
to ground understanding of the world in solid foundational principles
538 James Phelan

(e.g. God, Descartes’ cogito, various binary oppositions such as na-

ture/civilization). Poststructuralism argued that such foundations were
either illusory or dependent on erroneously privileging one side of the
binary over the other (speech over writing; God over the human; men
over women; white over black; mind over body, etc.). This critique
gave support to many contextualist, politically-oriented approaches
such as feminist criticism, critical race studies, postcolonial criticism,
and New Historicism. Practitioners of these approaches argued that
what appears to be natural about the status quo—and about literary
works that support the status quo—is actually a function of skewed
power dynamics that needs to be revised. This emphasis on politics
opened the door for attention to ethics, especially the ethics of the told.
(2) The rise and fall of Anglo-American deconstruction, the move-
ment spawned by the engagement of such figures as Hartman, Miller,
and de Man with Derrida’s analysis of language as a system of signs
devoid of any center (Derrida [1967] 1976). In this view, language is a
system in which signifieds were determined not by any direct relation
to objects or ideas in the world but by the play of signifiers. On the one
hand, Anglo-American deconstruction contributed to the breakdown of
the New Critical hegemony because its poststructuralist anti-
foundationalism undid such valued New Critical concepts as coherence
and unity. On the other hand, this development was the logical exten-
sion of New Criticism, because it perpetuated the view that literature
could be equated with its language and its distinctive ways of signify-
ing.
Like the New Criticism, Anglo-American deconstruction was initial-
ly more concerned with aesthetics (the glory of literary language is its
polysemous undecidability) than it was with ethics. Nevertheless, Mil-
ler in The Ethics of Reading (1987) identified the important ethical con-
sequences of deconstruction by offering its take on the position of the
reader. In a characteristic deconstructive paradox, Miller argued that the
reader’s ethical obligation is to respect the undecidability of the text’s
language. In other words, the ethical reader will recognize that the na-
ture of language inevitably undermines the search for a determinate
ethics of the told.
But Miller’s case for deconstructive ethics was eclipsed by the reve-
lation that his deconstructionist colleague at Yale, de Man, had, during
World War II, written several anti-Semitic articles for Le Soir, a Bel-
gian newspaper that collaborated with the Nazis. In light of the horrific
consequences of Nazi anti-Semitism, the position that de Man’s war-
time writings do not have a determinate ethics of the told appeared to
many to be the outcome not of a disinterestedly rigorous reading but of
 Narrative Ethics 539

an effort to absolve de Man of responsibility for his repugnant views.

After the de Man affair, literary studies became much less interested in
undecidability and much more open to other ways of analyzing the in-
tersections of ethics and literature.

3.4 The Ethical Turn: Poststructuralist and Humanist Ethics

Since the late 1980’s, the ethical turn has taken two primary forms:
poststructuralist ethics and humanist ethics. Because humanist ethics
engages more directly with other work in narratology, it gets more at-
tention here.
In the wake of the de Man affair, Derrida developed a greater ethico-
political emphasis in his own work (Derrida [1993] 1994) and called
attention to the philosophical ethics of Levinas ([1961] 1969, [1974]
1981, [1979] 1987; see Critchley [1999] for a discussion of deconstruc-
tive ethics, focusing on Derrida and Levinas). Levinas argues that the
essence of ethical behavior is to respect the otherness of the Other. He
uses the metaphor of “the face” and “facing” to convey this position.
One shows respect for the Other by facing his/her otherness. This em-
phasis on the Other dovetails with the political concerns of feminist,
postcolonial, and critical race theory as well with disability studies. As
a result, the poststructuralist stream emphasizes the ethics of alterity
with special attention to the ethics of the told (representations of the
other) and the ethics of reading (obligations to face otherness). Differ-
ent theorists offered variations on the central themes. Harpham (1999:
x) defined ethics as an “intimate and dynamic engagement with other-
ness,” while Attridge (1999: 28) maintained that “ethics is […] the fun-
damental relation not just between subjects but also between the subject
and its multiple others,” adding that this fundamental relation “is not a
relation and [it] cannot be named, for it is logically prior to relations
and names, prior to logic.” Hale (2007, 2009), in her meta-analyses of
the poststructuralist ethics of the novel, highlighted the recurrent atten-
tion to the ethics of reading and its injunctions to respect and to be re-
sponsible to the otherness of the text itself. Hale (2007) further noted
that on this point poststructuralist and humanist ethics, including the
rhetorical ethics of Booth, have much in common.
Humanist ethics acknowledges otherness as important for ethical
engagements with narrative, but it emphasizes the benefits of connect-
ing across difference. Booth’s The Company We Keep (1988) and
Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (1990) were foundational texts for hu-
manist ethics. While neither earned universal acclaim, together they
moved ethics to a prominent place in narrative theory and prepared the
540 James Phelan

way for Newton’s claim in Narrative Ethics (1995) that the two do-
mains are inseparable.
To appreciate Booth’s reflections on ethics and literature, it is help-
ful to start with his work on the rhetoric of fiction ([1961] 1983). Booth
initially focused on the efficacy of overt authorial rhetoric in the novel,
arguing that such rhetoric cannot be judged by a priori aesthetic dicta
such as “true art ignores the audience.” Instead, it needs to be assessed
according to its effectiveness in advancing the larger purposes of its
author’s construction. In developing this case, Booth reached two
broader conclusions. (1) Since an author’s use of any technique has ef-
fects on the novel’s audience, the author cannot choose whether or not
to employ rhetoric but only which kind of rhetoric to employ. (2) The
effects of rhetoric on the audience include cognitive, aesthetic, affec-
tive, and ethical ones, often in close interaction with one another. In a
chapter on the ethics of the telling entitled “The Morality of Impersonal
Narration” (Booth [1961] 1983: 377–398), Booth noted that Jamesian
center-of-consciousness narration and unreliable character narration
tend to generate sympathy, even when used in the representation of eth-
ically deficient characters. As a result, Booth pointed out, these rhetori-
cal choices may lead readers overlook those deficiencies. The upshot of
the chapter is not to condemn these techniques, but rather to strike a
cautionary note about their ethical effects.
In the Afterword to the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction
([1961] 1983), Booth expressed some dissatisfaction with this argu-
ment, in part because he had let his personal moral commitments influ-
ence his rhetorical analyses. Later, Booth (1988) returned to his earlier
conclusions and incorporated them into a more explicit discussion of
ethics as an integral component of rhetoric. He employed the metaphor
of books as friends to convey his view of the ethics of reading. Explor-
ing this metaphor, Booth emphasized three key points: (1) friends are of
different kinds—some are good for us and some aren’t—and their ef-
fects on the individual may vary depending on when, where, and why
they are encountered; (2) many of these effects follow from the ways in
which these friends guide one’s trajectory of desires; (3) one of the key
functions of narrative fiction is to expand readers’ experiences as they
follow these trajectories of desire. Booth offers numerous exemplifica-
tions of these principles, most notably in extended analyses of ethical
virtues and deficiencies in the telling and told of Rabelais’ Gargantua
and Pantagruel and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Where Booth’s work arose out of a tradition of literary criticism,
Nussbaum’s arose out of an effort to revise a tradition of philosophical
inquiry into ethics. And where Booth was influenced by Aristotle’s way
 Narrative Ethics 541

of thinking about parts in relation to wholes, Nussbaum, a classicist and

a philosopher, was influenced by his discussions of ethics. She noted
that ethics is that branch of philosophy concerned with Aristotle’s ques-
tion of what the good life consists of, but she was dissatisfied with the
ways analytic philosophy approached that question. Its style of reason-
ing, she argued, created a disconnect between its form and its content:
how can one adequately discuss, say, an ethical struggle arising out of
being in love through the abstractions of analytic philosophy? Novels,
by contrast, seek to fit content to form (and vice versa), i.e. to set up
mutually reinforcing relations between the ethics of the told and the
ethics of the telling. As a result, novels conduct ethical inquiry in ways
that are superior to those of analytic philosophy. More specifically,
novels explore the concrete particularity of ethical dilemmas faced by
fully realized characters, and those explorations harness the cognitive
power of the emotions. Nussbaum (1997) later went on to explore the
ethics of and to widen her scope to basic issues of human rights.
Newton represents something of a hybrid between Booth and Nuss-
baum, even as he has some affinities with poststructuralist ethics. Like
Booth, he has a sophisticated, fine-grained narratological understanding
of narrative fiction, but rather than consider narrative as rhetoric with
ethics forming an integral part of that conception, he views narrative as
ethics. Like Nussbaum, he grounds his view of ethics in work by other
thinkers, particularly Baxtin, Cavell, and Levinas. From Baxtin ([1986]
1993), he borrows the concept of ‘vživanie,’ or ‘live-entering’ (empa-
thy with the Other without loss of self); from Cavell (1979), the concept
of acknowledging (being in a position of having to respond); and from
Levinas ([1974] 1981, [1979] 1987) the concepts of the Said (the told),
Saying (performing a telling) and Facing (looking at or looking away).
Newton (1995: 11) describes his project as the investigation of the “eth-
ical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the
reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that
process.” He uses his triumvirate of thinkers to good effect as he offers
thoughtful, nuanced analyses of the interrelations of the ethics of the
telling and the ethics of the told in fiction by Dickens, Conrad, James,
Ishiguro, and others. Like Nussbaum, Newton (1998, 2001, 2005) has
gone on to expand and develop his approach in later books, and in an
essay on teaching narrative theory (2010), he revisits his conception of
narrative as ethics by developing the metaphor that narrative and ethics
haunt each other.
Altieri (2003) has objected to what he sees as the excessively ration-
al basis of Booth’s and especially of Nussbaum’s ethics. He has thus
argued for a mode that can do better justice to what he calls the “partic-
542 James Phelan

ulars of rapture,” a mode of reading analogous to the sublime, in which

affect overpowers rational judgment. Also to be mentioned is the im-
portant contribution to the relations between affect and ethics made by
Keen (2007, ed. 2011; Keen → Narrative Empathy).
Phelan (2005, 2007, 2013) has sought to extend, clarify, and refine
Booth’s work on the integral connection between rhetoric and ethics by
highlighting the significance and centrality of ethical judgments in the
experience of reading narrative. Phelan argued that, given the variety of
ethical thought on display in the world’s narratives, it is valuable to do
rhetorical ethics not only from the outside in, as Nussbaum and Newton
do, but also from the inside out. That is, rather than privilege the ethical
systems of one or more thinkers, the analyst can seek to uncover the
ethical values underlying the specific rhetorical exchanges of a particu-
lar narrative. As part of his work on unreliable character narration, Phe-
lan has put forth the idea that its ethical consequences can have effects
ranging along a spectrum from bonding (Huck Finn’s naiveté leads him
to be ethically unreliable in a way that increases the reader’s sympathy
for him) to estranging (Jason Compson’s selfishness and pride lead to
negative readerly judgments). Phelan (2011) has extended this work on
the ethics of unreliability by examining the ethics of “deficient narra-
tion,” i.e. narration that authors signal as reliable but readers find “off-
kilter,” such as Huck Finn’s narration in much of the Evasion section of
Twain’s novel.

3.5 Ethics and the Narrative Identity Thesis

Questions about the ethics of writing/composing have extended beyond

the domain of literary narrative to the domain of identity (Bamberg →
Identity and Narration). Many philosophers and psychologists (e.g.,
MacIntyre [1981], Bruner [1987], and Schechtman [1997]) have ad-
vanced the view that conceiving of one’s life as a narrative is essential
to having a self. As Strawson (2004) pointed out in an essay contesting
this thesis about narrative identity, the view has both a descriptive psy-
chological component (this is how human beings experience their lives)
and a normative ethical component (having a narrative identity enables
one to live a better life). Strawson rejected both components of the nar-
rative identity thesis. Although he did not deny that some people expe-
rience their lives as narratives, he disputed that all (or even most) peo-
ple do. Citing his own experience, he distinguished between
Diachronics (those who do experience their lives as narratives) and Ep-
isodics (those who do not). He objected even more strongly to the ethi-
cal component of the narrative identity thesis, arguing that (1) having a
 Narrative Ethics 543

narrative of one’s life often entails distorting the past and thus taking
one further away from accurate self-understanding and (2) that one can
live ethically independent of having a narrative of one’s life.
Strawson’s argument did not lead to a wholesale rejection of the nar-
rative identity thesis, and indeed some commentators found fault with
his reasoning (Battersby 2006). But both the thesis and Strawson’s ef-
fort to debunk it point to the high stakes of questions about narrative
ethics.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Altieri’s objections to Booth and Nussbaum indicate that the interrela-

tions between the affective and ethical dimensions of reading deserve
further examination. Hale’s (2007, 2009) work indicates that those do-
ing poststructuralist ethics and those doing humanist ethics could learn
from each other without giving up their distinctive projects. The simi-
larities and differences among the ethical dimensions of narrative in
different media are also worthy of further study. (For some valuable
initial work in this area on film narrative, see Richter 2005, 2007.) Eth-
ics in lifewriting (Eakin 2004), in medical narrative (Charon 2006), in
legal narrative (Brooks 2001), and in other domains involved in the nar-
rative turn also deserve further investigation. More generally, as the
recent collection Narrative Ethics (Lothe & Hawthorn 2013) indicates,
because the domains of narrative and ethics are themselves so vast and
their interactions so varied, we can expect that exploration of their in-
tersections will continue to excite much debate and to yield rich results.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Altieri, Charles (2003). The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca:
Cornell UP.
Aristotle (1920). Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon P.
– (1952). Eudemian Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
– Aristotle (2002). Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Arnold, Matthew ([1880] 1998). “The Study of Poetry.” D. H. Richter (ed.). The Criti-
cal Tradition. Boston: Bedford, 411–418.
Attridge, Derek (1999). “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA:
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 114, 20–31.
544 James Phelan

Barthes, Roland ([1966] 1977). “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.”

R. Barthes. Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana, 20–30.
Battersby, James L. (2006). “Narrativity, Self, and Self-Representation.” Narrative 14,
27–44.
Baxtin, Mixail (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1986] 1993). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Aus-
tin: U of Texas P.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
– (1988). The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California
P.
Brooks, Cleanth (1947). The Well-Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Brooks, Peter (2001). Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature.
Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Bruner, Jerome (1987). “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 54, 11–32.
Cavell, Stanley (1979). The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford UP.
Charon, Rita (2006). Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York:
Oxford UP.
Crane, R. S. (1952). “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones.” R. S. Crane
(ed.). Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Critchley, Simon (1999). The Ethics of Deconstruction. West Lafayette: Purdue UP.
Derrida, Jacques ([1967] 1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P.
– ([1967] 1978). Writing and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
– ([1993] 1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. New York: Routledge.
Eakin, John Paul (2004). The Ethics of Lifewriting. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Hale, Dorothy J. (2007). “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories
of the Novel.” Narrative 15, 187–206.
– (2009). “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-
First Century.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America 124, 896–905.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt (1999). Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society.
Durham: Duke UP.
Horace (1998). “The Art of Poetry.” D. H. Richter (ed.). The Critical Tradition. Bos-
ton: Bedford, 68–78.
Keen, Suzanne (2007). Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford UP.
– ed. (2011). Narrative and the Emotions. Special issue of Poetics Today 32.
Levinas, Emmanuel ([1961] 1969). Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP.
– ([1974] 1981). Otherwise than Being. Kluwer Academic P.
– ([1979] 1987). Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP.
Lothe, Jakob & Jeremy Hawthorn (2013). Narrative Ethics. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981). After Virtue. South Bend: U of Notre Dame P.
Miller, J. Hillis (1987). The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Trollope, James, and
Benjamin. New York: Columbia UP.
Newton, Adam Zachary (1995). Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
– (1998). Facing Black and Jew: Literature as Public Space in Twentieth-Century
America. New York: Cambridge UP.
 Narrative Ethics 545

– (2001). The Fence and the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas, Yeshayahu Leibowitz,
and Israel among the Nations. Albany: SUNY P.
– (2005). The Elsewhere: Belonging at a Near Distance. Madison: U of Wisconsin
P.
– (2010). “Ethics.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Teaching Narrative Theory. New York:
MLA, 266–280.
Nussbaum, Martha (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.
New York: Oxford UP.
– (1997). Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon
P.
Phelan, James (2005). Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Nar-
ration. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– (2007). Experiencing Fiction: Progressions, Judgments, and the Rhetorical The-
ory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
– (2011). “The Implied Author, Deficient Narration, and Nonfiction Narrative: Or
What’s Off-Kilter in The Year of Magical Thinking and The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly?” Style 45, 127–145.
– (2013). Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010. Oxford: Blackwell.
Plato (1998a). The Republic, Book 1X. D. H. Richter (ed.). The Critical Tradition.
Boston: Bedford, 21–29.
– (1998b). Ion. D. H. Richter (ed.). The Critical Tradition. Boston: Bedford, 29–37.
Richter, David H. (2005). “Your Cheatin’ Art: Double-Dealing in Cinematic Narra-
tive.” Narrative 13, 11–28.
– (2007). “Keeping Company in Hollywood: Ethical Issues in Nonfiction Film.”
Narrative 15, 140–166.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2005). “Narrative.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclope-
dia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 344–348.
Schechtman, Marya (1997). The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Sidney, Sir Philip ([1595] 1998). “An Apology for Poetry.” D. H. Richter (ed.). The
Critical Tradition. Boston: Bedford, 134–159.
Šklovskij, Viktor (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1925] 1990). Theory of Prose. Elmwood Park,
IL: Dalkey Archive P.
Strawson, Galen (2004). “Against Narrativity.” Ratio 17, 428–452.
Wellek, Rene & Austin Warren ([1949] 1956). Theory of Literature. New York: Har-
court Brace and World.
Wimsatt, William K. & Monroe C. Beardsley ([1946a] 1954a). “The Affective Falla-
cy.” W. K. Wimsatt & M. C. Beardsley (eds.). The Verbal Icon: Studies in the
Meaning of Poetry. Louisville: U of Kentucky P, 21–40.
– & Monroe C. Beardsley ([1946b] 1954b). “The Intentional Fallacy.” W. K. Wim-
satt & M. C. Beardsley (eds.). The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry.
Louisville: U of Kentucky P, 3–18.
546 James Phelan

5.2 Further Reading

Buell, Lawrence (1999). “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA: Publications of

the Modern Language Association of America 114, 7–19.
Davis, Todd F. & Kenneth Womack (2001). Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in
Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P.
Eskin, Michael (2004). “Introduction: The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?”
Poetics Today 4, 557–572.
Korthals Altes, Liesbeth (2005). “Ethical Turn.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 142–46.
Phelan, James (2007). “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics
of Lolita.” Narrative 15, 222–238.
 Narrative Levels
John Pier

1 Definition

Narrative levels (also referred to as diegetic levels) are an analytic no-

tion whose purpose is to describe the relations between an act of narra-
tion and the diegesis, or spatiotemporal universe within which a story
takes place. At the outermost level, external to the intradiegetic (or die-
getic, i.e. first-level) narrative, the extradiegetic narrator recounts what
occurred at that first level; a character in that story can, in turn, become
an intradiegetic narrator whose narrative, at the second level, will then
be a metadiegetic narrative. This process can extend to further meta-
levels, forming a series of narratives patterned recursively in the fash-
ion of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. Characterized by a relation of
inclusion, narrative levels are distributed vertically when a change of
both (diegetic) level and speaker and/or addressee occurs, and horizon-
tally when no change of speaker takes place (as in a digression) or
when several parallel stories are recounted by different speakers but at
the same narrative level (as in Boccaccio’s Decameron). Narrative lev-
els are most accurately thought of as diegetic levels, the levels at which
the narrating act and the narratee are situated in relation to the narrated
story.

2 Explication

According to Genette, who first proposed the term, narrative levels are
one of the three categories forming the narrating situation, the other two
being the time of the narrating (subsequent, prior, simultaneous or in-
terpolated) and person (heterodiegetic or homodiegetic) ([1972] 1980:
chap. 5). Introduced for the purpose of systematizing the traditional
notion of embedding, narrative levels mark “the threshold between one
diegesis and another,” and more particularly “the fact that the second
diegesis is taken charge of by a narrative fashioned within the first die-
gesis” (Genette [1983] 1988: 84, original emphasis). This threshold re-
548 John Pier

sults from the fact that as every narrative, beginning with the first-level
narrative, is produced by an act of narration which is of necessity exter-
nal to that level: “any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level
immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing
this narrative is placed […]. The narrating instance of a first [i.e. first-
level] narrative is therefore extradiegetic by definition, as the narrating
instance of a second (metadiegetic) [i.e. second-level] narrative is [in-
tra]diegetic by definition, etc.” (Genette ([1972] 1980: 228–229, origi-
nal emphasis). It is important to bear in mind that first-level narrative
(récit premier or récit primaire) is intradiegetic and not, as stated by
some commentators, extradiegetic.
Narrative levels are frequently understood to correspond to narrative
framing or embedding. The two notions coincide to some extent, but it
is essential to remember that narrative levels extend into areas not gen-
erally taken into account in non-narratological discussions of framing
and embedding. From the perspective of narrative levels, framing or
embedding occurs between the intradiegetic and the metadiegetic lev-
els—not between the extradiegetic and the intradiegetic levels: narra-
tive levels come into play at all three levels, even in the absence of any
frame story (or metadiegetic narrative), it being important to remember
that extradiegesis, where the narrative act occurs, lies “outside” the in-
tradiegetic level. Lanser (1981: 134) puts it quite simply in postulating
levels A, B and C, where a tale within a tale corresponds to level C (cf.
Fludernik 1996: 342; Wolf 2006a: 181). In an attempt to resolve certain
difficulties found in accounts of narrative framing or embedding, Ge-
nette (not without analogy to the differentiation between “who speaks?”
and “who sees?” in his analysis of point of view and focalization) dis-
tinguishes level from voice. A second aspect of narrative levels is that
they operate in close conjunction with voice, constituting a four-part
typology of narrator status.
Another point is that much discussion about narrative levels has re-
sulted from two apparently incompatible ways of organizing them: by
definition, levels are distributed vertically whereas framing and embed-
ding are operations that involve inclusion. Genette embraces both, stat-
ing that a narrative event “is at a diegetic level immediately higher
than” the narrative act ([1972] 1980: 228) but ultimately pleading in
favor of an inclusionary relation, as illustrated with a series of stick fig-
ures and balloons ([1983] 1988: 85–86) where the second-level narra-
tive is “inside” the first-level narrative. The contradiction between these
two configurations has led some critics to revise the original concept
and others to reformulate the concept in different terms.
 Narrative Levels 549

Finally, a third set of issues, closely intertwined with the previous

two, concerns the types of relations between intradiegetic narrative and
metadiegetic narrative, extending from the explanatory to the thematic
to the narratorial. Succeeding discussions have sought to specify the
functional nature of these relations.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

One of the principal interests of narrative levels, a concept formulated

by structuralist narratology, is that it has been effective in setting out
terms for re-examining the traditional approaches to framing and em-
bedding and in opening up new lines of debate and inquiry. According-
ly, this section comments on embedding and framing from the perspec-
tive of narrative levels (3.1), outlines a number of the responses to the
various configurations of these levels (3.2) and comments on the func-
tional relations between intradiegetic and metadiegetic narrative (3.3).

3.1 Embedding and Framing

The terms embedding and framing themselves merit some clarification.

Often used synonymously, the domains covered by the two notions are
somewhat different. Embedding, along with linking and alternation,
represents one of the ways that narrative sequences can be combined
within a narrative instance or in different ones, and in this sense it is a
device that pertains to story (histoire), independently of any change of
level (Prince [1987] 2003: 5, 25, 48–49). The corresponding terms em-
ployed by Bremond (1973: 132) are, respectively, enclave (one se-
quence developing within another), bout-à-bout (the end of one se-
quence succeeded by the beginning of another) and accolement
(bracketing simultaneous sequences together). Similarly, Todorov
(1972: 379) proposes enchâssement (order: 1-2-1), enchaînement (or-
der: 1-2), and entrelacement or alternance (order: 1-2-1-2). Earlier,
however, Todorov ([1968] 1973: 83–85), employing the same terms,
had linked embedding to narrative levels, thus associating it with dis-
cours. In “Narrative-Men” (originally published in 1967), it is stated
that embedding coincides, not gratuitously, with the syntactic category
of subordination in modern linguistics (e.g. “Scheherazade tells that
Jaafar tells that the tailor tells that…”), and it is concluded that “em-
bedding narrative is the narrative of a narrative” (Todorov [1971] 1977:
71). Strictly speaking, however, likening narrative embedding to the
concept of embedding in transformational grammar, a concept devel-
550 John Pier

oped in place of subordination in traditional grammar, is not defensible:

a sentence such as “Hamlet knew that his father had been murdered”
cannot be described as an example of narrative embedding (cf. Pier
2011: 120–121). In order to avoid any misleading superimposition of
linguistic categories on narrative categories, Greimas and Courtés
(1979: 123) prefer to speak of “intercalation” in narrative texts rather
than embedding. It is thus useful to bear in mind that even though em-
bedding is the consecrated term in narrative theory, the process con-
cerned is actually one of intercalation, the insertion of one story in an-
other, i.e. metadiegetic narration, a relation which is not, in all cases,
one of subordination.
Emphasizing intercalation as the specific narratological sense of
embedding serves both to stake out the parameters of the concept and to
avoid the risk of assimilating it into phenomena that are actually of an-
other nature. With reference to the criteria of punctuation and continu-
um, boundary and logical levels that characterize embedding in fields
as diverse as linguistics, logic, psychology, communication, computer
science, Füredy (1989) identified the more extreme forms of embed-
ding found in artistic representation: (a) intact and multiplying bounda-
ry (e.g. mise en abyme, which in principle is open to infinite recursion);
(b) intact but reified boundary (escape from the undecidable and oscil-
lating boundary built into Escher’s Drawing Hands is possible only
through access to an otherwise inviolate metalevel); (c) transgressed
boundary (metalepsis; Pier → Metalepsis). Ryan (1986, 1991: 156–74)
employs the term “embedded narrative” in a way she characterizes as
“idiosyncratic” (1991: 274, n. 2) but which, requiring no speech act or
verbalization, is nonetheless a logical extension of the principle as out-
lined above. For her, embedded narratives are not only narratives that
“reflect the events of the factual domain” but also those that “delineate
unactualized possibilities” such as “dreams, fictions, and fantasies” as
well as “plans, passive projections, desires, beliefs concerning the his-
tory of TAW [textual actual world], and beliefs concerning the private
representations of other characters” (156).
In the field of conversation analysis, by contrast, embedding, re-
ferred to as “embeddedness,” concerns not a change of level but the
context of surrounding discourse and social activity. Thus a narrative of
personal experience may be embedded in an explanation or a prayer
and will be more or less embedded into the surrounding social activity
according to the frequency and length of turn-taking and the degree of
thematic and rhetorical integration into the general conversation (Ochs
& Capps 2001: 36–40; on the related notion of “situated communica-
tion,” see Young 1987: chap. 4). Indeed, if the story within the story is
 Narrative Levels 551

more characteristic of written narrative than it is of oral storytelling

(Fludernik → Conversational Narration – Oral Narration), this is large-
ly due to the attempt to restore a sense of orality to the written text and
to simulate oral storytelling. Yet another angle on embedding is taken
by deconstructive approaches to narrative. Considering that story is
embedded in the objects, subjects, and bodies of the world, that they are
in effect “texts,” these theories tend to assimilate text into its contexts
(cf. Punday 2003), thus stepping beyond the question of how one story
is embedded into another.
If embedding can be thought of as inserting or placing something
within a larger unit, framing is normally understood in the sense of en-
closing. This nuance stands out in the earliest definition of the frame
tale: “The concept is taken from framed pictures and this means that
one tale encloses [umschliesst] another like a frame,” its two forms be-
ing “cyclical frame tales” and “framed individual novellas” (Merker
1928–29: 1; for a historical account, see Jäggi 1994 and Kanzog [1966]
1977; for framing in different genres, see Duyfhuizen 1992; for frame
tales in Indian, Arabic and other cultures, see Picard 1987; Williams
1998: 104 comments on the frame metaphor from the visual arts). In
addition to Merker’s two forms, involving “one-story framing” and
“plural-stories framing” (or “interpolated framing”), note that a narra-
tive frame can be “complete” or “closed,” but also that an introductory
frame may be paired with a “missing terminal frame” just as a terminal
frame may be paired with a “missing initial frame” (Wolf 2006a: 185–
188; cf. Fludernik [2006] 2009: 28–29).
Framing is generally regarded as a presentational technique: the
frame tale is of limited length and varying significance, serving to ren-
der the more ample inset or inner tale (Binnenerzählung) accessible
and/or to authenticate it, imbuing it with a “narratorial illusionism”
(Nünning 2004: 17), particularly in simulations of oral storytelling.
Many but not all authors rely on quantitative criteria to characterize
frames. Thus Williams (1998) argues that “a frame articulates a dis-
cernable narrative scenario, focusing on the rhetorical dynamic of nar-
rative exchange” (107–108), and he goes on to outline a typology of
preliminary, introductory and prologue frames (120–125). However,
Williams does not appear to distinguish consistently between the frame
and the framed and at one point even inverts them: “Framed narratives
specify place and time—a setting—for the act of narrative” (110). Em-
bedding, which, technically, also occurs in frame tales, is not concerned
with the presentational relations between the two levels, but rather with
identifying the “threshold” or differential relation between the narrating
act and diegetic level. The principle of narrative levels does not seek to
552 John Pier

sort out these distinctions, and indeed Genette’s discussion wavers be-
tween narrative subordination and thematic precedence precisely when
he takes up the question of framing ([1983] 1988: 86–90).
Fludernik, speaking from the holistic perspective of natural narratol-
ogy, seems to be one of the few commentators to have distinguished
between framing and embedding. She observes that “[w]ith regard to
length, frame and inset are […] in inverse proportion to the relation ob-
taining between a story and the embedded story within it,” and she con-
cludes: “If the tale is conceptualized as subsidiary to the primary story
frame, a relationship of embedding obtains; if the primary story level
serves as a mere introduction to the narrative proper, it will be per-
ceived as a framing device.” (Fludernik 1996: 343) This distinction is
vital since, notably, it is only in the first case, where the embedding
discourse is dominant, that a mise en abyme can occur, as in portions of
the romance The Mad Trist that parallel certain incidents in Poe’s “The
Fall of the House of Usher” (cf. Dällenbach [1977] 1989). A sort of
“reverse” mise en abyme is the mise en cadre, where an element of the
subsidiary frame may proleptically illustrate some feature of the domi-
nant embedded story, as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (cf. Wolf
2010).

3.1.1 Narrator’s Status

Narrative levels differ from traditional concepts of embedding and

framing because they articulate these questions in significantly new
terms. Indeed, the concept cannot be isolated from other aspects of Ge-
nettian narratology, notably the time of the narrating and person which,
together with narrative levels, constitute the narrating situation. A full
treatment of narrative levels would thus bear not only on embedding
and framing but would also take into account the so-called narrator’s
status. The narrator’s status, broken down into the well-known four-part
typology of narrators combining level (extradiegetic/intradiegetic) and
the relationship of presence or absence of the narrator in the diegesis
(heterodiegetic/homodiegetic) (see Genette ([1972] 1980: 248), is a top-
ic that has attracted a considerable amount of commentary and revision.
Here, mention can only be made of some of the issues raised by the two
components of the narrator’s status. (For an explanatory note on Ge-
nette’s use of the term diegesis, see Pier [1986] 2010; for a discussion
of person, level and voice, see Walsh 2010.)
In his discussion of narrators and levels, Schmid ([2005] 2010: 67–
70) proposes to make Genette’s system more user-friendly by modify-
ing the terminology. In place of extra-, intra- and metadiegetic, the
 Narrative Levels 553

terms primary, secondary and tertiary are employed to designate narra-

tors and levels of embedding while diegetic vs. non-diegetic is adopted
instead of homo- vs. heterodiegetic to replace the traditional first-
person/third-person dichotomy. The translation of one system into the
other is thus as follows: extra- heterodiegetic narrator → primary non-
diegetic narrator; extra- homodiegetic narrator → primary diegetic nar-
rator; intra- heterodiegetic narrator → secondary non-diegetic narrator;
intra- homodiegetic narrator → secondary diegetic narrator; meta- het-
erodiegetic narrator → tertiary non-diegetic narrator; meta- ho-
modiegetic narrator → tertiary diegetic narrator. These emendations do
clarify some of the terminological issues, but it should be pointed out
that Schmid’s schema, extending from the primary to the tertiary level,
presents itself as a system of “levels of embedding, the degree of fram-
ing” (67), not as a typology of narrators (for which a separate set of cri-
teria are enumerated; cf. 66–67). In Genette’s system, as already point-
ed out, embedding occurs between the intradiegetic and the
metadiegetic levels (Schmid’s secondary and tertiary levels), not be-
tween the extradiegetic and intradiegetic levels (primary and secondary
levels). For Schmid, by contrast, the secondary level of narration func-
tions as a “quoted world” of the primary level and thus already as
framed or embedded narrative. Genette works out a typology of narra-
tors that includes no metadiegetic (or tertiary) level; the question of
embedding and framing is an extension of that typology that raises a
specific set of issues.

3.2 Distribution of Narrative Levels

As can be seen from the above example, the commentaries that the no-
tion of narrative levels has given rise to and the revisions put forth by
various authors center in large part around the prefixes added to the
word diegesis and the vertical and horizontal dimensions of embedding.
The prefix “meta-” in particular has drawn considerable attention, for
Genette does not employ the term metadiegetic in the sense of metalan-
guage, i.e. a language used to speak about an object language. Rather,
“the metanarrative [metadiegetic narrative] is a narrative within the
narrative, as the diegesis […] designates the universe of the first narra-
tive.” (228 n.1, original emphasis) (Note that metanarrative [métarécit]
must not be confused with Lyotard’s grand récit, sometimes translated
as “metanarrative,” or with “metanarrative comments”; cf. Nünning
2004: 15; Neumann & Nünning → Metanarration and Metafiction.)
554 John Pier

3.2.1 Meta-

In one of the best-known critiques, Bal, adhering to a metalinguistic

perspective, redefines embedding in terms of subordination, dominance
and hierarchy: “[a]n embedded unit is by definition subordinate to the
unit which embeds it” (1981b: 48). In place of “meta-” she thus adopts
“hypo-” (meaning “under”) and proposes to replace “metadiegetic”/
“metadiegesis” with “hypodiegetic”/“hypodiegesis,” reserving “meta-”
to the “superior level” (45; cf. Bal 1977: 35; Rimmon-Kenan [1983]
2002: 92–96 adopts this system of “subordination relations” between
levels). As a result, Genette’s system of narrative levels is inverted so
that it is the narrative act that is above or higher than the narrative
event.
In his reply Genette reaffirms the “inclusionary” approach as op-
posed to the metalinguistic conception, maintaining that a metanarrative
occurs “within” the narrative, that it is not a narrative “on” narrative
([1983] 1988: 91–92). Actually, Bal partly rallies to this position when
she states that quoted discourse is metalinguistic in relation to embed-
ding discourse but that metadiscourse, when it is without quotation
marks, must be qualified as “hypo-discourse” (1981b: 54–55). Genette
further stresses the essential connection between metadiegetic and met-
alepsis, a connection which is blurred when hypo- replaces meta-.
Despite this realignment, the term hypodiegetic continues to be
widely used in place of metadiegetic. Adopting metalanguage as a
model for narrative embedding, however, is not unproblematic: an em-
bedding discourse (by which Bal means quotation) is not a metalan-
guage, nor is an embedded discourse an object language; and while an
embedded discourse might be said to “depend” on the embedding dis-
course by which it is taken in charge, this is hardly the case of an object
language examined with the use of a metalanguage (indeed, quite the
opposite is true). Another point is that diegesis, in the sense of the spa-
tiotemporal universe in which the story takes place, is largely aban-
doned by Bal, for in her system hypodiegetic narrative results from the
embedding of the subject and object of narration, focalization and act-
ing—a synthesis of Greimas’s actantial roles and of Genette’s focaliza-
tion (1981b: 45; on the embedding of focalization, see Bal 1981a). She
distinguishes between embedding and framing on the basis that in the
former there occurs subordination of both actor and action whereas in
the latter only one or the other is subordinated. Interestingly, narrative
embedding is taken up again later under the heading “Levels of Narra-
tion,” but with no reference to hypodiegetic/hypodiegesis, concentrat-
 Narrative Levels 555

ing instead on speech representation and the relations of embedding

between fabula and text (Bal [1985] 1997: 43–66).

3.2.2 Vertical / Horizontal

Bal’s approach to narrative levels, carried out within the framework of

structural linguistics, was succeeded by models that postulate two types
of embedding: vertical, occurring in shifts between levels; and horizon-
tal, without change of level but narrated by different narrators. A good
example of this tendency is Nelles (1997), who, critical of Bal’s ac-
count of voice, subscribes to this distinction. He goes on to present a
number of cases in which a vertical change of levels takes place ac-
companied not with a change of narrator but a change of narratee (e.g.
the general narrator of The Canterbury Tales, who relates a second-
level tale). He also notes examples of horizontal embedding (such as
dreams) where no change of narrator takes place and where, rather than
a change of level, there is a change in the nature of the diegesis or uni-
verse within which the story takes place (132–133). The events of the
dream, he explains, “take place in an alternate universe created by a
character’s mind rather than being physically carried out in the spatial-
temporal universe of the rest of the narrative” (134). This adds a signif-
icantly new dimension to the question of narrative levels, leading
Nelles to distinguish, with reference to McHale’s (1987) characteriza-
tion of the “epistemological” dominant of modernist fiction as opposed
to the “ontological” dominant of postmodernist fiction, and also analo-
gously to Ryan (cf. § 3.1 above), between “epistemic” or “verbal” em-
bedding (communicating knowledge) and “ontological” or “modal”
framing (modes of being). García Landa (1998: 303–304) points out
that the latter form of framing, which he calls “semiotic insertion,” is
associated with Bal’s embedded focalization.
With regard to verbal embedding, one possibility is to consider
this from an enunciative perspective. Coste (1989: 165–174), for in-
stance, gives precedence to the notion of “overall narrator” over the
distinction homodiegetic vs. heterodiegetic narrator. He then sharply
separates the subject of the enunciation from the subject of the enunci-
ated, breaking down the subject as narrating instance into present story-
teller and past (or future) character. Based on these and other premises,
Coste sets forth two types of embedding: hypotactic, resulting from
grammatical subordination and materialized in the form of delegated
narration; paratactic (juxtaposition, coordination), forming a system of
“parallel” narrators at the same diegetic level. In its complex forms,
hypotaxis, a grammatical form that also applies to framing, tends to
556 John Pier

blur the origin of enunciation, resulting in effect in pseudo-diegetic nar-

ration: a narrative second in origin but which, lacking a diegetic relay,
is narrated as though it were diegetic (Genette [1972] 1980: 237–243).
As for narrational parataxis, this occurs when, without change of level,
narratives are combined in one of three ways: by sequential relay (sev-
eral narrators tell the same story chronologically); through concur-
rent/conflictive versions of the same story; in narrational crossfire (as in
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where the central character, Addie Bundren,
is absent). By highlighting discrete narrational acts rather than the
threshold between levels, parataxis is conducive to multiple points of
view and polyphonic narration, and is thus related to dialogism (Coste
1989: 188–205; Shepherd → Dialogism), tending to call into question
the very notion of narrative levels. Coste’s model departs from the tra-
ditional focus of embedding and framing on the story within the story;
however, as the distinction hypotactic vs. paratactic narration is config-
ured vertically and horizontally, the model does nevertheless echo mul-
ti-level embedding and plural stories framing. (On the convergence of
narrational parataxis and the horizontal plane, see García Landa (1998:
302; for a discussion of multiperspectivity, frame tales and paratextual
framing, see Wolf 2000).
Looking at narrative levels from the perspective of vertical and hori-
zontal distribution also opens the way to examining the concept in its
various historical contexts. Thus Tomassini (1990: 43–67) stresses the
fact that narrative levels, which involve the delegation of a speaker by
the narrator, are rooted in Plato’s two modes of narration, pure narra-
tion (haplē diēgēsis) and imitation of the heroes’ discourse (mimēsis),
and their mixed forms (a connection implicit in Genette and Bal but
explicit in e.g. García Landa 1998: 301, and Walsh 2010). Later, Re-
naissance Italian poetics identified four modes of narration—linear,
quasi-linear, oblique, quasi-oblique—two of which correspond to inter-
nal narratives. Quasi-linear narrative, in which a character becomes a
narrator, is equivalent to metadiegetic narrative, but it also suggests
more clearly than the modern concept the effect of reticence on the part
of the intradiegetic narrator and that of curiosity on the part of his/her
narratee. Quasi-oblique narrative, occurring without change of level
(thus horizontally), is close to the rhetorical figure of digressio which,
in narrative contexts, qualifies not as an analepsis but is sufficiently
autonomous to suspend development of the principal narrative. One
form of digression is excursus, where the extradiegetic narrator directly
addresses the reader (as in Tristram Shandy), the other being narrative
ekphrasis, as in the description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, a de-
scription which, however, verges on narration. Conceived in this way,
 Narrative Levels 557

digression cuts across modern distinctions such as explanatory metanar-

rative analepsis (Genette [1983] 1988: 93), models that exclude digres-
sion from framing and embedding (Williams 1998: 107–108) and ex-
tradiegetic narrative comment (Nünning 2004). Clearly, further
historical research on these matters is required.

3.2.3 Illocutionary / Ontological

Defining narrative levels in accordance with change of speaker and

diegetic level proceeds from structuralist narratology. As the discussion
above shows, however, a number of issues remain unresolved. Working
from the perspective of artificial intelligence, Ryan (1986, 1991: chap.
9), proposes to rearticulate the question of narrative levels in terms of
boundaries, frames and stacks.
To start with, story and discourse are defined not in the sense of the
“what” and “how” of narrative but as ontological (semantic) boundaries
and illocutionary (speech act) boundaries, respectively. In the simplest
case, a single speaker and the utterances are situated at the same level
of reality, and there is no crossing of boundaries (1). Boundaries can be
crossed in one of three ways, either actually (a) or virtually (b): change
of speaker where the speakers are in the same world (2a); speech act of
a character presented through that of a narrator (2b); crossing of onto-
logical but not of illocutionary boundaries (change in levels of reality in
Alice in Wonderland reported by the primary narrator) (3a); virtual
crossing of the ontological boundary but not of the illocutionary bound-
ary (a dream described from an external perspective) (3b); crossing of
both boundaries, a fiction within a fiction (4a); actual crossing of the
illocutionary boundary but virtual crossing of the illocutionary bounda-
ry (primary narrator speaking as though he were a secondary narrator
but never entering the world of the projected story) (4b).
Types (4a) and (4b), both of them forms of framing/embedding, can
be represented visually as in a picture frame (cf. Ryan 1991: 178).
However, modeling these processes in this way fails to distinguish illo-
cutionary from ontological boundaries and also to take into account the
chronological sequence of levels in a given narrative. To complement
frame structures, Ryan thus introduces the notion of “stacks,” a meta-
phor drawn by computer science from the “pushing” and “popping” of
a stack of cafeteria trays: as trays (or embedded stories) are added or
removed, the stack (series of embedding stories) is pushed down or it
pops up so that the topmost level remains in view. Where frames pro-
vide a static model of the text’s semantic domain and a map of bounda-
ries, stacks are dynamic, capturing moments of that domain and model-
558 John Pier

ing the mechanisms of boundary crossings. Developed independently of

Genette’s narrative levels, Ryan’s narrative frames and stacks neverthe-
less provide a basis for the analysis of metalepsis, as her comments on
McHale’s (1987: chap. 8) discussion of strange loops, contamination of
levels and other such cases shows (Ryan: 1991: 191–210; 2006).

3.3 Relations between Levels

The original account of narrative levels identified three types of rela-

tions between metadiegetic narrative and first-level narration, extending
from explanatory (causal relation) through thematic (contrast, analogy)
to narrational, independent of metadiegetic content (distraction, ob-
struction) (Genette [1972] 1980: 232–234). This list was later expanded
so as to incorporate Barth’s (1981) typology of the frame tale into a six-
part “functional” typology whose poles are diegetic content and the nar-
rating act: (a) explanatory (by metadiegetic analepsis); (b) predictive
(by metadiegetic prolepsis); (c) purely thematic; (d) persuasive; (e) dis-
tractive; (f) obstructive (Genette [1983] 1988: 92–94). For Genette,
Barth’s interest is in the thematic relations between the two levels.
However, it is also true that for Barth stories within stories are a form
of digression or postponement of the main story (“Digression and re-
turn is a variation on the theme of theme and variation”; 1981: 62), a
feature reserved by Genette to the distractive and obstructive functions
(cf. Pier 2011: 122–124).
A survey of the literature shows that a broad variety of other func-
tions have been attributed to the two narrative levels as well, and also
that a number of revisions of the system have been proposed. Numer-
ous authors writing about frame tales have stressed the authenticating
role (a “falsification” function has also been advocated; cf. Tomassini
1990: 175–182), and attention is frequently drawn to the fact that frame
tales serve to restore an aura of oral storytelling to written narratives,
some non-narratological discussions even restricting the frame tale to
the reproduction of oral stories (Jäggi 1994: 62). The expository func-
tion of framing has been noted (e.g. Kanzog [1966] 1977: 322), and
narrative framing as constitutive of “narrative circumstance” has also
been defended (Williams 1998: 110–112).
Closer to narrative levels proper is Shryock’s contention that Ge-
nette’s second typology, by adopting a functional perspective, implicit-
ly shifts to a speech act approach. Shryock (1993: 6–8) points out that
the explanatory and the predictive functions operate by virtue of their
illocutionary force while the persuasive, distractive and obstructive
functions can be qualified as such only by their perlocutionary effects
 Narrative Levels 559

(cf. Williams 1998: 101, 106). This suggests that intradiegetic narra-
tion, by serving as a “strategy of presentation” of metadiegetic narra-
tion, is not, as Genette would have it, “insignificant” ([1983] 1988: 95);
at issue, it seems, is the degree of saliency of narrative levels that pre-
vails in specific narratives.
Nelles (1997: 138–149), referring to Genette’s and Barth’s typolo-
gies, maintains that embedded narrative is characterized by a dual func-
tion: dramatic, as it defers or interrupts the embedding narrative; the-
matic, by highlighting contrast or analogy. In light of these two
functions he outlines an “interpretive strategy” for the study of narra-
tive levels which incorporates Barthes’ hermeneutic, proairetic and
formal codes.
The disparities between these and other accounts of the relations be-
tween the two levels, intradiegetic and metadiegetic, are due at least in
part to the lack of a shared conception of function. Further progress in
this area will thus require theoretical reflection on the notion of func-
tion in order to clarify its applicability to narrative levels.
One already existent line of inquiry into the functional nature of nar-
rative levels can be traced back to Šklovskij. In an essay devoted to
sjužet and the devices of repetition, postponement and digression,
Šklovskij ([1925] 1990: chap. 2) shows how these and other techniques,
by retarding the development of the principal story, contribute to the
deautomatization of perception, or defamiliarization, one of the princi-
pal aims of art. It has been noted by Seager (1991: chap. 1) how Todo-
rov ([1971] 1977), who stresses the importance of narrating within nar-
ration and thus the fundamental role of metadiegesis (a term not
employed by Todorov) in narrative generally, effectively draws atten-
tion to the connection between the three functions of metadiegetic nar-
ration (explanatory, thematic, narrational) and the perception of retarda-
tion, an effect which, according to Šklovskij, is produced particularly
by framing devices. Seager also credits Todorov (1979) with pointing
out that Genette’s system of extra-, intra- and metadiegetic levels repre-
sents a rationalization of Šklovskij’s devices of sjužet composition. But
at the same time he comments on the fact that neither of these narratol-
ogists follows up on the deautomatization of perception which, in
Šklovskij’s poetics, is functionally indissociable from the devices of
retardation. This is a point on which Šklovskij and structuralist narra-
tology seem to diverge, but it is also a point that opens up perspectives
for present-day narratology to develop a more functional approach to
narrative levels.
560 John Pier

4 Topics for Further Investigation

By formulating embedding and framing in terms of change of speaker

and diegetic level, narrative levels have proved fruitful not only in clar-
ifying questions that have remained problematic in the traditional no-
tions, but also for determining premises and raising questions for con-
tinued debate. As already mentioned, further consideration is required
into narrative levels from a historical perspective, both in practice and
in theory (chap. 3.2.2), as well as into a functional approach to the con-
cept (chap. 3.3).
Because of the connection of narrative levels with framing in narra-
tive, it is a natural step to inquire into the relevance of frames in other
disciplines to this narratological category (e.g. Wolf 2006b). This be-
gins with frame analysis (Goffman 1974) and extends, inter alia, to
cognitive frames and scripts. To date, cognitive narratology has devoted
little research to narrative levels (cf. Herman 2013: chap. 7; Herman →
Cognitive Narratology); deictic shift theory (Duchan et al., eds. 1995)
and contextual frame theory (Emmott [1997] 1999) are topics that open
up prospects for further research in this direction.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Bal, Mieke (1977). Narratologie (Essais sur la signification narrative dans quatre ro-
mans modernes). Paris: Klincksieck.
– (1981a). “The Laughing Mice.” Poetics Today 2.2, 202–210.
– (1981b). “Notes on Narrative Embedding.” Poetics Today 2.2, 41–59.
– ([1985] 1997). Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
Barth, John (1981). “Tales within Tales within Tales.” Antaeus 43, 45–63.
Bremond, Claude (1973). Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil.
Coste, Didier (1989). Narrative as Communication. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Dällenbach, Lucien ([1977] 1989). The Mirror in the Text. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Duchan, Judith F. et al., eds. (1995). Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspec-
tive. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard (1992). Narratives of Transmission. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickin-
son UP.
Emmott, Catherine ([1997] 1999). Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London & New York:
Routledge.
– ([2006] 2009). An Introduction to Narratology. London & New York: Routledge.
 Narrative Levels 561

Füredy, Viveca (1989). “A Structural Model of Phenomena with Embedding in Litera-

ture and Other Arts.” Poetics Today 10, 745–769.
García Landa, José Ángel (1998). Acción, relato, discorso. Estructura de la ficción
narrativa. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay in the Organization of Experience.
New York: Harper & Row.
Greimas, Algirdas-Julien & Joseph Courtés (1979). Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné
de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette.
Herman, David (2013). Storytelling and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT P.
Jäggi, Andreas (1994). Die Rahmenerzählung im 19. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur
Technik und Funktion einer Sonderform der fingierten Wirklichkeitsaussage.
Berne: Lang.
Kanzog, Klaus ([1966] 1977). “Rahmenerzählung.” W. Kohlschmidt & W. Moln (eds.).
Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 3, 321–
343.
Lanser, Susan (1981). The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton:
Princeton UP.
McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge.
Merker, Erna (1928–29). “Rahmenerzählung.” P. Merker & W. Stammler (eds.). Real-
lexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Vol. 3. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–4.
Nelles, William (1997). Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. New
York: Lang.
Nünning, Ansgar (2004). “On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology and an
Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary.” J. Pier (ed.). The Dy-
namics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 11–57.
Ochs, Elinor & Lisa Capps (2001). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Sto-
ries. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Picard, Hans Rudolf (1987). Der Geist der Erzählung: Dargestelltes Erzählen in litera-
rischer Tradition. Bern: Lang.
Pier, John ([1986] 2010). “Diegesis.” Th. A. Sebeok & M. Danesi (eds.). Encyclopedic
Dictionary of Semiotics. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 217–219.
– (2011). “Narrative Embedding and the Multilinear Text: The Case of John
Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse.” S. Patron (ed.). Théorie, analyse, interprétation
des récits / Theory, analysis, interpretation of narratives. Bern, etc.: Lang, 119–
146.
Prince, Gerald ([1987] 2003). Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln & London: U of Ne-
braska P.
Punday, Daniel (2003). Narrative after Deconstruction. Albany: SUNY P.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Routledge.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1986). “Embedded Narratives and Tellability.” Style 20, 319–340.
562 John Pier

– (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Blooming-

ton: Indiana UP.
– (2006). “Metaleptic Machines.” M.-R. R. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis/London:
U of Minnesota P., 204–230, 246–248.
Schmid, Wolf ([2005] 2010). Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Seager, Dennis L. (1991). Stories within Stories: An Ecosystemic Theory of Metadieget-
ic Narration. New York: Lang.
Shryock, Richard (1993). Tales of Storytelling: Embedded Narration in Modern French
Fiction. New York: Lang.
Šklovskij, Viktor (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1925] 1990). Theory of Prose. Elmwood Park:
Dalkey Archive P.
Todorov, Tzvetan ([1968] 1973). Poétique. Paris: Seuil.
– ([1971] 1977). “Narrative-Men.” The Poetics of Prose. Oxford: Blackwell, 53–
65.
– (1972). “Texte.” O. Ducrot & T. Todorov (eds.). Dictionnaire encyclopédique des
sciences du langage. Paris: Seuil, 375–388.
– (1979). “Some Approaches to Russian Formalism.” St. Bann & J. E. Bowlt, eds.
Edinburgh: Academic P, 6–19.
Tomassini, Giovanni Battista (1990). Il racconto nel racconto: analisi teorica dei pro-
cedimenti d’inserzione narrative. Roma: Bulzone.
Walsh, Richard (2010). “Person, Level, Voice: A Rhetorical Reconsideration.” J. Alber
& M. Fludernik (eds.). Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Co-
lumbus: Ohio State UP, 35–57.
Williams, Jeffrey (1998). Theory and the Novel: Narrative reflexivity in the British
tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Wolf, Werner (2000). “Multiperspektivität: Das Konzept und seine Applikationsmög-
lichkeit auf Rahmungen in Erzählwerken.” V. Nünning & A. Nünning (eds.).
Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektiven-
struktur in englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT, 79–109.
– (2006a). “Framing Borders in Frame Stories.” W. Wolf & W. Bernhart (eds.).
Framing Borders in Literature and Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 179–206.
– (2006b). “Introduction: Frames, Framing and Framing Borders in Literature and
other Media.” W. Wolf & W. Bernhart (eds.). Framing Borders in Literature and
Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–40.
– (2010). “Mise en cadre—A Neglected Counterpart to Mise en abyme: A Frame-
theoretical and Intermedial Complement to Classical Narratology.” J. Alber & M.
Fludernik (eds.). Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Colum-
bus: Ohio State UP, 58–82.
Young, Katharine Galloway (1987). Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology
of Narrative. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
 Narrative Levels 563

5.2 Further Reading

Clarke, Bruce (2008). “Metamorphosis and Embedding.” B. Clarke. Posthuman Meta-

morphosis, Narrative and Systems. New York: Fordham UP, 94–146

Derrida, Jacques (1978] 2002). “The Parergon.” B. Richardson (ed.). Narrative Dynam-
ics. Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 354–
365.
Genette, Gérard ([1987] 1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus & Sabine Schlickers (2010). “La mise en abyme en narrato-
logie.” J. Pier & F. Berthelot (eds.). Narratologies contemporaines. Approches
nouvelles pour la théorie et l’analyse du récit. Paris: Editions des Archives Con-
temporaines, 91–108.
Morson, Gary Saul (1978). “The Heresiarch of Meta.” PTL 43: 407–427.
 Narrative Strategies
Valerij Tjupa

1 Definition

Narrative strategy is a use of certain narrative techniques and practices

to achieve a certain goal. The approach adopted and the intended goal,
which presuppose certain competences (creative, referential, and recep-
tive), characterise the author of the artistic text. However, the category
of narrative strategies may also be used for the analysis of non-artistic
narrative discourses where a distinction between the biographic author
and the implied author is usually not important.

2 Explication

Each narrative is an utterance and thus a communicative act. In accord-

ance with Aristotle’s “rhetorical triangle,” somebody tells somebody
about something. Thus the theory of narration belongs to the field of
the general theory of communication; consequently, narrative strategies
comprise a certain class of communicative strategies of culture.
Narrative strategies are often reduced to the writer’s techniques.
However, the notion of strategy, taken from military science, correctly
describes the speaker’s preferences that direct his creative behaviour
after he makes a strategic choice and determines the final result, as op-
posed to various tactical actions. Applied to narrative practices, this
fundamental distinction avoids identifying the author with the narrator.
The author’s strategic position provides unity of the communicative
aim which the narrator’s (sometimes several narrators’) discourse leads
to. This position may be either homogeneous with regard to the narrat-
ing subject’s position or distanced and even ironical in relation to him.
The aim of speaking or writing is the interaction of consciousnesses
in a communication event (see van Dijk 1988): choral harmony or pro-
vocative dissonance, monologic dominance or dialogic concordance
(see Тjupa 2010). Difference in communicative aims generates a variety
of strategies. A strategic choice is made by the biographic author
 Narrative Strategies 565

(scriptor). Working consciously with the tactical means of narrative

writing, however, he does not always adequately reflect on the narrative
strategy of his own text. Any communicative strategy, narrative in par-
ticular, being “a speaker’s active position in an objective and semantic
sphere” (Baxtin 1996: 187), cannot be reduced to “a speaker’s speech
will” because “a subjective moment when an utterance is produced is
inseparably combined with its objective and semantic side, limiting and
connecting it with […] the situation of speech communication” (180).
“Strategic choices do not emerge directly from a worldview or from a
predominance of interests peculiar to this or that speaking subject”
(Foucault [1969] 2002: 81). Rather, they are made “on the basis of the
position occupied by the subject in relation to the domain of objects”
(ibid.) and in relation to an addressee or a circle of addressees. This
“situation” may be and usually is connected with the implied author.
The latter may be thought of as a complex of discourse competences
which are virtual by nature, analogously to Saussure’s langue (cf.
Greimas & Courtès 1979: 249), but they are more or less consistently
and successfully realised by the biographic author.
It is crucial that the narrative strategy correlates not with the narra-
tor, who is free to adopt one narrative tactic or another, but with the
implied semantic entity of the abstract author (Schmid [2003] 2010:
36–51). The narrative subject (narrator) is positioned in relation to ob-
jects and recipients of narration by the cognitive subject of communica-
tion (author), which consists in adopting a strategic choice. Thus under-
stood, narrative strategy is a configuration of three aspects of a single
utterance that influence each another: 1) narrative modality (the speech
subject’s rhetorical competence); 2) narrative world picture (the sphere
of objects that are of narrative interest); 3) narrative intrigue (the aspect
of plot that correlates the story with the recipient’s expectations). These
three aspects correlate with the three aspects of any utterance as a
communicative event.

3 Aspects of the Phenomenon and History of its Study

3.1 Narrative Modalities

The rhetorical modality of the narrator’s speech behaviour determines

what kind of “witness and judge” (Baxtin 2002b: 396) of “eventful be-
ing” (Baxtin) the narrator is. The category of modality is linked with
the categories of focalization (Niederhoff → Focalization) and perspec-
tive (Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of View), but it is not identical
566 Valerij Tjupa

to them. Explaining the term “focalization,” Genette ([1972] 1980) re-

fers to the degree of the narrator’s awareness and the extent to which
his knowledge is restricted. However, the narrator does not always rep-
resent knowledge: medieval Christian narrators, for instance, were
guided by sacred conviction and tended to ignore or transform empiri-
cal facts. A chain of events (a story) can be recounted in the modality of
a) neutral knowledge, b) an unreliable narrator’s personal opinion
(Booth [1961] 1983: 158–159), c) authoritative conviction that does not
need approval, or d) in the modality of understanding that is not subjec-
tive (e.g. an opinion) but is also not neutral or objective and that can be
characterised as inter-subjective (sharing of a common understanding
among subjects).
The modality of knowledge presupposes the narrator’s principal
“outsideness” (vnenaxodimost’ [Baxtin 2003: 72]) in relation to a re-
counted story. Homer could not witness the events of the Trojan war;
nevertheless, the narrator of Homer’s epic, relying on legend, tells
about these events in the narrative modality of knowledge. This
knowledge is a content of consciousness that does not depend on con-
sciousness itself (pure knowledge is not personified and is reproduc-
tive). Such a narrator is analogous to the leader of a ritual choir who
recounts commonly known things more expressively than others. The
strategy of impersonal narrative omniscience adopted by a teller can be
characterised as choral. Writers of the early modern period may adopt a
similar narrative strategy (cf. the narrator’s position in Gogol’s Taras
Bul’ba [1842]).
The modality of opinion is characterised by an apparently personi-
fied position and thus an emotional and moral, rather than factual, in-
volvement in the flow of events. Such tellers present their own version
of a recounted story and “make stronger demands on the reader’s pow-
ers of inference than do reliable narrators” (Booth [1961] 1983: 159).
Thus the narrative strategy of unreliable narration adopted by Nabokov
in Lolita (1959) “consists in inviting the reader with the help of the tex-
tual structure to guess the potencies concealed in the text; the reader is a
co-creator and takes over certain authorial functions (carefully and jeal-
ously measured by the implied author)” (Ždanova 2008: 61).
The other two modalities correspond to an intermediate position of
“evaluative outsideness” (Baxtin 2003: 72) that does not presuppose
omniscience but provides a wider conceptual horizon of the narrator
than a participant in events may have. A profound difference between
modalities consists in the convinced and convincing narrator’s mono-
logic axiological domination, on the one hand, and in the understanding
narrator’s dialogically open position, on the other. The word “convic-
 Narrative Strategies 567

tion” is intended to focus on “a definite set of values […]. It is unipolar.

Only one voice sounds in it […]. It exists in the ready-made, stably dif-
ferentiated and evaluated world” (Baxtin 1986: 513). The narrative of
conviction is subjective in terms of values (the narrator is not only a
witness but also explicitly judges what goes on), but it is not personi-
fied. This is the narrative strategy frequently adopted by Tolstoj.
The convergence of two (or even several) viewpoints in a narrated
story that belong to a narrator and a character or to a narrator and an
addressee establishes the modality of understanding. Such narration
deepens the sense of the related story, but it does not bear the marks of
absolute truthfulness of knowledge or of the absolute value of convic-
tion. The truth of understanding is not relative but “principally exceeds
the limits of one consciousness […] and is born at the junction point
where different consciousnesses meet each other” (Baxtin 2002a: 92),
as it occurs in Dostoevskij’s polyphonic novel. The narrative of under-
standing is personified but aims at overcoming the limits of the sub-
ject’s horizon. Such is the narrative strategy in the late works by Čexov.
These texts are characterised by the same narrative strategy, even given
the difference in narrative tactics employed in Dostoevskij’s novels and
in Čexov’s short stories.

3.2 Narrative World Pictures

The referential competence of narration consists in the actual “world

picture which provides the scale for determining what an event is”
(Lotman [1970] 1977: 234). From the perspective of narratology, the
general notion of world picture represents the basic structures of narra-
tive experience, the experience of eventfulness (Hühn  Event and
Eventfulness). Constituting original assumptions about the general
premises of our being, the world picture determines the “relevance” of
transitions between situations that constitute a subject matter of the sto-
ry (Schmid [2003] 2010: 9). The degree of eventfulness motivating the
possibility and justifiability of a story is not an abstract value but de-
pends on the idea of event formed in the given epoch, the literary genre
in question, the model of eventfulness put forward by the work itself
and the reader’s position (Šmid [2003] 2008: 24). Like a conventional
mathematical space, the narrative world picture “guarantees a possible
meaningful unity of possible judgements” (Baxtin 2003: 55) about what
Baxtin calls the “event of being (sobytie bytija).” The inter-subjective
“topos of agreement” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958), necessary
for understanding the text, limits the breadth of the world outlook with
a certain conceptual horizon and creates a virtual space in which con-
568 Valerij Tjupa

sciousnesses communicate in an addressee’s mind. Developing Perel-

man and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s conception of “rhetorical world pictures,”
we can single out four experience structures basic for narrative practic-
es, corresponding to the four narrative modalities:

1) precedental world picture (typical for myths and fairy tales) that
does not allow characters to avoid their status destiny: an event is
“always a fact which takes place, though it need not have taken
place” (Lotman [1970] 1977: 236); it may set a precedent for
succeeding facts of the same sort;
2) imperative world picture (of the parable type) that presupposes
an unquestionable axiological system of the world order in which
a character always has freedom of choice, even though this
choice is objectively assessed in terms of good and evil; an event
consists of fulfilling or failing to fulfil a duty, of observing the
moral law of the world or of breaching it;
3) occasional world picture (of the anecdote type) in which a char-
acter existing in a flow of eventualities is granted the freedom of
self-presentation, each of them claiming the status of eventful-
ness due to its uniqueness. Here, an event is any change in the
static plot situation which is vitally important for a character
(Tamarčenko 2008), but not for the world order;
4) probabilistic world picture (based on synergetics), concentrating
on bifurcation points at which the story “forks.” Such points re-
sult from an unstable condition of the fictional world demanding
a change that can, however, be different from the one reported in
the story, meaning that the story could have unfolded in another
way. Here, “an event is what could have been done differently”
(Ricœur [1983] 1984: 97). At the same time, narrative “temporal
schemes” may be only multiple virtual perspectives that unfold
in the heart of the story in the direction of a possible but unde-
fined horizon (Baroni 2010: 212). Eventfulness of this kind is
based on a character’s responsibility for choosing one of the pos-
sible directions of the further course of life; however, in compar-
ison to the imperative strategy, the unfolding of the chain of
events cannot be assessed unambiguously because it correlates
not with the norm of being but with its mystery.

3.3 Narrative Intrigue

A place that an addressee is strategically given by the author is deter-

mined by a narrative intrigue, i.e. narrative interest of the plot, a “hu-
 Narrative Strategies 569

man, sublunary” way of understanding what goes on (Veyne [1971]

1984). It connects the beginning of the story with its end and is based
on our ability to trace a chain of narrated events. “In this sense, the Bi-
ble is a great intrigue of world history, and every literary intrigue is a
sort of a miniature of a big intrigue that connects the Apocalypse with
the Book of Genesis” (Ricœur 1984: 40; trans. V. T.). Understood as
tension in a chain of events that arouses and realises certain readerly
expectations, an intrigue is a configuration of episodes addressing the
reader and implying familiarity with the narrative tradition. Intrigue in
Ricœur’s understanding of the term is analogous to White’s (1973)
“emplotment” and is linked to the category “plot.” Intrigue is not plot
(sjuzhet) distinguished from story (fabula), as proposed by the Russian
formalists, but an aspect of plot that addresses the reader’s receptive
intentions.
When correlated with narrative modalities and world pictures, the
basic modifications of narrative intrigue can be grouped as follows:

1) the retrospective intrigue of realisation takes place in a fairy tale

or in a mythical narrative with the precedental world picture re-
lated in the modality of knowledge whose end is already known;
the narrative interest at reception results from nuances of detail
and the fabric of speech;
2) narrative with the imperative world picture presupposing the mo-
dality of conviction is paired with the didactic intrigue of neces-
sity; narrative interest is concentrated on a positive or negative
outcome of the sequence of events;
3) the occasional world picture of narrations in the modality of
opinion motivates the intrigue of adventure; the receptive inten-
tion consists in the reader’s paradoxical expectation of the unex-
pected events that are supposed to occur in this kind of plots;
4) the heuristic intrigue of revelation of the unobvious is generated
by the probabilistic world picture of narrations in the modality of
understanding (cf. Doležel 1998).

3.4 The Unity of a Narrative Strategy

Discovering and analysing the generating mechanism of the communi-

cative unity of the text requires a wide variety of narratological con-
cepts. Basic complexes of discourse characteristics underlying a partic-
ular communicative aim include the above-mentioned strategies of
choral harmony, monologic dominance, dialogic discordance and dia-
570 Valerij Tjupa

logic concordance. At the same time, the creative, referential and recep-
tive characteristics of each of the strategies stipulate one another and
reject alien characteristics of other strategies. Thus earlier narrative
practices, up to the time of the literary classics of the 19th century, are
monostrategic and the unity of a narrative strategy is provided by its
uniqueness for the given text. In contrast, the non-traditional narrative
practices of the 20th and 21st centuries are characterised by a trend to-
wards polystrategic symbioses and eclectic unities of the narrative act.
Unity is preserved thanks to the dominance of one of the complexes of
narrative characteristics (i.e. complexes of a narrative modality, a narra-
tive world picture and a narrative intrigue).

3.5 History of Study of the Phenomenon

It was Souvage (1965), in his study of the English novel, who first
wrote about narrative strategies. A short but not quite clear definition of
this category was proposed by Prince ([1987] 2003: 64): “In recounting
a narrative, the set of narrative procedures followed or narrative devices
used to achieve some specific goal.” This definition concerns not only
narrative strategies, but also tactics. More recently, the term has be-
come widespread, especially in Russian narratology. Narrative strate-
gies are usually considered in the context of a given literary material
(Kovalev 2009), sometimes less clearly named “authorial” (Andrianova
2011) or “literary” (Kibal’nik et al. 2008) strategies. However, this
fundamental theoretical category is used in many studies on this topic
merely to indicate particular features of the investigated text. On the
other hand, Western narratology examines differences that can be char-
acterised as strategic, using other terms such as “narrative modalities”
(Doležel 1973; Ryan 1992), “suppositions” (Roussin 2010), etc. These
various terms can be used to cover such fundamental characteristics of
narrative discourse that are denoted with the widely used term “strate-
gies.”
Each of the three interconnected aspects of a narrative strategy may
be studied separately, and indeed, each of them (narrative modality,
narrative world picture, narrative intrigue) has its own research history.
Scholarship devoted to “the illusion of skaz” (Ėjxenbaum 1924) and
to the imitation of oral narration in literary form opened the way to in-
terest in the unreliable narrator (Booth [1961] 1983), a narrator whose
opinions cannot be taken at face value. Development of the categories
of point of view (Doležel 1967; Uspenskij 1973) and focalization (Ge-
nette [1972] 1980; Bal 1977, [1985] 1997) has significantly broadened
insights into narrativity (Abbott  Narrativity), while the emergence of
 Narrative Strategies 571

the “new rhetoric” has contributed to a greater understanding of the

broad spectrum of narrative modalities.
A significant role in developing the category of world picture was
played by Lotman’s turn to the theory of eventfulness (Lotman [1970]
1977) and by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyca’s (1958) typology of “rhe-
torical world pictures.”
By adopting the notion “implied reader” (Schmid → Implied Read-
er), narratology was able to turn to the analysis of modelling the ad-
dressee of narration by the text of the story. Significant input into this
turn has been provided by historiography. By the term “emplotment,”
White (1973: 7–8) meant imparting meaning to a story by combining
the events comprising it into a single, universal or archetypical form.
Following the same line of thought, Ricœur ([1984] 1985: 165) devel-
oped a system for examining the structure of a narrative against the
reader’s life world. With reference to Baxtin, Genette, Lotman and
Uspenskij, Ricœur ([1984] 1985: 159) adopted the notion of plot as
proposed by the historian Veyne ([1971] 1984). Broadening and deep-
ening this notion, Ricœur integrated into Aristotle’s “muthos” Augus-
tine’s reflections on time, White’s “emplotment” and Frye’s (1957)
“modalities.” At the same time, he stressed the addressive (Aristotle’s
“catharsis”) and explaining functions of the plot, describing it as a
“configuration” of episodes that calls for a responsive “refiguration” of
the narrated story by a receptive consciousness.
Close attention to the receptive side of narration has resulted in put-
ting the problem of its strategic purpose in the foreground. However,
the study of narrative strategies as three foundational aspects of the
communicative effectiveness of narrative has only recently begun to
develop (Тjupa 2001, 2011, 2012; Žyličeva 2013). The term “narrative
strategies” has not yet become widespread, but a need for this concept
is becoming more evident.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Systematic study of narrative strategies will show that their emergence

and establishment in the communicative practice of telling stories is
consistent and follows a historical pattern. A better understanding is
required of the phases of narrative in the evolution of human thinking
(e.g. Herman ed. 2011). This will serve as a basis for sound compara-
tive research on the parallel historical lines of the development of oral
and written works in different national languages. Addressing the cate-
gory of narrative strategies may thus significantly broaden narratologi-
572 Valerij Tjupa

cal knowledge by complementing its theoretical and analytical aspects

with historical and comparative factors. Adopting the comparative
methodology of Veselovskij’s historical poetics (Kemper 2013) would
be an effective way to develop a research branch of historical (com-
parative) narratology.

(Translated by Inna Drach)

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Andrianova, Marija D. (2011). Avtorskie strategii v romannoj proze Andreja Bitova. S-

Petersburg: S-Peterb. gos. un-t.
Baxtin, Mixail М. (Bakhtin, Mikhail) (1986). “Zametki.” M. M. Baxtin. Literaturno-
kritičeskie stat’i. Moskva: Xudožestvennaja literatura, 509–531.
– (1996). “Problema rečevyx žanrov.” М. М. Baxtin. Sobranie sočinenij v 7 tomax.
T. 5. Moskva: Russkie slovari, 159–206.
– (2002a). “Problemy poėtiki Dostoevskogo.” М. М. Baxtin. Sobranie sočinenij v 7
tomax. T. 6. Moskva: Russkie slovari, 5–300.
– (2002b). “Rabočie zapisi.” М. М. Baxtin. Sobranie sočinenij v 7 tomax. T. 6.
Moskva: Russkie slovari, 371–439.
– (2003). “K filosofii postupka.” М. М. Baxtin. Sobranie sočinenij v 7 tomax. T. 1.
Moskva: Russkie slovari, 7–68.
Bal, Mieke (1977). Narratologie (Essais sur la signification narrative dans quatre
romans modernes). Paris: Klincksieck.
– ([1985] 1997). Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U
of Toronto P.
Baroni, Raphaël (2010). “Réticence de l’intrigue.” J. Pier & F. Berthelot (eds.). Narra-
tologies contemporaines: Approches nouvelles pour la théorie et l’analyse du ré-
cit. Paris: Éd. des archives contemporaines, 199–213.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Doležel, Lubomír (1967). “The Typology of the Narrator: Point of View in Fiction.” To
Honor Roman Jakobson. Vol. 1. The Hague: Mouton, 541–552.
– (1973). Narrative Modes in Czech Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
– (1998). Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP.
Dijk, Teun A. van (1988). “The Analysis of News as Discourse.” T. A. van Dijk (ed.).
News Analysis / Case Studies of International and National News in the Press.
Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Ėjxenbaum, Boris M. (Eikhenbaum) (1924). Skvoz’ literaturu. Leningrad: Academia.
Foucault, Michel ([1969] 2002). Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Frye, Northrop (1957). The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP.
 Narrative Strategies 573

Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Greimas Algirdas J. & Joseph Courtés (1979). Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la
théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette.
Herman, David, ed. (2011). The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness
in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska P.
Kemper, Dirk et al. (2013). Die russische Schule der Historischen Poetik. München:
Fink.
Kibal’nik, Sergej A. et al. (2008). Literaturnye strategii Viktora Pelevina. S-
Petersburg: Petropolis.
Kovalev, Oleg A. (2009). Narrativnye strategii v literature (na materiale tvorčestva
F. M. Dostoevskogo). Barnaul: Izd. Altajskogo gos. un-ta.
Lotman, Jurij M. ([1970] 1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P.
Perelman, Chaïm & Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958). Traité de l'argumentation: La
nouvelle rhétorique. Paris: PUF.
Prince, Gerald ([1987] 2003). A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
UP.
Ricœur, Paul ([1983] 1984). Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
– (1984). Temps et récit. T. 2. Paris: Seuil.
– ([1984] 1985). Time and Narrative. Vol. 2. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Roussin, Philippe (2010). “Généalogies de la narratologie, dualisme des théories du
récit.” J. Pier & F. Berthelot (eds.). Narratologies contemporaines: Approches
nouvelles pour la théorie et l’analyse du récit. Paris: Éd. des archives contem-
poraines, 45–73.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1992). “The Modes of Narrative and their Visual Metaphors.”
Style 26.3, 368–387.
Šmid, Vol’f (Schmid, Wolf) ([2003] 2008). Narratologija. Мoskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj
kul’tury.
Schmid, Wolf ([2003] 2010). Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Souvage, Jacques (1965). An Introduction to the Study of the Novel, with Special Refer-
ence to the English Novel. Ghent: E. Story-Scientia.
Tamarčenko, Natan D. (2008). “Sobytie sjužetnoe.” Poėtika: slovar’ aktual’nyx termi-
nov i ponjatij. Мoskva: Intrada, 239–240.
Тjupa, Valerij I. (2001). Narratologija kak analitika povestvovatel’nogo diskursa.
Tver’: Tverskoj gos. un-t.
– (2010). Diskursnye formacii: Očerki po komparativnoj ritorike [Očerk 5]. Mos-
kva: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury.
– (2011). “Narrativnaja strategija romana (‘Doktor Živago’).” Novyj filologičeskij
vestnik. Moskva: RGGU, 3.18, 8–24.
– (2012) “Narrativnaja strategija romana ‘Master i Margarita’.” Michail Bulhakow,
jego czasy i my. Kraków: Scriptum, 337–347.
Uspenskij, Boris A. ([1970] 1973). A Poetics of Composition. Berkeley: U of California
P.
Veyne, Paul ([1971] 1984). Writing History: Essay on Epistemology. Manchester:
Manchester UP.
574 Valerij Tjupa

White, Hayden (1973). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century

Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP.
Ždanova, Anna V. (2008). Narrativnyj labirint “Lolity” (Struktura povestvovanija
v uslovijax nenadežnogo narratora). Toljatti: Izd. Volžskogo universiteta im.
V. N. Tatiščeva.
Žyličeva, Galina A. (2013). Narrativnyje strategii v žanrovoj structure romana (na
materiale russkoj prozy 1920-1950-x gg). Novosibirsk: NGPU.

5.2 Further Reading

Christoffersen, Rikke (2006). Narrative Strategies in the Novels of Erich Maria Re-
marque: A Focus on Perspective. Stirling: U of Stirling P.
Dunne, Michael (1995). Hawthorne’s Narrative Strategies. Oxford: U of Mississippi P.
Gillespie, Michael P. (1989). Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in the
Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Morton, Peter (2006). “Narrative Strategies in the Fictive Diary.” Life Writing Sympo-
sium, 13–15 June 2006. Flinders: Flinders UP.
Niati, Justin S. (2012). Narrative Strategies in African Folktales: Revisiting the Russian
Formalism Theory. Frederick: Publish America.
Pollheide, Jens (2003). Postmodernist Narrative Strategies in the Novels of John
Fowles. Bielefeld: Bielefeld UP.
Roston, Murray (2006). Graham Greene’s Narrative Strategies: A Study of the Major
Novels. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Тjupa, Valerij I. (2006). “The Communicative Strategy of Chekhov’s Poetics.” J.
Douglas Clayton (ed.). Chekhov: Poetics – Hermeneutics – Thematics. Ottawa: U
of Ottawa P, 1–20.
– (2009). “Communicative Strategy of the Anecdote and the Genesis of Literary
Genres.” Russian Journal of Communication 2.3/4, 161–170.
Trieloff, Barbara A. (1984). “Absence supreme”: Narrative Strategies in Beckett’s
Post-trilogy Prose. Hamilton: McMaster UP.
Weese, Katherine L. (2006). “The ‘Invisible’ Woman: Narrative Strategies in the Stone
Diaries.” Journal of Narrative Theory 36.1, 90–120.
 Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse
Stefan Iversen

1 Definition

Rhetoric can be defined as “the use of symbols to induce social action”

(Hauser 2002: 3), thus making rhetorical discourse texts aimed at spe-
cific audiences for specific reasons in specific situations. While they are
rarely complete narratives or completely narrative, such discourses of-
ten use narrative elements as means to their argumentative, convincing
or otherwise motivational ends. The study of narratives in rhetorical
discourse takes as its object discourses that primarily serve argumenta-
tive functions in contrast to aesthetic or didactic functions. It overlaps
with subfields of narrative study, most importantly rhetorical narratolo-
gy, research on storytelling (Norlyk, Wolff Lundholt & Hansen →
Corporate Storytelling) and Narrative Inquiry (Bamberg → Identity and
Narration). In contrast to more formal approaches to narrative such as
classical narratology (Meister → Narratology), these approaches share
an interest in the ways in which narratives move or influence readers
and audiences. They all understand narrative as situated in a communi-
cative framework.

2 Explication

Being a form of rhetorical criticism, the study of narratives in rhetorical

discourse offers analytical and evaluative readings of narratives and
narrative elements in situated discourse or acts aimed at persuading,
convincing, uniting or otherwise moving people towards specific ends.
It differs from narrative inquiry (as practiced in psychology, ethnogra-
phy, socio-linguistics and the social sciences) in that the primary object
of narrative inquiry is personal/group identity or linguistic competence.
It also differs from rhetorical narratology as practiced in literary criti-
cism in that the latter conceives “of narrative as an art of communica-
tion” (Phelan 2005a), while the study of narratives in rhetorical dis-
course works primarily with narratives in rhetorical communication.
576 Stefan Iversen

Thirdly, in methodology as well as in expected output, it differs from

theories of storytelling (e.g., corporate communication, branding),
when storytelling is understood as the strategic use of narratives: where
the study of storytelling draws heavily on quantitative methods in at-
tempts to maximize specific communicative effects, rhetorical criticism
combines close reading with contextual analysis in order to arrive at
normative judgments.
Despite different takes on what delimits rhetorical discourse, most
researchers engaged with the study of narratives in rhetorical discourse
would agree on a core corpus including, at the very least, all types of
political communication, public debate, critical journalism and most
types of public address bearing on contested issues. Among the relevant
genres, found across media and communication platforms, are speeches,
presentation material, public dialogue, rallies, blogs, manifestos, consti-
tutions and legislation, declarations, letters of opinion, editorials and
demonstrations. An example would be Barack Obama’s 2009 address to
a joint Session of Congress on health care. Here, Obama combined the
retelling of Ted Kennedy’s experience of children suffering from can-
cer with a larger narrative of what constitutes the American character in
order to persuade his audience to act in favor of the proposed reform.
Another example of a rhetorical discourse employing narratives would
be Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign (www.kony2012.com).
This campaign used videos distributed online to raise awareness and
inspire the public to take action toward catching an African war crimi-
nal. The controversy surrounding the campaign was partly due to the
intense use these videos made of narrative elements, infusing stories of
the victims and the story of the perpetrator not only with the story of
the rhetor of the multimodal production but also with a story about the
inscribed audience.
The foundational debates in this subfield of narrative study are con-
cerned with delimiting a) the question of what constitutes rhetorical
discourse and b) the question of what constitutes a narrative or a narra-
tive element in rhetorical discourse.
a) The question of what makes a discourse rhetorical has a long his-
tory and is still being debated, with positions spanning a continuum
from very narrow definitions (reserving the term for, say, explicitly
persuasive public verbal genres) to very inclusive ones (having it cover
all kinds and aspects of human symbol use). In modern rhetorical criti-
cism—often referred to as “the new rhetoric,” a term borrowed from
Olbrechts-Tyteca and Perelman’s and seminal Traité de l’argumen-
tation: La nouvelle rhétorique (1958), and from Kenneth Burke’s writ-
ings from the 1950s—two approaches stand out in the attempt to anchor
 Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse 577

the term “rhetorical discourse.” The first ties the notion of rhetoric to
the concept of rhetorical situation. Bitzer (1968) defined rhetorical dis-
course as a specific response to a specific situation: “it is the situation
which calls the [rhetorical] discourse into existence” (5) For him, a rhe-
torical situation comprises three necessary and sufficient components:
an exigence (“an imperfection marked by urgency,” a problem modifia-
ble by discourse), a rhetorical audience (those “capable of being influ-
enced by discourse and of being mediators of change”) and constraints
(persons or events with the “power to constrain decision and action
needed to modify the exigence”) (6–7). While often both highly artistic
and formally elaborate, rhetorical discourse is thus a means to an end,
and that end exists as a more or less explicit and changeable occurrence
or state of affairs in the real world. Bitzer’s insistence on this one-way
causality between occurrence and rhetorical discourse (his example is
the assassination of Kennedy) has since been challenged (Vatz 1973,
2009) and modified (Hauser 2002; Kjeldsen 2008). However, the idea
of distinguishing rhetorical discourse from, say, poetic or scientific dis-
course with recourse to the degree of manifest intentionality and func-
tion remains a crucial and distinctive move for this approach to rhetori-
cal criticism.
The second way of delimiting the term “rhetorical discourse” takes
its cue from Burke’s notion of rhetoric as identification. A major thrust
in Burke’s work is the intention to expand the idea of what counts as
rhetoric from the neo-Aristotelian notions of rhetorical discourse as
finding the most persuasive elements in a given situation to a much
broader concept of rhetoric as any more or less conscious process of
identification through the use of symbols: “The difference between the
‘old’ rhetoric and the ‘new’ rhetoric may be summed up in this manner:
whereas the key term for the ‘old’ rhetoric was persuasion and its stress
was upon deliberate design, the key term for the ‘new’ rhetoric is iden-
tification and this may include partially ‘unconscious’ factors in its ap-
peal” (Burke 1951: 203). According to Burke, most actions are moti-
vated by processes beyond rational persuasion, processes of identifying
with, say, an idea, a world view, an image or a tonality. These forms of
identification are constructed through what Burke calls consubstantiali-
ty (positive identification: “I am like this”) and diversification (negative
identification: “I am different from that”).
b) Being focused on rhetorical discourse with narrative elements ra-
ther than on full-fledged narratives, the different positions in the study
of narratives in rhetoric result in rather different definitions of what a
narrative is and on what epistemological and ontological level it might
function. In a recent introduction to the field, Rowland (2009) suggests
578 Stefan Iversen

differentiating between two main functions of narratives in rhetorical

texts: epistemic and persuasive. The epistemic function has to do with
the ability of narrative to function as a tool for “understand[ing] the
world” (121). Through the sequential, teleological structure of narra-
tive, we ascribe meaning and value to past and future occurrences and
establish relationships between them. According to Rowland, the per-
suasive function is an umbrella term that brings together different but
often connected ways in which narratives produce persuasive effects in
a given rhetorical situation: narratives “keep the attention” of the audi-
ence, they “create a sense of identification” between the sender/subject
matter and the audience, they help “break down barriers” (122) through
their ability to show a different world view from the inside, tapping into
emotions and values by zooming in on particular people undergoing
particular changes. While Rowland’s distinction between epistemic and
persuasive is helpful for a quick overview of the positions in the field, it
runs the risk of highlighting similarities where differences might matter
more. Visualized along a spectrum, these differences range from, at the
one end, conceiving of narrative as an optional stylistic device, to, at
the other end, conceiving of narrative or narrative understanding as a
fundamental, epistemological prerequisite for communication to take
place at all.

3 History of the Term

Although the systematic study of narratives on rhetorical discourse is a

fairly recent enterprise in the sense it is being discussed here, the ques-
tion of the role of narratives in rhetorical discourse, as well as the ques-
tion of the power of fictional narratives to move audiences, was raised
already in classical thinking, most notably by Aristotle and Quintilian.
A major surge of interest took place during the 1980s, inspired by a
more general turn toward narratives in history (White), psychology
(Bruner) and philosophy (Ricœur; MacIntyre). Fisher and his idea of
the narrative paradigm stands as perhaps the most radical contribution
to this upsurge, partly due to its own ideas and partly due to the debate
and discussion it provoked. Lucaites and Condit disagreed with some of
the basic assumptions of Fisher’s reasoning and suggested instead a
rethinking of insights from classical rhetoric. Apart from some addi-
tions to and revisions of Fisher’s basic categories, the study of narra-
tives in rhetorical discourse has lain rather dormant in recent years.
This is surprising, given the degree to which narratives and elements of
narratives thrive in present-day political discourse.
 Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse 579

3.1 Statements of Facts: Classical Rhetoric

With Rhetoric and Poetics, Aristotle established an early and influential

division between two kinds of aesthetic consideration. In this division,
fully invented narratives belong to poetics. To Aristotle, narratives play
minor roles in the non-fictive rhetorical genres of the forensic, the de-
liberative and the epideictic in that they are confined to the following
two functions: examples and statements of facts (narratio). Narratives
as examples are a type of proof, pertinent in deliberative speeches and
divisible into two types: “one consisting in the mention of actual facts,
the other in the invention of facts by the speaker” (Aristotle 1984:
1393). Narratives as statements of facts come under forensic speeches,
where in a sequential manner they represent the events of the (juridical)
case to the audience (jury). For Aristotle, then, narratives in rhetorical
discourse are tools for representation, either in order to make the nature
of previous events temporarily present or to use former or invented
events as images for things that could or should happen.
Quintilian elaborates on the notion of narratives in rhetorical dis-
course as narratio, which he defines as “the persuasive exposition of
that which either has been done, or is supposed to have been done”
(1920: 67). Crucial to this exposition is that it avoids the temptation to
dwell on artificiality, ornamentation and other forms of poetry: the nar-
ratio should remain as factual as possible.
Seen from the perspective of classical rhetoric, then, narratives in
rhetorical discourse are or ought to be markedly different from invented
narratives on a formal as well as on a functional level. Invented or fic-
tional narratives strive towards formal complexity, ambiguity and turn-
ing points while narratives used in rhetorical discourse should strive for
simplicity, clarity and reliability. Narratives used for rhetorical purpose
should fit the situation in which they are employed; they should be per-
suasive in the Aristotelian sense of that term.

3.2 The Narrative Paradigm: Fisher

The premise informing Fisher’s concept of the narrative paradigm is

that a large part of actual argumentation, including most cases of indi-
vidual and social decision-making, relies on narratives rather than on
what is traditionally taken to be argumentative discourse. Taking his
cue from MacIntyre (MacIntyre 1981), Fisher conceives of humans as
essentially storytelling animals, as homo narrans, choosing what seems
like the right path through life with recourse to stories: “the world is a
set of stories which must be chosen among to live the good life in a
580 Stefan Iversen

process of continual recreation. In short, good reasons are the stuff of

stories” (1984: 8).
According to Fisher, this insight calls for a major reorientation of
rhetoric and communication studies. Rather than treating narrative as a
specific genre or text-type, it should be seen as a meta-discourse, as a
fundamental way of rationalizing behavior thanks to “narrative rational-
ity.” Fisher’s position stands “in marked contrast to the view that narra-
tion is merely an element in rhetorical discourse or is a specific literary
genre” (1984: 59). The concept of narrative paradigm thus moves be-
yond the distinction initially set up in this article between reading nar-
rative as rhetoric and reading narrative elements in rhetorical discourse.
In the narrative paradigm, the sequential orderings of narrative serve
different functions: they bind together the disparate experiences of in-
dividuals into a coherent identity by connecting the choices and values
of the individual to the commonly shared narratives that carry the val-
ues of social identities. How, then, do we choose which stories and thus
which good reasons to identify with and follow?
In order to analyze the relations between different narratives as well
as between narratives and those who identify with them, Fisher intro-
duces a distinction between what he calls narrative probability and
narrative fidelity. A story worth identifying with must “ring true to the
human condition” (Fisher 1987: 176). It accomplishes this by realizing
a double coherence: internally, it must cohere as a structure (it must
“hang together” and be “free of contradiction” (Fisher 1985: 349). Ex-
ternally, it must cohere with what is taken to be the case in the culture
where the story appears: it must accord “with the logic of good rea-
sons” (349), i.e. display a certain degree of fidelity with regard to exist-
ing narratives. The decision to identify with or discard a line of narra-
tive rationality is thus made with recourse to the structure of the
proposed story as well as to the ways in which the story connects to
other stories already accepted as valid in the life of the group or indi-
vidual.
Comparing Fisher’s idea of the role of narratives to the one in clas-
sical rhetoric, the differences are striking. Rather than a statement of the
facts or an optional example used in an act of persuasion, narrative be-
comes epistemologically unavoidable, part of the very ground upon
which arguing as well as most other types of communication take place.
Fisher’s theory stirred up an intense debate in American rhetoric
during the 1980s, the first wave of which came in a special issue of The
Journal of Communication in 1986 (vol. 35.4). In the discussions of the
narrative paradigm, two weaknesses were pointed out by several rhetor-
icians. The first regards what appears to be a major limitation inherent
 Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse 581

in Fisher’s concept of fidelity. If narrative reasoning comes about only

when a new narrative shares values with what is already taken to be
reasonable, how does the paradigm explain actual change in value and
belief systems? (Kirkwood 1992: 75; see Stroud 2002 for an expanded
version of this critique).
A second, perhaps more fundamental problem, regards the epistemo-
logical omnipresence of narratives as stated by Fisher’s idea of a para-
digm. Rowland (1989) uses three case studies to argue convincingly
against the description of narrative as a universal meta-discourse. Tradi-
tional rhetorical texts without storylines or plot as well as plot-rich fic-
tion with strange entities clearly resist the application of narrative fidel-
ity and probability. Rowland concludes that “the domain in which
narrative approaches to rhetoric should be utilized is much narrower
than Fisher and others have suggested” (1989: 51).
In a more indirect but also more consequential way, Lucaites and
Condit (1985) voiced a similar critique, not only questioning the possi-
bility and validity of a pan-narrative approach but also suggesting an-
other way of studying narratives in rhetorical discourse.

3.3 Narratives as Lenses: Lucaites and Condit

Lucaites and Condit argue that narratives carry different functions in

different types of discourse. Their suggestion is thus diametrically op-
posed to the meta-discursive ambitions of the narrative paradigm. They
distinguish between poetic, dialectic and rhetorical discourse, motivated
by, respectively, the search for aesthetic pleasure, enlightenment and
power. Drawing on Quintilian, they suggest analyzing narratives in rhe-
torical discourse on the basis of this type of discourse’s need to be
adapted to specific contexts, audiences and purposes. These three sub-
functions all share the quality of specificity in that rhetorical discourse,
as well as the narrative elements appearing in it, is bound to a specific
situation.
The contextual sub-function stems from the fact that a rhetorical
discourse is involved in an ongoing negotiation between at least two
parties. This has two formal consequences. The first is that it requires a
narrative within a rhetorical discourse to be unequivocal (it must “invite
only one interpretation”) in order to clearly state the rhetor’s case. Sec-
ond, because it is part of a discourse that attempts to move actual audi-
ences to action, it must “stop short of the formal stage of plot ‘resolu-
tion’ by virtue of its purpose to encourage audience enactment”
(Lucaites & Condit 1985: 100).
582 Stefan Iversen

The audience function is linked to the fact that rhetorical discourse

is always directed at a specific audience. It also has two formal conse-
quences, requiring that narrative rhetoric be consistent and concise.
Consistency becomes important because the use of a narrative should
be coherent internally and fit the context in which it occurs, meaning
that it should strive to make sense in connection with the reality of the
intended audience. The requirement of concision follows from the fact
that rhetorical discourse should avoid putting unnecessary strain on the
patience of the audience.
The third sub-function—purpose—is the one that most emphatically
makes narratives in rhetoric stand apart from, say, fictional narratives.
To Lucaites and Condit, narratives in rhetorical discourse are always a
true subset of a rhetorical artifact with an often very specific purpose,
tied inextricably to the rhetor or sender of the artifact. The first formal
consequence of this explicit link between a rhetorical artifact and its
sender is that the narrative should aim for a “formal unity of narrator,
author, and speaker” (101). The second consequence is that the ethos of
the rhetor by necessity is connected to the impact of the narrative ele-
ments as well as vice versa.
As should be evident, Lucaites and Condit express doubts about the
validity of Fisher’s promotion of narrative to the position of master
metaphor for human communication. Instead, their suggestion can be
summed up as a poetics of the adequate use of narrative elements in
rhetorical situations, an approach compatible with the ideas of narra-
tives as statements of facts or examples: a “rhetorical narrative is a sto-
ry that serves as an interpretative lens through which the audience is
asked to view and understand the verisimilitude of the propositions and
proof before it” (94).
It is tempting to posit Fishers’ and Lucaites and Condit’s positions
as extremes in a polarized discussion. Fisher deals with the epistemo-
logical qualities of narratives of social and individual identity but lacks
adequate tools to analyze the specificity of the rhetorical narrative. Lu-
caites and Condit analyze these specifics but offer no tools for dealing
with matters of more general narrative identification. Or, seen from an-
other perspective: Lucaites and Condit offer few reasons for choosing
narratives as part of an attempt to convince while Fisher claims that it is
impossible to avoid narratives even if one tried to do so.

3.4 Recent Developments

The difference is rather striking if one compares the massive prolifera-

tion of narrative studies with the amount of work done on narratives in
 Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse 583

rhetorical discourse during the last twenty years. As McClure put it in

2009: “in rhetorical theory and criticism narrative and the narrative par-
adigm have become virtually dead subjects” (2009: 189). Nevertheless,
several pieces of interesting research have come out in the 2000s and
early 2010s, most of which elaborate on Burke’s notion of identifica-
tion while some also engage with aspects of Fisher’s concept of the nar-
rative paradigm.
Any scholar engaging with the narrative paradigm will have to posi-
tion herself with regards to the double critique of the paradigm: on the
one hand, its problem of being too general and wide, effectively turning
narrative, as Rowland puts it, into a general “model for understanding
the world” (Rowland 1989: 43); on the other hand, the problem of its
analytical tools (probability and fidelity) being too narrow and inept at
dealing with phenomena like the “inventional possibilities of new nar-
ratives, the rhetorical revision of old narratives, and the appeal and ac-
ceptance of improbable narrative accounts” (McClure 2009: 191).
Stroud has taken issue with aspects of the second problem in a series
of articles (Stroud 2002, 2003, 2004). Challenging Fisher’s ideas of
probability and fidelity with a case that “involves contradictions at the
level of values within a text and the reader’s necessitated activity of
trying to synthesize or reconcile such contradictions,” Stroud revises
the definitions of fidelity and probability to better account for situations
where audiences encounter and make sense of discourse with “contra-
dictory value structures” (2004: 42), which Stroud calls “multivalent
narratives.”
A more radical repositioning of the narrative paradigm is presented
by the Burke expert McClure (2009). In stark contrast to the critique of
the expansive ambitions of the narrative paradigm, McClure moves to-
wards an “extension of the [narrative] paradigm that is consistent with
poststructuralism” (191) through a further widening of the range of the
Burkean notion of identification.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

The lack of contemporary research on narratives in rhetorical discourse

has left a range of pressing questions unanswered, some stemming from
unresolved issues in the existing research, others raised by the trans-
formations of communication brought on by, among other things, pro-
cesses of digitalization and globalization.
A major challenge in relation to the first set of questions is the prob-
lem of the epistemological reach and impact of narrative effects in rhe-
torical discourse. Are we to understand narratives (as Fisher argued) as
584 Stefan Iversen

a general master trope for human existence? Or are we rather, as Lu-

caites and Condit argued, to understand them as examples and state-
ments of facts? Connected to this question of the place of narration are
questions of the deliberative functions of narratives. To what extent
should they be treated as subduing and thus a threat to processes of de-
liberation (Salmon [2007] 2010) or as subversive and thus a vehicle for
such processes? Following this line of thought, what might the study of
narratives in rhetorical discourse learn from work done on the ways in
which narratives are used as tools for reversing or transforming existing
opinions through the use of so-called counter-narratives (Bamberg &
Andrews 2004; Godall 2010)?
A promising but so far untapped field of investigation exists be-
tween work in rhetorical criticism of narratives and recent work in so-
cial sciences and sociology on narratives and storytelling in society and
politics. Expanding the focus on personal life stories in narrative in-
quiry to a wider perspective of what Holstein and Gubrium call “the
social life of stories” (2012: 3), several researchers offer new insights
on, as the subtitle of Polletta (2006) dubs it: “storytelling in protest and
politics.”
Seen from the more rigorous viewpoints of classical and postclassi-
cal narratology, the study of narratives in rhetorical discourse seems
lacking when it comes to definitions and delineations of the objects of
study. Does it make sense to establish a set of necessary and sufficient
conditions for narratives in rhetorical discourse, or are we better off
with granular or prototypical descriptions? How much and what parts
of narrative elements (or degrees of narrativity; Abbott → Narrativity)
should be present in order for a rhetorical discourse to warrant a narra-
tive analysis? And what and how does it matter whether a narrative in a
rhetorical discourse employs strategies of fictionalization (Walsh 2007;
Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narration)?
The second set of questions has to do with the fact that the rhetorical
narratives of today thrive in a new media ecology, making different
demands on as well as offering new options for senders, audiences and
the modalities of expression. With the shift from mass media to mass
self-communication, and with the displacements of former distinctions
between public and private brought on by social media, the forms and
functions of narratives in rhetorical discourse are undergoing substan-
tial changes. Socio-linguistic work on narratives (Georgakopoulou
2007) has argued that earlier theories of life narratives subscribed to an
implicit understanding of narratives as stable, autonomous and mono-
perspectival entities, thus ignoring that in real, unfolding lives, narra-
tives are often dialogical, multi-perspectival and fragmented. These
 Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse 585

insights have funneled into research on narrative in new media (Page &
Bronwen 2011), but they have yet to be put to work on narratives in
political rhetoric. Connected to these matters is the question of the au-
dience. The study of narratives in rhetorical discourse could benefit
from researchers engaging with powerful tools of rhetorical narratology
such as the notion of positioning (Phelan 2005b) for analyzing the ethi-
cal and value-generating interactions between textual form and readerly
response.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aristotle (1984). Rhetoric. J. Barnes (ed.). The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. Two.
Princeton: Princeton UP.
Bamberg, Michael & Molly Andrews (2004). Considering Counter-Narratives: Narrat-
ing, Resisting, Making Sense. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Bitzer, Lloyd F. (1968). “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1.1, 1–
14.
Burke, Kenneth (1951). “Rhetoric Old and New.” Journal of General Education 5,
202–209.
Fisher, Walther (1984). “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm.” Communi-
cation Monographs 51, 1–22.
– (1985). “The Narrative Paradigm: An Elaboration.” Communication Monographs
52, 347–367.
– (1987). Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason,
Value and Action. Columbia: U of South Carolina P.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amster-
dam: Benjamins.
Godall, H. L. (2010). Counter-Narrative: How Progressive Academics Can Challenge
Extremists and Promote Social Justice. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast P.
Hauser, Gerald A. (2002). Introduction to Rhetorical Theory. Long Grove, Illinois:
Waveland Press Inc.
Holstein, James A. & Jaber F. Gubrium, eds. (2012). Varieties of Narrative Analysis.
London: Sage Publications.
Kirkwood, William G. (1992). “Narrative and the Rhetoric of Possibility.” Communi-
cation Monographs 59, 30–47.
Kjeldsen, Jens E. (2008). “Mediated publics and rhetorical fragmentation.” Democracy,
Journalism and Technology: New Developments in an Enlarged Europe. Tartu:
Tartu UP, 115–128.
Lucaites, John Louis & Celeste Michelle Condit (1985). “Re-constructing Narrative
Theory: A Functional Perspective.” Journal of Communication 35.4, 90–108.
586 Stefan Iversen

MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press.
McClure, Kevin (2009). “Resurrecting the Narrative Paradigm: Identification and the
Case of Young Earth Creationism.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39.2, 189–211.
Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie & Chaïm Perelman (1958). Traité de l’argumentation: La
nouvelle rhétorique. Paris: PUF.
Page, Ruth & Thomas Bronwen, eds. (2011). New Narratives. Stories and Storytelling
in the Digital Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Phelan, James (2005a). “Rhetorical Narratology.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 500–504.
– (2005b). Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
Polletta, Francesca (2006). It Was Like a Fever. Storytelling in Protest and Politics.
Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Quintilian (1920). Institutio Oratoria. Quoted from: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/-
Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/4B*.html
Rowland, Robert (1989). “On Limiting the Narrative Paradigm: Three Case Studies.”
Communication Monographs 56, 39–54.
Rowland, Robert (2009). “The Narrative Perspective.” J. Kuypers (ed.). Rhetorical
Criticism. Perspectives in Action. Plymouth, MA: Lexington Books, 117–142.
Salmon, Christian ([2007] 2010). Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind. London:
Verso.
Stroud, Scott R. (2002). “Multivalent Narratives: Extending the Narrative Paradigm
with Insights from Ancient Indian Philosophical Texts.” Western Journal of
Communication 66, 369–393.
– (2003). “Narrative Translation Across Cultures: From the Bhagavad Gita to The
Legend of Bagger Vance.” Journal of Communication and Religion 26.1, 51–82.
– (2004). “Narrative as Argument in the Indian Philosophy: The Astāvakra Gitā as
Multivalent Narrative.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37, 42–71.
Vatz, Richard E. (1973). “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhet-
oric 6.3, 154–161.
Vatz, Richard E. (2009). “The Mythical Status of Situational Rhetoric: Implications for
Rhetorical Critics’ Relevance in the Public Arena.” Review of Communication
9.1, 1–5.
Walsh, Richard (2007). The Rhetoric of Fictionality. Columbus: Ohio State UP.

5.1 Further Reading

Charland, Maurice (1987). “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, 133–150.
Foss, Sonja K. (2004). “Narrative Rhetoric.” Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and
Practice. Long Grove, Illinois: Waweland P., 333, 382.
Hauser, Gerard (1999). Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public
Spheres. Columbia: U of South Carolina P.
Lewis, William F. (1987). “Telling America’s Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan
Presidency.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, 280–302.
 Narrativity
H. Porter Abbott

1 Definition

Though it has become a contested term, “narrativity” is still commonly

used in two senses: in a fixed sense as the “narrativeness” of narrative
and in a scalar sense as the “narrativeness” of a narrative, the one ap-
plied generally to the concept of narrative, the other applied compara-
tively to particular narratives. As such, it can be aligned with any num-
ber of modal pairings: e.g. the lyricism of the lyric/a lyric; the
descriptiveness of description/a description. Depending on the context,
these two uses of the term “narrativity” can serve their purposes effec-
tively. But increasingly over the last three decades, the term has filled a
growing and sometimes conflicting diversity of conceptual roles. In the
process, other terms have, in varying ways, been drawn into the task of
understanding narrativity, including “narrativeness” (used colloquially
above), “narrativehood,” “narratibility,” “tellability,” “eventfulness,”
“emplotment,” and “narrative” itself. To define narrativity fully, then,
requires a survey not only of its different conceptual uses, but also of
the supporting roles these other terms have been sometimes called on to
play.

2 Explication

This lively contestation has accompanied narrativity’s rise as a central

term, and in some cases the central term (Sternberg, Sturgess, Fluder-
nik, Audet, Simon-Shoshan), in narrative analytics. This is in large part
because of the way the term has leant itself to a general shift away from
the formalist constraints of structuralist narratology (where the term is
rarely found) as attention has turned increasingly to the transaction be-
tween narratives and the audiences that bring them to life. As such, it
has helped open up the study of narrative to an array of approaches—
phenomenological, discursive, cognitive, historical, cultural, evolution-
ary—that have transformed the field.
588 H. Porter Abbott

The term’s advantage in this expansion of disciplinary applications

is built into its grammatical status as a reference to a property or prop-
erties rather than to a thing or class. As what one might call an “adjec-
tival” noun, narrativity suggests connotatively a felt quality, something
that may not be entirely definable or may be subject to gradations.
Ryan’s distinction between “being a narrative” and “possessing narra-
tivity” (2005c: 347, 2006a: 10–11) brings out the difference: where a
narrative is a “semiotic object,” narrativity consists in “being able to
inspire a narrative response” (2005c: 347). This flexibility and compar-
ative freedom from restrictive categorizing (must a narrative have more
than one event? [(Hühn → Event and Eventfulness)] must narrative
events be causally connected? [Toolan → Coherence)] must they in-
volve human or humanlike entities? [(Jannidis → Character)]) also
gives the term a certain user-friendliness. To adapt Ryan’s language, if
we ask: “Does Finnegans Wake have more or less narrativity than Little
Red Riding Hood?” we will get much broader agreement than if we ask
“Is Finnegans Wake a narrative?” (Ryan 2006a: 9, 2007: 30). In short,
if narrative itself is a “fuzzy concept” (Ryan 2006b, 2007; Jannidis
2003), narrativity is a term more closely attuned to its fuzziness (Her-
man 2002). This practical advantage of the term has also abetted the
development of a transgeneric and transmedial narratology (Wolf 2002;
Ryan 2005c, 2006a; Hühn & Sommer → Narration in Poetry and Dra-
ma; Ryan → Narration in Various Media) that includes narrative in
genres and media where words are no longer central to narration and
where readers become viewers and even active participants. It has even
facilitated consideration of narrativity in media that lack expectations of
eventfulness (lyric poetry), sequentiality (painting), or even hetero-
referentiality (referring to events outside the medial domain) that are
the staple of narrative. Most controversial among the latter has been
instrumental music, considered by many a purely self-referential artistic
medium. Among those sketching a possible “narratology of music”
(Kramer 1991; Newcomb 1987; McClary 1997; Micznik (2001); Wolf
2002, 2004; Meelberg (2006); Almén (2008); Grabócz 2009), it has
been Micznik, Wolf, and Almén who have explicitly capitalized on the
finer calipers of the term “narrativity” to capture narrative effects
achievable in a medium that cannot tell a story.
Not surprisingly, then, narrativity has been more often used as a var-
iable quality than as a necessary component or set of components by
which narrative can be defined. Thus Herman adopts the term “narra-
tivehood” in the sense given it by Prince (1999) as a “binary predicate”
by which “something either is or is not” deemed a story, and in this way
reserves “narrativity” as a “scalar predicate” by which something is
 Narrativity 589

deemed “more or less prototypically storylike” (Herman 2002: 90–91).

As Herman suggests, this distinction correlates with the distinction be-
tween “extensional” and “intensional” aspects of narrative which were
introduced to narratology through the application of “possible worlds”
theory by Doležel (1979, 1983, 1998), Pavel (1986), Ryan (1991), and
others. Nevertheless, narrativity has not been used exclusively in an
intensional sense. In his most recent reconsideration of this knotty ter-
minological problem, Prince (2008) has sought to expand the concept
of narrativity to include both extensional and intensional aspects. For
the first—the entities that constitute narrative—he has retained the term
narrativehood; for the second—the qualities or traits of narrative—he
has applied the term narrativeness. In Prince’s view, both are scalar
concepts in that they are subject to degrees, the first quantitative, the
second qualitative. Without using the term narrativity at all, Morson
(2003) also distinguishes between the defined object, for which he uses
the term narrative, and the quality of narrativeness, which a narrative
may or may not have (see also Hühn 2008: 143).
Further complicating any effort to organize the range of discourse
on narrativity are the ways in which the term has been deployed in
modal or generic distinctions to delineate both a field of specifically
narrative modes and a broader field in which narrative is one of a num-
ber of communicative and artistic modes. In both, its flexibility as a
scalar phenomenon plays a role. At the broadest level of abstraction,
then, the discussion of narrativity can be organized under four head-
ings: (a) as inherent or extensional; (b) as scalar or intensional; (c) as
variable according to narrative type; (d) as a mode among modes.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Prehistory of Narrativity

If, as noted above, the specific term “narrativity” did not develop its
lively range of conceptual roles until the last decades of the 20th centu-
ry, closely related concepts have been deployed from the start. The
most influential precursor concept is the property of mediation, which
Plato identified when distinguishing between the indirect representa-
tional character of diegesis and the direct presentational character of
mimesis: the one narrated by the poet, the other performed (The Repub-
lic, Bk 3). As Schmid (2003: 17–18) notes, mediation was a central fo-
cus of classical narratology well before narratology got its name, nota-
bly in Stanzel’s major work of the 1950s and 1960s, later reinvigorated
590 H. Porter Abbott

in A Theory of Narrative ([1979] 1984), but lacking the word “narra-

tivity.” Another classical precursor concept is Aristotle’s idea of muth-
os, “the configuration of incidence in the story” (Greimas & Ricœur
1989: 551), which anticipates the concept of “emplotment,” a central
term for Ricœur and others in the discourse on narrativity. In the devel-
opment of structuralist narratology, the Russian formalist idea of “the
dominant” has also been critical. Usually attributed to Tynjanov
([1927] 1971) and influentially developed by Jakobson, the dominant is
the “focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and
transforms the remaining components” and as such guarantees “the in-
tegrity of the structure” (Jakobson [1935] 1971: 105). The dominant has
been taken up by Sternberg and others as a categorical determinant, a
perceived modal predominance, distinguishing any particular narrative
from other modal kinds (see 3.5 below).

3.2 Narrativity as Inherent or Extensional

Though narrativity has leant itself predominantly to usage that is inten-

sional, subjective, and variable according to context, audience, and oth-
er factors, there have been several powerful conceptions of the term as
inherent, determinative, and co-extensive with any particular narrative.

3.2.1 Immanence

Greimas is the major exception to the general structuralist neglect of

narrativity. His conception of the term is also notable for its breadth of
application, referring to a structuring force that generates not simply all
narratives but all discourse: “le principe organisateur de tout discours”
(Greimas & Courtés 1979: 249). With regard to narrative in particular,
Greimas distinguishes between an apparent and an immanent level of
narration, with narrativity located in the latter. As such, “narrativity is
situated and organized prior to its manifestation. A common semiotic
level is thus distinct from the linguistic level and is logically prior to it,
whatever the language chosen for the manifestation” (Greimas [1969]
1977: 23).
It is also important to note that, for Greimas, narrativity is a disor-
ganizing as well as an organizing force in that it disrupts old orders
even as it generates new ones. It is “the irruption of the discontinuous”
into the settled discourse “of a life, a story, an individual, a culture,”
disarticulating the existing discourse “into discrete states between
which it sets transformations” ([1983] 1987: 104). To bear this in mind
is to see the deep commonality of modes (descriptive, argumentative,
 Narrativity 591

narrative) often left segmented in analytical terminology. In an analysis

of Maupassant’s “A Piece of String,” Greimas carefully demonstrates
how customary distinctions such as that between descriptive and narra-
tive segments give way at a deeper level that organizes “according to
canonical rules of narrativity” ([1973] 1989: 625). However static they
may appear to be, descriptive segments are imbued with the same un-
dergirding narrativity that organizes the segments of action.

3.2.2 Emplotment

For Ricœur, a key manifestation of narrativity is “emplotment,” the ar-

ticulation of which involves “broadening, radicalizing, [and] enriching”
the Aristotelean idea of plot with the Augustinian understanding of time
([1985] 1988: 4). This allows him on the one hand to develop a com-
plex reassessment of the temporal difference between fictional and his-
torical narrative, while on the other to bring out their deep commonali-
ty. To accomplish this, Ricœur, like Greimas, posits a deep level of
narrativity; but unlike Greimas, he sees it as a “pre-understanding” of
our historical mindedness—“an intelligibility of the historicality that
characterizes us” (Greimas & Ricœur 1989: 552)—and it lies at the
heart of his critique of Greimas’s a-temporal model of fictional narra-
tive (Ricœur [1980] 1981). In addition, and further differentiating his
usage from that of Greimas, Ricœur saw the operation of emplotment as
a dialectical process, a dynamic interaction between this “first-order
intelligence” and the surface level where narrative is structurally mani-
fest in the text (Greimas & Ricœur 1989: 551–552). Emplotment, then,
is an evolving, processual feed-back loop between the informing level
of narrativity and the particularity of its manifestation.
Like Ricœur, White (1973, 1978, 1981) does not limit narrativity to
the designated modes of fiction. But where Ricœur’s theory of emplot-
ment not only bonds but distinguishes fictional and nonfictional narra-
tivity (Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narration), White has tend-
ed over the course of his writings to stress the commonality of their
narrativity. More than this, narrativity is for White a “panglobal fact of
culture,” without which there is no conveying knowledge as meaning.
Narrativity is at one with the perception of meaning because meaning
only emerges when events have been “emplotted” with “the formal co-
herency that only stories can possess” (White 1981: 19). For this rea-
son, history, by definition, cannot exist without narrativity. In its ab-
sence, there is a mere succession of events (annals) or, at best, events
organized by some other means than plot (chronicles). It is emplotment
that brings events to life, endowing them with cultural meaning, since
592 H. Porter Abbott

“[t]he significance of narrative is not latent in the data of experience, or

of imagination, but fabricated in the process of subjecting that data to
the elemental rhetoric of the narrative form itself” (Walsh 2007: 39).
The final irony, then, is that narrativity is the unacknowledged necessi-
ty of what we take for truth, for to attain the status of truth, a represen-
tation of “the real” requires, at a minimum, “the character of narrativi-
ty” (White 1981: 6).

3.2.3 A Logic of Narrativity

For Sturgess, too, narrativity is inherent in narrative. It is an “enabling

force” that “is present at every point in the narrative” (Sturgess 1992:
28). He also echoes Greimas when he writes of narrativity’s power over
“nonnarrative” segments like descriptive passages. It governs “not only
the chronology of a novel’s story, but equally every interruption of that
chronology, and every variation in the mode of representation of that
story” (22). At the same time, he situates himself in opposition to
Greimas’s idea of “a deep structural level of narrative which is pre-
sumed in some way to account for the existence of the narrative in
question” (14). Drawing on Bremond’s (1973) critique of Greimas,
Sturgess sees narrativity instead as an all-determining “logic” or “pow-
er of narrativity which decides” how elements are deployed at any mo-
ment in a narrative (Sturgess 1992: 140–141).
Cohen also proposes a logic of narrativity, but one that simply re-
quires that the languages of literary and filmic fiction render their signs
consecutively. The result, however, is also a co-extensively inherent
narrativity that the reader or viewer is led to apprehend: “an unfolding
structure, the diegetic whole, that is never fully present in any one
group yet always implied in each group” (1979: 92). Like Sturgess, and
unlike Ricœur and White, Cohen restricts narrativity to works of con-
scious art. But Sturgess’s concept differs from all three in two funda-
mental ways. First, for Sturgess, the “logic of narrativity” requires no
sequential structuring principle, but simply the ability to arouse “a
sense of its own wholeness” as narrative (1992: 28). Second, narrativity
only crystallizes when the reader is persuaded that what is being read is
a narrative. It is in this sense a reflexive concept.
An advantage of both Sturgess’s and Cohen’s logics is the way they
can accommodate postmodern and other extreme forms of weakened or
obscured storyline that are often considered “anti-narrative,” since
“every narrative will possess its own form of narrativity” (Sturgess:
ibid.). In Cohen’s words, even “the randomness common to […] surre-
alist experiments points to the fundamental and seemingly inevitable
 Narrativity 593

narrativity of cinematic and literary language” (1979: 92). A disad-

vantage of this approach to narrativity is the threat of circularity, which
weakens both its analytical leverage and its ability to distinguish narra-
tive competence from narrative incompetence.

3.3 As Scalar or Intensional

Some scholars start out with an extensional definition of narrativity,

equating it with a “set” of defining conditions, as in “the set of qualities
marking narrative and helping a reader or viewer perceive the differ-
ence between narrative and non-narrative texts” (Keen 2003: 121) or
“the set of properties characterizing narrative and distinguishing it from
nonnarrative” (Prince [1987] 2003: 65). But these same scholars will
often go on to treat the concept of narrativity as an intensional quality
by which a text is felt to be “more or less narrative” (ibid.). Indeed, as
Schmid (2003: 30) notes, it is hard to remain objective or to do away
with an interpretive stance when discussing the scalar narrativity of
texts. This double usage of narrativity is the problem Prince (2008) set
out to resolve when he divided narrativity into narrativehood and narra-
tiveness. As he demonstrates, the scalar nature of narrativity is not only
complicated by the variable combinability of these two subcategories
but by other factors as well. With similar ambition, Ryan has spelled
out a “tentative formulation of [nine] nested conditions” that might be
used in describing narrative as a “fuzzy set,” recognizable in any par-
ticular work according to the number and importance of the conditions
present (Ryan 2006a: 7–10, 2006b: 194). Many scholars have, nonethe-
less, centered their theorizing on a single manifestation of narrativity,
while explicitly or implicitly acknowledging the complexity of narra-
tive response that makes narrativity both a scalar and a fuzzy concept.
This in turn means that there can be no pure segregation of their work
under one caption or another.

3.3.1 Sequentiality

In the 1970s, when Sternberg developed his theory of three overarching

“master forces” of narrative—curiosity, suspense, and surprise
(1978)—he did not use the word “narrativity.” In more recent years,
however, the term “narrativity” has become increasingly useful for him
as “the play of suspense/curiosity/surprise between represented and
communicative time.” The important sequentiality in this regard is an
intersequentiality entailing “an interplay between the one sequence's
flow of developments and the other's flow of disclosures” (2010: 637).
594 H. Porter Abbott

A narrative, then, is a text in which “such play dominates.” Narrativi-

ty would appear to be a scalar property which can be “stronger” or
“weaker,” but when it is dominant in any text, its “functional” character
is to act as a “regulating principle” (1992: 529). At this point, the theo-
ry transits to a concept of inherency. Thus “strong narrativity […] not
merely represents an action but interanimates the three generic forces
that play between narrated and narrational time” (2001: 119). If this
process "constantly changes en route from beginning to end" (2010:
637), these changes involve fluid qualitative adjustments of thought and
feeling as the text is processed by the mind. But they, along with all the
other elements of the narrative, are orchestrated according to “the un-
breakable lawlikeness of the narrative process itself” (2003: 328).
Almost all arguments identifying narrativity with sequentiality start
from the idea that there is more to it than simply one thing after the oth-
er. In this they follow antecedent theorizing ranging from Aristotle’s
view of the well-made tragedy to Tomaševskij’s ([1925] 1965) defini-
tion of fabula and Forster’s ([1927] 1962) definition of plot, all of
which stress the importance of causal connection. Since then, much
theorizing about narrative has featured a sense of causal agency as “a
necessary condition of narrativity” (Richardson 1997: 106; White 1981;
Bal [1985] 1997; Bordwell 1985; Rabinowitz 1987). Pier (2008) more
rigorously distinguishes between treatments of causality suitable in de-
fining narrative and “narrative worlds” and a more adequate under-
standing of narrativity in relation to the complex, evolving, process of
causal inference “set in motion by heuristic reading and semiotic read-
ing” (134).
More recently, understanding of sequentiality has been enlarged by
the importation of schema theory from cognitive psychology (Bordwell
1985; Fludernik 1996; Herman 2002; Hühn 2008; Emmott & Alexander
→ Schemata). Especially important has been the concept of cognitive
scripts in analyzing what happens at the script/story interface (Herman
2002). Scripts are stereotypical sequences warehoused in the brain that
together contribute to Bruner’s (1991) “canonicity” or the expectations
on which Sternberg’s sequence of curiosity/suspense/sur-prise depends.
They participate in varying degrees of narrativity, depending on the
extent to which they are breached with the unexpected. (For further
commentary on narrativity and schema theory, see 3.2.4 below.)
Ryan complicated the sequential unfolding of scalar narrativity
when she located it in the varying ratio of two levels: “one pertaining to
story (or the ‘what’ of a narrative) and the other to the discourse (or the
‘way’ such narrative content is presented).” For example, “[t]he same
text can present full narrativity in sense 1, but low narrativity in sense
 Narrativity 595

2, when it tells a well-formed story but the progress of the action is

slowed down by descriptions, general comments, and digressions”
(2007: 34 n.25). Kermode (1983) takes this bi-level approach a step
further. In narratives of any complexity, he argues, the sequentiality of
the story’s narrativity is always at war with the nonnarrativity of the
discourse. Narrativity on this view is a kind of psycho-cultural “propri-
ety” that lies in the comforting “connexity” of the fabula, accepted
simply as such. In this way, Kermode’s account of the reassurance of
story chimes with White’s idea of narrativity as a conduit of ideological
doxa. But for Kermode, what disturbs the orthodoxy freighted in the
narrativity of the fabula is the sujet or the rendering of the story. It is
the sujet that prevents us, if we are intent on not “underreading,” from
resting in the story’s reassuring sequential narrativity, for it abounds in
“mutinous” nonnarrative elements that contend with the text’s narrativi-
ty, crying out to be accommodated by interpretation even as they frus-
trate it (137).

3.3.2 Eventfulness

Recent attention to eventfulness by the Hamburg Narratology Research

Group responds to the need for a clearer understanding of what consti-
tutes a narrative event than is found in most sequentiality-based theo-
ries (Hühn 2008: 146). Schmid (2003) develops his theory of eventful-
ness within a definition of the narrative event as a non-trivial change of
state that takes place and reaches completion (is “resultative”) in the
actual (“real”) world of any particular fictional narrative. Its narrativity,
then, depends on its non-triviality, which in turn is a factor of its event-
fulness. For Schmid this depends on five key variable features: rele-
vance, unpredictability, persistence, irreversibility, and non-iterativity.
Hühn (2008) supplements Schmid’s concept by drawing on schema
theory and Lotman’s concept of the “semantic field.” Combining these
two areas of research gives Hühn’s version of eventfulness an analyti-
cal scope that includes both the cognitive drama of schematic disrup-
tion and an awareness of historical and cultural contexts afforded by the
recognition of differing semantic socio-cultural fields.
Audet has sought to disconnect the concept of narrativity from any
dependent connection with crafted narrative, identifying it instead with
the more widely occurring sense of what he calls “eventness [événe-
mentialité], […] where the tension between a before and an after seems
to generate a virtuality, that of a story to come” ([2006] 2007: 34). Au-
det builds on Lotman’s idea of a hierarchy of events, proposing three
levels or types of event: the “inworld event” (concrete action), the “dis-
596 H. Porter Abbott

cursive event,” and the “operal event” (“connected to the performing of

the work itself”) (33), each of which in its emergence raises narrativity
through its aura of events to come. However far one wishes to go down
this road with Audet, he, like Cohen, Sturgess, and as we will see
Fludernik, has found a way to accommodate those postmodern experi-
mental texts that often frustrate narratologists wedded to a narrative-
centered theory.
Morson (2003) also uses a concept of eventness (with other quali-
ties) in developing his scalar concept of narrativeness. Adapting the
term from Bakhtin, Morson’s version of eventness is the sense of mul-
tiple (but not infinite) possibilities for what will ensue, given where we
are in the narrative. It is a feeling of “process” not unlike that of life as
it is lived (72). It is the source of narrative suspense, and, to the degree
that a narrative sustains from one moment to the next this quality of
being open to future developments, to the same degree does the reader
experience the quality of narrativeness.

3.3.3 Tellability

Originally introduced by Labov (1972), tellability (Baroni → Tellabil-

ity) (or narratibility; cf. Prince 2008) is what makes a story worth tell-
ing. It allows a positive answer to the question “What’s the point?” and
has often been “hard to disentangle” from narrativity (Ryan 2005b:
589). Specifically, tellability is the variable potential of a story as yet
unnarrativized, while narrativity is the variable success of its narrativiz-
ing. In Herman’s precise wording: “Situations and events can be more
or less tellable; the ways in which they are told can […] display differ-
ent degrees of narrativity. Thus, whereas both predicates are scalar,
tellability attaches to configurations of facts and narrativity to sequenc-
es representing those configurations of facts” (2002: 100). Nonetheless,
the border between the two concepts has often been blurred. In scalar
conceptions of narrativity, tellability often ranks high on the list of
qualities that participate in a text’s narrativity. Bruner (1991) asserts
that without tellability there can be no narrativity. Tellability is also
essential to Fludernik’s experience-based concept of narrativity. Con-
ceived as the narrator’s emerging sense of the importance (“point”) of
the events narrated, tellability, for Fludernik, is the third of three narra-
tional operations—reviewing past events, reproducing them, and evalu-
ating them—that, when conjoined, “constitute narrativity” (2003: 245).
For Hühn (2008), eventfulness is the prior concept on which tellability
depends. In passing, he makes the useful distinction between narratives
with sufficient eventfulness to be tellable and what he terms “process
 Narrativity 597

narratives,” found in the sciences, historiography, lawsuits, and even in

recipes and instruction manuals, which are “a more descriptive and neu-
trally informative way of tracing and communicating developments,
processes, and changes” (145 n.30). Elaborating further, Hühn argues
that tellability is absent from the narrativity of the uneventful, plotless
narration of type I events, but is the key distinction of the eventful, em-
plotted narration of type II events (see Hühn → Event and Eventful-
ness).

3.3.4 Narrative Competence and Experientiality

The increasing concern for reader/audience response in postclassical

narratology has led to a focus on narrative competence, which has in-
volved varying degrees of a “constructivist” orientation to narrativity
like the one Scholes (1982) developed in reaction to the widespread use
of the term in film theory as “a property of films themselves.” In Eng-
lish, Scholes argued, the word narrativity “implies a more sentient char-
acter than we generally allow an artifact. For this reason and some oth-
ers,” Scholes employs the word “to refer to the process by which a
perceiver actively constructs a story from the fictional data provided by
any narrative medium. A fiction is presented to us in the form of a nar-
ration (a narrative text) that guides us as our own narrativity seeks to
complete the process that will achieve a story” (60).
Echoing Iser ([1972] 1974) and Sternberg (1978), Scholes’s concept
of narrativity engages in fictional world-making by filling in gaps, both
“passive or automatic” and “active or interpretive,” guided always by
the semiotics of fictional and filmic language (Scholes 1982: 61). Once
aroused, the “primary effort” of our narrativity is “to construct a satis-
fying order of events.” This it does by exercising the power of our nar-
rativity in concert with the “narrational blueprints” (69) of the art to
construct “two features: temporality and causality” (ibid.). Anticipating
McHale’s (2001) view of weak narrativity, Scholes argued that this ex-
ercise of our gift of narrativity is essential even in those postmodern
and experimental novels and films that seek to disrupt it, since without
this cognitive and semiotic equipment the effects of their disruption
would go unexperienced (64).
Leitch also adopted a constructivist narrativity, but with an account
of the capabilities required that is interestingly different from Scholes’s:
“At its simplest level, narrativity entails three skills: the ability to defer
one’s desire for gratification; […] the ability to supply connections
among the material a story presents; and the ability to perceive discur-
sive events as significantly related to the point of a given story or se-
598 H. Porter Abbott

quence” (Leitch 1986: 34). For Leitch (similarly to Scholes), it is up to

any particular narrative “to cultivate an appropriate degree of narrativi-
ty, which may vary widely from one story to the next” (35). However,
both stop short of a more extreme constructivism by contending that
narrativity leaves off when we are no longer “under the illusionary
guidance of a maker of narratives” (Scholes 1982: 64). This would
leave out of account the power of narrativity to read a narrative where
none is intended—to project, for example, from natural events the signs
of a maker intent on communicating a prophetic story. “Life resumes,”
Scholes writes, “when narrativity ceases” (ibid.).
Nelles goes further in the direction of readerly control when he de-
fines narrativity as “the product of a tropological operation by which
the metaphor of narration is applied to a series of words on a page. To
read a text by means of the trope of narration is to read out of it a narra-
tor and its voice, and a narratee and its ear” (Nelles 1997: 116). Narra-
tivity is at work, in other words, when a reader frames, or reframes, a
text as narrative, an operation that can be applied even to texts com-
monly designated as something else (a lyric poem, an argument, a piece
of music). Once such a text is imbued with narrativity, “the tools of nar-
rative analysis can be applied” (120). From here it is a short step to nar-
rativity as a universal feature of creative perception, that power that
White theorizes as at once seeing and making history where there is
none—the power to narrativize the real.
The infusion of cognitive research has invigorated research on narra-
tive competence. Notable in this regard is the work of Fludernik, for
whom narrativity is quite explicitly “not a quality inhering in a text, but
rather an attribute imposed on the text by the reader who interprets the
text as narrative, thus narrativizing the text” (2003: 244). Fludernik
derives the essential quality of narrativity from what she calls “human
experientiality,” building on pre-cognitive work by Hamburger ([1957]
1993) and Cohn (1978) that had keyed narrative to its unique capability
of portraying consciousness. Fludernik enlarges this focus with insight
gained from Labovian discourse analysis and schema theory, expanding
it to encompass a great range of expressive acts, starting with the con-
versation of everyday life (Fludernik → Conversational Narration –
Oral Narration). Thus when readers encounter texts formally described
as narratives, they draw on an immense accumulation of frames and
scripts that arise from the experience of life itself.
In this way, Fludernik displaces the centrality traditionally conferred
on the formal properties of “story,” “plot,” and “narrator” in definitions
of narrative, while (like Cohen, Sturgess, and Audet in their different
ways) expanding the range of full narrative legitimacy to experimental
 Narrativity 599

fiction in which these properties are barely perceptible. At the same

time, by locating narrativity as a “natural” process not dependent on the
experience of literature, Fludernik broadens what Culler (1975: 134–
160) called “naturalization”—the process by which a reader gains or
seeks to gain cognitive control over texts. She also narrows this process
to a specifically narrative operation, replacing Culler’s term “naturali-
zation” with “narrativization,” by which the reader draws on a compen-
dium of experiential, not strictly literary, schemata marshaled under the
“macro-frame” of narrativity. It is this that allows a “re-cognization of a
text as narrative” (Fludernik 1996: 313). Only to the degree that a text
resists narrativization does it discourage perceptions of narrativity. Yet
even extreme postmodern textual derangements and other such “unnat-
ural” cases, if repeated often enough, may become part of a reader’s
natural experience and thus susceptible to narrativization.
Herman, in his turn, builds on the “natural narratology” of Fluder-
nik, Labov, and others, drawing, as they did, on cognitive theory and
discourse analysis. For Herman, too, narrativity can be found in the
larger terrain of human experience, and indeed much of his work inter-
mixes a focus on narrativity as it occurs in conversation, ranging across
a spectrum from the banal to the unfathomable. To put this in his
words: “Narrativity is a function of the more or less richly patterned
distribution of script-activating cues in a sequence. Both too many and
too few script-activating cues diminish narrativity” (Herman 2002: 91).
But Herman also critiques Fludernik’s reliance on “experientiality” as
the determinate factor in gauging a text’s degree of narrativity. To do
so, he argues, places “too much weight on a participant role whose de-
gree of salience derives from a larger, preference-based system of
roles” (2002: 169, 2009: passim).
Phelan (2005, 2007), from his quite differently oriented “rhetorical
understanding of narrativity,” also advocates maintaining a focus on
both sides of the reader/text transaction. For him, narrativity is a com-
plex, “double-layered phenomenon” involving both a progression of
events and a progression of reader response. Each is characterized by a
“dynamics of instability,” the one driving the tale, the other driving the
response to it (Phelan 2007: 7). The tension of characters acting and
reacting in an unstable situation is accompanied by a “tension in the
telling—unstable relations among authors, narrators, and audiences,”
and it is the complex interaction of the two kinds of instability that con-
stitutes narrativity and that “encourages two main activities: observing
and judging” (ibid.). Put differently, narrativity involves “the interac-
tion of two kinds of change: that experienced by the characters and that
experienced by the audience in its developing responses to the charac-
600 H. Porter Abbott

ters’ changes” (Phelan 2005: 323). As a scalar concept, “[v]ery strong

narrativity depends on the work’s commitment to both sets of variables
(textual and readerly). Weak narrativity arises from the work’s lack of
interest in one or both sets of variables” (Phelan 2007: 215; see also
Ryan 2007; Prince 2008).

3.3.5 Fictionality

Keen draws attention to a “slippage” whereby fictionality has been in-

cluded as an index of narrativity (2003: 121). This controversial associ-
ation of narrativity and fictionality can be traced back to Hamburger
([1957] 1993). However, as noted above, White (1973, 1978, 1981),
has encouraged not just a slippage but a conflation of narrativity, fic-
tionality, and history. Historical narratives are “verbal fictions the con-
tents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which
have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they
have with those in science” (1978: 82). Consciously or not, White iro-
nizes a distinction that Woolf expressed when she wrote, “Let it be fact,
one feels, or let it be fiction. The imagination will not serve under two
masters simultaneously” (Woolf [1927] 1994: 473; see also Ryan 1991;
Doležel 1998: 1–28; Cohn 1999: chap. 7). From his functionalist stand-
point, Walsh rises above both White’s extreme view that “[a]ll narrativ-
ity […] shares in the properties of fictionality” and the counter-
argument for an absolute categorical distinction between fiction and
nonfiction. “Fictionality,” he contends, “is the product of a narrative’s
frame of presentation, of the various possible elements of what Gérard
Genette has described as the paratext” (2007: 45). Correlatively, “a
rhetoric of fictionality depends for its cultural currency upon its func-
tional distinctiveness from nonfictional narrativity” (46).

3.4 As Variable according to Narrative Type, Genre, or Mode

Herman writes that “narrative genres are distinguished by different

preference-rule systems prescribing different ratios of stereotypic to
nonstereotypic actions and events” (2002: 91). Variant narrativities, in
other words, accompany generic variations among the totality of narra-
tive genres. In her influential essay, “The Modes of Narrativity,” Ryan
(1992) developed a narrativity-based taxonomy of narrative text types
that included “simple narrativity” (dealing with a single conflict as in
fairy tales and anecdotes), “complex narrativity” (having interconnect-
ed narrative threads as in the triple-decker 19th-century novel), “figural
narrativity” (abstract universals, concepts, or collectivities freighted on
 Narrativity 601

characters and events as in certain lyrical and philosophical works),

“instrumental narrativity” (illustrative support in sermons and treatises),
and “proliferating narrativity” (having no overarching narrative but a
series of little narratives involving the same cast of characters as in pic-
aresque and magical realist novels). Ryan (1992, 2004, 2005c) also in-
vokes the necessity of a modal view of narrativity if we are fully to
grasp the narrative potential of non-verbal media: “It is only by recog-
nizing other modes of narrativity […]—modes such as illustrating, re-
telling, evoking, and interpreting—that we can acknowledge the narra-
tive power of media without a language track” (2005a: 292).
Hühn (→ Event and Eventfulness) distinguishes between “broad”
and “narrow” definitions of narrativity according to whether one is op-
erating with a minimal definition of narrative with its minimal concept
of event (type I) or a more restricted definition of narrative, requiring
an event or events that fulfill certain conditions (type II). Hühn’s dis-
tinction yields a fixed concept of narrativity for “plotless” or “process”
narration built from type I events, but yields a scalar concept of narra-
tivity for “plotted” narration in which type II events play an integral
role. In her three-part anatomy of narrativity, Revaz (2009) includes a
plotless type (chronicle) organized solely by chronology (diary-like
genres), followed in ascending degrees of complexity by relation and
récit (fully emplotted narrative). Fludernik, resisting the efforts of some
to extend full narrativity to historical writing, categorizes it instead as
“restricted narrativity, narrative that has not quite come into its own”
(1996: 26). Finally, where Ryan (1992) uses the term “anti-narrativity,”
McHale settles on the term “weak narrativity” to describe the way in
which Hejinian, Ashbery, and other avant-garde narrative poets interpo-
late, break up, or suspend narrative lines in their work. In such works,
narrativity is not abolished; rather, “we intuit that we are in the pres-
ence of narrativity. But at the same time that our sense of narrative is
being solicited, it is also being frustrated” (McHale 2001: 164).

3.5 As a Mode among Modes

Chatman’s widely referenced distinction between narrative “text-types”

and “non-narrative text-types” (argument, exposition, description)
draws on the idea of a type-determinative “overriding” presence of one
property or another (1990: 21). Though he does not use the term “narra-
tivity,” in essence he is echoing the Russian formalist concept of the
“dominant” that Sternberg deploys when he writes of the way a pre-
dominating narrativity draws technically non-narrative elements into a
narrative whole.
602 H. Porter Abbott

Phelan sets narrativity in contrast to two other modes: lyricality, in

which the dominant is “an emotion, a perception, an attitude, a belief”
or some form of meditation; and portraiture, in which the dominant is
the revelation of character. All three can to some extent be present in a
text of any length, but a text is hybridized when two or more are pre-
sent in strength, with one or the other dominating (Phelan 2007: 22–
24). What is meant by “hybrid” and by the terms, “dominate” and
“dominant” is itself a question on which there is room for debate.
Sternberg, for example, argues for the importance of “properly [nam-
ing] the text after its dominant” since, once narrativity dominates, it
draws the nonnarrative elements under its control in a way that is abso-
lute. This includes “language, existents, thematics, point of view, etc.”
as well as descriptive phrases and “equivalence patterns.” Under suffi-
cient narrative pressure, “the descriptive turns kinetic” (Sternberg 2001:
119–120). This would appear, however, to exclude the possibility of
hybrids for, given the dominant, “everything assimilates and conduces
to its narrativity, as inversely with narrative elements in descriptive
writing” (121). For Schmid (2003: 21–22), the situation can be more
fluid, such that there are hybrid texts in which the functionality of de-
scriptive and narrative elements can vie for dominance. A key element
in reading such texts, then, is how the reader chooses to interpret them.
In sum, the growing attention to the term “narrativity” continues to
keep pace with the increasing range and richness of narratological de-
bate. Whether or not this term will eventually displace the centrality of
the term “narrative,” what Prince wrote over a decade ago still holds
true: “further study of narrativity constitutes perhaps the most signifi-
cant task of narratology today” (1999: 43).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The widely endorsed idea promoted by Bruner, Sacks, and others
that “each of us constructs and lives a narrative” (Sacks 1985: 105) has
been attacked by Strawson (2004) as a fallacy that does not match the
“gappy” discontinuity of consciousness and selfhood. But the issue is
more complex than either position (Battersby 2006), and narrativity
may play a key role in resolving it. (b) Related to this is the need for
more work on narrativity as a part of what Brooks calls “our cognitive
toolkit” (2005: 415; Herman 2002, 2009). (c) The narrativity of dreams
is a limit case on which much depends in the definition of narrativity.
On the one hand, there is flat rejection (Prince 2000: 16); on the other,
support (Metz 1974; Walsh 2010). (d) Work is needed on narrativity in
 Narrativity 603

digital media, especially in narrativized games (Ryan 2006a) and what

Aarseth (1997) calls ergodic literature in which the “story” is created in
real time insofar as the events are determined by “non-trivial” actions
of the players. (e) A highly consequential and disputed area for research
is the role narrativity plays in law, its ethics and its practice (Brooks &
Gewirtz 1996; Brooks 2005; Abbott [2002] 2008: 175–192; Sternberg
2008; Simon-Shoshan 2012; Ayelet 2013). (f) Narrativity may well
turn out to be a key concept in building a critical and theoretical under-
standing of “narrative-impaired” art that has recently been gathered un-
der the heading of “unnatural narratology.”

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606 H. Porter Abbott

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5.2 Further Reading

Baroni, Raphaël (2007). La Tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris:

Seuil.
Brés, Jacques (1994). La narrativité. Louvain: Suculot.
Davis, Nick (2012). "Rethinking Narrativity: A Return to Aristotle and Some Conse-
quences." Storyworlds 4, 1–24.
Fleischman, Suzanne (1990). Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to
Modern Fiction. Austin: U of Texas P.
Gaudreault, André (1988). Du littéraire au filmique: système du récit. Paris: Méridien
Klincksieck.
Kearns, Michael (1999). Rhetorical Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Kellner, Hans (1987). “Narrativity in History: Poststructuralism and Since.” History
and Theory 26, 1–29.
– (1990). “‘As Real as It Gets…’ Ricœur and Narrativity.” Philosophy Today 34,
229–242.
Meister, Jan Christoph (2007). “‘Narrativité’, ‘événement’ et objectivation de la tempo-
ralité.” J. Pier (ed.). Théorie du récit: l’apport de la recherche allemande. Ville-
neuve d’Asq: Septentrion, 189–207.
Odin, Roger (2000). De la fiction. Bruxelles: De Boeck.
Prince, Gerald (1996). “Remarks on Narrativity.” C. Wahlin (ed.). Perspectives on
Narratology: Papers from the Stockholm Symposium on Narratology. Frankfurt
a.M.: Lang, 95–106.
Singer, Alan (1983). “The Methods of Form: Narrativity and Social Consciousness.”
SubStance 41, 64–77.
Tiffeneau, Dorian, ed. (1980). La narrativité. Paris: CNRS.
Wolf, Werner (2003). “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualiza-
tion and its Applicability to the Visual Arts.” Word and Image 19, 180–197.
 Narrativity of Computer Games
Britta Neitzel

1 Definition

Narrativity can be understood as a virtual capacity of computer games.

Like every game, computer games consist of rule-governed actions car-
ried out by a player. But they may also contain elements typical for nar-
ratives: actions, events, characters, and a setting. If these elements are
arranged in a story-like order, a computer game possesses narrativity
(Abbott → Narrativity). Additionally, computer games, in contrast to
other games (such as ball games or chess), integrate a representational
level depicting the player’s actions in the game world and the player
herself in the form of an avatar who acts within this world. This repre-
sentational level can be compared with the level of narrative discourse.

2 Explication

As to the narrativity of computer games, one of the important questions

concerns the relation between the ludic and the narrative and their rela-
tive proportions. This interrelation has been defined in a spectrum of
positions, ranging from the conception that computer games are narra-
tives (Murray 1999) through the assumption that computer games con-
tain narrative structures or elements (e.g. Neitzel 2000; Aarseth 2004a;
Juul 2005; Ryan 2006) to the denial of any narrativity in computer
games (Eskelinen 2001).
Narrating and playing are both very old and fundamental forms of
human expression and culture (cf. Huizinga [1938] 1998; Barthes [1966]
1977). They have sometimes been combined, as in the theater where a
story, previously written down as a drama text, is not told but performed
by actors, or in the cinema, where the projection of the film shows what
was previously recorded (including the performance of the actors). Both
media—theater and cinema—have been discussed with respect to their
narrativity (Hühn & Sommer → Narration in Poetry and Drama; Kuhn &
Schmidt → Narration in Film). These discussions have mainly focused
 Narrativity of Computer Games 609

on discourse or the level of (re)presentation, i.e. diegesis rather than mi-

mesis in respect of drama (Plato 1979), or on telling rather than showing
in respect of film (Branigan 1984). Discussions on filmic narration in
particular have raised the question of whether film possesses a narrating
instance (cf. Bordwell 1985; Chatman 1978, 1990; Gunning 1994;
Gaudreault 1984). This question reappears in the discussion of the narra-
tivity of computer games (cf. Laurel 1991; Neitzel 2000, King &
Krzywinska eds. 2002), but it also raises another one: What is the role of
the player? While in the theater and in the cinema the spectators are ex-
cluded from the production of the play or film, respectively, in computer
games they (as players) are an indispensable part of the production of the
chain of actions displayed on the computer screen.
Hence the study of the narrative potential of computer games is led
to specify how the ludic and the narrative interact, thus producing the
concrete medial form of a computer game. The relevance of this ques-
tion results from the premise that the ludic and the narrative are differ-
ent or even incompatible forms. Narrative is traditionally defined by its
linearity and chronology: it presents a story (histoire in Genette’s 1972
[1980] terms) with a beginning, a middle and an end (Aristotle 1995),
and its events proceed successively. Bordwell (1985: 49) defines the
story as “an action as a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events
occurring within a given duration and a spatial field.” This story is
transmitted through a discourse (récit), which is the result of an act of
narration. Games are defined differently from narratives: by repetitions
(Buytendijk 1933, 1958) and recursions (Scheuerl [1954] 1990), or as a
self-reflexive movement that falls back on itself with no reference to
anything beyond its borders, be it factual or temporal (Scheuerl ([1954]
1990). While in a narrative someone (a narrator) recounts actions, a
game consists of actions carried out by the players.

3 History and Aspects of the Study of Narrativity in

Computer Games

Depending on the starting point one chooses, computer games date

back between forty and sixty years. The year 2001 was pronounced by
Aarseth (2001) year one of game studies, thereby inaugurating a new
discipline. The following sections will start with a brief historical over-
view of computer games and then take up recurrent questions on the
subject. Owing to the differences within the field of computer games,
the research questions are in some cases accompanied by descriptions
of computer game genres or individual games.
610 Britta Neitzel

Research on a new medium on which there have been studies either

draws on established methodologies or refers to (assumed) similarities
in other media. Since narrative is a large and influential part of our cul-
ture present in various media (Ryan → Narration in Various Media), it
seems reasonable to assume that computer games tell stories as well. A
story-like order of the game events displayed on the computer screen
may resemble visual narration in film. For this reason, the study of nar-
rativity in computer games has played a prominent role in the emergent
field of game studies.

3.1 Pre-history: Hypertext Studies

Experiments with hypertext in the 1980s and 90s inspired the explora-
tion of possibilities of ”interactive storytelling” as a new form of narra-
tive in digital media (cf. Bolter 1991; Landow 1992; Landow ed. 1994).
The study of hypertexts was extended to include verbally based com-
puter games, the so-called text adventures. In this tradition, computer
games are seen in connection with other texts based on computer tech-
nology. The main emphasis still remains on the text and the changes it
undergoes (e.g. Ryan ed. 1999). Murray (1999) includes computer
games in her study of narrative in cyberspace by observing them with
respect to their narrativity, along with chatterbots (computer programs
that simulate communication), Multi-User-Dungeons (text-based fanta-
sy games played on the early internet), 3-D movies and finally the ho-
lodeck (holographic simulation, which became famous in the Star Trek
series). Laurel (1991) examines computer applications and interfaces
using the metaphor of the theater and drawing on Aristotelian drama
theory. In her study, computer games represent only one application
among others. One of the most insightful studies in this tradition is
Aarseth (1997). This work analyses the differences between various
types of text underlying the changed role of the reader in cybertexts,
where the reader not only participates in the construction of meaning
but also in the construction of the final text itself. His focus, however,
remains on verbal media, and apart from an excellent analysis of the
text-adventure, computer games are not discuss.

3.2 The Ludology vs. Narratology Debate

The question of narrativity in computer games led to the first major de-
bate in game studies, the starting point for a general survey of the field.
The spectrum of approaches in this debate, the so-called Ludology vs.
Narratology Debate, ranged from euphoric affirmations of the new pos-
 Narrativity of Computer Games 611

sibilities of storytelling (Murray 1999) to outright denial of the narra-

tive quality of computer games (Eskelinen 2001). Even though studies
on narrativity in computer games fell (and still fall) far short of forming
a school, a vehement and often polemical body of criticism was di-
rected at studies that saw the computer game as one possible form of
future storytelling or that simply treated the computer game as a new
narrative medium. On the one hand, this criticism had a “political” di-
mension motivated by the fear that established disciplines such as liter-
ary or film studies would incorporate computer games into their own
territories, treating them as derivatives of literature or film. On the other
hand, this critical position argued that computer games are first and
foremost games, and that methods developed for the study of literature
and film are insufficient to deal with their specifics (Aarseth 2004b:
362).
Both positions—simply treating the computer game as narrative or
negating any relation between narratives and games whatsoever—are
too narrow in scope. In the first case, there is a danger of overlooking
differences between games and narratives. The second position, by con-
trast, risks disregarding similarities between computer games and narra-
tives. Not every game has the same structure, computer games being
structured differently from ball games, for instance. Common to both
positions is that they one-sidedly isolate one single dimension to the
exclusion of all others, an approach which fails to acknowledge the
specifics of the computer—namely, the fact that the computer is a hy-
brid medium that integrates various forms and media—and in so doing
dissolves distinctions between them (cf. Thomsen ed. 1994). Digital
memory and processing mechanisms allow the computer to adapt an
almost unlimited number of surfaces to equally innumerable functions
as well as to integrate and modify the structures of other media (cf.
Bolter & Grusin 2000; Manovich 2001). The computer as toy (Sutton-
Smith 1986), and the computer game, must be described with reference
to this dissolution of boundaries and integration of various elements.
The fact that computer games are games by no means excludes them
from having narrative qualities. There are common, trans-boundary el-
ements both in computer games and in narratives, and there is a transi-
tion zone between narrative and non-narrative computer games. In the
meantime, the topic of narrativity has become just one question among
others in the field of game studies. To name only a few further research
aspects: player studies, involvement, interface studies, space in com-
puter games, online games and sociality, gamification, serious games.
612 Britta Neitzel

3.3 Degrees of Narrativity

Computer games show a wide variety of forms and genres. They can be
subdivided into abstract and mimetic games: games of skill (Geschick-
lichkeitsspiele), which demand dexterity from the players; and puzzle
games (Denkspiele), which demand cognitive skills and decision-
making. These groups overlap. Some games use abstract graphic ele-
ments that have to be arranged in a certain order or assembled like a
puzzle. In other games, with abstract graphics, the dexterity of the play-
ers is important, as when the game elements have to be thrown or shot.
Related to the latter are so-called shooters, which demand dexterity in a
representational game world.
As to the narrativity of computer games, it is also important to con-
sider whether the player’s role is to direct a single game element (an-
thropomorphic or otherwise) or a group of elements. While computer
role playing games, (action) adventures and action games fall in the
first category, various sorts of sports games, (economic) simulations or
strategy games (in which teams or armies are directed) belong to the
second.
Additionally, computer games are played on mobile phones,
handheld or TV-connected consoles, the computer or on arcade ma-
chines. They are played alone, together with friends (in one room) or
with strangers (and/or friends) on the Internet. And finally, in the histo-
ry of computers the mode of representation has evolved from games
that are only text-based (e.g. Zork, infocom 1977) or games with simple
graphics (e.g. Pong, Atari 1972) to games with a representation that is
almost cinematic. Text-based games and games with simple graphics
continue to exist in niches.
When the interest lies in the narrativity of computer games, it is
common not to include all types of computer games. Different genres of
computer games have different degrees of narrativity. Thus most ab-
stract computer games lack narrative qualities (Ryan 2006; Aarseth
2004b), since narrativity presupposes the presence of “characters,
event, setting” (Ryan (2006: 182).

3.4 Storystructures in the (Action)Adventure Game

The genre of the adventure (or action adventure) game has been studied
with respect to its narrativity (see e.g. Neitzel 2000; Wolf 2001; Walter
2001; Hartmann 2004). Two features in particular qualify adventures
for a narrative analysis. First, in adventures the player directs a single
avatar in a representational setting and not, as for example in strategy or
 Narrativity of Computer Games 613

team sports games, a team or an army. Second, adventures provide a

relatively linear chain of actions and offer explicit points for the player
to make a decision. They are, in Pias’ (2002: 184) words, “decision-
critical.” In the classical adventure, neither the execution of these deci-
sions nor how fast they are made on the cognitive level is important, so
that neither dexterity nor the speed of reaction are the point of the game
but the decision and the consequences it provokes.
Juul (2005: 67) calls games in which a player has to follow a con-
secutive chain of actions “games of progression” because they set up
challenges for the players one after another up to the end. “Games of
emergence,” on the other hand, set up challenges for the players indi-
rectly through an interacting set of rules and do not have a fixed end
state but one that evolves through the actions and decisions made in a
game session. Many games incorporate a mixture of the two forms.
The lines of action that evolve in a game are twofold. There is the
possible chain of actions determined by the program which Thon
(2011: 16), drawing on Rouse (2001), calls the “virtual designer-story,”
and there is the actual chain of actions that is set up by the player while
she is playing, the “player story.” Adopting a term proposed by the
Russian formalists, Neitzel (2000) has defined the latter as the “sujet”
of a narrative game, because it is only here that the actual order of
events is determined.
The progression of the virtual story in (action) adventure games is
programmed according to a narrative structure that Todorov ([1971]
1971) has called the mythological story structure (cf. Neitzel 2000).
Games with a mythological structure provide players or their avatars
with a clearly defined aim that marks the end state of the game (e.g.
“Rescue the Princess!”). The path to this aim can be arranged different-
ly from one game to another. A classical narrative can use a linear path
to this end: starting at the initial situation, a linear chain of events and
actions leads to the end of the story. A game organized like this offers a
very limited degree of freedom for the player: she does not have any
choice, which makes the game rather boring, or, more precisely, there is
no game at all because a game must offer at least two options. Accord-
ing to Ryan (2006: 196), the conflict between narrative design and
gameplay is rooted in the “difficulty of integrating the bottom-up input
of the player within the top-down structure of a narrative script.”
Computer game programs almost always contain infrastructures that
enable the player to actualize multi-linear chains of actions and events.
This means that between the starting point and the endpoint of the game
there are alternative paths or chains of events from which the player
may choose. In a multi-linear story (Murray 1999: 188), there can be
614 Britta Neitzel

crossroads or dead ends that force the player to return to another path.
Other paths may lead back to the main path in loop lines (Wages et al.
2004; Ryan 2006 102–103). In many games, these paths are realized
spatially, forcing the player to orient herself in the fictional game
world, cross this world and meet the challenges that lead to the goal.
Linear and multi-linear story structures have in common that, in
most cases, they lead to a single endpoint or, in the case of a multi-
linear structure, to one of several possible endpoints. A structure with
multiple branching paths that leads to an indefinite number of endpoints
would not be programmable. To avoid this problem, dead ends and
loops leading back to the main path are integrated (Wages et al. 2004).
To enhance the unpredictability and uncertainty necessary for play-
ing, these structures of action lines can be supplemented by require-
ments for skill and speedy reaction on the part of the player. In addition
to an overall line of action, computer role playing games usually con-
tain numerous short linear action lines. In the game world, a player en-
counters Non-Player Characters (NPCs) who provide her avatar with
quests and tasks. Depending on the particular game, the player has to
accomplish the quests either successively in a linear order to progress
towards an end state or randomly in a network-like structure. To per-
form the tasks, the player must kill a certain number of the enemy, find
objects, visit a particular place, or perform similar clearly defined ac-
tions that require a certain skill. After completing the task, the game
character returns to the quest-giver, is given her award and possibly a
new quest. Retrospectively, the quests can be interpreted as little sto-
ries: e.g. “The avatar has retrieved the food stolen by the Orcs and res-
cued the inhabitants of the village.” But as Aarseth (2004b: 369), in
reference to Tronstad, emphasizes, while the story has a constative
quality, the quest itself is performative, acted out.
Quests in role playing games are often integrated into fantasy stories
involving a fight between good and evil. These framing stories are con-
veyed to the player in scattered parts and in different modes of repre-
sentation: verbally at the beginning of the game or through quests; by
monologues of NPCs, visual cut-scenes, books found in the game; or,
on a paratextual level, by printed supplements, possibly novels or mov-
ies about the game but also by fellow players. Other parts of the my-
thology may be known through former games. As in myths, no clear
origin can be identified. It has often been observed that these multiple
stories and story fragments add to the narrativity of computer games
(e.g. Ryan 2006; Jenkins 2004; Pearce 2004).
The second underlying narrative structure that can be found in (ac-
tion) adventure games is the gnoseological structure, a form that does
 Narrativity of Computer Games 615

not provide the players with a clearly defined aim (cf. Neitzel 2000).
Todorov ([1971] 1971) defines the Parsifal-saga as the prototype of a
gnoseological narrative. These narratives are about the search for mean-
ing and, in contrast to mythological narratives, have an ending that is
unforeseeable from the beginning of the narration and tends to point
back into the past. This becomes obvious in Todorov’s second example,
the detective novel, in which the protagonist tries to find out what had
happened. With regard to computer games, this structure can be found
mainly in adventure games. An early example is Zork. In this game, the
player is thrown into a situation in which she does not know what to do,
where she is located and what the environment looks like. The player
never knows which events are relevant for the solution of the game (see
Aarseth 1997: 112). No concrete clues are given on her way as to how
to find the solution. Uncertain about which storyline to follow, the
player’s first task in an adventure game is to get a sense of the world
and the situation. Thus the more or less successful attempts of a player
to navigate in the game world differ enormously from the well-
considered constructions of narrative discourse generally found in liter-
ary narratives or films. The player’s path through the game can be con-
sidered a search for meaning. In contrast to action games, usually
backed up with a mythological structure, the player of an adventure
game is not given a clear aim as to how orient herself within the game
(Neitzel 2000).

3.5 Separation of Narration and Play

The player’s participation in the act of actualizing these virtual story

lines has led to another tendency in studies of narrativity in computer
games: the separation of phases of play and narration (e.g. Furtwängler
2001; Walter 2001) or of ludic and narrative elements in a computer
game (Newman 2004: 93–94; Thon 2007, 2011). So-called cutscenes,
which are fully pre-produced and in which players cannot intervene, are
the narrative phases of the game, while scenes in which the players can
intervene (and must intervene to get the game going) are the ludic or
interactive phases. The ludic and the narrative are often considered in-
compatible (Walter 2001: 302). Significantly, scenes in which the play-
er can intervene do not have a name of their own. While “cutscene” is
an established term, “playscene” is not. The playscene represents the
normal case whereas the cutscene is something special that has emerged
recently in the history of computer games and in need a discriminating
term. Cutscenes are usually found at the beginning of a game where
they constitute the exposition, introducing the place and time of the ac-
616 Britta Neitzel

tions, the protagonists and possibly their aims. Additional cutscenes,

interspersed in the playscenes, often mark turning points in the game’s
underlying story, while in the playscenes the players carry out a rela-
tively fixed chain of actions. At the end of the game, there is often a last
cutscene, an epilogue which marks the end of the story and the game.
The model on which this separation of narrative and ludic elements
is based can be traced back to Barthes’ differentiation between cardinal
functions and catalyzers ([1966] 1977). It acts upon the assumption that
cardinal functions, which propel the game forward, are found in
cutscenes, while playscenes contain only catalyzers. This means that
the decisions which are important for the course of the pre-programmed
story are not made by the player but provided to her in the cutscenes
(cf. Pias 2002).
Even if the act of narration, in the simplified sense of setting up a
fixed chain of actions, might take place only in the cutscenes, the narra-
tivity of computer games is not restricted to them. The playscenes are
meaningful for the cutscenes and the story of the game: they tie in with
the events and elements in the cutscenes. They provide information on
the progress of the action, contain the same figures and are set in the
same environment. In some games (e.g. Blade Runner [Westwood
1997], Silent Hill II [Konami 2001] or Fahrenheit [Quantic Dream
2005]), the choice of a particular cutscene, which is executed by an al-
gorithm within the game program, depends on the decisions a player
has made in the preceding playscenes. The construction of meaning
necessary for a story thus takes place in the playscenes. However, alt-
hough it is true that a player does not play in the cutscenes, some games
(e.g. Half Life [Valve 1998] or Metal Gear Solid – Snake Eater
[Konami 2004]) offer the opportunity for the player to intervene in the
cutscenes and to change the perspective of the virtual “camera,” for
example, which indicates that the avatar is looking around in the game
world.
Backe’s (2008) model is also concerned with the construction of
meaning. He separates game and narrative as well. However, in contrast
to the approach mentioned above, this separation does not apply to the
level of the game’s syntax; instead, he transfers the narrative of a com-
puter game to the level of its reception or interpretation. Backe devel-
ops a model with a trichotomy of sub-, micro-, and macrostructures in
which he distributes narrative and ludic elements. These structures are
distinguished into world-rules (substructure), aims of the game (micro-
structure) and meta-rules (macrostructure). While on the level of sub-
structures the ludic paidia (a free form of play (Caillois [1958] 2001) is
enacted, which means that players can explore the game world more or
 Narrativity of Computer Games 617

less freely, the second level (microstructures) is the reign of ludus,

which defines the aim of the game as well as the conditions for win-
ning. Finally, the third level (macrostructures) is determined by narra-
tive principles. This level, according to Backe, belongs to a second-
order game, a game of interpretation or reception.
Backe’s model of the ludic and of the second-order narrative game
(the game of reception or interpretation) separates levels that interact in
the computer game. The construction of a story may take place in the
player’s interpretation of the game, but the possibilities for this inter-
pretation are given—“pre-formed” by the game’s program.

3.6 Spatial Narration

The pre-design of a possible story is the basis for “interactive storytell-

ing” (cf. Crawford [2004] 2013). A digital environment is established
in which players can intervene and decide, within given possibilities,
which events or actions to actualize. The aim of interactive storytelling
is to make the players choose precisely those possibilities which will
form a story-like line of actions and events (without letting them know
that they are guided in a certain direction). Focusing on the environ-
mental qualities of interactive storytelling, Jenkins (2004) suggests that
one should think of game designers not as storytellers but as “narrative
architects” (129). “Game designers don’t simply tell stories; they de-
sign worlds and sculpt spaces.” (121)
In this regard, interactive storytelling and computer games are con-
ceptually related to possible worlds theory and practice (cf. Pias 2002:
183–185; Ryan 2001: 99–105). Like possible worlds, computer games
work in the subjunctive mode: they pre-form possibilities of what can
actually happen in a digital environment. For Ryan (2006), who em-
ploys a relatively broad definition of narrative (“capturing a fictional
world that evolves in time under the action of intelligent agents is all it
takes for a semiotic artifact to fulfill the semantic conditions of narra-
tivity”; 200), this qualifies a computer game as narrative.
On the basis of such a broad definition of narrative, even other com-
puter games apart from action and adventure games would qualify as
narrative. This applies to the so-called “Sandbox Games” (Squire
2008), for example, which allow players to do just anything in a virtual
environment. Some games mix sandbox elements with a more rigid
progression of events. In the very popular Grand Theft Auto (GTA) se-
ries, the players (apart from fulfilling missions) get the opportunity to
drive in a stolen car through the GTA-cities and listen to music (in each
game, different radio stations are offered). Thus, since the publication
618 Britta Neitzel

of GTA-Vice City (Rockstar Games, 2002), “cruising” has become the

activity these games are known for.
Furthermore, games of emergence (see 3.4 above), in their form as
world-building games (in computer game genre terms: simulations),
would also count as narrative if Ryan’s (2006) definition of narrativity
is employed. These games, which have been associated with Todorov’s
([1971] 1971) third category, the ideological structure (cf. Neitzel
2000), are defined by rule structures that lead to repetitive and recursive
activities. Thus in each game session of the simulation Sim City (Maxis
since 1989), a different city will emerge, but the player-actions that lead
to the city will be very similar to the activities in former game sessions.
In this respect, Sim City can be compared to football or tennis. Such
games do not have an intrinsic ending but are stopped by extrinsic fac-
tors (the memory capacity of a computer or arbitrary time restrictions).
However, it is not really possible to retell the “story” of these games.
The “(his)story” of a game like Sim City or Civilization (Micropose
since 1991) has the structure of a chronicle (Neitzel 2000), which is not
a narrative form in the strict sense of the term.

3.7 Aspects of the Fictional Game World

In games and play, the separation of levels (story and discourse) is in-
complete. Bateson (1972) states that a play-action always includes me-
ta-communication. For a player, killing a monster in a game means “I
know that I am killing a monster in a game.” The player is aware of that
she is playing.
However, in the computer game context this knowledge need not be
based on an abstract reflection of the game’s semiotic status. Rather,
the actions of a player of a computer game themselves already encom-
pass two levels: the fictional level (e.g. “Mario rescues Princess Toad-
stool”) and the physical level (e.g. “I press the button combination of
cross and triangle”) (cf. Neitzel 2004). Like performative speech acts,
which cause changes outside the linguistic realm, the actions of a player
on the interfaces of the computer (in combination with the technical
apparatus) cause changes in the fictional game world (Neitzel 2007a).
This double-level characteristic is incorporated into the technical appa-
ratus of the computer game. While the material body of the player re-
mains outside the game, she operates inside the game with the help of a
semiotic body, her avatar, which serves as a tool for operations, as a
fictional figure in the game’s diegesis, and (in multiplayer games) as a
representative for the player. Through the avatar, the player functions
as an actor in the game and at the same time remains a spectator: she
 Narrativity of Computer Games 619

sees herself acting through the avatar. This leads to three notable differ-
ences between computer games and narratives:
1) Metalepsis, “a grabbing gesture that reaches across levels and ig-
nores boundaries” (Ryan 2004: 441), is the normal case in computer
games. It is not an artistic deviance but the basis of the game (Pier →
Metalepsis).
2) As a consequence of these two positions (being inside and outside
the fictional game world at the same time), computer games not only
provide the player with a point of view but additionally with a point of
action (cf. Neitzel 2007b; Thon 2009).
3) The fictional game actions and the physical actions (of the player
and the technical apparatus that displays the game actions) take place at
the same time. Thus if one identifies the act of playing with the act of
narrating, the result is simultaneous narration (Neitzel 2000; Ryan
2006), a form of narration seldom found in literature (Genette [1972]
1980: 218–219).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Though much has been done in recent years, the narrative analysis of
computer games, as are game studies, is still at its beginning. So far,
there are divergent approaches but no schools, nor is there a consensus
on central issues. This is due not only to the novelty of computer
games, but also to the diversity of scholars’ disciplinary backgrounds.
Few game scholars have a sound knowledge of narratology, and proba-
bly an even smaller number of narratologists are knowledgeable about
computer games. Thus all the issues named above are in need of further
investigation. What is required are more case studies as well as a closer
look at the modes of mediation and at the relation between narrative
and ludic elements in specific games. Beyond the necessity of precise
analyses of games and their narratives, two broader issues are worth
investigating.
On the level of cultural practices, the narratology vs. ludology de-
bate can be pursued further. The aim here should not be to decide
whether computer games are narratives or a form of play but to investi-
gate the relation between the cultural practices of narrating and playing.
Taking up Ong’s ([1982] 1995: 136) statement that a “secondary orali-
ty” emerges through the multiple use of electronic technologies, it
should be investigated whether (and how) the computer contributes to
the displacement of narration by play or of narratives by games.
620 Britta Neitzel

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aarseth, Espen J. (1997). Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins UP.
– (2001). “Game Studies, Year One.” Games Studies 1.1 http://www.game-
studies.org/0101/editorial.html
– (2004a). “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.” N. Wardrip-
Fruin & P. Harrison (eds.). First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and
Game. Cambridge: MIT P, 45–55.
– (2004b). “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse.” M.-L. Ryan (ed.). Narra-
tive across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln/London: Nebraska UP,
361–376.
Aristotle (1995). Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Backe, H.-J. (2008). Strukturen und Funktionen des Erzählens im Computerspiel. Eine
typologische Einführung: Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Barthes, Roland ([1966] 1977). “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.”
R. Barthes. Image Music Text. London: Fontana, 79–124.
Bateson, Gregory (1972). “A theory of play and fantasy.” G. Bateson. Steps to an
Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 177–193.
Bolter, Jay David (1991). Writing Space. The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of
Writing. Hillsdale: Hove; London: Lawrence Earlbaum.
– & Richard Grusin (2000). Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge:
MIT P.
Bordwell, David (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge.
Branigan, Edward (1984). Point of View in the Cinema. A Theory of Narration and
Subjectivity in Classical Film. Berlin, etc.: Mouton.
Buytendijk, Frederik J. J. (1933). Wesen und Sinn des Spiels. Das Spielen des Men-
schen und der Tiere als Erscheinungsform der Lebenstriebe. Berlin: Wolff.
Buytendijk, Frederik J. J. (1958). “Das Menschliche in der menschlichen Bewegung.”
F. J. J. Buytendijk. Das Menschliche. Wege zu seinem Verständnis. Stuttgart:
Koehler, 170–188.
Caillois, Roger ([1958] 2001). Man, Play, and Games. Chicago: U of Illinois P.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– (1990). Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Itha-
ca/London: Cornell UP.
Crawford, Chris ([2004] 2013). Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling. Berkeley:
New Riders.
Eskelinen, Marku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1.1. http://www.-
gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/
Furtwängler, Frank (2001). “‘A crossword at war with a narrative’ Narrativität versus
Interaktivität in Computerspielen.” P. Gendolla et al. (eds.). Formen interaktiver
Medienkunst. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 369–400.
 Narrativity of Computer Games 621

Gaudreault, André (1984). “Narration et monstration au cinema.” Hors Cadre 2, 87–98.

Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Gunning, Tom (1994). D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film. The
Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: U of Illinois P.
Hartmann, Bernd (2004). Literatur, Film und das Computerspiel. Münster: LIT.
Huizinga, Johan ([1938] 1998). Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-element in Culture.
London: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry (2004). “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” N. Wardrip-Fruin &
P. Harrigan (eds.). First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game.
Cambridge: MIT P, 118–130.
Juul, Jesper (2005). Half-real. Video games between real rules and fictional worlds.
Cambridge: MIT P.
King, Geoff & Tanya Krzywinska (eds.). (2002). SreenPlay. Cinema / Videogames /
Interfaces. London: Wallflower.
Landow, George P. (1992). Hypertext. The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
– ed. (1994). Hyper / Text / Theory. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP.
Laurel, Brenda (1991). Computers as Theatre. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Manovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P.
Murray, Janet H. (1999). Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyber-
space. Cambridge: MIT P.
Neitzel, Britta (2000). Gespielte Geschichten. Struktur- und prozessanalytische Unter-
suchungen der Narrativität von Videospielen. Weimar.
www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate2063/Dissertation.html
– (2004). “Wer bin ich? Zur Avatar-Spieler Bindung.” B. Neitzel et al. (eds.).
“See? I’m real ...” Multidisziplinäre Zugänge zum Computerspiel am Beispiel
von Silent Hill. Münster: Lit, 193–212.
– (2007a). “Metacommunication in (computer)games and play.” W. Nöth & N.
Bishara (eds.). Self-Reference in the Media. Berlin: de Gruyter, 237–252.
– (2007b). “Point of View and Point of Action. Eine Perspektive auf die Perspekti-
ve in Computerspielen.” K. Bartels & J. N. Thon (eds.). Computer/Spiel/Räume.
Materialien zur Einführung in die Computer Game Studies. Hamburg: Zentrum
für Medienkommunikation, 8–28.
Newman, James (2004). Videogames. London: Routledge.
Ong, Walter J. ([1982] 1995). Orality and Literatcy. The Technologizing of the Word.
London: Routledge.
Pearce, Celia (2004). “Towards a Game Theory of Game.” N. Wardrip-Fruin & P. Har-
rigan (eds.). First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cam-
bridge: MIT P, 143–153.
Pias, Claus (2002). Computer Spiel Welten. München: Sequenzia.
Plato (1979). The Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Rouse, Richard (2001). Game Design. Theory & Practice. Plano: Wordware.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in
Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
– (2004). “Metaleptic Machines.” Semiotica 150.1/4, 439–469.
622 Britta Neitzel

– (2006). Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

– ed. (1999). Cyberspace Textuality. Computer Technology and Literary Theory.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Scheuerl, Hans ([1954] 1990). Das Spiel. Weinheim: Beltz.
Squire, K. (2008). “Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for
the Interactive Age.” K. Salen (ed.). The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth,
Games, and Learning. Cambridge: MIT P, 167–198.
Sutton-Smith, Brian (1986). Toys as Culture. New York: Gardner P.
Thomsen, Christian W., ed. (1994). Hybridkultur. Bildschirmmedien und Evolutions-
formen der Künste. Siegen: DGF Sonderforschungsbereich.
Thon, Jan-Noël (2007). “Unendliche Weiten? Schauplätze, fiktionale Welten und so-
ziale Räume neuerer Computerspiele.” K. Bartels & J.-N. Thon (eds.). Compu-
ter/Spiel/Räume. Materialien zur Einführung in die Computer Game Studies.
Hamburg: Zentrum für Medienkommunikation, 29–60.
– (2009). “Perspective in Contemporary Computer Games.” P. Hühn et al. (eds.).
Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Narration.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 279–299.
– (2011). “Zu Formen und Funktionen narrativer Elemente in neueren Computer-
spielen.” J. Sorg & J. Venus (eds.). Erzählformen im Computerspiel. Zur Medi-
enmorphologie digitaler Spiele. Bielefeld: Transcript, 1–22.
Todorov, Tzvetan ([1971] 1971). “The Two Principles of Narrative.” Diacritics 1, 37–
44.
Wages, Richard et al. (2004). “Benutzerführung und Strukturen nichtlinearer Geschich-
te.” B. Neitzel et al. (eds.). “See? I’m Real ...” Multidisziplinäre Zugänge zum
Computerspiel am Beispiel von Silent Hill. Münster: LIT, 41–57.
Walter, Klaus (2001). Grenzen spielerischen Erzählens. Spiel- und Erzählstrukturen in
graphischen Adventure Games. Phil. Diss. Universität Siegen
http://www.ub.uni-siegen.de/epub/diss/walter.htm
Wolf, Mark J. P. (2001). The Medium of the Video Game. Austin: U of Texas P.

5.2 Further Reading

Arsenault, Dominic (2008). Narration in the Video Game An Apologia of Interactive

Storytelling, and an Apology to Cut-Scene Lovers. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr.
Müller.
Bogost, Ian (2006). Unit Operations. An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cam-
bridge: MIT P.
Ryan, Marie-Laure & Jan-Noël Thon, eds. (2014). Storyworld across Media. Toward a
Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
 Narratology
Jan Christoph Meister

1 Definition

Narratology is a humanities discipline dedicated to the study of the

logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation.
Dominated by structuralist approaches at its beginning, narratology
has developed into a variety of theories, concepts, and analytic proce-
dures. Its concepts and models are widely used as heuristic tools, and
narratological theorems play a central role in the exploration and mod-
eling of our ability to produce and process narratives in a multitude of
forms, media, contexts, and communicative practices.

2 Explication

As a human science, narratology is historically defined and reflects on-

going changes in research agendas and methodologies in the humani-
ties. At the same time, the persistence of narratological inquiry for more
than four decades, despite its increasing “centrifugal tendencies” (Barry
1990), testifies to its cohesion as a system of scientific practices.
During its initial or “classical” phase, from the mid-1960s to the ear-
ly 1980s, narratologists were particularly interested in identifying and
defining narrative universals. This tendency is still echoed in a concise
1993 definition of narratology as “the set of general statements on nar-
rative genres, on the systematics of narrating (telling a story) and on the
structure of plot” (Ryan & von Alphen 1993: 110). However, a decade
later, narratology was alternatively described as (a) a theory (Prince
2003: 1), (b) a method (Kindt & Müller 2003: 211), or (c) a discipline
(Fludernik & Margolin 2004: 149).
The third option seems most adequate: the concept of discipline sub-
sumes theory and method, acknowledging narratology’s dual nature as
both a theoretical and an application-oriented academic approach to
narrative. Narratology is no longer a single theory, but rather comprises
a group of related theories (cf. Herman ed. 1999). This has motivated
624 Jan Christoph Meister

some to conclude that narratology is in fact a textual theory whose

scope extends beyond narratives and to claim that “none of the distinc-
tions introduced by narratology to text theory is specific to any genre”
(Titzmann 2003: 201).
However, contemporary “postclassical” narratology cannot be re-
duced to a text theory, either. Over the past twenty years, narratologists
have paid increasing attention to the historicity and contextuality of
modes of narrative representation as well as to its pragmatic function
across various media, while research into narrative universals has been
extended to cover narrative’s cognitive and epistemological functions.
Against this background, two questions deserve particular attention: (a)
How does narratology relate to other disciplines that include the study
of narrative? (b) How can its status as a methodology be characterized?
Five observations can be made in response to these questions which
at the same time substantiate the above definition of narratology:

(i) Narratology is not the theory of narrative (Bal 1985), but rather a
theory of narrative (Prince 1995: 110; Nünning 2003: 227–228).
Other theories of narrative coexist with narratological ones. The re-
lation between narrative theory and narratology is thus not sym-
metrical, but hierarchical and inclusive (Nünning & Nünning 2002:
19).
(ii) At the same time, narratology is more than a theory. While it may
not have lived up to the scientistic pretension expressed in its invo-
cation as a new “science of narrative” (Todorov 1969: 10), it does
qualify as a discipline. It has a defined object domain, explicit
models and theories, a distinct descriptive terminology, transparent
analytical procedures and the institutional infrastructure typical of
disciplines: official organizations; specialized knowledge resources
(journals, series, handbooks, dictionaries, bibliographies, web por-
tals, etc.); a diverse scientific community engaging in national, in-
ternational, and interdisciplinary research projects. And last but not
least, narratology is taught in undergraduate and graduate courses.
(iii) Narratology’s overriding concern remains with narrative represen-
tation as type, although it does not preclude the study of narrative
tokens. Defining narratology in positive terms may prove difficult,
but defining it ex negativo is not: a statement on narrative represen-
tation―a theory, an argument, but also a concrete empirical find-
ing―is not narratological if it does not ultimately concern “narra-
tive qua narrative” (Prince 1990: 10).
(iv) In the wake of the “narrative turn,” the application of narratologi-
cal tools to extra-narratological research problems has become
 Narratology 625

more and more widespread, resulting in a multitude of compound

or “hyphenated” narratologies. However, in a theoretical perspec-
tive not every approach labeled “narratological” automatically con-
stitutes a new narratology sensu strictu. While one subset of the
new approaches comprises methodological variants (natural narra-
tology, critical narratology, cognitive narratology, etc.; Herman
2002; Fehn et al., eds. 1992; Fludernik 1996), others focus on the-
matic and ideology-critical concerns (post-colonial narratology,
feminist narratology, etc.; cf. Nünning 2003; Nünning & Nünning
2002).
(v) Despite the high level of academic attention enjoyed by the prac-
tices and products of human narrative competence, the com-
monsense notion of narrative is still predominantly associated with
text-based narratives. “Narrative representation” is therefore a
preferable definition of narratology’s object of study in that it
counteracts this reductionism in two ways: (a) narrative representa-
tion is not media specific, since its specificity is of a functional or-
der and lies in narrativity. (b) “representation” denotes the product
as well as the process of representing or, as Prince stated: “Narra-
tive is an act and it is an object” (1990: 4).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Coining of the Term “Narratology”

The French term narratologie was coined by Todorov (1969: 10), who
argued for a shift in focus from the surface level of text-based narrative
(i.e. concrete discourse as realized in the form of letters, words and sen-
tences) to the general logical and structural properties of narrative as a
univers de représentations (9). Todorov thus called for a new type of
generalizing theory that could be applied to all domains of narrative,
and in fact for a hypothetical “science that does not exist yet; let’s call
it NARRATOLOGY, or science of narrative.”
The neologism alluded to social and natural sciences such as sociol-
ogy and biology (Herman 2005: 19), and its invention by Todorov is
sometimes interpreted as a foundational act. However, the assumption
of a direct link between the history of the concept and the history of the
discipline is misleading: hardly any of the important contributions to
early narratology explicitly associated itself with “narratology” by title
(e.g. Communications 8, 1966; Genette [1972] 1980; Prince 1973;
Bremond 1973; Culler 1975; Chatman 1978). Bibliometrical analysis of
626 Jan Christoph Meister

some 4,500 entries listed in the online bibliography of the “Interdisci-

plinary Center for Narratology” (ICN) shows that usage of the concept
as a methodological and disciplinary identifier in French, Dutch, Ger-
man, and English monographs and journal articles only became popular
after the publication of Bal’s Narratologie in 1977. The first use of the
term in an English title is found in Ryan (1979) and in a German title in
Schmidt (1989).
One of the reasons for the scientific community’s hesitant ac-
ceptance of the name “narratology” was the proliferation of related and
more general concepts as well as of alternative research agendas con-
cerned with narrative. In Germany, the terms Erzähltheorie and Erzähl-
forschung were already well established and had been in use since the
mid-1950s (Lämmert 1955), which might also explain why Ihwe’s
1972 attempt to introduce the term “narrativics” (Narrativik) met with
limited success. Among the Russian avant-garde, for whom poetry
dominated literature, the call for a “theory of prose” amounted to a plea
for a revaluation of the other hemisphere, while important American
contributions such as Booth ([1961] 1983) or Chatman (1978, 1990a)
evolved from the tradition of New Criticism and rhetoric. Finally,
French narratologists were rooted in structural linguistics and semiolo-
gy (Greimas [1966] 1983), in logic (Bremond 1973), or in rhetorical
and traditional grammatical categories Genette ([1972] 1980).

3.2 Precursors

Core elements and ideas at play in the narratological modeling of narra-

tive were introduced as early as Greek antiquity, while others originated
from the late 19th century onward, particularly in the context of phe-
nomenological, morphological and hermeneutic taxonomies and theo-
ries of literary and folk narratives.

3.2.1 Plato and Aristotle: Representational Modes and the

Functional Relation between Character and Action

In The Republic, Plato differentiated literary genres on the basis of the

genre-specific constellation of two fundamental modes of speech
termed mimesis, the direct imitation of speech in the form of the charac-
ters’ verbatim dialogues and monologues, and diegesis, which compris-
es all utterances attributable to the author. According to Plato, the lyric
genre is restricted to the use of diegesis and the dramatic genre to the
use of mimesis, with only the epic genre combining both. This funda-
mental distinction of the two principal modes of narrating not only an-
 Narratology 627

ticipated the 20th-century opposition showing vs. telling, but it also

prefigured one of the three analytical dimensions adopted by Genette
([1972] 1980), namely voice.
Aristotle’s Poetics presented a second criterion that has remained
fundamental for the understanding of narrative: the distinction between
the totality of events taking place in a depicted world and the de facto
narrated plot or muthos. He pointed out that the latter is always a con-
struct presenting a subset of events, chosen and arranged according to
aesthetic considerations. This resulted in the Poetics’ functional ap-
proach to fictional protagonists and their actions, the latter explained as
governed by the aesthetic and logical requirements of the overall muth-
os.

3.2.2 The Normative Paradigm: 17th to Early 20th-century

Theories of the Novel

Prose narrative as we know it today became an accepted part of the lit-

erary canon only from the 18th century onward. Focusing on aspects of
thematics and didactics, the main question motivating its early theorists
(e.g. Huet [1670] 1715; Blanckenburg [1774] 1965) was therefore nor-
mative: would the new literary form stand up to the qualitative stand-
ards of the ancient epos? This concern continued to dominate many
theories of the paradigmatic narrative genre right into the early 20th
century, most prominently in Lukács ([1916] 1993).

3.2.3 Re-introducing the Formal Paradigm: Spielhagen and Friedemann

Spielhagen ([1876] 1967) was one of the first to address formal features
of narrative again, and he did so by distinguishing novel and novella in
terms of the complexity and functionality of characters and the different
economies of action and plot design. His study ([1883] 1967) intro-
duced a fundamental taxonomic distinction between first- and third-
person narration and also reflected on the author-narrator relation. Mo-
tivated by a dislike for anti-illusionary narrative devices, Spielhagen
declared that the ideal narrative never alerts the reader to the ongoing
process of narration.
Friedemann ([1910] 1965) took exception to this normative postu-
late. For her, mediality was a constitutive element of narration rather
than a defect, and the narrating instance an inherent feature of any nar-
rative, whether (fictionally) present or logically implied. The methodo-
logical significance of this insight can hardly be overestimated:
Friedemann had effectively defined the essence of narrative in structur-
628 Jan Christoph Meister

al terms, taking the principle of Plato’s phenomenological definition of

the epos one step further.

3.2.4 From Catalogue to Formula: Aarne-Thompson vs. Propp

Late 19th-century literary history and theory equated narrative with

literary narrative, thus leaving research on the folktale to specialists. In
the 1880s, the pioneers of a new empirical approach in folklore studies
formed the “Finnish School,” and in 1910 Aarne, one of its members,
published the first version of a catalogue known as the Aarne-
Thompson-Index (Aarne & Thompson [1928] 1961), used international-
ly to the present day (Uther 2004). The expanded catalogue now lists
2,500 summarized variants of folk tales across eight categories.
A theoretical attempt to reduce literary narratives to basic principles
was presented in Forster ([1927] 2005). He argued that the hypothetical
minimal story “The king died, and then the queen died” could be trans-
formed into a valid narrative plot by the addition of an explanatory
clause such as “of grief.” Focusing on empirical folk tales, Propp
([1928] 1968) presented a model of the elementary components of nar-
ratives and the way they are combined. However, in contrast to his pre-
decessors, Propp abstracted from the content plane altogether in order
to describe a particular type of Russian fairy tales in terms of a se-
quence of thirty-one abstract “functions.”
Propp’s approach was to receive considerable attention among the
French structuralists who, while acknowledging the model’s originality,
at the same time criticized it for its purely sequential, mono-linear logic
of action and suggested replacing it with combinatory, multi-linear
models (Lévi-Strauss [1976] 1964). Partly on the basis of such revi-
sions, Propp’s functional model served as a fundamental point of refer-
ence for the elaboration of “story grammars,” Chomskian generative
grammar being the other. The idea of a generative grammar of narrative
was to be taken up not only by narratologists (Prince 1973, 1980; van
Dijk 1975; Pavel 1985), but also by Artificial Intelligence (AI) re-
searchers who tried to design artificial story telling systems (Rumelhart
1980; Bringsjord & Ferrucci 1999).

3.2.5 Russian Formalism

Russian formalism, which flourished from about 1916 until suppressed

by the Stalinists in the late 1920s, had a more radical cultural-
ideological agenda: its aim was to prove the autonomy of art as form.
Literature in particular was considered a phenomenon sui generis that
 Narratology 629

cannot be explained adequately in terms of content or of biographical or

historical context. Šklovskij (1917] 1965) postulated the need to study
literature in terms of purely formal features such as the principle of de-
familiarization, which governs the literary use of language and accentu-
ates the textual artifact as an autonomous signifying structure. The most
influential contribution from a narratological perspective was the for-
malist differentiation of fabula and sujet (Tomaševskij [1925] 1971), in
which the latter is defined as a defamiliarisation of the former.

3.2.6 Pre-structuralist Theories of Narrative:

Perspective, Time, Logic and Rhetoric

3.2.6.1 Perspective

Early in the last century, the question of narrative perspective (Nieder-

hoff → Perspective – Point of View) became the subject of a poetologi-
cal controversy initiated by the novelist and theorist Henry James. He
advocated the scenic method of narration in which narrative perspective
is strictly tied to the epistemological constraints of a particular charac-
ter, a technique demonstrated particularly in The Ambassadors (1903).
James’s admirer Lubbock ([1921] 1972) postulated that such character-
bound “point of view” should in fact be considered the qualitative
standard for narrative prose, thus elevating James’s technical distinction
into one of principle, namely that of “showing” vs. “telling.” According
to Lubbock, a coherent mimetic representation can only originate from
the epistemological point of view of a character (i.e. from pure “show-
ing”).
Descriptive rather than prescriptive by design, Pouillon (1946)
broadened the scope and distinguished three principal forms defined in
terms of the narrator’s temporal and cognitive stance vis-à-vis the char-
acters. Friedman (1955) extended the scope further, proposing a graded
spectrum of eight modes of perspective in which each type is deter-
mined by its ratio of character to narrator-bound sequences. An even
more complex stratified model in which the positions of character and
narrator are correlated in the four dimensions of ideology, phraseology,
spatio-temporal constraints, and psychology of perspective was devel-
oped by Uspenskij ([1970] 1973), a member of the Moscow-Tartu
school of semiotics. The idea has been taken further in Schmid (2005),
which represents the most comprehensive model of perspective to date.
A phenomenological contribution to the theory of perspective was
that of the Austrian Anglicist Stanzel, who identified three proto-typical
“narrative situations” ([1955] 1971). In the “I narrative situation,” the
630 Jan Christoph Meister

narrator exists and acts within the narrated world; in the “authorial nar-
rative situation,” he is positioned outside the narrated world but domi-
nates the process of mediation by commenting on events; in the “figural
narrative situation,” the third-person narrator remains unobtrusive while
the narrative information is filtered through the internal perspective of
the reflector character. Stanzel understood these three narrative situa-
tions to be ideal types and thus modeled them on a synthetic typological
circle. Actual narratives, he observed, often occupy an intermediate
position between these situations and are thus best modeled in terms of
a synthetic typological circle.
The controversy over the pragmatic merits of Stanzel’s approach
versus its methodological constraints and inconsistencies continues to
the present day (cf. Cohn 1981; Kindt & Müller 2006; Cornils 2007;
Schernus 2007), as does the more general narratological general debate
on the concept of narrative perspective (cf. van Peer & Chatman eds.
2001; Hühn et al., eds. 2009).

3.2.6.2 Time

With respect to the category of time, Müller (1948) introduced an

equally fundamental distinction between “narrated time” (erzählte Zeit)
vs. “time of narration” (Erzählzeit). The correlation between the two
dimensions, as he showed, characterizes the pace of a narrative.
This approach was further explored by Lämmert (1955), one of the
first large-scale taxonomies of narrative. For Lämmert, the phenome-
nology of individual narratives can be traced back to a stable, universal
repertoire of elementary modes of narrating. He distinguished various
types of narration which stretched, abbreviated, repeated, paused and
interrupted, skipped and eliminated sub-sequences, while other types
perfectly imitated the flow of narrated time. (The category of time in
Genette [1972] 1980 is examined in similar terms.) Drawing on Lub-
bock’s ([1921] 1972) work as well as on Petsch (1934), Lämmert relat-
ed these elementary forms of narrative temporality to the principal
modes of narration such as scenic presentation, report, reflection, and
description. Unfortunately, the systematic gain of his contribution was
hampered by an overly complex and at times “fuzzy” taxonomy which
tries to account for all forms of narrative flashbacks and flash forwards.

3.2.6.3 Logic and Rhetoric

A philosophically more concise contribution to narrative theory was

Hamburger ([1957] 1973), a book which explored the semantics and
 Narratology 631

pragmatics of literary communication, and in particular the specific log-

ic of the use of temporal and personal deixis under the conditions of
fictional reference. Hamburger pointed out that neither the subject of an
utterance nor the utterance’s temporal location and reference can be
adequately inferred from the words and sentences of a literary narra-
tive: literature overwrites the rules and conventions of everyday lan-
guage use with its own logic.
The question of the validity and reliability of narrative utterances
was again raised by Booth ([1961] 1983), this time from a rhetorical
and ethical perspective. He introduced the concept of “unreliable narra-
tor,” interpreting cases of conflicting and self-contradicting narration as
an aesthetic device aimed at signaling the author’s moral and normative
distance from his narrator. However, the way in which Booth con-
structed his argument made it necessary to introduce a second, more
speculative concept, namely that of the implied author (Schmid → Im-
plied Author). While the concept of “unreliable narrator,” rejected by
structuralists such as Genette ([1983] 1988), has become more accepted
in post-classical narratology, the controversy over the implied author’s
plausibility is ongoing (Booth 2005; Kindt & Müller 2006).

3.3 French Structuralism: 1966–1980

French structuralism eventually gave the decisive impulse for the for-
mation of narratology as a methodologically coherent, structure-
oriented variant of narrative theory. This new paradigm was proclaimed
in a 1966 special issue of the journal Communications, programmatical-
ly titled “L’analyse structurale du récit.” It contained articles by leading
structuralists Barthes, Eco, Genette, Greimas, Todorov, and the film
theorist Metz.
Three traditions informed the new structuralist approach toward nar-
rative: Russian Formalism and Proppian morphology; structural linguis-
tics in the Saussurean tradition as well as the structural anthropology of
Lévi-Strauss; the transformational generative grammar of Chomsky.
Against this background, the structuralists engaged in a systematic re-
examination of the two dimensions of narrative already identified by
Šklovskij, fabula and sujet, re-labeled by Todorov in French as histoire
and discours and by Genette as histoire and récit.
From 1966 to 1972, narratology focused mainly on the former. At
the most abstract level, the semiotician Greimas concentrated on the
elementary structure of signification. Building on Lévi-Strauss’s (1955,
[1958] 1963) structural analysis of myths, Greimas ([1966] 1983) pro-
posed a deep-level model of signification termed the “semiotic square,”
632 Jan Christoph Meister

which represents the semiotic infrastructure of all signifying systems.

The mapping of this universal deep structure onto a given narrative’s
surface structure can then be explained in terms of transformational
rules. Finally, a typology of six functional roles attributable to charac-
ters (main vs. secondary character, opponent vs. helper, sender vs. re-
ceiver; cf. Greimas [1973] 1987) complements the approach. Barthes
([1966] 1975) proposed a functional systematics of narrated events
which distinguishes “kernels,” i.e. obligatory events that guarantee the
story’s coherence, and optional “satellites” that serve to embellish the
basic plot. Todorov (1969) furthered the linguistic analogy by equating
actions to verbs, characters to nouns and their attributes to adjectives,
and then by then linking these elements through modal operators. This
narrative syntax operates on the abstract level of a narrative langue:
instead of accounting only for the manifest sequence of events repre-
sented in a given fictional world, this “grammar” also included the log-
ic of virtual action sequences, e.g. those imagined in a narrated charac-
ter’s mind. Bremond (1973) explored the logic of represented action
from yet another angle, modeling it as a series of binary choices in
which an “eventuality” results in “action” or in “non-action” and, in the
former case, in “completion” or in “non-completion.” The interest in
questions of action logic and narrative grammar was taken up in Prince
(1973) which synthesized and systematized the earlier approaches, and
yet again in Pavel (1985), which combined Bremond’s abstract binary
logic with game theory (cf. Herman 2002).
While the theoretical ambition and level of abstraction of early
structuralist models of narrative were impressive, their practical rele-
vance was hard to prove to philologists. Greimassian semantics is a
case in point: used as a descriptive grammar, its categories were defined
with a degree of generality too broad to be faulted; put to the test as a
generative grammar, its yield was too abstract to demonstrate the ne-
cessity or the explanatory power of the transformational process from
semiotic deep structure to the surface structure of narrated events and
characters.
This systematic and methodological gap was addressed by Genette
([1972] 1980), who presented a comprehensive taxonomy of discourse
phenomena developed alongside a detailed analysis of narrative com-
position and technique in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
Broadly speaking, Genette’s narratological taxonomy covered three
functional domains of literary narrative: the temporal structure and dy-
namics of representation (in the dual sense of product and process of
representational activity); the mode of narration and its underlying log-
ic of narrative communication; and the epistemological and normative
 Narratology 633

constraints of the gathering and communication of information during

the narrative process. The terminology and neologisms introduced by
Genette in together with his taxonomy soon became the narratological
lingua franca.
In contrast to his formalist predecessors and structuralist colleagues,
Genette had no intention of designing a fully coherent and self-
contained theory of narrative. This sparked fundamental narratological
controversies over Genettian concepts such as “focalization” (Bal 1977;
Jahn 1996, 1999b) and set the stage for numerous debates that were to
result in postclassical narratology. Some of this criticism was addressed
in Genette ([1983] 1988).

3.4 Poststructuralist Narratology: 1980–1990

The following decade was dominated by two major trends: a widening

of narratology’s scope beyond literary narrative and the importing of
concepts and theories from other disciplines (Ryan & van Alphen 1993:
112). The process thus mirrored the general shift from structuralist to
poststructuralist methodologies that was taking place in the humanities
at that time.
Chatman (1978) demonstrated the applicability of narratology to
visual narratives. Bal ([1985] 1997) and others proved narratology’s
relevance in the analysis of cross-textual phenomena such as intertextu-
ality and intermediality, as well as in that of intra-textual phenomena of
polyvocality (Lanser 1981). Derridaen deconstruction was introduced
by Culler (1981), who questioned the implicit genealogy from story
(histoire, fabula) to discourse and argued that the relation of dependen-
cy between the two is the exact opposite: discourse generates story. The
psychological motivation at play in this process of retrospective em-
plotting was explored in Brooks (1984). Another influence came from
feminist studies: Lanser (1986) proposed to include gender as a system-
atic category for the narratological analysis of the narratorial profile as
well as of point of view and mode of presentation. On a more abstract
level, Pavel (1986) and Doležel (1988) extended the narratological
model by introducing modal logic and the theory of possible worlds.
These models accounted for the implicit, non-realized virtual narratives
indicated by fictional characters’ hopes, wishes, etc. which may not
materialize but nevertheless serve to point to the theoretical possibility
of an alternative course of events. Ryan (1991) explored this line of
reasoning even further, linking it to the simulation paradigm of AI. Fi-
nally, the postclassical phase of narratology saw an increase in the ex-
porting of narratological concepts and theorems to other disciplines
634 Jan Christoph Meister

(Meuter → Narration in Various Disciplines), thus contributing to the

“narrative turn” (cf. White 1980; Kreiswirth 1995).

3.5 Post-classical Narratology and “New” Narratologies:

1990 to Present

With time, the tension between structuralist narratology’s original con-

cern for systematicity and logical coherence and the need for a response
to calls for a more pragmatically oriented theory of narrative could no
longer be ignored, as observed by Prince (2003).
Fludernik (1996) signaled a shift in focus from text-based phenome-
na to the cognitive functions of oral and non-literary narrative, thus
opening a new chapter in the narratological project. In contrast, Gibson
(1996) argued for a radical deconstruction of the entire conceptual ap-
paratus developed by the structuralists. Whether such philosophical
criticism in the Derridaen vein deserves to be classified “narratological”
has however been met with skepticism (e.g. Nünning & Nünning 2002:
15).
Even so, the deconstructionist and postmodernist onslaught stimu-
lated a multitude of new approaches aimed at combining the structural-
ists’ concern for systematicity with a renewal of interest in the cultural
and philosophical issues of history and ideology. The resulting wave of
critically oriented narratological models and theories proved to be
methodologically heterogeneous, prompting Herman (ed. 1999) to in-
troduce the plural concept of “narratologies.” A comprehensive survey
by Nünning & Nünning (2002) and by Nünning (2003) grouped the
proliferation of “new narratologies” that got underway during the 1990s
into eight categories, three of which have turned out to be the dominant
methodological paradigms of contemporary narratology:

(a) Contextualist narratology (Chatman 1990b; note that Chatman in-

troduces the term, but criticizes the approach) relates the phenome-
na encountered in narrative to specific cultural, historical, thematic,
and ideological contexts. This extends the focus from purely struc-
tural aspects to issues of narrated content.
(b) Cognitive narratology (Herman 2000, ed. 2003) focuses on the
human intellectual and emotional processing of narratives. This
approach is not restricted to literary narratives: “natural” everyday
and oral narratives are considered to represent an underlying an-
thropological competence in its original form (Fludernik 1996).
Cognitivist approaches also play a crucial role in AI research, the
aim of which is to model or simulate human narrative intelligence
 Narratology 635

(Jahn 1999a; Mateas & Sengers eds. 2003; Meister 2003; Lönneker
et al., eds. 2005).
(c) Transgeneric approaches (Hühn & Sommer → Narration in Poetry
and Drama) and intermedial approaches (Ryan → Narration in
Various Media; cf. Ryan 2005, ed. 2004; Wolf 2004) explore the
relevance of narratological concepts for the study of genres and
media outside the traditional object domain of text-based literary
narrative. Application, adaptation and reformulation of narratologi-
cal concepts go hand in hand with the narratological analysis of
drama (Fludernik 2000; Jahn 2001; Richardson 2007; Fludernik
2008; Nünning & Sommer 2008), poetry (Hühn 2004; Hühn &
Kiefer 2005; Schönert et al. 2007), film (Bordwell 1985; Branigan
1992; Schlickers 1997; Mittell 2007; Eder 2008), music (Kramer
1991; Wolf 2002; Seaton 2005; Grabócz 2009), the visual and per-
forming arts (Bal 1991; Ryan 2003, ed. 2004; Berns → Performa-
tivity), computer games (Ryan 2001, 2006, 2008) as well as other
domains. This broadening of the narratological palette beyond spe-
cific media highlights the necessity for further research on narrativ-
ity (Abbott → Narrativity).

3.6 Outlook

The development of narratology has been dependent not only on its

theoretical or meta-theoretical advances, but has also emerged with the
gradual consolidation of organizational and institutional structures. In
this respect, three phases can be identified:

Phase 1: The formation of cross-disciplinary narratological interest

groups. Beginning with the contributors to the programmatic 1966
special issue of the journal Communications and the creation dur-
ing the 1970s by Bremond, Genette, Todorov, Marin, and Metz of
the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (Centre National
de Recherche Scientifique), informal organizational models (also
represented by the Tel Aviv group with its influential journal Poet-
ics Today, or in the Amsterdam School initiated by Bal) have
played a decisive role in shaping narratology as a paradigmatic in-
ter-discipline.
Phase 2: The advent of officially funded narratological institutions
for academic research and teaching since the late 1990s, such as
the “Forschergruppe Narratologie” and the “Interdisciplinary Cen-
ter for Narratology” at Hamburg University, the “Zentrum für
Erzählforschung” at Wuppertal University as well as the “Center
636 Jan Christoph Meister

for Narratological Studies” at the University of Southern Denmark

and the “Project Narrative” at Ohio State University in the US.
Phase 3: The founding of national and international narratological
umbrella organizations. These include the North American “Inter-
national Society for the Study of Narrative,” the Scandinavian
“Nordic Network,” and the “European Narratology Network.”

To date, the theoretical definition of narratology has generally followed

one of three lines of reasoning: the first upholds or questions narratolo-
gy’s original formalist-structuralist credo; the second explores family
resemblances among the old and the “new narratologies” and their vari-
ous research paradigms; the third focuses on the methodological dis-
tinction between hermeneutic and heuristic functions, sometimes sug-
gesting that narratology’s scope ought to be restricted to the latter and
sometimes arguing that it ought to be defined in even more general
terms. While the merit of these theoretical definitions is obvious, narra-
tology’s potential for further development is perhaps better described in
terms of an interaction of three concurrent processes: expansion of the
body of domain-specific theories on which narratology is based; con-
tinuous broadening of its epistemic reach; consolidation of an institu-
tional infrastructure, which has helped to transform a methodology into
a discipline.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

The diversification of narratology since the 1990s has not only borne
witness to its continued relevance, but it has also underscored the need
to address the problem of methodological identity. What exactly is nar-
ratology (cf. Kindt & Müller 2003)? How can it be defined in theoreti-
cal and methodological terms? The need for critical self-reflection by
practicing narratologists can be argued from two angles.
Even during the heyday of poststructuralism, it was observed that
“visits to the tool shed of narratology may be of advantage even to
those making critical theory their main residence” (Hoesterey 1991:
214). However, can conceptual imports taken from structuralist narra-
tology retain their theoretical precision and integrity in a foreign meth-
odological context, or are they not rather destined to degenerate into
mere metaphoric labels? Descriptive concepts such as mise en abyme or
metalepsis (Pier → Metalepsis) seem to be less at risk (cf. Wolf 2005;
Schmid 2005a), while others―notably the core narratological concept
 Narratology 637

of narrator―resist straightforward appropriation, as film or computer

game studies (e.g. Neitzel 2005) have come to realize.
Yet examples like these also point to a more fundamental issue that
extends beyond the scope of individual concepts. What is the principal
methodological status of the undertaking now that it has transformed
into a “Narratology beyond Literary Studies” (Meister et al. 2005): is
narratology a tool, a method, a program, a theory, or is it indeed a dis-
cipline (Schönert 2004)?
Nünning and Nünning’s comprehensive 2002 survey (cf. Nünning
2003) of the multitude of “new narratologies” concluded with a list of
six desiderata, calling for: (a) more studies in the history of narratology;
(b) concrete examples of narratological analyses of texts; (c) detailed
theoretical explication of narratological conceptual fundamentals; (d)
narratological reconstructions of phenomena relevant to literary history;
(e) narratological work in the field of cultural history; (f) research on
intermedial aspects of narrative.
In the intervening years, most of these desiderata have been ad-
dressed at least in part. For example, the Russian formalists’ constitu-
tive role has been reconstructed in Schmid (ed. 2009), which includes
seminal original texts in (German) translation. Others have investigated
historical links between narratology and German Erzähltheorie (Cornils
& Schernus 2003; Fludernik & Margolin 2004). Narratological anal-
yses of texts, films, visual artifacts, etc. were undertaken starting in the
1970s and continue to nourish narratological reflection today. Numer-
ous studies―some of them book-length―have been devoted to funda-
mental concepts such as event and eventfulness (Schmid 2003; Hühn
→ Event and Eventfulness), narrativity (Sturgess 1992; Sternberg
2001; Audet et al. [2006] 2007; Pier & García Landa eds. 2008; Abbott
→ Narrativity), action (Meister 2003), character (Jannidis 2004; Eder
2008; Jannidis → Character) and perspective (Hühn et al., eds. 2009;
Niederhoff → Perspective – Point of View; Niederhoff → Focaliza-
tion); research on procedural aspects of narrative that long remained
unnoticed has emanated from digital media studies (Ryan 2002, 2006).
By contrast, a narratologically based approach in literary history―
called for repeatedly (Bal 1986; Pavel 1990; Nünning 2000; Fludernik
2003, etc.)―is still outstanding. Similarly, the potential for interdisci-
plinary cooperation between narratology and text linguistics has also
not been fully exploited yet. After a promising start in the 1970s (van
Dijk 1975) this work has been taken up only occasionally (e.g. Adam
[1985] 1994; Karlgren & Cutting 1994; Toolan [1988] 2001). Recent
contributions such as Adam (2005), Lehmann (2008) or Janik (2008)
demonstrate the synergy of this approach.
638 Jan Christoph Meister

Contemporary narratology has clearly responded to the call to

broaden the scope of methodology and object domain. At the same
time, the last two desiderata underscore literary narrative’s paradigmat-
ic status for the narratological study of narrative representation.

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642 Jan Christoph Meister

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644 Jan Christoph Meister

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(ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality, Disciplinarity. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 83–107.

5.2 Web Resources

NarrBib (short for “Narratological Bibliography”)

www.icn.uni-
hamburg.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=8&Itemid=13
ENN (European Narratology Network)
www.narratology.net/
ICN (Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, Hamburg University)
www.icn.uni-hamburg.de
Project Narrative (Ohio State University)
 Narratology 645

www.projectnarrative.osu.edu/
Zentrum für Erzählforschung (Bergische University, Wuppertal)
www.fba.uni-wuppertal.de/zef/
Center for Narratologiske Studier (University of Southern Denmark, Kolding)
www.sdu.dk/Om_SDU/Institutter_centre/Ilkm/Forskning/Forskningsprojekter / C_Narratolo
gi.aspx
 Narrator
Uri Margolin

1 Definition

In the literal sense, the term “narrator” designates the inner-textual (tex-
tually encoded) highest-level speech position from which the current
narrative discourse as a whole originates and from which references to
the entities, actions and events that this discourse is about are being
made. Through a dual process of metonymic transfer and anthropomor-
phization, the term narrator is then employed to designate a presumed
textually projected occupant of this position, the hypothesized producer
of the current discourse, the individual agent who serves as the answer
to Genette’s question qui parle? The narrator, which is a strictly textual
category, should be clearly distinguished from the author (Schönert →
Author) who is of course an actual person.

2 Explication

A narrator is a linguistically indicated, textually projected and readerly

constructed function, slot or category whose occupant need not be
thought of in any terms but those of a communicative role. Terms des-
ignating this role include discursive function or role, voice, source of
narrative transmission, producer of current discourse, teller, reporter,
narrating agent or instance. The position occupied by this presumed
inner-textual originator of the discourse functions as a logico-linguistic
center for all spatio-temporal and personal references occurring in the
discourse, i.e. as highest-level center of the discourse. An inner-textual
narrator can in principle be assigned to any narrative text, not just a fic-
tional one, and such ascription does not require any knowledge about
the actual world producer of the words of the text, be it a human being
or a computer program. The linguistically projected narrator and the
actual world producer will be confronted at a later stage (3.6).
Good reasons, stemming from text linguistics, philosophy, narratol-
ogy and common sense, can be adduced for the necessity or at least ad-
 Narrator 647

visability of granting the narrator category as defined above a central

place in the description and interpretation, both informal and profes-
sional, of literary narratives. In Benveniste’s (1966) and Jakobson’s
(1971) text linguistics, any utterance is described as consisting of two
indissoluble components: the speech event (énonciation, saying) and
that which is said (énoncé) to which correspond, respectively, the sayer
(sujet de l’énonciation) and the one spoken of (sujet de l’énoncé). Since
narrative utterances are a subset of the universe of utterances, they too
must therefore contain a sayer. For narrative, the terms thus translate
into narration, narrated event, narrator and narrated agent(s), respective-
ly. A narrator can thus be defined as the sujet de l’énonciation of one or
more utterances that represents an event (Coste 1989: 166). In terms of
linguistic pragmatics or speech act theory, any narrative, regardless of
its length, is a macro speech act of the constative type, claiming that
such and such happened. For a claim to be made, there needs to be an
agent who makes this claim, hence the narrator. If narrative is a report
of acts and events, we need a reporter behind it, and if it is a tale, we
need a teller. In terms of communication theory, any act of communica-
tion consists of a sender sending a message to a receiver. A narrative
consists of someone telling someone else that something happened, and
no such act can be imagined without a sender-narrator position. Even a
failed, confused or contradictory act of reporting presupposes a narrator
no less than a successful one.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Plato was the first to claim that the underlying difference between nar-
rative and drama as basic types of discourse consists in the difference
between directly showing and indirectly telling or reporting, rooted in
the absence or presence respectively of a mediating instance between
the characters’ speech and the audience. And the narrator is precisely
this mediating instance. Modern arguments for mediacy as the generic
hallmark of narrative can be found in Friedemann ([1910] 1965) and
Stanzel ([1955] 1971). In contemporary narratology it is customary to
distinguish between three functions which are essential to give rise to
any narrative: doing, seeing and saying (Bal 1981: 45). Thus, characters
do certain things which are viewed from a certain perspective, and what
is seen is then reported. To these three functions there correspond three
roles: narrative agent, focalizer (which has been a subject of scholarly
controversy) and narrator. Baxtin’s ([1934/35] 1981) influential theory
of the novel, which can be generalized to all narrative, regards the nov-
648 Uri Margolin

el as the site of interplay between two kinds of utterances: those stem-

ming from the characters and those stemming from an inner textual nar-
rator. The whole essence of narrative would be missed if one were to
deny the textual existence of a narrator as a stylistic and ideological
position. Finally, psychonarratology (e.g. Bortolussi & Dixon 2003)
has shown that readers process literary narratives in the same way as
they do ordinary communication insofar as they assume a textually en-
coded conversational partner responsible for the contents of the narra-
tive. This mimetic-illusionist assumption a bout the nature and status of
the narrator has recently come under scrutiny by cognitively-oriented
narratologists (Nünning 2001; Fludernik 2003; Herman → Cognitive
Narratology). On this view, both narrated world and narrator are not
inherent to the text, but rather constructed in readers’ minds at the point
of intersection of individual textual data and general cognitive catego-
ries possessed by these readers. A literary narrative is consequently a
text capable of creating in the reader’s mind the representational illu-
sion of observing an ongoing process of narrative communication in
which a more or less personalized narrator plays a key role. Identifying
and characterizing such a narrator is an optional naturalization or mean-
ing creation strategy open to the reader and building upon two kinds of
input: textual signals and storytelling scenarios (frames, schemes) the
reader already possesses from his real-life experience and which are
activated once a certain number of narrator indicators have been identi-
fied in the text (Emmott & Alexander → Schemata). Works which de-
stroy the illusion of an independently existing narrated domain may still
produce a powerful representational illusion of narrative activity with a
narrator figure behind it. One can say in conclusion that the notion of
narrator has been approached and defined in terms of three distinct the-
oretical frameworks (Grall 2007): rhetoric (speech act, communica-
tion); narratology (mediation, interplay of utterances); and cognitive
science (reader psychology and models of text comprehension).

3.1 Identifying the Narrator: Constitutive Conditions

Some narrators are more marked and individuated than others. But what
are the minimal textual conditions under which one could identify a
distinct narrating position or voice? Such conditions could be repre-
sented as a hierarchical series. The text must be capable of being natu-
ralized as representing one or more reporting utterances or speech acts
stemming from one or more agents. Some texts, classified as narratives
in our culture, such as unframed interior monologues (Schnitzler’s
Fräulein Else) or textes-limites of modernism or postmodernism, do not
 Narrator 649

satisfy this requirement and consequently cannot be considered as pos-

sessing any inscribed originators. The second condition is that it should
be possible to demarcate the utterances of which the text consists and
assign each of them to a distinct voice or originator. (It is only in rare
cases that all utterances recorded in a text were originally made by one
speaker at one time.) The third condition is that one should be able to
determine the hierarchical relations between the different utterances and
their originators, as defined by such questions as who can quote whom,
who can refer to whom and who can report about whom (Margolin
1991), but also to determine the total number of such originators and
levels of speech in the text. Finally, and most crucially, one should be
able to identify a single, highest-level originator of all originators, so to
speak: one general, primary or global textual narrating voice, such that
(a) the text as a whole can be seen as a macro speech act or utterance
emanating from that voice, and (b) all textually occurring utterances
originating with other speakers are embedded within this macro speech
act, that is, are merely quoted or mentioned in it. There is no algorithm
for deciding whether any or all of the above conditions are satisfied by
a given text even though readers make such decisions semi-intuitively
all the time. The muse who provides the answer to the epic question at
the beginning of the Iliad is the earliest Western example of such a
global narrator, but this occurs also with the anonymous voices relating
the whole of War and Peace or Père Goriot. When it is not possible to
identify a single highest-level narrator, we are dealing with multi-
narrator narratives (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the
Fury, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red) in which different textual seg-
ments consist of reports stemming from different speakers, none of
whom occupy a position higher than the others. “Narrator” in the proto-
typical sense, however, designates the single, unified, stable, distinct
human-like voice who produces the whole narrative discourse we are
reading. In general, although not universally, this discourse assumes the
shape of an account of independently existing and known facts. Going
one step further, the narrator can be envisioned as a fictional agent who
is part of the story world and whose task it is to report from within it on
events in this world which are real or actual for him (Thomson-Jones
2007: 78).

3.1.1 “Unnatural Voices” in Postmodern Narratives

Richardson (2006) described the difficulty in pinning down and defin-

ing a single or unified or stable highest-level narrator position in many
postmodern texts, even though they contain numerous signs of narrator
650 Uri Margolin

and narrational activity alike. In such texts, of which Beckett’s Trilogy

is the showcase, it is sometimes impossible to locate a constant highest-
level narrator, and even if one is locatable, this utterer has no voice of
his own or is mimetically impossible. The first case involves either a
constant reversal of levels between quoter and quoted where “the one
you invented has invented you” (Beckett), or an open-ended regression
of levels where whenever we think we have finally reached the primary
textual speaker, the unquoted quoter, it turns out that this discourse,
too, is in fact being quoted by a still higher-level voice. In the second
case, the highest-level speaker is a mere conduit or “mouth” (Beckett)
voicing a discourse whose inscribed originator is someone else, so that
all tokens of “I” in this discourse designate not the utterer, but that
“cantankerous other” (Beckett). The net result is that “I seem to speak,
it is not I; about me—but it is not about me” (Beckett). The supposedly
highest-level voice ends up lacking all identity, as it is merely a “ghost
writer” for another or the mere conduit for another’s discourse or an
impersonator speaking as another (Margolin 1986/87). In the mimeti-
cally impossible case (Richardson 2006: 103–105), the primary speaker
turns out to be a number of distinct voices which merge without any
explanation, which contain so much incommensurable information that
they cannot be unified into one speech position or whose level is inde-
terminate and floating between the character, narrator and persona of
the biographical author, as when such a narrator claims to have invent-
ed figures in other texts by the same author (e.g. Beckett’s Trilogy).
Finally, a specific highest-level individual voice cannot be identified in
a discourse consisting of a verbal collage of recycled clichés from me-
dia reports, advertising and the like (Petersen 1993: 138).

3.2 Individuating the Narrator

When a primary global narrator can be defined for a given narrative, the
discourse as a whole can be viewed as its macro speech act. Individuat-
ing the narrator in a literary fictional context means constructing or in-
ferring an image of the utterer with the sole means for so doing being
the verbal record of his speech act. This task needs to be guided by two
theoretical frameworks: linguistic pragmatics, which seeks to define the
time, place, and context of utterance and the utterer’s capabilities, be-
liefs and communicative intentions; and the cognitive psychological
theory of attribution, which seeks to infer from a behavior, including
verbal, the dispositions and attitudes of the agent (Margolin 1986).
Now literary texts vary enormously as regards the kinds and the amount
of clues they provide for this purpose and the resultant textual marked-
 Narrator 651

ness of the narrator or “degree of narratorhood” (Chatman’s term). At

degree zero we have the impersonal or transparent mode of narration
associated with an anonymous voice or covert (effaced, imperceptible)
narrator coming from nowhere and announcing categorically that “once
upon a time there was.” At the other end stands the perceptible, drama-
tized or personal mode of narration associated with an overt narrator
who could say things like “Living now in my old age in the city of NN,
I still remember with great affection what X did 30 years ago.” Obvi-
ously, the greater the number and diversity of the textual elements
available for speaker indication, the richer the resultant speaker image.
Once again, the two extremes would be a mere voice with no psycho-
logical person behind it and a concrete figure with both an inner life
and a body.

3.2.1 Types of Utterances

One major source of data for building the image of the narrator is
claims occurring in his/her discourse that go beyond the strict reporting
of individual facts. These include summaries, analyses, comments, and
generalizations of various kinds, all concerning the narrated domain.
Chatman (1978) has proposed a useful typology of such claims in as-
cending order from set descriptions and temporal summaries to reports
of what characters did not do, say or think, then to explanations, inter-
pretations and judgments of reported actions or characters, and ending
with generalizations of any kind, including purported general truths,
maxims and norms of action which go well beyond the reported events.
The extent of such claims varies enormously from one author to the
other, two extremes being Hemingway and Henry James. The aesthetic
desirability of such narratorial “intrusions” or “telling” beyond mere
“showing” has been the object of heated critical debate since the 19th
century (e.g. Otto Ludwig [1977], Friedrich Spielhagen [1883] 1967,
Käte Friedemann [1910] 1965, Percy Lubbock [1921] 1947 and Wayne
C. Booth [1961] 1983). Critics for whom narratorial mediation is a
mere handmaiden for showing camera-like what happened would advo-
cate the avoidance of all such material and consider it a mere deviation
detracting from the effectiveness of the narration. Conversely, those for
whom mediation is the very essence of narrative as distinguished from
drama would consider such material as radical enrichment of “mere
reporting.”
652 Uri Margolin

3.2.2 Situational Indicators

The types of utterances just mentioned help us individuate the narrator

as a mind, so to speak. But what about him/her as a person in a com-
municative situation? Here linguistic features play the major role.
Doležel (1967) has outlined several such features, again in hierarchical
order. First is the use of first- and second-person pronouns to indicate
the presence of the originator and the inscribed addressee of the current
speech event, both of whom are absent in third-person discourse. Next
is the use of all three major tenses, especially of the present tense, to
indicate the current communicative transaction relative to which all nar-
rated events are temporally ordered. In pure third-person past-tense nar-
ration, on the other hand, the past tense is not related to any particular
speech situation, but is more aspectual, merely indicative of the narrat-
ed events already having taken place. Third is the use of deictics
(demonstratives, indexicals, shifters) of time and place such as “now,”
“here,” “lately,” “yesterday,” etc. relating the narrated events to a pre-
sent speaker and his embodied space-time position. Another major ele-
ment is address to the inscribed narratee, such as the famous “Dear
reader,” consisting of questions and admonitions and providing the
speaking voice with immediacy, projecting an ongoing communicative
exchange (telling) in addition to what is being narrated (told). Such ad-
dress is part of the rhetorical strategy employed by the narrator, and
embodies his/her communicative intentions. Equally important is the
use of subjective semantics, expressing the narrating instance’s atti-
tudes and reactions to the narrated events, which both adds a strong
personal element and functions as part of the teller’s rhetorical strategy
vis-à-vis the addressee. A final individuating feature is a personal style
of narration, indicative of a particular mind style.

3.2.3 Narration-oriented Utterances

Narratorial comments are focused on the narrated, while the linguistic

features listed above may be indicative of the narrated or the narration.
The fullest systematic picture of elements in the communicative situa-
tion (narration) which help characterize the narrator can be provided by
using Jakobson’s model of verbal communication (1960), five of whose
six functions are concerned with enunciation. The expressive function
is concerned with the speaker’s self-reference, self-characterization,
and expression of emotions and attitudes. The conative or appellative
functions may create the illusion of face-to-face communication where
the addressee is urged to listen, understand, sympathize, etc., not only
 Narrator 653

with respect to the narrated, but also regarding the narrator and his cur-
rent activity. Metalinguistic references to the medium employed (oral or
written) and its limitations again highlight the narrator’s present act of
telling, and so do discussions of the appropriateness and potentialities
of the type of discourse selected (letter, diary, confession, report). And
finally, there are of course references to the current narrating activity
and its linguistic embodiment as it is being produced.
As Prince (1982) and Nünning (1989) have noted, the greater the
number of signs of the narration compared to those of the narrated, the
more marked the narrator and his activity become. An extreme example
is provided by postmodern narratives where hardly any story gets told,
since most of the text is concerned with the process of telling and its
difficulties and with the figure of the teller and his struggle to tell
(Neumann & Nünning → Metanarration and Metafiction). Finally,
when the telling process is foregrounded and presented as durative (tak-
ing days, months or years), it is possible to draw conclusions not only
with respect to some of the narrator’s mental and physical traits, but
also as regards possible changes to these features in the course of the
narration.

3.3 Major Aspects of a Narrator’s Image

Once a certain amount of individuating information about the narrator

has been garnered from the textual data listed above, one could attempt
to draw an image of this narrator as a human or human-like figure. Now
in principle any physical, mental or behavioral aspect of the narrator
could enter such a picture, but as regards those aspects most closely tied
to the defining teller role, the following have been suggested by various
narratologists: degree and kind(s) of knowledge possessed; reliability;
relation to various components of the speech act performed; articulate-
ness; attitude towards the narrated (straightforward, ironic, sympathetic,
etc.); projected teller role.

3.3.1 Knowledge

Once a global narrator has been identified in a discourse, all infor-

mation about the narrated domain, including characters’ direct dis-
course, originates with that narrator. Now the knowledge a narrator
may have about any of the characters may be restricted to what can be
garnered from sense impressions, or it may include direct access to their
minds, something not possible outside fiction (Niederhoff  Focaliza-
tion). Even if restricted to external data, a narrator may know more, the
654 Uri Margolin

same as or less than one or more of his characters, and he may also
withhold information from his addressee. One egregious example is
Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the narrator
withholds the crucial information that he himself is the murderer. Some,
but by no means all, anonymous narrating voices telling their story in
the third-person past tense are endowed with omniscience: “Familiarity,
in principle, with the characters’ innermost thought and feelings;
knowledge of past, present and future; presence in locations where
characters are supposed to be unaccompanied […]; and the knowledge
of what happened in several places at the same time” (Rimmon-Kenan
[1983] 2003: 96). And such panoramic or Olympian knowledge can be
fully authoritative, not open to any challenge or enquiry. This is the
maximal degree and kind of knowledge any narrator can possess, and
the possibility of any narrating instance possessing such knowledge is
the most basic constitutive convention of all fiction writing. As soon as
the narrator becomes personalized, knowledge claims begin to be re-
stricted in scope and kind to the humanly possible (unless the speaker is
a supernatural entity) and are open to modalization (“it seems,” “proba-
bly,” “as far as can be known”) and thus the challenge of limited epis-
temic authority. Because of their rhetorical needs, authors sometimes
endow personalized narrators with intermittent omniscience. The highly
personalized narrator of Proust’s first-person novel À la Recherche du
temps perdu can thus on occasion report with certainty about what an-
other person thought or what happened when someone was all by him-
self.

3.3.2 Reliability

Personalized narrators, and only personalized ones, may on occasion be

deemed by the reader as unreliable, meaning that the validity of some
or even all claims made by them is low or non-existent, that these
claims need consequently to be rejected and, if possible, replaced by
more valid, reader-formulated ones regarding the given topic. (Notice,
though, that if the narrator is cast in the role not of a reporter of facts
but of an inventor of tales, unreliability is inapplicable [Walton 1990:
374–375].) Following Phelan and Martin (1999), one can distinguish
three axes of unreliability: facts and events of the narrated domain; the
interpretation of such facts (i.e. supplied inferences, explanations or
motivations); moral, practical, aesthetic, etc. judgments and evaluations
of these facts. While the first two kinds of reliability are epistemic, the
third is clearly axiological and normative. Moreover, unreliability of
factual claims is the most radical, since it may prevent us from figuring
 Narrator 655

out what the narrative world was “really” like. A narrator may himself
alter the reliability of any of his claims by citing lack of information or
inability on his part to fathom things. There are numerous indicators of
narratorial factual unreliability (cf. D’hoker & Martens eds. 2008) in-
cluding paratextual and intertextual elements such as title (Diary of a
Madman) or a narrator figure falling clearly under a codified unreliable
literary type (picaro, scoundrel). In multiple narrator texts (3.4), con-
flicts between the reports on the same events by different narrators in-
dicate that at least one of them is unreliable. In realistic literature, a ma-
jor clash between our world knowledge (extra-textual information) and
claims made by the narrator may also serve as such an indicator (Han-
sen 2007). Inner-textual indicators of factual unreliability are incon-
sistency and incongruity between claims made by the narrator regarding
the same events, while illogicality, invalid or non-sequitur inferences as
well as explanations and generalizations lacking any evidence are
grounds for deeming narratorial interpretations of fact unreliable.
Strong conflict with the moral or aesthetic norms held by the reader are
grounds for rejecting narratorial judgments. In the factual and interpre-
tative cases, one also assumes that the events of the narrated domain are
in and by themselves amenable to a consistent description and that valid
generalizations and explanations of this domain are possible. Narratori-
al unreliability is ultimately a readerly computational hypothesis adopt-
ed in order to explain the origin of inconsistencies and incongruities in
the narrated world, a crucial point first made by Yacobi (1981). To
claim that the narration of a given story is unreliable is to assume the
existence of a personalized mediator with human-like cognitive and
sensory capabilities whose erroneous or aberrant mind can serve as the
source of all textual incongruities with respect to the narrated domain
(Marcus 2007).
Once we are ready to psychologize the narrator, we could seek for
mental explanations for the unreliability of some or all of his claims.
Depending on the particular text, such grounds could be the narrator’s
lack of knowledge or experience, mental deficiencies ranging from lim-
ited intelligence to insanity or drug-induced hallucinations, self-decep-
tion (in cases of autobiographical narration), a particular mental dispo-
sition (the chronic liar), and a deliberate deceptive strategy. Creating a
narrator figure whom readers will deem unreliable redirects attention
from the told to the telling and the teller, from what is known and eval-
uated to the circumstances and activities of informing and judging, and
to the person failing to perform them properly.
656 Uri Margolin

3.3.3 Relation to the Narrative Act

From the speech act of narration one can construct an image of its per-
former along three major axes: status, involving the speaker’s relation
to his speaking activity; contact, involving the speaker-audience rela-
tion; and stance, involving the relation between the speaker and the top-
ic of his discourse. Such is the key thesis of Lanser (1981), the most
comprehensive account to date of the narrator in terms of speech act
theory. Status covers, among other things, social identity, extent of
knowledge, presentation of the told as report or invention, and “mimet-
ic authority” encompassing sincerity and honesty or their absence,
trustworthiness (both intellectual and moral), and competence or skill at
telling. Contact includes the teller’s attitude towards his inscribed ad-
dressee: formality to intimacy, deference to contempt; self-reference
and direct address or the absence of both; the teller’s attitude towards
his activity including self-confidence or hesitancy, consciousness of
this activity of telling and reference to it or lack of both. Stance is a
more heterogeneous category, but most important probably is the narra-
tor’s relation to his characters: adopting or not adopting their language
and/or spatio-temporal perspective and/or values (Lanser 1981: 224).
Lanser’s pragmatics of narration follows in the footsteps of classical
rhetoric where a speaker is regarded as a human subject with various
emotions (pathos), values (ethos) and intentions and who, through the
organization and manner of delivery of his discourse, seeks to mold in
particular ways the attitudes, emotions and judgments of his addressees
(Grall 2007: 253–254).

3.3.4 Articulateness

Under this heading is understood the manner of telling, especially those

stylistic choices that help characterize the speaker’s discourse and, by
metonymic transfer, the speaker’s mind as sophisticated, abstract, com-
plex and rational or their opposite, finely nuanced or simplistic, emo-
tional and immediate or rational and distanced, and so on. While such
qualifications cannot be strictly defined in any systematic and exhaus-
tive manner, they form an important part of our personality sketch of
the narrator as perceiver, chronicler and analyst of the narrated world.
Our corresponding judgment of him as intelligent and perceptive or not
will have a decisive influence on our assessment of his credibility and
ultimately on how much of what he claims about the narrated domain
we are ready to accept.
 Narrator 657

3.3.5 Attitude to the Narrated

Equally incapable of formal definition and failsafe determination, yet

every bit as important, is the narrator’s attitude towards the told, as
manifested in the way characters and events are represented. An open-
ended list of qualifiers would include neutral vs. judgmental, sympa-
thetic vs. detached, involved vs. distanced, cynical, sentimental, emo-
tionally charged, curious, amused, bewildered, and so on. The relation
between the tone or manner of telling and its subject matter can itself
serve as the basis for second-order characterization of the speaker.
Speaking in a cold, distanced manner about an atrocity may lead us to
characterize the speaker as heartless or as doing his best to hide his
emotions, depending on the context (Margolin 1986). The drawing of
such inferences is not an exact science, for it depends on the specific
inner-textual contexts as well as on the reader’s cultural context; even
so, such inferencing plays an important role in any portrait of the narra-
tor drawn by the reader.

3.3.6 Projected Teller Role

The last key aspect of the narrator’s image is his/her textually projected
role. Is the narrator presented as a reporter (chronicler, biographer, his-
torian, eye witness) who vouches for the truth of his assertions regard-
ing the narrated? Or as an editor or publisher transmitting and vouching
for the prior existence and/or authenticity of the documents (letters,
diaries) he is presenting (though not necessarily for the veracity of the
claims made in them)? Or as an author-fabricator, a storyteller engaged
in the invention of stories, perhaps with a playful attitude? Or maybe as
an oral teller, as in the skaz tradition, presenting a story to a live audi-
ence with a focus on the performative or transmissive aspect, on oral
address and unmediated audience response? (For the underlying func-
tions, see Ryan 2001; for the key properties of the narrator in his teller
role, see Booth [1961] 1983 and Petersen 1993.)

3.4 Plurivocal and Multi-level Narration

Some narratives do not have a general or global narrator, so that the

events on the narrated level are related by numerous independent partial
narrators, neither of whom refers to the discourse of the others, thus
creating “narrative parataxis” (Coste 1989: 173). Now these partial nar-
rators need not be participants in the narrated events, as when three
contemporary historians tell the story of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia.
658 Uri Margolin

Furthermore, each of them may narrate a different phase of the total

action sequence, a pattern labeled “narrative relay” (Coste 1989: 173),
or the same events may be covered by all of them in converging or di-
verging ways. In fictional narratives, one encounters both patterns, but
with the difference that the narrators are normally also participants in
the events they narrate. Since each character-narrator possesses his own
perspective or “take” on the events, the net result is multi-perspectival
narration where there exist two or more narrating instances who portray
the same events in different ways, each from his own standpoint (Nün-
ning 2001: 18). An epistolary novel consisting entirely of correspond-
ence between two or more persons is a plurivocal narration in which
each letter writer reports on and discusses events concerning himself,
his addressee or some third party. An epistolary novel with a framing
editor’s discourse turns this editor into the global narrator, since all the
embedded letters are basically quoted by him, the text as a whole con-
stituting a two-level narrative.
In general, a narrative can comprise several hierarchically ordered
levels of narration, each with its own narrator. In such cases, the prima-
ry narrator is the one who introduces or quotes all the others, without
himself being introduced by any of them; the secondary narrator is in-
troduced or quoted by the first and introduces in his turn all lower-level
narrators, and so on. This story-within-a-story phenomenon has been
described by Nelles (2005: 134) as a “structure by which a character in
a narrative text becomes the narrator of a second narrative text framed
by the first one,” i.e. where one narrator’s discourse embeds that of an-
other at a subordinate level. While the primary narrator may remain a
disembodied voice, all lower-level narrators are characters with respect
to the primary one and must therefore be individuated to some degree
with respect to verbal, mental, behavioral and physical features. Em-
bedded narrators (Pier  Narrative Levels), too, can function either as
reporters, in which case issues of reliability are paramount, or as story-
tellers, where their skill at story telling and its impact on their destiny
are key (Walton 1990: 369–372).

3.5 Narrators and Characters

When a narrator employs tokens of “I” and “you” in his discourse,

these tokens automatically refer to him in his current speaker role and
to his inscribed addressee as participants in the ongoing communicative
transaction. But these tokens may also refer to speaker and addressee as
entities existing beyond the sphere of narration as objects of telling
(=characters, narrative agents) in the narrated sphere. And as character
 Narrator 659

(Jannidis → Character), they may be located at points in space and time

beyond the narration’s here and now. Insofar as narrators have them-
selves as narrative agents, they are engaged in producing a first-person
narrative, whereas if it is their addressees who act as narrative agents, a
second-person narrative is being produced. If the entities referred to in
the narrator’s discourse are not part of the current communicative situa-
tion, then a third-person narrative is produced. (Note that it is quite pos-
sible to have a third-person narrative in which the speaker and the ad-
dressee in their communicative roles are quite prominent.) Put
differently, the referents of first- and second-person narratives partici-
pate in both story and discourse systems and those of third-person nar-
ratives in the story system only. Using the narrated system as our point
of departure, the main distinction is between narratives in which the
narrator also participates in the narrated events (first-person narrative)
and those in which he does not (second- and third-person narratives).
Several unusual forms of narration merit special attention with re-
gard to the narrator-character relation. One is the impersonal “one”
form where the pronoun can designate anyone and everybody who is or
would be in the situation portrayed, including the narrator himself. But
this particular pronoun endows narration with a depersonalized aura.
The “you” form automatically picks out the inscribed addressee and can
pick out any reader who is ready to put himself imaginatively in this
addressee’s situation. But what if the narrator’s claims are about a
“you” in a separate narrated sphere, possibly also distinct in space and
time from the narrational sphere? Why tell the addressee his own life
story? And how possible is it for a personalized narrator to have access
to this “you’s” interiority? No one motivation is possible, only a series
of local context-dependent ones (Fludernik ed. 1994). “We”-narrative
concerning not speaker and addressee, but rather the speaker and oth-
er(s) in a distinct narrated sphere, is especially tricky. “We” is always
I+other(s). So is it the whole group speaking in unison, like the chorus
in Greek tragedy, or one speaker only? And if this speaker is one, is he
an authorized spokesperson for the group? “We”-narratives may serve
as tools for constructing a group’s sense of cohesion and identity, but
mental access by the we-narrator is necessarily curtailed. Since
we=I+other(s), whenever a text using a first-person plural pronoun
seeks to depict the thoughts of other(s) beyond the speaker, it necessari-
ly straddles the line between first- and third-person narration: a charac-
ter discloses that which can only be known by an external, impersonal
intelligence, that is, an omniscient narrative voice. Such narratives are
thus simultaneously first- and third-person discourses, transcending this
basic narratological divide (Richardson 2006: 60).
660 Uri Margolin

When speaking about his own discourse, the narrator normally

adopts his own current epistemic and evaluative perspective, although
he can adopt the presumed perspective of his inscribed addressee, as in:
“Is it ever boring, listening to you.” When making claims about the nar-
rated domain, the narrator can engage his own perspective, but alterna-
tively he may take on the perspective of a character, speaking “[a]s
though he himself were […] in the epistemological position he attrib-
utes to a character, reporting what he takes this character to know”
(Walton 1990: 379). In the case of the autodiegetic (=autobiographical)
narrator, the character whose epistemological position he adopts may be
himself at a different time, usually in the past, but possibly also a pro-
jected future version of himself. In his study of Dostoevskij’s poetics,
Baxtin ([1929] 1984) showed the myriad ways in which a character’s
perspective can be incorporated into the narrator’s discourse, ranging
from harmony up to sharp internal dissonance and parodic inversion.
Free indirect discourse, one of the hallmarks of fiction writing, is a lin-
guistic form combining the narrator’s deictic position and the charac-
ter’s idiom and semantics. Finally, a narrator can speak of himself qua
narrative agent as of another, that is, in the second or third person (e.g.
Caesar in De bello gallico). The reasons for such a deictic shift are nu-
merous and local, but the transfer can never encompass the whole text;
otherwise, it will not be identifiable.

3.6 Alternative Models

The narrator figure presented so far is the one postulated or constructed

in standard, classical narratology. As we have seen, it is based on three
assumptions, namely, that for every work of narrative fiction:

(a) There exists a specifiable inner-textual, highest -level speech or

communication position functioning as the point of origin of the
current discourse. In other words, all narrative fiction is commu-
nication.
(b) There is always an individual figure or agency occupying this speech posi-
tion and thus backing the assertions contained in the narrative discourse or
presenting the fictional world to us (Kania 2005).
(c) This individual figure or agency exists on the strictly fictional
level, and is a distinct entity within the fictional universe project-
ed by the text.

Thus, in writing down his text, the flesh and blood author gives rise to a
substitutionary speaker who performs the macro speech act of reporting
 Narrator 661

and who is solely responsible for all claims, specific or general, made in
this report (Ryan 1981, Martínez-Bonati 1996). In writing down his
actual text and communicating it to actual readers, the author thus pro-
jects or evokes the image of an act(ivity) of narrative communication
between a fictional narrator and his fictional narratee(s). (Schmid 2005:
45–46). This fictional narrator is assumed to be a constituent of every
work of narrative fiction and hence a universal, indispensable compo-
nent of any narratological model. Note that the three claims listed
above form a hierarchical order, so that one cannot assert (c) without
asserting (a) and (b), or assert (b) without asserting (a). Conversely, one
can reject (c) and yet maintain (a) and (b), or deny both (c) and (b) and
still keep (a). And of course one can deny all three claims. Over time,
and even more so in the last decade, challenges to one or more of these
three assumptions or claims have been issued by linguists (Banfield,
Kuroda), philosophers (Hamburger, Currie, Wilson, Kania), and literary
scholars (most prominently Patron [2010], but also Walsh [1977] and
Köppe and Stühring [2011]). All of these challenges deny at least the
pan-narrator claim, the claim about the “ubiquity of the non-actual fact
telling narrator” (Alward), no matter how textually unmarked or ef-
faced, by turning such a narrator into a mere option within the narrato-
logical model, to be applied to a given narrative only if warranted by
the existence in the text of certain textual features. Hamburger ([1957]
1993) for example has argued on philosophical grounds that one can
meaningfully speak of a narrator figure only in first person narratives,
while in all other cases the narrator is a mere metonymy for a presenta-
tional textual function. Banfield (1982) has argued on linguistic
grounds that the notion of narrator is meaningful and warranted only in
cases of overt, foregrounded narration similar to the oral one, such as
the skaz (which is of course third person narration).
As soon as the universality of the fictional narrator is rejected, a uni-
form treatment of all varieties of narrative fiction is no longer possible,
and the one, universal model is replaced with a whole set of options,
alternatives or partial models, each of them being deemed the most ap-
propriate or warranted in some case or another. But why stop with (c)?
In fact, assumption (b) and even (a) can, and have been, rejected by
some scholars at least for some (types of) texts. Sylvie Patron for ex-
ample (Patron 2010) claims that not all works of narrative fiction can
be justifiably regarded as acts of communication, thus denying the uni-
versality of (a). Some works of narrative fiction are similar to Benven-
iste’s histoire, and hence better regarded as non-communication, so the
argument goes, since it is not possible to define in them a global, inner
textual speech position functioning as point of origin of the discourse as
662 Uri Margolin

a whole. In such works, one might add, the marginalized or non- exist-
ent communicative function is replaced by the dominance of the presen-
tational one. And on this non-communicative (or semantic-oriented)
view it is expressions by themselves that can refer, and the entities in
the narrated domain can be established without recourse to a particular
speech position. Accepting just assumption (a) as universal would im-
ply viewing narrative texts as consisting of an interplay of two kinds of
discourses, defined by such hierarchical (hence anti-symmetrical) rela-
tions as dominant and subordinate, embedded and embedding, quoting
and quoted, referring and referred to. The dominant discourse is associ-
ated with the highest-level speech position and is for convenience’s
sake referred to as the discourse of the narrator, while the subordinate
discourses are associated with the speech positions of characters. Yet
one deals here with linguistic and discursive functions or roles only,
and stops short of any attempt to anthropomorphise them, to identify
and characterize any specific human- or human-like individuals who
occupy the respective positions. Stylistic and ideological features, ra-
ther than pragmatic or individual-psychological ones, are the ones to be
associated with each speech position. (Baxtin).
Accepting assumptions (a) and (b) while rejecting (c) opens up three
options as to the identity of the occupant of the narrator position. One is
obviously (c) itself, the maximalist view which is precisely the one be-
ing rejected. The other one is the minimalist: the occupant of the high-
est- level speech position in a work of narrative fiction is always the
actual author, but in a ludic or make-believe guise, feigning the making
of true assertions, and sometimes also pretending to be someone else.
And there is also the middle position: if we replace essentialism with
instrumentalism and universal claims with qualified existential ones, we
can regard the author in a make-believe mode and the fictional narrator
as two co-existing options. In some cases the first would be the better
warranted by the text, while in others the second would be more appro-
priate. The choice is thus between a fictional individual who reports
seriously of facts in the narrated domain as known to him, and the actu-
al author-performer merely feigning, pretending or playing the role of a
reporter of facts, or a maker of true factual assertions, while in actuality
he is their inventor (Searle’s illocutionary pretense. See Searle 1975).
In terms of rules of procedure or methodological norms, two opposing
norms can be envisioned. The first would claim that the default case of
the originator of the narration is the fictional narrator, and good reasons
should be provided whenever one rejects this option in favour of the
author-cum-fabulator one. The opposite norm, advocated by some phi-
losophers, is that the default case is the author as fabulator-pretender,
 Narrator 663

and good reasons should be provided whenever one posits instead a

fictional individual as teller-reporter. The most crucial case is that of
heterodiegetic (third person), impersonal narration, where the highest
textual speaker position is occupied by an anonymous, unindividuated
voice (“geistig und abstrakt” in Thomas Mann’s words) or, in other
words, where the speaker position is unmarked. It is precisely in such
cases, several scholars have argued, that it is totally unwarranted to fill
the teller slot with a fictional individual figure of an “effaced” narrator.
In such cases, so the argument goes, it makes much more sense to make
the actual author in his role as pretender the originator of the discourse.
Such narratives are hence “narratorless” in that they do not satisfy (c),
while still possessing (b).
If we adopt an instrumentalist view of theories, regarding them as
cognitive tools rather than ontological commitments, once could now
quickly assess the relative cost/benefit of postulating a fictional narrator
vs. an author as pretender in cases of third person impersonal narration.
Quite obviously, the advantages of one position are the shortcomings of
the other and vice versa. The advantages of the author as pretender are
as follows: this position conforms with Occam’s dictum that entities
(and, one might add, especially fictional ones) should not be multiplied
beyond necessity. It also conforms to David Lewis’ principle of mini-
mal departure for fictional worlds, which states that a fictional world
should be assumed to be as similar as possible to the actual one unless
explicitly specified otherwise (Lewis 1978). And this view further ena-
bles us to tackle in a straightforward manner the issue of narrative style
and composition. It is thus the actual author in his role as pretend-
reporter who makes all of the stylistic and compositional choices re-
garding the narration. And finally, adopting this view provides continu-
ity with a long tradition harking back to Antiquity. Conversely, sticking
with the always a fictional narrator position, even in the case of imper-
sonal third person narration, preserves the absolute distinction between
the fictional and the actual, as well as providing a uniform treatment
along a continuum for all varieties of narrative fiction, instead of split-
ting the domain into radically heterogeneous sub-domains. And it is
also simpler, since it involves a semantic consideration only, and does
not require pragmatic considerations about actual people playing spe-
cific, culturally defined pretend roles. Arguments for and against each
position keep being offered in the research literature, but it may be our
deeply held fundamental views on the relation between art and actuali-
ty, rather than methodological considerations, which ultimately make
us adopt one of the two positions.
664 Uri Margolin

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The image of the textual speaker as constructed in the context of

fiction writing should be examined in its relation to the projected
speaker image in lyrical poetry (persona) and in non-fictional narra-
tives. (b) It is assumed here that the diarist and letter writer are narra-
tors, yet Chatman (1978) denies this: is it because he implicitly identi-
fies narrator with global narrator? (c) Can narrators be focalizers, and if
so, when and to what extent? This problem has not been touched upon
here, yet is the subject of extensive debate in the critical literature. (d)
This entry makes no use of the notion of implied author (Schmid 
Implied Author), which the present writer finds redundant in a commu-
nication -based model. However, the implied author appears in almost
every discussion of the narrator. Should this be the case? (e) Narrator
unreliability as regards judgments and evaluations has been treated here
entirely as a matter of readers’ criteria, unlike factual unreliability, for
which there are objective inner-textual indicators. Why has this view
emerged only recently, and is the resistance to it associated with the
implied author postulate?

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Baxtin, Mixail (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1929] 1984). M. B. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Po-

etics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
– ([1934/35] 1981). “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Es-
says. Austin: U of Texas P, 259–422.
Bal, Mieke (1981). “Notes on Narrative Embedding.” Poetics Today 2.2, 41–59.
Banfield, Ann (1982). Unspeakable Sentences. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Benveniste, Émile (1966). Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Bortolussi, Marisa & Peter Dixon (2003). Psychonarratology. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Coste, Didier (1989). Narrative as Communication. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
D’hoker, Elke & Gunther Martens, eds. (2008). Narrative Unreliability in the Twenti-
eth-Century First-Person Novel. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Doležel, Lubomír (1967). “The Typology of the Narrator: Point of View in Fiction.” To
Honor Roman Jakobson. The Hague: Mouton, vol. I, 541–552.
Fludernik, Monika (2003). “Commentary: Narrative Voices—Ephemera or Bodied
Beings.” New Literary History 32, 707–710.
 Narrator 665

– ed. (1994). Second-Person Narrative. Special issue of Style 28.3.

Friedemann, Käte ([1910] 1965). Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik. Darmstadt:
WBG.
Grall, Catherine (2007). “Rhetorique, narratologie et sciences cognitives: Quel status
pour le narrateur?” J. Bessiere (ed). Litterature, Representation, Fiction. Paris:
Honore Champion, 247–266.
Hamburger, Käte ([1957] 1993). The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Hansen, Per Krogh (2007). “Recognising the Unreliable Narrator.” Semiotica 165,
227–246.
Jakobson, Roman (1960). “Linguistics and Poetics.” Th. A. Sebeok (ed.). Style in Lan-
guage. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 350–377.
– (1971). “Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb.” R. Jakobson. Selected
Writings. The Hague: Mouton, vol. 2, 130–147.
Köppe, Tilman & Jan Stühring (2011) “Against Pan-Narrator Theories.” Journal of
Literary Semantics 40, 59–80.
Lanser, Susan (1981). The Narrative Act. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Lewis, David (1978). “Truth in Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly 15, 37–46.
Lubbock, Percy ([1921] 1947). The Craft of Fiction. Smith: New York.
Ludwig, Otto (1977). Romane und Romanstudien. München: Hanser.
Marcus, Amit (2007). Self Deception in Literature and Philosophy. Trier: WVT.
Margolin, Uri (1986). “The Doer and the Deed.” Poetics Today 7, 206–225.
– (1986/87). “Dispersing/Voiding the Subject.” Texte 5/6, 181–210.
– (1991). “Reference, Coreference, Referring, and the Dual Structure of Literary
Narrative.” Poetics Today 12, 517–542.
Martínez-Bonati, Félix (1996). “On Fictional Discourse.” C.-A. Mihailescu & W.
Hamarneh (eds.). Fiction Updated. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 65–75.
Nelles, William (2005). “Embedding.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia
of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 134–135.
Nünning, Ansgar (1989). Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der
erzählerischen Vermittlung. Trier: WVT.
– (2001). “Mimesis des Erzählens.” J. Helbig (ed.). Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im
20. Jahrhundert. Heidelberg: Winter, 13–47.
Patron, Sylvie (2010). “The Death of the Narrator and the Interpretation of the Novel.
The Example of Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo.” Journal of Literary Theory 4,
217–233.
Petersen, Jürgen H. (1993). Erzählsysteme. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Phelan, James & Mary Patricia Martin (1999). “The Lessons of Weymouth.” D. Her-
man (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus:
Ohio State UP, 88–109.
Prince, Gerald (1982). Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative. Berlin:
Mouton.
Richardson, Brian (2006). Unnatural Voices. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2003). Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics.
London: Methuen.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1981). “The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction.” Poet-
ics 10, 517–539.
666 Uri Margolin

– (2001). “The Narratorial Functions.” Narrative 9, 146–152.

Searle, John (1975). “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History
6, 319–332.
Schmid, Wolf (2005). Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Spielhagen, Friedrich ([1883] 1967). Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Stanzel, Franz ([1955] 1971). Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby-
Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses. Bloomington: Inidiana UP.
Thomson-Jones, Katherine (2007). “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator.”
British Journal of Aesthetics 47, 76–95.
Walsh, Richard (1997). “Who is the Narrator?” Poetics Today 18, 495–513.
Walton, Kendall (1990). Mimesis as Make-believe. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Yacobi, Tamar (1981). “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.” Poetics
Today 2.2, 113–126.

5.2 Further Reading

Alward, Peter (2007). “For the Ubiquity of Nonactual Fact-Telling Narrators.” Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, 401–404.
Blödorn, Andreas et al., eds. (2006). Stimme(n) in Texten: Narratologische Positions-
bestimmungen. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Currie, Gregory (2010). Narratives and Narrators. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Herman, Luc & Bart Vervaeck ([2001] 2005). Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Lin-
coln: U of Nebraska P.
Jakobson, Roman (1990). “The Speech Event and the Functions of Language.” R. Jak-
obson. On Language. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 69–79.
Kania, Andrew (2005) “Against the Ubiquity of Fictional Narrators.” Journal of Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism 63, 1, 47–54.
Marcus, Amit (2008). “A Contextual View of Narrative Fiction in the First Person Plu-
ral.” Narrative 16, 46–64.
Margolin, Uri (2011). “Necessarily a Narrator or Narrator if Necessary: A Short Note
on a Long Subject.” Journal of Literary Semantics 40, 43–57.
Nünning, Ansgar, ed. (1998). Unreliable Narration. Trier: WVT.
Patron, Sylvie (2009). Le Narrateur. Introduction à la théorie du récit. Paris: Armand
Colin.
– (2012) “Reply.” Peer Bundgard et al. (eds.) Narrative Theories and Poetics: 5
Questions. Automatic Press, 159–169.
Phelan, James (2001). “Why Narrators Can be Focalizers—and Why it Matters.” W.
van Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Alba-
ny: State U of New York P, 51–64.
Tacca, Oscar (1985). Voces de la novela. Madrid: Gredos.
Wilson, George M. (2007). “Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film.” Philosophical
Studies 135, 73–88.
 Non-temporal Linking in Narration
Wolf Schmid

1 Definition

Besides the temporal linking of elements (including their more or less

overt causal linking), which is constitutive of narrativity, there is also
non-temporal linking, which is an important constructive device of nar-
rative accounting for its semantic density. A linking is regarded as non-
temporal if segments of the story or of the text, regardless of their posi-
tion in time and irrespective of their causal embedding, are associated
on the basis of properties they are perceived to share. The foremost
manifestation of non-temporal linking, which is based on the paradig-
matic structure of the text, is equivalence (Jakobson 1960), comprising
both similarity and contrast. The dual nature of equivalence is ex-
pressed by Lotman’s ([1970] 1977) synonymous term “co-opposition”
(so-protivopostavlenie).

2 Explication

Equivalence means equality of two elements with regard to a certain

value, i.e. identity of the elements in a particular feature and non-
identity in others. In verbal texts, equivalence refers to features either of
the text itself (formal equivalence) or of what is depicted in it (thematic
equivalence). Thematic equivalence can refer to situations, characters,
and actions. Situational and actional equivalence refers either to one
and the same character (isofigural equivalence) or to different charac-
ters (heterofigural equivalence). Whereas in poetry, formal equivalence
is based mainly on sound instrumentation and rhythm dominates, in
classical prose narration it is thematic equivalence that takes the lead.
Equivalence has been promoted by Jakobson (1960) to a constitutive
device of verbal art, i.e. of texts dominated by the poetic function. Alt-
hough Jakobson does not restrict the sphere of poetic function to poet-
ry, in his examples he concentrates on genres with a high degree of
sound repetitions such as lyric verse, political slogans or common say-
668 Wolf Schmid

ings. Twenty years later Jakobson expands the range of equivalence or,
as he says now, of parallelism. According to him, parallelism is consti-
tutive of poetry, but also occurs in narrative prose, for while parallelism
is not so dominant in the areas of prosody, metrics, grammar and lexis,
it can be found in larger thematic structures: “the composition of the
plot, the characterization of the subjects and objects of the action, and
the sequence of themes in the narrative” (Jakobson & Pomorska [1980]
1983: 107).
Equivalence produces, against the sequentiality of the story (Grabes
→ Sequentiality), a simultaneity (Margolin → Simultaneity in Narra-
tive) of elements which are often distant from one another not only on
the syntagmatic axis of the text, but also on the time axis of the story.
As equivalences form non-temporal links between elements scattered
across the text, the result could be called the work’s “spatial form,” to
use Joseph Frank’s ([1945] 1963) mistakable and often misunderstood
term. In any case, equivalence competes with temporal links such as
sequentiality and causality. These cannot be transformed into equiva-
lences. Being before or after, being cause or effect are ontological des-
ignations of a completely different nature to being equivalent. The cat-
egorical difference between temporal and non-temporal linking cannot
be dissolved.

3 Aspects of the Phenomenon and History of its Study

3.1 Perception of Equivalence in Narrative

Similarity and contrast, the manifestations of equivalence, can be repre-

sented as bundles of identities and non-identities concerning those fea-
tures actualized by the story. Whether an equivalence appears as simi-
larity or contrast is not decided by the number of identities and non-
identities, but solely by the position that the corresponding features take
in the story’s hierarchy. The process of hierarchization undergone by
the features in a story can be very dynamic. When the story emphasizes
a feature x in which two elements A and B are identical, the equivalence
of A and B appears as a similarity. In another phase of the story, a fea-
ture y can be highlighted. If the elements A and B are non-identical in y,
the equivalence appears as a contrast, regardless of in how many other,
non-actualized features A and B coincide.
An equivalence, in particular a thematic equivalence, must be actu-
alized in order for it to be noticed. The safest way to actualize an equiv-
 Non-temporal Linking in Narration 669

alence and to ensure its noticeability is its intersection with other equiv-
alences, either on the same structural level or on another level.
The highlighting of specific features and the assignment of equiva-
lences is a matter of interpretation. Although the equivalences do char-
acterize and reciprocally determine one another, their identification and
integration into a semantic thread remains an action to be performed by
the reader. The actualization of potential equivalences contained in the
work will always be only partial. This partialness is not only based on
the number of equivalences, but also on their multiple relatability,
which produces new results from each different analytical perspective.
Of all the equivalences and equivalence relations available in a text, the
reader will always select only the ones that correspond to the meaning
s/he expects or wishes. Reception reduces the complexity of the work
in that it selects those relations that become identifiable as meaningful
within its particular horizon. In reading and interpreting, we therefore
draw a thread through the thematic and formal equivalences and the
thematic features that can be actualized in them, and we necessarily
disregard an abundance of other features and equivalences (Schmid
1984).

3.2 Equivalence in Poetic and Classical Narrative Prose

Once euphonic and rhythmical repetitions enter into the formal equiva-
lence, the narrative text approaches a prose type which is widespread in
the literatures of post-realist modernism. That type is called “poetic” or,
in Russian philology, “ornamental” prose (Schmid → Poetic or Orna-
mental Prose). Ornamentalism, however, is not merely a stylistic, but
also a structural phenomenon which manifests itself as fully in the nar-
rated story as in the texture. The formal equivalences overlay the lin-
guistic syntagma of the narrative text, resulting in rhythmic patterns and
sound repetition. The thematic equivalences project a network of non-
temporal concatenation onto the temporal sequence of the story. In ex-
treme ornamental prose, narrativity can be weakened to such a degree
that no story whatsoever is told any more. The temporal links are then
merely embryonic and no longer align the happenings with the continu-
ity of a story. The unity of the work is provided instead by, as it were,
simultaneously given equivalences. An example is the “Symphonies”
by the Russian symbolist Andrej Belyj, which strive to implement mu-
sical composition in verbal art.
Equivalence plays an essential role not only in ornamental, but also
in ‘normal,’ action-oriented classical narrative prose without a peculiar
sound elaboration of the texture, as in the novels of Tolstoj or Dostoev-
670 Wolf Schmid

skij. These novels are by no means ornamental, yet they do contain a

more or less overt paradigmatic design, as in the oppositions found in
Tolstoj’s War and Peace (1868–69), for example. The situations denot-
ed in the work’s title form an opposition that organizes the whole work,
as do the juxtapositions of town and country, Petersburg and Moscow,
French and Russian, Napoleon and Kutuzov. Not by chance, in a letter,
Tolstoj (1936–64: LXII, 269) mentions the “labyrinth of linkages” that
determines the message of his novel Anna Karenina (1875–77). In Dos-
toevskij’s Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) there is a superficial simi-
larity between Ivan Karamazov and his followers such as Smerdjakov,
Rakitin and Kolja Krasotkin. But on closer examination it appears that
all of Ivan’s adepts realize only one of his different positions, whereas
Ivan himself keeps changing his positions with each of the many trea-
tises he writes. So instead of a similarity of views, we get a contrast of
the adherents’ highly selective and fixed, if not to say petrified,
worldviews on the one hand, and an ever-changing one of their idol on
the other. In both cases, equivalence, whether in the form of dominating
similarity or of contrast, plays a seminal role in the works’ signifying
structures.

3.3 Functions of Equivalence in Narrative

Among the functions of equivalence in narrative, at least five can be

distinguished.

3.3.1 Rhetorical Function

The first function is shared by narrative with persuasive texts, charac-

terized by advertising and rhetoric. Such texts tend to use equivalence
abundantly, either in the form of leitmotifs, where similarity clearly
dominates, or in the form of equivalences proper, where the relation-
ship between similarity and contrast is balanced. In both cases, parallel-
ism serves the purpose of persuasion, as in Marc Antony’s “But Brutus
is an honorable man.” An intermediate means to this aim is increased
memorability and heightening of the power of suggestion.
Increased memorability and heightening of the power of suggestion
are effective in narrative prose, as well. It is not seldom that leitmotifs
contribute to these effects. For example, leitmotifs function as carriers
of connotations. Tolstoj’s novels provide numerous cases of connota-
tive leitmotifs: in War and Peace, to mention just one example, the
“shortened upper lip of the little princess Bolkonskaja,” Andrej Bol-
konkij’s wife, who is doomed to die during her first childbirth.
 Non-temporal Linking in Narration 671

Another device that rhetoric and narrative have in common is shap-

ing an equivalence between the beginning and the end of the text. How-
ever irrelevant the similar and dissimilar passages may be for the core
of the message, the listener will get the impression that the speech is
well structured. The effect of a well-wrought construction gives not
only a certain aesthetic satisfaction, but will also be interpreted by the
listener in the sense that the speech is well-thought-out and that its ar-
guments are well-founded. This, of course, enhances the persuasiveness
of the orator’s theses. Comparable effects can be observed in narrative
where the ending, for the sake of an effect of well-structuredness, den-
sity, and closeness, is constructed equivalent to the beginning, some-
times leading authors to implement a “false ending” (Šklovskij [1921c]
1991: 56) consisting, say, of a description of nature which compensates
for a lack of a real conclusion.

3.3.2 Shaping Archisituations

Equivalence of situations in a narrative can be compared to rhyme in

verse. This is known as “situation rhyme” (Meijer 1958). According to
Jakobson (1960: 372), “in poetry, any conspicuous similarity in sound
is evaluated in respect to similarity and/or dissimilarity in meaning.”
The linkage of two words by the similarity of their sounds produces
hybrid semantic associations that Lotman ([1970] 1977: 146) calls ar-
chisemes. It would be more correct to say “archisememes.”
An archisememe is an intersection or set union of sememes, or
meanings of words. An archisememe can unite contrasting but compat-
ible sememes such as “north” and “south” or “birth” and “death,” con-
taining semantic features common to both sememes. In poetry an ar-
chisememe can unite sememes that may be completely incompatible.
From a poem “I am Goya” by Andrej Voznesenskij, Lotman cites the
sememes Goya (the name of the painter), gore (“grief”), golos (“voice”)
and golod (“hunger”), all united into an archisememe. This ar-
chisememe exists solely on the basis of the sound similarity of the sig-
nifiers, is found only in this poem, is completely bound to its structure
and is hard to explain in words.
A comparable semantic process can be observed in situation rhymes
of narrative prose. We can thus speak of archisituations based on the
equivalence of two or more situations.
In Anna Karenina, we have a striking resemblance of dream motifs
that are shared by both Anna and Vronsky. It is the vision of a little and
dreadful-looking peasant with a disheveled beard, working on some-
thing made of iron and murmuring some incomprehensible words in
672 Wolf Schmid

French. This vision enters Anna’s mind after her first encounter with
Vronsky when a railway worker was run over by the train. After several
occurrences, it reappears at her suicide under the wheels of the train. In
this way, the nightmare contributes to the fatal end of Anna’s story.
Another example of Tolstoy’s art of shaping significant and psycho-
logically motivated chains of equivalences is the motif of cutting a
body into pieces. This motif establishes a tripartite chain that stretches
across the whole part of the novel devoted to Anna. The motif occurs
for the first time when Anna’s acquaintance with Vronsky is overshad-
owed by the accident in which the rail worker’s body is cut in two. The
second occurrence is after the lovers’ consummation of their love.
Vronsky is compared, evidently from Anna’s point of view, to a mur-
derer, who “with fury, as it were with passion, […] falls on the body
[he has robbed of life] and drags it and cuts it; so he covered her face
and shoulders with kisses” (Part II, Chapter 11). Anna carries this im-
age within herself until her destiny has been fulfilled under the slicing
wheels of the train. With this concatenation of motifs, Anna’s death
under the wheels of the train appears as the fulfillment of a schema of
her fate which was sealed as early as her first encounter with Vronsky.

3.3.3 Shaping Categorical Frames

Thematic equivalences contribute to the semantic framework of a story

in that they do not only shape a bridge between more or less remote
passages of the text, but can convey certain connotations. Features
foregrounded in them determine the categorical frames of the story-
world functioning as carriers of symbolic or symptomatic meanings.
In Anna Karenina, there is a set of physical details characterizing
the heroine: “the little willful tendrils of her curly hair that would al-
ways break free about her neck and temples”; her “small, skillful, mag-
ic hands”; her “easy, resolute steps”—everything metonymically repre-
senting her liveliness and life force, and above all her often mentioned
“narrowed eyes,” symbolizing her narrow perception of reality. During
Anna’s lifetime, Vronsky’s even strong teeth are mentioned several
times, but after her death he goes to the Serbian war with toothache.
Anna’s hair and Vronsky’s teeth forming chains of leitmotifs, on the
one hand, and contributing to a series of similarities and dissimilarities,
on the other, become indicators of the characters’ inner situations.
 Non-temporal Linking in Narration 673

3.3.4 Marking Eventfulness

To be narrative implies 1) a temporal structure with two states, the ini-

tial state and the final state, and 2) an equivalence of the initial and final
states. With every story, the reader will concentrate primarily on the
temporal links and their logic. In the interpretation of a narrative text,
the first question to be asked is in what way initial and final states of
the storyworld differ (cf. Stierle 1977: 217). The ascription of meaning
in the reading of narrative texts aims to identify changes to the initial
situation as well as the logic that underpins these changes. Not only the
determining causes, but even the changes themselves are only rarely
described explicitly and reliably and must therefore usually be recon-
structed. In their reconstruction, the reader is called on to draw on
equivalences. In many cases, it is only non-temporal linking that brings
temporal changes and their logic to the surface.
It is not seldom that a change of state underlying a whole novel can
be tracked only in many small and inconspicuous steps. An example is
Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, depicting the “decline of a fami-
ly,” as stated in the subtitle of the German original. The changes be-
tween the many steps, however inconsiderable they may seem, manifest
themselves in symptoms appearing not only in the characters and their
behavior but also in small details of the setting. In Mann’s Bud-
denbrooks such symptomatic details form pairs of similarity and con-
trast that make the changes observable.

3.3.5 Forming Gestalten

As in poetry, so in prose: equivalence generates structures which can be

described in terms of gestalt psychology (Schmid 1977). But whereas in
poetry the gestalt emerges from sound and rhythm, in prose it is mainly
thematic units that form the material of the gestalten. Equivalences, to-
gether with their configurations and concatenations, project their pat-
terns onto the storyworlds, giving them a specific character of struc-
turedness. The effect is that Tolstoy’s worlds, for example, evoke an
impression very different from Dostoevskij’s or Puškin’s.

3.4 History of the Study

3.4.1 Russian Formalism and its Ambiance

The study of equivalence or parallelism in narrative was developed

primarily by Russian formalists and scholars close to them. The essays
674 Wolf Schmid

by Šklovskij gathered in his collections (1921a, [1921b] 1991, [1921c]

1991, [1925] 1991) drew attention to the fundamental devices of sjužet
construction such as parallelism, stepped construction, and the opposi-
tion of action and counter-action (cf. Hansen-Löve 1978). The repre-
sentatives of the Russian theory of composition (esp. Petrovskij [1921]
1987, 1925, 1927; cf. Aumüller 2009) concentrated on functional as-
pects of novella composition. In postformalist times, Vinogradov
(1934, 1941), inspired by sjužet and composition theory, made exten-
sive observations on the paradigmatic construction of Puškin’s narra-
tive prose. Jakobson, who as early as 1921 ([1921] 1979) had studied
varying forms of parallelism in poetry, including the “realization of an
inverse parallelism” as a sjužet construction, introduced in 1935 the
dichotomy of the paradigmatic chains—metaphor/similarity/poetry vs.
metonymy/contiguity/prose—and he demonstrated their hybridization
with the example of the poet Pasternak’s prose (1935).

3.4.2 Western Research

Due to the fact that the theory of equivalence and parallelism had been
formulated in Russia and that those phenomena took a significant posi-
tion in Russian literature from Puškin to Tolstoj and to postrealist prose
(Čexov, symbolism, avant-garde of the 1920s), further theoretical de-
velopment of the concept in the West and its practical application to
texts took place predominantly in the context of Russian philology.
A prominent part was played by Dutch Slavists. As early as 1958,
Meijer examined “situation rhyme” in a novel by Dostoevskij (1958).
Van Holk examined Puškin’s Coffin-maker, demonstrating that the tale
is a “typical specimen of a poet’s prose in that its composition turns out
to be extremely rigorous, while on the other hand the relationships be-
tween the personages remain elementary” (1968: 109). Van der Eng
dealt theoretically with juxtapositions of motifs and chains of opposi-
tions in narrative prose (1973, 1978a, 1993) and also analyzed different
forms of paradigmatization in the prose of Puškin (1968) and Čexov
(1978b, 1981), examining in particular progressive and regressive se-
mantic accumulation.
In the vein of the Dutch research and referring to the Slavic tradi-
tion, Schmid formulated a theory of equivalence in prose narrative
(1984), analyzed the semantic effects of intratextual motif paradigms in
Puškin’s Tales of Belkin ([1991] 2013), and provided interpretations of
ornamental narrative in Čexov and Russian writers of the 1920s (1992,
1998).
 Non-temporal Linking in Narration 675

4 Topics for Further Investigation

The question that needs to be addressed most urgently is the sensual

aspects of non-temporal linking. Formalist and structuralist interpreta-
tions are mostly satisfied with exploring the semantic results of the par-
adigmatic arrangement, but at the same time neglecting the non-
cognitive side of the sjužet construction. This aspect is difficult to de-
scribe, but it exists nonetheless and plays a not insignificant role in our
perception of narratives.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aumüller, Matthias (2009). “Die russische Kompositionstheorie.” W. Schmid (ed.).

Slavische Erzähltheorie. Russische und tschechische Ansätze. Berlin: de Gruyter,
91–140.
Eng, Jan van der (1968). “Les récits de Belkin. Analogie des procédés de construction.”
J. v. d. Eng et al. The Tales of Belkin by A.S. Puškin. The Hague: Mouton, 9–60.
– (1973). “Priem: central’nyj faktor semantičeskogo postroenija povestvo-
vatel’nogo teksta.” J. v. d. Eng & M. Grygar (eds.). Structure of Texts and Semi-
otics of Culture. The Hague: Mouton, 29–59.
– (1978a). “The Dynamic and Complex Structure of a Narrative Text.” J. v. d. Eng
et al. On the Theory of Descriptive Poetics: Anton P. Chekhov as Story-Teller
and Playwright. Lisse: de Ridder, 33–58.
– (1978b). “The Semantic Structure of ‘Lady with Lapdog’.” J. v. d. Eng et al. On
the Theory of Descriptive Poetics: Anton P. Chekhov as Story-Teller and Play-
wright. Lisse: de Ridder, 59–94.
– (1981). “Dynamic Narrative Construction—Čechov as an Example.” Slavica
Hierosolymitana 5/6, 137–150.
– (1993). “Iskusstvo novelly. Obrazovanie variacionnych rjadov motivov kak fun-
damental’nyj princip povestvovatel’nogo postroenija.” V. M. Markovič & W.
Schmid (eds.). Russkaja novella. Problemy teorii i istorii. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo
S-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 195–209.
Frank, Joseph ([1945] 1963). “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” The Widening Gyre:
Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 3–62.
Hansen-Löve, Aage (1978). “Die formalistische Sujettheorie.” Der russische Forma-
lismus. Wien: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 238–
273.
Holk, André van (1968). “A Semantic Discourse Analysis of ‘The Coffin-Maker’.” The
Tales of Belkin by A. S. Puškin. The Hague: Mouton, 86–109.
Jakobson, Roman ([1921] 1979). Novejšaja russkaja poėzija. Podstupy k Xlebnikovu.
Selected Writings. Vol. 5. The Hague: Mouton, 299–354.
676 Wolf Schmid

– (1935). “Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak.” Slavische Rund-

schau (Praha) 7, 357–374.
– (1960). “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Th. A. Sebeok (ed.). Style
in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 350–377.
– & Krystyna Pomorska ([1980] 1983). Dialogues. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lotman, Jurij ([1970] 1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: U of Michi-
gan P.
Meijer, Jan (1958). “Situation Rhyme in a Novel of Dostoevsky.” Dutch Contributions
to the IVth International Congress of Slavistics. The Hague: Mouton, 1–15.
Petrovskij, Michail ([1921] 1987). “Short Story Composition in Maupassant: Toward a
Theoretical Description and Analysis.” Essays in Poetics 12, 1–21.
– (1925). “Morfologija puškinskogo ‘Vystrela’.” V. Brjusov (ed.). Problemy poėti-
ki. Sbornik statej. Moskva: Zemlja i fabrika, 173–204.
– (1927). “Morfologija novelly.” Ars Poetica 1, Moskva, 69–100.
Schmid, Wolf (1977). Der ästhetische Inhalt. Zur semantischen Funktion poetischer
Verfahren. Lisse: de Ridder.
– (1984). “Thematische und narrative Äquivalenz: Dargelegt an Erzählungen
Puškins und Čechovs.” R. Grübel (ed.). Russische Erzählung. Russian Short Sto-
ry. Russkij rasskaz. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 79–118.
– ([1991] 2013). Proza Puškina v poėtičeskom pročtenii. ‘Povesti Belkina’ and
‘Pikovaja dama.’ Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo S-Peterburgskogo universiteta.
– (1992). Ornamentales Erzählen in der russischen Moderne. Čechov—Babel—
Zamjatin. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang.
– (1998). Proza kak poėzija. Puškin—Dostoevskij—Čexov—avangard. Saint Pe-
tersburg: Inapress.
Šklovskij, Viktor (1921a). Razvertyvanie sjužeta. Petrograd: Opojaz.
– ([1921b] 1991). “The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and
General Devices of Style.” Theory of Prose. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive
Press. 15–51.
– ([1921c] 1991). “The Structure of Fiction.” Theory of Prose. Elmwood Park:
Dalkey Archive Press. 52–71.
– ([1925] 1991). Theory of Prose. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press.
Stierle, Karlheinz (1977). “Die Struktur narrativer Texte: Am Beispiel von J. P. Hebels
Kalendergeschichte ‘Unverhofftes Wiedersehen’.” H. Brackert & E. Lämmert
(eds.). Funk-Kolleg Literatur 1. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 210–233.
Tolstoj, Lev (1936–64). Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v 91 t. Moskva: Xudožestvennaja
literatura.
Vinogradov, Viktor (1934). “O stile Puškina.” Literaturnoe nasledstvo 16–18, Xud,
135–214.
– (1941). Stil’ Puškina. Moskva: Xudožestvennaja literatura.

5.2 Further Reading

Veldhues, Christoph (1995). “‘Gleich- und Gegenüberstellung’: Intratextuelle und in-

tertextuelle Bedeutung in der Literatur.“ Zeitschrift für Slawistik 40, 243–267.
 Performativity
Ute Berns

1 Definition

The terms “performativity” and “performance” derive from the verb “to
perform.” They denote the capacity to execute an action, to carry some-
thing out actually and thoroughly, as well as to do according to pre-
scribed ritual. “To perform” may also be used in the sense of “to per-
form an artistic work,” i.e. to act in a play, to play an instrument, to
sing or dance. In narratology, performativity denotes modes of present-
ing or evoking action. A performance, i.e. the embodied live presenta-
tion of events in the co-presence of an audience at a specific place and
time, is performative in the narrow sense: performativity I. Here the
audience experiences the actors and the action directly, i.e. visually and
acoustically at a minimum. Performance can take place in the real
world (as in a wedding ceremony or a court trial) or it can depict fic-
tional events (as in a theater performance). Verbal or visual scripts can
prepare the performance in playtexts and stage directions, film scripts
and choreographic sketches. These may also detail gestures, facial ex-
pressions and voice. In a wider sense, the term performativity can also
be applied to non-corporeal presentations, e.g. in written narratives:
performativity II. Here performativity refers to the imitation or illusion
of a performance. In this case, readers reconstruct the performance di-
mension in their minds―the performance is imagined.
In systematic terms, actions can be conveyed on two different levels
of the presentational process. They can be located, first, on the level of
histoire (the story that is presented). This aspect of performativity is
called “performativity I.i or II.i.” Here the spectator’s or reader’s atten-
tion is directed to the actions taking place in the story, actions that can
be conveyed with varying degrees of immediacy. Secondly, the actions
can be located on the level of the narration (the narrator’s act of media-
tion). This is called “performativity I.ii or II.ii.” In this case, the read-
er’s or spectator’s attention is directed to the act of narration itself, or to
the actions of the narrator, which can be foregrounded to a greater or
lesser degree. When the performativity of the act of narration is consid-
678 Ute Berns

ered in a wider pragmatic and cultural context, aspects of the empirical

author (e.g. gender) can also become pertinent to the reception and ap-
preciation of narrative as a form of cultural agency.

2 Explication

Performativity and performance are interdisciplinary concepts that have

emerged in linguistics and the philosophy of language, in performance,
theater and literary studies, as well as in ethnology, sociology and cul-
tural studies (Loxley 2007). Although the terms “performative,” “per-
formance” and “performativity” are frequently referred to across a
broad range of narratological investigations, they have received no sys-
tematic treatment in this field to date. Therefore, this article will aim
above all to provide a systematic account of how the concept of per-
formativity currently pertains to narratology.
Performativity I refers to the performance of a narrative, i.e. to its
fully embodied, live enactment in front of an audience in a real world
context or on stage. The audience, co-present with the presenters or ac-
tors, can experience this performance visually (as in a pantomime) or
both visually and acoustically (as in most theatrical, musical and real-
world performances); there may be physical contact between audience
and presenters, and some performances even affect the audience’s ol-
factory sense. Performativity II refers to the illusion of a performance
created in non-corporeal presentations of a narrative (Wolf → Illusion
(Aesthetic)), e.g. in writing, cartoons or film. These presentations of
narratives evoke a performance in the mind of the reader or spectator.
In narrative, performativity can be located on two levels: the level of
the story, or histoire (i); the level of the act of narration or narrator’s
action (ii). Performativity I.i refers to the level of histoire (the story that
is presented) in the performance, i.e. in the fully embodied enactment of
a narrative. The spectator of the performance perceives the unfolding of
a story in a scenic transmission, bodily presented by one or more actors.
Performativity II.i refers to the level of histoire (the story that is pre-
sented) in the non-corporeal presentation of actions not mediated by a
narrator (Alber & Fludernik → Mediacy and Narrative Mediation). In
the strictest sense, this denotes direct speech only, as in dramatic writ-
ing, dialogue quoted verbatim, etc. (McHale → Speech Representa-
tion). Yet performativity can also refer to the level of the narrator’s
agency or act of narration (ii). In the case of performativity I.ii, the
spectator of a performance perceives an act of narration taking place.
Here the performance consists in the presentation of a story by a narra-
 Performativity 679

tor or presenter, e.g. in the figure of the rhapsodist vis-à-vis an audi-

ence. The story is mediated in a plurimedial manner by a single narra-
tor/presenter. His or her voice, body or actions rather than those of in-
dividually embodied persons or characters form the core of the
performance, which allows for different degrees of impersonation. Per-
formativity II.ii (e.g. in written narratives) refers to the narrator’s self-
thematizations, to his or her explicit comments on the story or the act of
narration and to addresses to the reader (Neumann & Nünning →
Metanarration and Metafiction).
The two levels of performativity (histoire [i] and act of narration
[ii]) thus introduce a relation of partial congruity between live perfor-
mances and evocations of the illusion of performativity in purely verbal
narrative―a congruity that can also be investigated in a historical per-
spective (Fludernik → Conversational Narration – Oral Narration). The
performativity of the illusion of dramatic presentation in written narra-
tive corresponds to or appears to be modeled on scenic performances.
Likewise the performativity of the act of presentation or narration, es-
pecially in feigned orality or skaz narration, corresponds to or appears
to be modeled on performances by an embodied storyteller.
Understood as the capacity to generate in the reader’s mind the no-
tion of a performance, performativity on both levels (histoire and act of
presentation) can be graded according to a scale of greater or lesser per-
formativity. Direct presentation on the story level (II.i) can be more or
less absolute (e.g. mental processes can be presented as an interior
monologue or as free indirect speech). Analogously, mediation of the
act of narration on the level of the narration (II.ii) can be either more
obvious or less so (overt vs. covert). When performativity evokes ac-
tion in the mind of the reader or viewer, the demands it makes on the
audience’s imagination vary according to the media in which that ac-
tion is presented. Arguably, the performativity of films and cartoons,
thanks to the immediacy of the imagined actions to which they give
rise, is greater than that of purely verbal narratives, except when mental
actions such as thoughts are presented (Ryan → Narration in Various
Media).
In the case of both performativity I.ii and II.ii, the actual or implied
act of narration can itself present a story or “story of narration”
(Erzählgeschichte, Schmid 2005). This story tells of changes in the sit-
uation, attitude or behavior of the narrator. Some critics here also apply
the term “mimesis” when they speak of the “mimesis of storytelling”
(Mimesis des Erzählens, Nünning 2001), or when they distinguish be-
tween “process mimesis” and “product mimesis” (Hutcheon 1984: 36–
47). On this level, the act of narration is thematized in a self-reflexive
680 Ute Berns

manner. Performative in this sense is often used synonymously with

self-conscious and reflexive or with metanarrative and metafictional.
The two basic levels of performativity can also be re-conceptualized
in speech act terminology that describes utterances as a mode of action.
According to the philosopher Austin ([1962] 1975), utterances not only
have a propositional content―they do not only say something―but
they do something as well, provided that they fulfill specific conven-
tions. Searle ([1969] 1995) further formalizes the felicity conditions of
utterances while foregrounding the successful communication of the
speaker’s intention against a complex and contingent background. In
the context of narratology, the performativity of speech acts is relevant
on two levels. First, speech acts directly precipitate action on the story-
level (promises, threats, wooing, etc), whether in court-rooms or dra-
matic dialogue (Pfister [1977] 1993: 118–119). Second, the narrator
deploys speech acts (to identify and report, generalize and promise,
etc.) on the level of narration (Chatman 1978: 161–166). On this level,
whole narratives can also be treated as metaphorical “utterances” or
“complex speech acts” (e.g. Pratt 1977; Todorov [1978] 1990); in this
perspective, a novel, too, is a speech act. Analyses of the act of narra-
tion in this sense tend to emphasize the narrative’s performativity in a
larger pragmatic and cultural context, possibly taking account of the
empirical author or of paratextual matter and stressing the narrative act
as a mode of cultural agency that engages with cultural conventions and
shapes collective identities.
Since speech act theory remains language-based, it applies only to
verbal narratives. Yet other media, e.g. painting or film, rely on visual
or on visual and acoustic performativity, which may involve pointer or
narrator figures. The specific demand performativity makes on the
spectator’s imagination thus varies according to the medium.
Though used primarily to denote the co-presence and live interac-
tion between the presenter(s) of a narrative and the audience, the notion
of performance is sometimes deployed in a looser sense. With a view to
media in which the narrative is encountered as already given and com-
plete, as in a novel, film or painting, the term performance is also used
to describe the process of realization or mental performance of the re-
cipient. In this case, the term becomes synonymous with the individual
reading or viewing process.
 Performativity 681

3 Concepts and their Study

3.1 Performativity I: Corporeal Presentation of Action

When performativity is realized in a performance―performativity

I―actions are presented in all their plurimedial dimensions (McAuley
2007). Nevertheless, the intensity with which they are experienced may
vary. The spatial proximity between performance and audience as well
as the possible manipulation of light and sound bear on this experience.
The impact of styles of acting or ritualized behavior within given con-
ventions of presenting and viewing may also enhance or lessen the im-
pact of performativity in a performance. Disciplines that study the per-
formativity of narratives in cultural or theatrical performances rarely
draw on narratology, although they do focus on the performativity of
narratives in a wider, communicational and context-sensitive frame-
work. Ethnographic and anthropological work (Turner 1982) investi-
gates the way in which a society performatively constructs, preserves or
changes its traditions, identity and cultural memory. Theater and per-
formance studies (Auslander ed. 2003) complement this research as
they analyze the processual nature and liminality of these performative
constructions, i.e. their capacity to dramatize moments of transition and
change. These studies emphasize the significance of material embodi-
ment and re-contextualization, paying attention to the impact of fore-
grounded theatricality, audience interaction and the transitoriness of the
performance (Fischer-Lichte 2004).
However, studies of oral narratives presented by a corporeal teller
tend to focus on performativity I.ii, i.e. on the level of the narrator’s
agency rather than on the story level, as they investigate how narratives
produce―in a performative and interactive manner―individual and
group identity on a pragmatic and cultural plane. Since Labov (1972),
research on oral narrative and face-to-face narration in linguistic dis-
course analysis and sociolinguistics has been concerned with specific
characteristics of the oral format. More recent investigations have be-
come increasingly sensitive to cultural contexts, analyzing how narra-
tive performances constitute or index individual, social and cultural
identities (Georgakopoulou 1997: 123–197), as well as roles, relation-
ships, stances and activities (Bamberg → Identity and Narration).
Moreover, some analyses of the provisional character of narratives-in-
performance indicate that the act of narration, understood as a social,
communicational event, acquires collaborative aspects. From an ethno-
logical perspective, Bauman (1986) looks at narrators in closely-knit
communal settings and shows how the narrated events are shaped in the
682 Ute Berns

narrative event. And the sociolinguists Ochs and Capps (2001) analyze
how performances of provisional narratives negotiate the teller’s desire
for coherence and identity while acknowledging contradictory human
experiences in open collaborative forms of narration. This focus on oral
narratives as performative modes of embodied social communication
and interaction has sparked interdisciplinary work which Herman
(1999: 219) describes as “socionarratological.”
Performances can be scripted as well as mediatized. Some aspects of
the performativity actualized in a performance may be scripted in a
play- or filmscript or in visual sketches or even in community-based
guidelines for the performance of ritual acts. In play- or filmscripts,
numerous aspects of the performance are encoded through deictic refer-
ences to the hic et nunc of the dramatic situation in the main text, but
also through stage directions detailing spaces, bodily movements, light
and sounds (Elam 1980; De Marinis [1978] 1993). Drawing on the
work of Elam, Fludernik has recently explored the implications of lo-
cating discourse either at the level of the playtext or at the level of the
performance. She also suggests that we revise the general narrative
communication model for all written narratives so that it includes per-
formance as an additional optional level (Fludernik 2008: 365). In lyri-
cal poetry, performativity can be traced in the visual layout (length of
lines, stanzas) that serves to structure the oral performance of the poem
as well as in the foregrounded acoustic potential or “musicality” of the
language (Wolf 2003: 78; Hühn & Sommer → Narration in Poetry and
Drama). However, performances are not only prepared in various ways.
They can also be recorded or mediatized. This again inflects the degree
of their performativity in the new medium and involves modifications
of meaning (Auslander [1999] 2005).

3.2 Performativity II: Non-corporeal Presentation of Action

3.2.1 Performativity II.i: Histoire or Story

Performativity as performativity II is also manifest in non-corporeal

representations of action. The term performative in the wide sense of
dramatic or unmediated roughly coincides with the term “mimetic” as
opposed to “diegetic.” In book III of Plato’s The Republic, Socrates
speaks of pure diegesis when the poet represents the action in his own
voice only. In the mixed mode of the epic, the poet combines his autho-
rial descriptions and comments with mimetic elements, i.e. direct
speech representing the characters’ speech. And when the poet com-
pletely effaces his own voice and represents the action in the imitated
 Performativity 683

voices of the characters only, this is called pure mimesis, to be found in

drama (Plato 1997: 394c). Plato thus confines his notion of mimesis to
the level of histoire as specified by Genette and singles out drama as
the mimetic (or performative) genre par excellence. However, Plato
(395c–398b) attacks and devalues the mimetic mode for its corrupting
effects on a strictly ordered society. Aristotle (1995: 1448a, 20), too,
distinguishes between pure narrative, mixed narrative and dialogue, and
pure dialogue. In contrast to Plato, however, Aristotle (1448b, 5–20)
endorses the mimetic mode specified by Plato on account of its strong
imitative force, which, he argues, gives pleasure and is pedagogically
valuable. On this account, he lauds Homer’s epic writing for its gener-
ous use of the mimetic mode (1460a, 5–10).
The major classical authorities thus describe the dramatic genre as
performative because it presents the story in an unmediated or direct
manner. This description has been repeated throughout critical appreci-
ations of the genre, leading Pfister ([1977] 1993: 4) to draw attention to
the “absolute nature” or unmediated presentation as a necessary criteri-
on in his classic model of dramatic communication. Yet Pfister admits
that unmediated or “absolute” presentation is an idealization, and in fact
research on forms of mediation to be found in drama has greatly ex-
panded (see below).
Performativity in the sense of direct or mimetic performativity can
also become a feature of narratives that are regarded as mediated such
as short stories or novels. In the 18th century, readers juxtaposed the
“dramatic illusion” (performativity II.i) attributed to Richardson’s nov-
els and the “epic” impact (performativity II.ii) ascribed to the work of
Fielding who foregrounds the narrator. In 19th-century definitions, nar-
rative realism had to be “dramatic,” “impersonal,” or “objective.” And
in the early 20th century, the mimetic mode of “showing” as opposed to
the diegetic mode of “telling” turns into a well-nigh obligatory and de-
fining characteristic of modernist writing and poetics. Henry James
([1909] 1986: 45–51) gives explicit priority to modes of immediacy
such as rendering the characters in their own voices or portraying the
events through their eyes and minds in order to achieve empathy (Keen
→ Narrative Empathy) and a “scenic” impression of life. At about the
same time, Lubbock ([1921] 1957: 200) attempted an extensive analysis
of the methods of presentation involved in the creation of this illusion
of an immediate encounter with “life,” which “gives validity, gives di-
rect force to a story.” Historicizing the modernist era’s normative aes-
thetics, Lodge (1996) suggests that its adherence to a mimetic manner
of representation has given way, in postmodernist fiction, to a prefer-
ence for the mediated, diegetic mode.
684 Ute Berns

Without using the term, Booth and Genette both take a closer look at
the concept of performativity underlying these normative assumptions.
Though opposing showing and telling, Booth points out that authorial
agency is not conveyed merely in addresses to the reader or in com-
ments and direct judgments, but also through the direct speech of relia-
ble characters, the ordering of the narrative discourse or through any
shifting of the point of view. “Everything he [the author] shows will
serve to tell” ([1961] 1983: 29). Yet, as Genette points out, this does
not impair the performativity of “showing.” While drawing on Booth,
Genette ([1972] 1980) nevertheless distinguishes the representation of
action and of speech. He argues that within the diegetic mode, mimetic
or direct speech does not represent speech at all, but rather repeats
speech or, in literary narrative, directly constitutes it: “narrative will
efface itself before the direct quotations where all representational func-
tion has been abolished, just as when a judicial orator interrupts his dis-
course to allow the tribunal itself to examine an exhibit” ([1972] 1980:
5). Genette treats the phenomenon of performativity under the heading
of “mood” and “distance” (161–164), where he refers to the “illusion of
mimesis” (164) thus conveyed.
Other theorists pursue the question as to whether performativity can
be graded on the story level. In his early writing, Chatman (1978) dis-
tinguishes between “non-narrated stories” and stories deploying a cov-
ert or an overt narrator, arguing for the existence of conventions to the
effect that the narrator should be considered as absent. He claims that
conventions of non-narration hold for the epistolary novel, for gradable
possibilities of representing a character’s speech and thought, for the
neutral reporting of action, or for descriptions that seem to emerge
through a character’s internal focalization (Niederhoff → Focalization;
1978: 146–196; for a linguistic construction of this argument, see Ban-
field 1982). Standard examples of narratives with an absent narrator are
Hemingway’s “The Killers” or some of Dorothy Parker’s stories con-
taining only dialogue and action not commented upon. Chatman later
drops the concept of the non-narrated narrative, arguing that every nar-
rative is by definition narrated or presented by either an agent or an in-
strument which need not be human (1990: 115–116).
Whereas Chatman’s argument suggests that performativity, especial-
ly in the representation of speech, can be graded in a fairly straightfor-
ward way, Sternberg, focusing on speech, argues that the communica-
tive functions of reported discourse, such as e.g. the impression of
greater or lesser immediacy or liveness, cannot be correlated straight-
forwardly with specific linguistic features such as direct, free indirect,
or indirect speech. After all, the unmediated representation of untagged
 Performativity 685

direct dialogue in written narrative does not necessarily convey a great-

er degree of immediacy than reported dialogue with a narrator specify-
ing, for instance, the facial expressions and gestures accompanying the
utterances or the tone of the voices. Sternberg thus abandons graded
correlations of linguistic form and performative effect in favor of an
account of the full range of the communication. Its transposition into
written language always remains selective and implies choices; quoting
always involves mediation (1982: 145). This insight can be extended
from the representation of speech to that of visual detail (Chatman
1978: 28–31). Whereas written descriptions of characters (“a woman”)
and settings (“a room”) have to be “built from nothing,” cinematic de-
scriptions of characters or settings start with a plethora of detail which
the camera may reduce in many ways. As a consequence, there is al-
ways more than one approach to creating the illusion of immediacy,
and the conventions determining what counts as a successful achieve-
ment of this illusion may vary (Wolf 1993). The opposition of showing
and telling is particularly relevant to the discussion of film (Kuhn &
Schmidt → Narration in Film), where language and camera may oper-
ate independently from each other (Chatman 1990: 124–160).

3.2.2 Performativity II.ii: Narrator and Act of Narration

As far as discourse level or act of narration are concerned, the concept

of performativity II.ii refers to the narrator’s agency or the act of
presentation and to the pragmatic context of this act. The capacity at
issue thus inheres in all modes of the act or process of presenting the
story. Writing about Baudelaire and Sterne respectively, MacLean
(1988) and Pfister (2001) emphasize that the foregrounding of the act of
narration can feign a performance in which narrator and audience are
conceived as fully embodied, co-present and interactive. Moreover,
Schmid (2005: 268–270) argues that the act of narration implies both
the story narrated (die erzählte Geschichte) and the story of narration
(Erzählgeschichte). This “story of narration” usually remains a frag-
ment, but in some cases it offers a great many details and may even
take precedence over the story proper, as in Tristram Shandy. The per-
formativity that refers to the act of presenting includes forms of self-
reflexivity such as metanarration and metafictionality that effectively
dramatize or foreground the act of narration. As Nünning and Fludernik
point out, the accumulation of a large number of metanarrative com-
ments results in a “deliberate meta-narrative act of celebration of the act
of narration” (Fludernik 1996: 275) or a “mimesis of narration” (Mime-
sis des Erzählens, Nünning 2001).
686 Ute Berns

The notion of the absolute nature of drama, as indicated above,

amounts to an idealization, since the act of presenting can be traced in
dramatic writing, too. The play within the play and other metatheatrical
devices in Hamlet, or the heightened intertextuality of Stoppard’s Trav-
esties direct our interest to the narrative act. Pfister discusses chorus,
prologue and epilogue as narratorial devices along with Brecht’s use of
song and montage, his deployment of a presenter figure as well as his
anti-illusionist approach to the theater apparatus ([1977] 1993: 69–84).
Recent studies focus on onstage narrators in memory plays or on narra-
tive insets including the telling of anecdotes, jokes and dreams, but they
also thematize the narrator as an abstract structural agency. Jahn (2001)
even assimilates the concept of overt or covert narratorial agency in
plays to the narratorial agency we associate with the novel, thus sketch-
ing a transgeneric perspective for drama and novel that is further elabo-
rated by Nünning & Sommer (2008) and Fludernik (2008). All of this
work strongly suggests that the performativity of drama is a much more
“mixed” affair than has previously been thought. Conversely, forms of
poetry that display great immediacy of consciousness or achieve scenic
presentations in different voices do not square with the notion of poetry
as pure diegesis (Wolf 2003; Pfister 2005).
Performativity is at stake also when narrative discourse as a whole is
treated as a speech act, or when the attention shifts to the pragmatic
relations within which the narrative itself turns into an act. Pratt (1977:
2, 86) treats literature as a “speech context” in which the individual
work or speech act is deciphered according to “unspoken, culturally-
shared knowledge of the rules and conventions.” Incidentally, her
alignment of natural and literary language is diametrically opposed to
Austin’s and Searle’s position, notorious for describing what Searle
calls “fictional discourse” as “parasitic” on ordinary language (Austin
[1962] 1975: 22), or as a series of pretended, make-believe speech acts
(Searle [1969] 1995). Pratt (1977: 152–224) and later Todorov ([1978]
1990) focus on the performativity of genre conventions in particular.
And in a historical perspective, Petrey (1988) traces the specific con-
ventions of the “realist speech act” in 19th-century French novels,
while Esterhammer (2000) investigates the shape of the “Romantic per-
formative” in Britain and Germany. Taking Pratt’s considerations into a
different theoretical arena, Rudrum (2008) posits that the concept of
narrativity itself should be de-essentialized and rethought as conven-
tion- and community-based performativity (Abbott → Narrativity).
Iser ([1972] 1974]) and Kearns (1999) theorize the reader’s response
in general terms when they argue that literary narratives, by performing
illocutionary acts and implicatures, trigger interpretive choices in the
 Performativity 687

act of reading. Moreover, Iser ([1991] 1993: 281–296) also discusses

the narrative act or “fictionalizing acts” in an anthropological perspec-
tive. He points out that the Aristotelian notion of mimesis already im-
plies a teleological thrust exceeding mere imitation, which is increas-
ingly complemented in the course of history by a performative
dimension in the process of reception. Here the concept of performa-
tivity seems to combine the formalized features of performativity in
speech act theory with the contingent aspects of (mental) performances
in the reader’s relation to the text (Prince → Reader).
Finally, a number of critics have explored how gender bears on the
performativity of the narrative act and its pragmatic relations. Lanser
(1981) draws on speech act concepts of performativity to reappraise the
gendered relation between author, narrator and point of view. She later
argues for a contextualist narratology that aims to investigate how
“texts, like bodies, perform sex, gender and sexuality” ([1999] 2004:
127). Page (2006: 94–142) complements this approach by insisting that
the performativity of gender in narratives possesses an ideological di-
mension that cannot be appreciated without attending to the specific
social functions of these narratives.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

As this brief survey has shown, the notion of performativity cuts across a
wide spectrum of fruitful research in narratology that calls for more sys-
tematic investigation. Rather than aiming to replace the categories that
have served to label some of this research so far (“mimesis,” “aesthetic
illusion,” “metanarrativity,” etc.), such investigations could further ex-
plore the relations between them. For instance, this survey suggests that
the concept of performativity could serve as an ideal site for studying the
interrelation between the degree of narrative performativity in visual or
verbal forms of presentation and the more or less determinate visual and
kinesthetic mental performance taking place in the mind of the reader or
spectator. How do different media or specific cultural environments af-
fect this interrelation? Furthermore, the survey indicates that the concept
of performativity and the two levels of narrative to which it refers pro-
vide a distinct inroad into research on written narratives. In this perspec-
tive, investigation into the textual illusion of scenic presentation and the
textual illusion of orality can be pursued as accounts of complementary
types of textual performativity. At the same time, the capacity of speech
acts to shape gendered as well as social or cultural identities (Butler
1997) seems to merit closer analysis in written narratives, too.
688 Ute Berns

Yet the concept of performativity also introduces a theoretical que-

ry. In narratology, the notion of performativity is indebted both to the
concept of the speech act and to the concept of performance. Speech act
analysis, when restricted to verbal narratives, demands a certain degree
of idealized formalization, while the analysis of performance deals with
highly contingent and embodied interactions as processes. The relation
between these two points of reference and their integration into narrato-
logical research needs to be developed further. Considering the fully
embodied and specifically situated performance of utterances, we must
ask what precisely the abstractions of speech act theory involve and
how they shape narratological analysis drawing on speech act theory. In
any case, the study of performativity in narratology supplements the
analysis of performativity in narrative with the analysis of the per-
formativity of narratives. On this account, the narratological study of
performativity offers the potential of complementing structural analysis
of narrative with analysis of its communication situation that is cultur-
ally and historically specific.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aristotle (1995). “Poetics.” The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford
Translation. Vol. 2. Ed. J. Barnes. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Auslander, Philip ([1999] 2005). Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New
York: Routledge.
– ed. (2003). Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. 4
vols. London: Routledge.
Austin, John L. ([1962] 1975). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Banfield, Ann (1982). Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the
Language of Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bauman, Richard (1986). Story, Performance and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral
Narratives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York:
Routledge.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca:
Cornell UP.
De Marinis, Marco ([1978] 1993). The Semiotics of Performance. Bloomington: Indi-
ana UP.
Elam, Keir ([1980] 1987). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen.
 Performativity 689

Esterhammer, Angela (2000). The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in

British and German Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford UP.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2004). Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
– (2008). “Narrative and Drama.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa (eds.). Theorizing
Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 355–383.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (1997). Narrative Performances: A Study of Modern
Greek Storytelling. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Herman, David (1999). “Toward a Socionarratology: New Ways of Analyzing Natural-
Language Narratives.” D. Herman (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives. Co-
lumbus: Ohio State UP, 218–246.
Hutcheon, Linda (1984). Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New
York: Methuen.
Iser, Wolfgang ([1972] 1974). The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in
Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
– ([1991] 1993). The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Jahn, Manfred (2001). “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratolo-
gy of Drama.” New Literary History 32, 659–679.
James, Henry ([1909] 1986). “Preface to the New York Edition.” H. James. The Am-
bassadors. London: Penguin.
Kearns, Michael (1999). Rhetorical Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Labov, William (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Ver-
nacular. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.
Lanser, Susan Sniader (1981). The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction.
Princeton: Princeton UP.
– ([1999] 2004). “Sexing Narratology: Toward a Gendered Poetics of Narrative
Voice.” M. Bal (ed.). Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cul-
tural Studies. London: Routledge, vol. 3, 123–139.
Lodge, David (1996). “Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction.” M. J. Hoffman & P.
D. Murphy (eds.). Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 348–
371.
Loxley, James (2007). Performativity. London: Routledge.
Lubbock, Percy ([1921] 1957). The Craft of Fiction. London: Viking.
MacLean, Marie (1988). Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment.
London: Routledge.
McAuley, Gay (2007). “State of the Art: Performance Studies.” SemiotiX 10
<http://www.semioticon.com/semiotix/semiotix10/sem-10-05.html>.
Nünning, Ansgar (2001). “Mimesis des Erzählens: Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsäs-
thetik, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte des Akts des Erzählens und der Me-
tanarration.” J. Helbig (ed.). Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert:
Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger. Heidelberg: Winter, 13–47.
– & Roy Sommer (2008). “Narrative and Drama.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa
(eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 331–354.
690 Ute Berns

Ochs, Elinor & Lisa Capps (2001). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Story-
telling. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Page, Ruth E. (2006). Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Petrey, Sandy (1988). Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Per-
formances of History. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Pfister, Manfred ([1977] 1993). The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP.
– (2001). Laurence Sterne. Horndon: Northcote House.
– (2005) “‘As an unperfect actor on the stage’: Notes Towards a Definition of Per-
formance and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” E. Müller-Zettelmann &
M. Rubik (eds.). Theory Into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 207–228.
Plato (1997). “Republic.” Complete Works. Ed. J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1977). Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloom-
ington: Indiana UP.
Rudrum, David (2008). “Narrativity and Performativity. From Cervantes to Star Trek.”
J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter,
253–276.
Schmid, Wolf (2005). Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Searle, John R. ([1969] 1995). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Sternberg, Meir (1982). “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Re-
ported Discourse.” Poetics Today 3, 107–156.
Todorov, Tzvetan ([1978] 1990). Genres in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Turner, Victor (1982). From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New
York: PAJ.
Wolf, Werner (1993). Ästhetische Illusionen und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Er-
zählkunst. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
– (2003). “The Lyric―An Elusive Genre: Problems of Definition and a Proposal
for Reconceptualization.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28, 59–91.

5.2 Further Reading

Butler, Judith (1990). “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phe-
nomenology and Feminist Theory.” S.-E. Case (ed.). Performing Feminisms:
Feminist Critical Theory and Theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 270–283.
Felman, Shoshana ([1980] 2003). The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with
J.L. Austin, or, Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford: Stanford UP.
Fishelov, David (1989). Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory.
University Park: Pennsylvania State UP.
Gaudreault, André ([1990] 2004). “Showing and Telling: Image and Word in Early
Cinema.” M. Bal (ed.). Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cul-
tural Studies. London: Routledge, vol. 4, 359–367.
Haesenbrouck, Karel van, ed. (2004). “Performance.” Online-Journal Image & Narra-
tive No. 9 <http://www.imageandnarrrative/performance/performance.htm>.
 Performativity 691

Nünning, Ansgar (2004). “On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology and an

Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary.” J. Pier (ed.). The Dy-
namics of Narrative Form. Berlin: de Gruyter, 11–57.
Wirth, Uwe, ed. (2002). Performanz: Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissen-
schaften. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
 Perspective – Point of View
Burkhard Niederhoff

1 Definition

Perspective in narrative may be defined as the way the representation of

the story is influenced by the position, personality and values of the
narrator, the characters and, possibly, other, more hypothetical entities
in the storyworld. The more common term in Anglo-American criti-
cism, which will be treated as equivalent here, is “point of view.”

2 Explication

In the visual arts, perspective refers to a method that presents a scene as

perceived from a “single fixed viewpoint” (Carter 1970: 840), creating
the impression of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional sur-
face. In a painting of this sort, parallel lines converge as they recede
from the viewer; objects gain or lose in size depending on whether they
are near or far; and in the background, colors lose their intensity and
acquire a bluish tinge. That the concept of perspective can also be ap-
plied to language is made evident by the following sentence, assumed
to be spoken by a boy: “My father towered above me.” The man in
question need not be a giant; the impression of his great height might
simply result from the boy’s viewpoint. The example also shows that
the concept of perspective may be extended from vision in the literal
sense to vision in the figurative sense, i.e. to interpretation and evalua-
tion. Thus the verb “towered” suggests that the father is threatening the
boy. Again, this impression need not be shared by other observers, as it
might be an interpretation of the father’s body language by a son who
has a difficult relationship with his parent. Most narratologists use per-
spective in the broader sense that includes visual data without being
limited to them.
The concept of perspective is especially pertinent to narrative. Nar-
ratives have at least one narrator and usually more than one character
and thus offer the possibility for a range of, and a change of, perspec-
 Perspective – Point of View 693

tives. A narrator may tell the story from his own point of view, as in the
following example: “A long time ago, little Stephen Dedalus, an inhab-
itant of Dublin, was eagerly listening to a story told to him by his fa-
ther.” But a narrator may also tell the story from the point of view of a
character, as is shown by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man; the Joycean narrator adopts the perspective of little Stephen: “His
father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he
had a hairy face” ([1916] 1926: 7). The point of view of a small child is
indicated by the simple, repetitive syntax and by the periphrases “glass”
for monocle and “hairy face” for beard.
Perspective is a complex and controversial concept, as is attested by
the proliferation of rival metaphors such as “reflector” (James [1908]
1972: 247), “focalization” (Genette [1972] 1980; Niederhoff → Focali-
zation), “slant,” “filter,” and “interest-focus” (Chatman 1990), or “win-
dow” (Jahn 1996; Fludernik 1996). One source of confusion and con-
troversy, which is related to the spatio-visual origin of the term, is the
ambiguity of the attributes “external” and “internal,” pointed out by a
number of scholars (e.g. Edmiston 1991: 155) but ignored by many
more. In narratology, these terms are not used with reference to well-
defined spaces (inside or outside a box) but with reference to minds
(inside or outside a character’s consciousness). However, the bounda-
ries of a mind are less easily determined than those of a box. A charac-
ter’s consciousness can be directed inwards, as in meditation, but it can
also be directed outwards, as in perception. In the latter case, the “inter-
nal” perspective pulls us straight back into the “external” world. A fur-
ther difficulty is that the terms may refer both to points from which the
action is viewed and to regions that are viewed from these points. De-
scribing a point of view as “external,” for example, suggests that we are
viewing a character from the outside, from a spatial and possibly from
an emotional and ideological distance. But this does not tell us how far
our vision extends. In the case of the so-called camera perspective, it is
extremely limited: we only learn what a newcomer to the scene might
observe and thus have no way of knowing what the characters feel or
think. In the case of omniscient narration, our vision is not limited at
all. We have access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings, including
subconscious ones, as well as to every other conceivable region of the
storyworld. Thus it is important, in analyzing perspective, to indicate
not only a point or position from which the events are viewed, but also
the kind of mind located at this position and the kind of “privilege”
(Booth [1961] 1983: 160–163) this mind enjoys, i.e. its access, or lack
of such, to the different regions of the storyworld.
694 Burkhard Niederhoff

A second reason why perspective is a difficult concept has been

pointed out by Lanser. “Unlike such textual elements as character, plot,
or imagery, point of view is essentially a relationship rather than a con-
crete entity. As it tends to evade stabilization into the language of
‘things’, it has been difficult to grasp and codify” (1981: 13). Analyz-
ing an image in terms of perspective means analyzing it as a view, i.e.
as the result of a relation between a viewing subject and a viewed ob-
ject. Narratologists have occasionally succumbed to the temptation of
simplifying things by reducing the relation to one of the elements con-
nected by it.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 From James to Stanzel: Pre-structuralist Typologies

Point of view is used in its technical sense, with reference to a narrative

method, as early as 1866 (Stang [1959] 1961: 107–111). The first sus-
tained discussion of the subject in English is to be found in the writings
of James. However, “point of view” in James usually refers to a writer’s
temperament and outlook on life (cf. Morrison 1961/62: 247–248).
When James discusses narrative method, he uses such related spatio-
visual metaphors as “centre (of consciousness),” “window,” “reflector,”
or “mirror,” all of which refer to a character whose experience governs
the presentation of the story. James prefers this kind of presentation to a
first-person narrator ([1908] 1972: 249), and he also advocates con-
sistency in point of view, deploring his own deviation from such con-
sistency in one of his tales as a “lapse from artistic dignity” ([1908]
1972: 244).
James’s disciple Lubbock ([1921] 1972) systematized the master’s
critical observations into a coherent theory organized around an opposi-
tion between telling and showing, i.e. the traditional method of relating
a story, in which the narrator is prominent (Plato’s diegesis), and a new,
quasi-dramatic method, in which the narrator retreats to the background
(Plato’s mimesis). Lubbock distinguishes four points of view, arranged
here in a sequence from telling to showing and paraphrased in more up-
to-date terms: (a) third-person narration with a prominent or authorial
narrator; (b) first-person narration; (c) third-person narration from the
point of view of a character, a Jamesian “reflector;” (d) third-person
narration without comments or inside views (called “the dramatic
method”). Lubbock does not recommend the fourth type, as one might
expect an advocate of showing to do. He points out the sacrifices that
 Perspective – Point of View 695

this type entails, such as the difficulty of depicting the mental life of
characters (256–257), and he comes down in favor of the third type, the
reflector mode, which is also preferred by James. This type combines
access to the mental life of the reflector character with a withdrawal of
the narrator.
Lubbock is a spokesman for the Zeitgeist, especially as regards his
predilection for showing over telling and the withdrawal of the narrator.
The only conspicuous dissenter is Forster, who argues that novelists
need not be consistent in their point of view and that narratorial com-
ments and intrusions are legitimate ([1927] 1990: 81–84). But this is a
minority opinion. Even three decades later the premises and preferences
established by James and Lubbock are still going strong. Friedman con-
tinues to advocate consistency in point of view and expresses a some-
what qualified predilection for showing as against telling. Like Lub-
bock, he uses this opposition as the principle underlying a range of no
less than eight points of view ([1955] 1967: 119–131):

(1) “editorial omniscience” (third-person narration with an intrusive

narrator);
(2) “neutral omniscience” (similar to the first, with a less intrusive
narrator);
(3) “‘I’ as witness” (minor character as first-person narrator);
(4) “‘I’ as protagonist” (protagonist as first-person narrator);
(5) “multiple selective omniscience” (third-person narration from
the point of view of several characters in succession, as in
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway);
(6) “selective omniscience” (third-person narration from the point
of view of one character);
(7) “the dramatic mode” (third-person narration in scenic mode
without inside views);
(8) “the camera” (like the previous, without a clear distinction).

Friedman’s typology includes several different criteria: the knowledge

of the narrator (which distinguishes 1 and 2 from 5 and 6); the frequen-
cy with which a narrator comments on or interrupts the story (1 vs. 2);
the question of whether a narrator is also a character (3 and 4 vs. the
rest); the narrator’s importance as a character (3 vs. 4); constancy or
change of point of view (5 vs. 6); etc. It is a moot point whether all of
these criteria should be subsumed under the one umbrella term of point
of view. Furthermore, it may be doubted whether each of the eight
types can be situated at a particular point on a scale ranging from telling
to showing. Why the “‘I’ as witness” should tell more and show less
696 Burkhard Niederhoff

than the “‘I’ as protagonist” is far from evident. Nor is it obvious why
these two are more remote from the telling mode than types (1) and (2).
A first-person narrator who tells the story with hindsight and frequently
comments on the action is a better example of the telling mode than
“neutral omniscience,” Friedman’s second type.
A major objective of the Lubbock-Friedman school is the elimina-
tion of the narrator, in particular the avoidance of narratorial comment,
which they regard as intrusive moralizing. A novel, according to these
critics, should make the readers see or experience the story instead of
telling them what to think about it. Booth delivers a trenchant critique
of such claims in The Rhetoric of Fiction ([1961] 1983), arguing that
the elimination of ideology envisaged by the advocates of showing is a
delusion. Narrative has, as the title of his book implies, a rhetorical di-
mension: it communicates views and values. Doing so in an overt way,
with a visible narrator making explicit comments, is just as legitimate
as doing so in a covert way, by opting for a first-person narrator or
adopting the point of view of a character. In a similar vein, Weimann
(1962) traces the historical development from narrators who speak their
minds to narrators who adopt the point of view of a character; to Wei-
mann, this development is a story of decadence and decline. Twenty
years after these critics, Lanser (1981) restates their arguments with
some new inflections. While Weimann argues from a Marxist stand-
point, Lanser is inspired by feminism, and where Booth draws on rheto-
ric to situate the techniques of fiction within a broader framework,
Lanser relies on speech act theory. Furthermore, she is no longer con-
cerned with repudiating Lubbock and Friedman, but rather responds to
structuralists such as Chatman and Genette. These differences notwith-
standing, Lanser continues the case made by Booth and Weimann in
that she endorses a study of point of view that includes its socio-
political implications and the writer’s ideological agenda.
A model that has been highly influential in the German-speaking
world is Stanzel’s typological circle, which was first proposed in [1955]
1971 and presented in its most elaborate form in [1979] 1984. In this
version, the circle is organized around three diametrical lines (see il-
lustr.). They represent three criteria, each of which results in a binary
opposition yielding two terms: mode (narrator vs. reflector); perspec-
tive (internal vs. external); person (identity vs. non-identity of the nar-
rator’s and the characters’ realms, i.e. first person vs. third person). The
six terms resulting from the three criteria are placed at equidistant
points on the typological circle. Three of them define the “narrative
situations” that are privileged in that, empirically speaking, most extant
narratives cluster around them. The external perspective corresponds to
 Perspective – Point of View 697

the authorial situation, the reflector mode to the figural situation, and
the identity of the realms of existence of narrator and characters to the
first-person situation. Thus each narrative situation is defined by one of
the poles in the binary opposition resulting from the three criteria and
also, to a lesser extent, by the two adjacent poles. The figural situation,
for example, consists in the dominance of the reflector mode and is ad-
ditionally characterized by an internal perspective and by the non-
identity of the worlds of narrator and character ([1979] 1984: 55).

Stanzel has always been given credit as an eloquent critic; his typologi-
cal system, however, has not won much approval. Cohn, for example,
points out that the criteria of mode and perspective are so close that
they can be regarded as equivalent: a reflectorial mode implies an inter-
nal perspective, a narratorial mode an external one (1981: 176–180; cf.
Genette [1983] 1988: 78–79). Cohn and other critics, such as Leibfried
(1970: 246), have also suggested that Stanzel should allow for a free
combination of his oppositions instead of enclosing them in a circle.
This is especially obvious in the case of first-person narration, which
comes in two different forms: an authorial one, in which narrators tell
the story as they see it at the time of the narration, i.e. with hindsight;
and a figural one, in which they render it the way they experienced it as
characters in the story. In the typological circle, these two forms can be
accommodated only as intermediate cases between the narrative situa-
tions, which is awkward. While it makes sense to posit a range of tran-
sitional cases between the authorial and the figural situation, no such
range exists between the I-situation and the two other situations. A nar-
698 Burkhard Niederhoff

rative may be a perfect example of both first-person and figural narra-

tion. Cohn, for one, has shown that free indirect thought, a form of
thought presentation associated with the figural narrative situation, oc-
curs in first-person narrative (1978: 166–172).

3.2 Genette and his Critics

The free combination of distinctions is the hallmark of Genette’s Nar-

rative Discourse, the most influential contribution to narrative theory
from the quarters of French structuralism. Genette attacks theorists like
Friedman and Stanzel for locating such terms as first-person narration,
the dramatic mode or figural narration within the same category as
“points of view” or “narrative situations.” Genette insists on separating
questions and distinctions relating to the narrator (“voice” in his termi-
nology) from those relating to perspective, arguing in favor of a free
combination of narrator types and point-of-view types. Furthermore,
Genette introduces a neologism, replacing perspective with focalization
([1972] 1980: 185–211). He distinguishes three types of focalization,
which differ primarily in the amount of information they allow the nar-
rator to communicate. Zero or non-focalization, a reformulation of the
traditional idea of omniscience, grants the narrator access to every con-
ceivable region of the storyworld; internal focalization, roughly equiva-
lent to Stanzel’s figural narrative situation, means a restriction to the
experience of one character; external focalization, similar to Friedman’s
camera, imposes an even greater restriction, for it precludes inside
views and limits narration to what an ignorant and uninvolved observer
might perceive. Genette adds a further distinction to the second or in-
ternal type, which may be either fixed (adhering to one character
throughout the text), variable (shifting between different characters) or
multiple (shifting between different characters while retelling the same
event).
Genette’s rigorous separation of narrators and focalizations has
more than once been hailed as a Copernican breakthrough in narrative
theory, but surprisingly few narratologists have been willing to accept
the consequences of this separation. After all, it makes sense only if
narrators and perspectives are distinct categories, in other words if the
choice of a particular kind of narrator does not entail a particular per-
spective. Genette suggests that, in principle at least, his three focaliza-
tions may occur in first-person narration just as much as in third-person
narration ([1983] 1988: 114–129). However, scholars such as Fludernik
(2001b: 621) or Cordesse (1988) disagree with this homological model.
They argue that omniscience or zero focalization is not an option for
 Perspective – Point of View 699

first-person narrators, since they do not have access to other minds and
are restricted to what they have learnt in the course of the story. Fur-
thermore, Fludernik claims, following a suggestion by Cohn, that first-
person narrators cannot exclude their own thoughts and feelings (Cohn
& Genette [1985] 1992: 263). Even when a first-person narrator does
not reveal them, rendering the story in the camera mode, the reader will
attribute thoughts and feelings to him or her in the process of reading
(Fludernik 2001a: 103).
A comprehensive treatment of focalization or perspective in first-
person narrative is given by Edmiston, who comes to the following
conclusions (1991: 168): zero focalization is possible (but has to be
regarded as an infraction of a literary norm); internal focalization is also
possible, with the experiencing I as the point-of-view character; exter-
nal focalization in the Genettean sense is not an option, but there is the
additional option of telling the story from the point of view of the nar-
rating I (for which Edmiston enlists the now-unemployed term of ex-
ternal focalization). While these conclusions do not precisely confirm
the homological model suggested by Genette, they would appear to cor-
roborate his general stance of allowing for a relatively free combination
of narrator and point-of-view options. It should also be kept in mind
that the case for a restriction of point of view or focalization in first-
person narrative is always based on the knowledge of the narrator. This,
however, is only one facet or parameter of point of view. Furthermore,
this case rests on rather commonsensical or realistic assumptions. Since
most of us are willing to abandon such assumptions when it comes to
narrative content, it is hard to see why we should be less broad-minded
about narrative discourse. If we are willing to be entertained by invisi-
bility cloaks, we should not demur at first-person narrators who are
omniscient.
In addition to the debate about the applicability of Genette’s classi-
fication of focalizations to first-person narration, there has also been a
more general debate about the triple nature of this typology. Most nar-
ratologists seem to prefer a dual model to a triple one: see, e.g., Bal
([1985] 1997: 148), Vitoux (1982), Rabatel (1997) or Schmid ([2005]
2008: 137–138), all of whom distinguish, in different terms, between a
narratorial and a figural perspective. What is eliminated from these dual
typologies is the camera mode (Genette’s external focalization), which,
however, has been defended by Broich (1983). Interestingly, even some
of those who are skeptical about the camera mode make subordinate
concessions or distinctions which would appear to indicate that this
mode is not a figment of the narratological imagination. While Bal
compensates for the elimination of Genette’s external focalization by
700 Burkhard Niederhoff

introducing the concept of the focalized object, Vitoux grants the narra-
tor a “play of focalization” (359), which includes external focalization
as one of its options. Finally, Rabatel allows for an external vision both
within narratorial and figural focalization (101–102).

3.3 Parameters, Perspective Structure and the

Foregrounding of Perspective

A major tendency in recent work on perspective is an increasing aware-

ness of the diversity of the phenomenon. Scholars elaborate on the
basic types of the various classifications by discussing changes from
one type to another, intermediate cases, embeddings, transgressions or
unusual combinations. One method of accounting for the complexity of
narrative perspective is to distinguish its different facets or parameters.
Schmid, who builds on earlier studies along these lines by Uspenskij,
Lintvelt and Rimmon-Kenan, discerns five such parameters: space; ide-
ology; time; language; perception ([2005] 2008: 123–137). The point of
distinguishing these parameters is that they are not necessarily in line
with each other. A narrative may report events as they are perceived by
a character, while at the same time using language that is very remote
from that of the character. This is the case of James, as was pointed out
long ago by Scholes et al. ([1966] 2006: 270) and recently reiterated by
Aczel (1998). James’s novel What Maisie Knew tells us what Maisie
knew, but it does not show us how Maisie spoke. Of course, the differ-
ent parameters may also be in line, as in the beginning of A Portrait of
the Artist, where the narrator renders a child’s perceptions in a child’s
language. The alignment of parameters is referred to as “compact per-
spective” by Schmid, their dissociation as “distributive perspective”
([2005] 2008: 151–152). It should be added that scholars who favor the
parameter approach to perspective are not in full agreement about the
distinction and the number of parameters. Thus Fowler, who reviews
Uspenskij in similarly favorable terms as Schmid, argues that the pa-
rameter of “phraseology” (corresponding to “language” in Schmid’s
quintuple division) is not a separate parameter, but is inextricably
bound up with the others. “By separating off ‘phraseology,’ the theorist
simply expresses nostalgia for the text as decorative form” (Fowler
1982: 226).
An interesting recent development initiated by Nünning (2001) and
followed up by Surkamp (2003) is an attempt to enlist Pfister’s theory
of perspective in drama for the study of narrative. Ironically, this theory
was initially motivated by the inverse attempt to enlist a narratological
concept for the study of drama (Pfister [1977] 2000: 57). According to
 Perspective – Point of View 701

Pfister, the perspective of a character in a play is constituted by psycho-

logical disposition, ideology and the awareness of what the other char-
acters are up to. As the combination of these three factors will differ
from one character to another, they will view and judge the same event
in different ways. Pfister’s interest is not so much in individual perspec-
tives as it is in the differences or similarities between them. The point is
to establish the structure of perspectives, to hear the more or less har-
monious concert that is performed by the voices of a play. Structure
may be non-perspectival, approximately realized in some medieval mo-
ralities (all of the characters function as authorial mouthpieces, lacking
individual perspectives); it may be closed (different perspectives are
hierarchically structured around a privileged perspective, which is ei-
ther explicit, i.e. articulated by one of the characters, or implicit); final-
ly, it may be open (a hierarchy between the different perspectives is
lacking so that no privileged perspective emerges). Nünning transfers
Pfister’s theory to narrative, with some minor adjustments concerning
the relations between the perspectives and one major adjustment. Narra-
tive features not only characters, but also a narrator whose perspective
is defined, in similarly broad terms as that of a character, as a set of
“psychological idiosyncrasies, attitudes, norms and values, a set of
mental properties, and a world-model” (Nünning 2001: 213).
Nünning certainly has a point, for one thing because the texts that
most narratologists deal with include dialogue and are thus partly dra-
matic. Even as far as the strictly narrative portions of the text are con-
cerned, Nünning’s approach is valuable in that it alerts us to the poten-
tial plurality and diversity of perspectives. However, the dramatic
analogy can also be misleading. In drama there are roughly as many
perspectives as there are characters who speak. In narrative, however,
the mere existence of a character does not imply that his or her perspec-
tive is of any importance. If we learn that a character is a teenage girl,
we can make certain assumptions about her knowledge, her interests,
her values, etc. But this only turns into a perspective when we learn
about her views of the world around her. How prominent her perspec-
tive becomes also depends, of course, on the way her views are repre-
sented—with lofty disdain, with amusement, or with sympathy. Anoth-
er problem in Nünning’s approach to perspective is a potential loss of
the relational quality of the concept. When he writes that character per-
spective “embraces everything that exists in the mind of the character”
(2001: 211), there is a strong shift in the direction of the viewing sub-
ject and a danger of abandoning the relational character of the concept
pointed out by Lanser (1981: 13). To sum up, perspective structure
provides us with a chart of the potential perspectival reference points of
702 Burkhard Niederhoff

a text, whereas the more traditional narratological accounts of perspec-

tive analyze where the narrator situates the representation of the story in
relation to these points or how he or she makes it move between them.
An intriguing question about perspective is asked by Bonheim: Why
is it that in some narratives point of view seems to be highly important
and significant, while in others it appears to be negligible? (1990: 300).
In other words, can there be narrative without perspective or with a less
conspicuous one? If we think of the concept in purely spatio-visual
terms, the answer is not difficult. One can tell a story without a fixed
viewpoint in the literal sense, just as one can paint a landscape without
perspective. This has been demonstrated by Stanzel ([1979] 1984: 117–
122) and by Jahn (1999: 95–100), who elaborates on Stanzel’s binary
distinction between perspectival and non-perspectival depiction of
space with a scalar model. Similarly, if one thinks of focalization in
terms of restriction of information, then Genette’s zero focalization, the
equivalent of non-perspectival narrative, would appear to be a possibil-
ity; at the very least, focalizations may be more or less restricted. Based
on these premises, the answer to Bonheim’s question is that narrative
can be perspectival and non-perspectival, focalized or non-focalized,
and also something in-between. However, the answer becomes more
difficult if we follow Uspenskij or Lanser in defining perspective in a
more inclusive manner. If perspective also has an ideological dimen-
sion, a narrative without perspective is hardly possible. However, even
on the premise of a more inclusive definition, perspective may be more
or less conspicuous. A writer can foreground it by assigning it to a
character not usually selected for such purposes, e.g. a toddler, as in A
Portrait of the Artist, or an animal, an interesting case discussed by
Nelles (2001) and Burns (2002). Arguably, every shift of perspective
from a narrator to a character has a foregrounding effect, even if the
character is of a thoroughly unremarkable sort. Schmid argues that in
comparison with narrator perspective, character perspective is
“marked” in the linguistic sense ([2005] 2008: 138). Perspective is
foregrounded precisely when it is perceived as a perspective, i.e. as a
limited or partial view among other views of the matter that are equally
possible. When a narrator adopts a character’s perspective, the latter’s
view will be contextualized and qualified by the mere fact of the narra-
tor’s presence: it will appear not as the view, but as one view. Of all
literary genres or modes, narrative seems to be the one most suited to
create this effect, which is not the least of its attractions.
 Perspective – Point of View 703

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) It has been observed that camera narration alias external focalization
is employed only for part of a text, very often the beginning. It would
be interesting to study the transitions where this mode is abandoned. Is
the transition to a narratorial or to a figural point of view? The former
possibility would confirm Vitoux’s (1982) claim that camera narration
is merely an option in the play of narratorial focalization. (b) The study
of perspective has focused almost exclusively on fictional narrative. An
exploration of the subject in non-fictional narrative genres might yield
interesting results in its own right and also throw new light on the phe-
nomenon in fiction. (c) When narratologists review the work of their
predecessors, they usually focus on the gaps and the mistakes. Previous
theories are demolished or quarried for the purpose of building a new
one. This does not make for a fair appraisal of the critical tradition.
Perhaps it is time for a non-partisan history of theories of point of view
and related metaphors from James (or earlier) to the present day, pref-
erably by someone who makes a vow not to conclude the study with a
new theory or typology of their own.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Aczel, Richard (1998). “Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts.” New Literary History 29,
467–500.
Bal, Mieke ([1985] 1997). Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. To-
ronto: U of Toronto P.
Bonheim, Helmut (1990). “Point of View Models.” H. Bonheim. Literary Systematics.
Cambridge: Brewer, 285–307.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Broich, Ulrich (1983). “Gibt es eine ‘neutrale Erzählsituation’?” Germanisch-
Romanische Monatsschrift 33, 129–145.
Burns, Allan (2002). “Extensions of Vision: The Representation of Non-Human Points
of View.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Crit-
ics of Language and Literature 38, 339–350.
Carter, B.A.R. (1970). “Perspective.” H. Osborne (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Art.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 840–861.
Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Cohn, Dorrit (1978). Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Conscious-
ness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP.
704 Burkhard Niederhoff

– (1981). “The Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel’s Theorie des Erzäh-

lens.” Poetics Today 2, 157–182.
– & Gérard Genette ([1985] 1992). “A Narratological Exchange.” A. Fehn et al.
(eds.). Neverending Stories. Toward a Critical Narratology. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 258–266.
Cordesse, Gérard (1988). “Narration et focalisation.” Poétique 19, 487–498.
Edmiston, William F. (1991). Hindsight and Insight: Focalization in Four Eighteenth-
Century French Novels. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
– (2001a). “The Establishment of Internal Focalization in Odd Pronominal Con-
texts.” W. van Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Per-
spective. Albany: SUNY, 101–113.
– (2001b). “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization, and New Writing.”
New Literary History 32, 619–638.
Forster, Edward M. ([1927] 1990). Aspects of the Novel. London: Penguin.
Fowler, Roger (1982). “How to See through Language: Perspective in Fiction.” Poetics
11, 213–235.
Friedman, Norman ([1955] 1967). “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a
Critical Concept.” Ph. Stevick (ed.). The Theory of the Novel. New York: Free,
108–137.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Oxford:
Blackwell.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Jahn, Manfred (1996). “Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a
Narratological Concept.” Style 30, 241–267.
– (1999). “More Aspects of Focalization: Refinements and Applications.” J. Pier
(ed.). Recent Trends in Narratological Research. Tours: GRAAT, 85–110.
James, Henry ([1908] 1972). Theory of Fiction. Ed. J. E. Miller. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Joyce, James ([1916] 1926). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Cape.
Lanser, Susan Sniader (1981). The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction.
Princeton: Princeton UP.
Leibfried, Erwin (1970). Kritische Wissenschaft vom Text. Manipulation, Reflexion,
transparanente Poetologie. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Lubbock, Percy ([1921] 1972). The Craft of Fiction. London: Cape.
Morrison, Kristin (1961/62). “James’s and Lubbock’s Differing Points of View.” Nine-
teenth-Century Fiction 16, 245–255.
Nelles, William (2001). “Beyond the Bird’s Eye: Animal Focalization.” Narrative 9,
188–194.
Nünning, Ansgar (2001). “On the Perspective Structure of Narrative Texts.” W. van
Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany:
SUNY, 207–223.
Pfister, Manfred ([1977] 2000). The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP.
Rabatel, Alain (1997). “L’introuvable focalisation externe: De la subordination de la
vision externe au point de vue du personnage ou au point de vue du narrateur.”
Littérature 107, 88–113.
 Perspective – Point of View 705

Schmid, Wolf ([2005] 2008). Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Scholes, Robert et al. ([1966] 2006). The Nature of Narrative. 40th anniversary ed.
London: Oxford UP.
Stang, Richard ([1959] 1961). The Theory of the Novel in England: 1850–1870. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Stanzel, Franz K. ([1955] 1971). Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby-
Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
– ([1979] 1984). A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Surkamp, Carola (2003). Die Perspektivenstruktur narrativer Texte: Zu ihrer Theorie
und Geschichte im englischen Roman zwischen Viktorianismus und Moderne.
Trier: WVT.
Vitoux, Pierre (1982). “Le jeu de la focalisation.” Poétique, 13, 359–468.
Weimann, Robert (1962). “Erzählerstandpunkt und point of view: Zu Geschichte und
Ästhetik der Perspektive im englischen Roman.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und
Amerikanistik 10, 369–416.

5.2 Further Reading

Bärtschi, Willy A. (1976). Perspektive: Geschichte, Konstruktionsanleitung und Er-

scheinungsformen in Umwelt und bildender Kunst. Ravensburg: Maier.
Breuer, Horst (1998). “Typenkreise und Kreuztabellen: Modelle erzählerischer Ver-
mittlung.” Poetica 30, 233–249.
Guillén, Claudio (1971). “On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective.” C. Guillén.
Literature as System. Essays toward the Theory of Literary History. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 283–371.
Lintvelt, Jaap ([1981] 1989). Essai de typologie narrative. Le “Point de vue.” Paris:
José Corti.
Nünning, Vera & Ansgar Nünning (2000). Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Zur Theo-
rie und Geschichte der Perspektiven-Struktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis
20. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT.
Peer, Willie van & Seymour Chatman, eds. (2001). New Perspectives on Narrative
Perspective. Albany: SUNY.
Petersen, Jürgen H. (1993). Erzählsysteme: Eine Poetik epischer Texte. Stuttgart: Metz-
ler.
Rabatel, Alain (1997). Une Histoire du Point de Vue. Metz: U de Metz.
Rossholm, Göran, ed. (2004). Essays on Fiction and Perspective. Bern: Lang.
Röttgers, Kurt & Monika Schmitz-Emans, eds. (1999). Perspektive in Literatur und
bildender Kunst. Essen: Die Blaue Eule.
 Plot
Karin Kukkonen

1 Definition

The term “plot” designates the ways in which the events and characters’
actions in a story are arranged and how this arrangement in turn facili-
tates identification of their motivations and consequences. These causal
and temporal patterns can be foregrounded by the narrative discourse
itself or inferred by readers. Plot therefore lies between the events of a
narrative on the level of story and their presentation on the level of dis-
course. It is not tied to a particular mode of narrative expression, and it
can be observed across media and genres.
While plot constitutes one of the few narratological terms current in
everyday discourse and in literary criticism, the term has been used in
so many contexts that narratologists struggle to define its purview and
grapple with its terminology. Nevertheless, three basic ways of concep-
tualising plot can be distinguished:

(1) Plot as a fixed, global structure. The configuration of the ar-

rangement of all story events, from beginning, middle to end, is
considered.
(2a) Plot as progressive structuration. The connections between sto-
ry events, motivations and consequences as readers perceive
them are considered.
(2b) Plot as part of the authorial design. The author’s way of struc-
turing the narrative to achieve particular effects is considered.

In critical practice, these different conceptualisations of plot are often

combined.

2 Explication

Plot is a term employed in many different contexts, and the different

uses of the word in English (see OED 2013) resonate in its multiple
 Plot 707

meanings. A brief survey of the terms for (literary) plot in other Euro-
pean languages unfolds some aspects of the concept: from the deeply-
engrained narrativity of Aristotle’s “mythos” to the careful scheming
evoked by French “intrigue” and the action-based matter-of-factness
implied by German “Handlung.”
Plot can be approached as that feature of narrative which facilitates
the mental operations that translate story events into a meaningful nar-
rative. If one conceives of it as a fixed structure (conceptualisation 1),
then plot becomes a pattern which yields coherence to the narrative. In
the formalist and structuralist traditions, plot enchains story events in
typical sequences (see Propp [1928] 1968; Kafalenos 2006), or it re-
establishes an equilibrium that has been upset (see Todorov 1971: 51).
Other critics, foregrounding plot as structure, distinguish sets of plot
types that correspond to basic elements of human experience and shape
them into patterns (see Frye 1957; Hogan 2003). In this conceptualisa-
tion, plot also has strong ideological salience because it might rehearse
particular patterns of thinking in readers and endorse particular gender
roles, group identities and parameters of ethical behaviour implied by
these plots (see Abbott [2002] 2008; Miller 1980).
If one conceives of plot as a structuration, then it traces the thoughts
of readers as they ponder the reasons for events and the motivations of
characters and consider the consequences of actions in their quest to
make sense of the narrative as a whole (conceptualisation 2a). In this
conceptualisation, plot spans the time through which the narrative un-
folds. It develops dynamically as readers reconsider the motivation and
credibility of the actions and events they read about (see Brooks &
Warren 1943; Phelan 1989, 2007), recalibrate their expectations in se-
quences of surprise, curiosity and suspense (see Sternberg 1978; Baroni
2007) and follow the paths which their Freudian desires (see Brooks
[1984] 1992) or needs of meaning-making (see Dannenberg 2008)
might chart. Such processes of establishing plots in the tapestry of the
given can be considered as the mediating strategy of narrative which
translates between everyday experience and fictional artefacts (“mise en
intrigue”; see Ricœur [1983–85] 1984–88) and gives history its shape
and moral relevance (see White 1981).
If one conceives of plot as part of the authorial design (conceptuali-
sation 2b), then it becomes the means through which authors interest
readers, keep their attention as the narrative unfolds and bring it to a
surprising yet possibly satisfying conclusion. Such authorial design pre-
figures the mental operations which lead readers to a meaningful narra-
tive. Hence plot might display itself in the discourse of loquacious nar-
rators and emerge as the artistic feat of a particular author (see Crane
708 Karin Kukkonen

[1950] 1952). Plots can be designed to create elaborate patterns of co-

incidence, reversals and recognitions which lead to readers’ insights
about what is at stake in the narrative (see Aristotle 1996), to present
the different courses a narrative could take in forking plot paths (see
Bordwell 2002) or to lead readers away from their expectations about
narrative processes (see Richardson 1997, 2005).
The basic divergence in the discussion around plot occurs between
critics who consider plot as the fixed pattern that will have emerged at
the end of the narrative (conceptualisation 1) and critics who consider
plot as a dynamic development in the progress of the narrative (concep-
tualisations 2a and 2b). Making the claim that plot is often used exclu-
sively for the summative pattern of a narrative, alternative terms for the
dynamic side of plot have been put forward such as “emplotment”
(“mise en intrigue”; see Ricœur [1983–85] 1984–88) and “progression”
(see Phelan 1989). It seems important, however, to remember that plot
is both the process that facilitates readers’ engagement with a story and
its target, a pattern of meaning (see also Dannenberg 2008: 13).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Plot in Western Poetics and Criticism

Plot as a critical term takes us back to Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle de-

fines mythos, usually translated as “plot” in English, as the arrangement
of events (synthesis/systasis ton pragmaton) (see Poetics 1450a; 1996:
13), and when he lists the features of tragedy, he gives plot the most
important role. Plot allows characters to come to the fore through their
actions, brings about the emotional involvement of readers through re-
versal and recognition and generally constitutes “the soul and (as it
were) source of tragedy” (1996: 12). To fulfil these functions, plots
should be complete, unified and of a magnitude “such as can readily be
held in memory” (14). Plots can be simple or complex, involving rever-
sals (when actions have unintended consequences) and recognitions
(when the proper relationship between characters are disclosed), with
the latter, complex, type of plot being preferred for creating an effect of
surprise and moving audiences to pity and fear.
In his Poetics, Aristotle extends the discussion of plot to genres of
narrative beyond tragedy (in particular, to the epic with The Odyssey).
Later critics developed Aristotle’s principles further for epic, drama and
the novel. The neoclassical criticism of Italy and France in the 16th and
17th centuries demotes plot from the single governing principle of nar-
 Plot 709

rative to one of the features which authors need to master in order to

achieve verisimilitude (vraisemblance). At the same time, their detailed
consideration of Aristotle’s Poetics (and of Horace’s Art of Poetry) di-
versifies our understanding of plot. The French neoclassical critics, for
example, distinguish between the protagonist’s exploits (the “action”)
and their structuration, establishing links that are both necessary and
probable through the author’s “design.” The “fable” of a narrative de-
scribes both its plot and the moral instruction it is supposed to provide
(see e.g. Le Bossu [1675] 1708; Swedenberg 1944). The neoclassical
metaphor of the thread (“file”) of a plot, featuring the knot (“nœud”) of
the complication of the action and its resolution (“dénouement”), leav-
ing no “loose ends” behind, brings greater analytical sharpness to de-
scriptions of plot (see e.g. Scanlan 1977 on Racine; Scherer 1950: 62–
90, 125–148); it also offers colourful descriptions of plots that fail (see
e.g. Scudéry’s remark that the “Gordian knot” of the plot of Corneille’s
Le Cid “needs no Alexander” [1638] 1899: 74; translation by K.K.). An
understanding of different possible kinds of plots emerges for example
in John Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatick Poesie” (1668), where critics
distinguished between the tightly-constructed plots of French tragedy
and the profuse, more varied plots of English drama.
The assessment of plots for the quality of the links they establish,
the moral instruction they provide and the trade-off between coherence
and variability they achieve was to remain a key feature of English lit-
erary criticism until well into the 19th century: Sir Walter Scott de-
scribes (the complex) plot in his review of Austen’s Emma as “the ob-
ject of every skilful novelist” ([1815] 2009: 308); and Fielding’s Tom
Jones, a novel profoundly engaged with the neoclassical heritage, is
praised by Coleridge as “one of the three most perfect plots ever
planned” (see Crane [1950] 1952; the other two plots being Oedipus
Rex and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist).
In the course of the 19th century, character begins to gain prece-
dence over plot as the most important feature of narrative. Plot becomes
associated with the simplicity of the potboiler and the aesthetic short-
sightedness of reader caricatures like Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Earnest who declares, “The good end happily, and
the bad end unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Henry James de-
velops his famous juxtaposition of character and incident (“What is
character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the
illustration of character?” [1884] 1999: 392) against such reductive un-
derstandings of plot. E. M. Forster, even though he provides one of the
key definitions of plot as the causal enchainment of story events, stress-
es the primacy of character. For the genre of the novel in particular,
710 Karin Kukkonen

“we have already decided that Aristotle is wrong” (Forster [1927] 1953:
80). Plot, Forster says, works as a “sort of higher government official”
(81) who constantly calls upon characters to explain themselves. This
goes against the aesthetic ambitions of the novel, with its deep and
complex characters, which need not be consistent if it is sufficiently
convincing (see also Brooks & Warren 1943).

3.2 Plot as Global Structure

Models of the basic structure of plot have aimed to systematise the de-
velopment of narrative interest, such as Freytag’s (1908) pyramid of
rising and falling dramatic action (building on Horace’s remarks on the
five-act structure in Ars Poetica). But with the rise of structuralism,
these efforts were directed towards tracing global sequences of events
in narrative, such as Propp’s ([1928] 1968) thirty-one narrative func-
tions and Todorov’s (1971: 51) scheme of equilibrium – disturbance –
re-establishing the equilibrium. The issue of narrative interest has been
more prominent in the debates around canonicity and breach, tellability
and eventfulness (Baroni → Tellability; Hühn → Event and Eventful-
ness). The perspective on plot as structure, on the other hand, has led to
critics distinguishing between different kinds of plot and their compari-
son. Such typologies of plot differentiate for example between fortunate
and fatal outcomes (Miller 1980), constellations of storyworlds and
characters’ private worlds (Ryan 1991) and patterns of coincidence
(Dannenberg 2008). Kafalenos (2006) diversifies the structuralist idea
of a fixed prototypical sequence of story events in Propp and Todorov
into a more complex and general model of narrative.
In a thematic vein, Frye (1957) establishes a typology of genres and
their plots on the basis of the seasons. More recently, Booker (2004)
has reduced all narrative to seven basic plot structures: “overcoming the
monster,” “rags to riches,” “quest,” “voyage and return,” “comedy,”
“tragedy” and “rebirth.” In both their accounts and their terminology,
Frye and Booker stress the perennial mythic nature of these plots,
which relate to general features of the human experience.
Evolutionary literary criticism has taken a similar approach to plots,
detailing the evolutionary relevance of particular kinds of plot (Boyd
2009; Carroll 1999; Gottschall 2008). Cognitive approaches to narra-
tive have categorised generic plots according to the typical emotions
their narrative structure elicits (Grodal 1997) as well as for the general
emotional patterns they correspond to (Hogan 2003).
As condensations of human experience, such plot types are also
bound to political and social situations which come to the fore in the
 Plot 711

actions that promise (social) success and the options for action that are
open to male and female characters. Abbott’s ([2002] 2008) notion of a
“master plot,” the structure behind social narratives, more commonly
called “metanarratives” (after Lyotard’s “grands récits”), refers to the
political power and seductiveness of particular narrative constellations.
Feminist narratology (see DuPlessis 1985; Gutenberg 2000; Page 2006)
has worked towards plot typologies based on gender issues, especially
the distinction between the romance plot (with its telos of love and mar-
riage) and the quest plot (with its telos of adventure and heroics).

3.3 Plot as Progressive Structuration

The structuration of narrative by plot becomes a topic of inquiry in sev-

eral strands of narratology. In particular, E. M. Forster’s definition of
plot as causally connected story events is foundational for many discus-
sions of the phenomenon. According to Forster, story describes: “The
king died, and then the queen died,” whereas a plot motivates: “The
kind died, and then the queen died of grief” ([1927] 1953: 82). The plot
“demands intelligence and memory” of readers in order to solve the
“mystery” it proposes (83; see also Barthes’ “hermeneutic code” in S/Z
[1970] 1985). The causal aspect of plot has been discussed in several
contexts: Aristotle (1996) distinguishes between necessary and proba-
ble dimensions of causality while Barthes considers the “post hoc, ergo
propter hoc” fallacy (i.e. mistaking sequence for consequence) as the
“mainspring of narrative” ([1966] 1977: 94; see also Pier 2008); Rich-
ardson (1997) distinguishes between kinds of narrative causality con-
nected to different world views. The mainstream Western tradition of
considering plot as a progressing force, as facilitating the mental opera-
tions of readers in narrative, tends to rest this idea on the assumption
that the paradigmatic plot establishes causality (see Wellek & Warren
[1949] 1968).
In response to Propp ([1928]1968) and his reception in structuralism
(see e.g. Todorov 1969 on the Decameron and Barthes [(1966) 1977]
on Fleming’s Goldfinger) Bremond (1973) stresses the importance of
different available possibilities for the connections between plot motifs,
thereby offering an alternative to Propp’s model of a single track of
enchainment. Ryan (1991) brings Bremond’s optional model together
with possible-worlds theory when she suggests that plot tracks the path
by which the textual actual world is realised out of the mental worlds of
characters. In a next step, Dannenberg (2008) identifies two characteris-
tic patterns of such actualizing plot paths: coincidental convergence
(i.e. fortuitously merging plot paths for the characters) and counterfac-
712 Karin Kukkonen

tual divergence (i.e. “what if?” scenarios in which alternative plot op-
tions are explored). Her model combines the heuristic strengths of the
reduction of plot patterns with the importance of considering their un-
folding through the story. Dannenberg also discusses the historical de-
velopments of such constellations of convergence and counterfactuali-
ty.
The Russian formalist term “sjužet” has been related repeatedly to
the Western notion of plot. In the English translation of Šklovskij’s
treatment of sjužet as a (quasi-musical) theme uniting different “motifs-
situations” in narrative, “constitut[ing] a form no less than rhyme”
([1925] 1990: 46), sjužet becomes “plot.” Also in Lotman’s ([1970]
1977) definition of sjužet as providing the transgressive salience that
constitutes a narrative event, the term is translated as “plot.” Chatman’s
(1978: 43) discussion of plot as “story-as-discoursed,” which stresses
that story events are reordered through narrative discourse, draws on
Tomaševskij’s ([1925]1965: 66–68) distinction between fabula (events
in the actual temporal and causal order) and sjužet (events in the order
presented in the narrative, which establishes its own temporal and caus-
al relations) (cf. Schmid 2009; also Tomaševskij’s translators use the
term “plot” for sjužet). For his discussion of film, Bordwell (1985)
pries apart sjužet from style (story presentation in cinematic techniques)
in an important conceptual move which separates plot from discourse.
The distinction between sjužet as story events reordered (i.e. plot) and
sjužet as the rich, detailed texture of the narrative (i.e. discourse) is not
always clearly made, which is partly due to the terminological compli-
cations with Genette’s “histoire” and “discours” (and particularly the
translation of his work into English; Genette [1972] 1980). Between the
Russian, French and Anglo-Saxon traditions of narrative analysis, the
constitution of narrative levels and the role of plot within them has de-
veloped into a rather complex and confusing field (cf. Pier 2003;
Scheffel → Narrative Constitution).
Not only causal but temporal sequence, too, invites structuration of
the plot. Sternberg (1978) distinguishes four such processes of tempo-
rality between plot-type fabula and sjužet (causal) and story-type fabula
and sjužet (additive). His discussion also brings to the fore three cogni-
tive effects of readers’ engagement with this temporal arrangement of
events, which to some extent chart readers’ tracing of the structuration
of the plot: surprise (when readers discover a gap in their hypothesis-
building), curiosity (retrospection; when the gap lies in the antecedent
story events) and suspense (prospection; when the gap lies in the story
events to follow). As he stresses the importance of plot (“intrigue”) for
the development of tension in narrative texts and their effects on read-
 Plot 713

ers, Baroni (2007) expands Sternberg’s model by calling attention to

the contextual knowledge which facilitates gap-filling hypotheses as
well as to the emotional dimension of plot. Models of the unfolding
emotional appraisals of narrative situations (Hogan 2011) and the econ-
omy of emotional arousal in narrative (Warhol 2003) have been devel-
oped more generally in recent cognitive and feminist narratology, thus
providing important complements to the traditional focus on plot as
predominantly concerned with the processing of narrative information.
The plot and its structuration of story events have also been dis-
cussed for the telos they establish, and closure has often been consid-
ered as the most important element in the Aristotelian sequence of be-
ginning, middle and end because everything leads up to it in the arc of
tension which the narrative spreads throughout the plot. From this per-
spective, Kermode defines plot as follows: “The clock’s tick-tock I take
to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes
time by giving it form” (1967: 45). He relates the “tock,” and the im-
portance narratives take from their ending, to death and the notion of
apocalypse. Brooks inscribes the importance of the ending for narrative
dynamics within a psychoanalytical model. Drawing on Freud’s “pleas-
ure principle” and its relation to eros and thanatos, Brooks identifies in
reading a “desire for the end reached only through the at least minimal-
ly complicated detour [i.e. retardations and repetitions], the intentional
deviance, [...] which is the plot of narrative” ([1984] 1992: 104). This
focus on the ending has been criticised as foreshortening the reading
experience (see Phelan 1989: 111), but it also constitutes one way of
thinking about the double nature of plot which, on the one hand, un-
folds as a (temporal, causal) sequence and, on the other hand, is de-
signed to lead to a certain meaningful ending.

3.4 Plot as Authorial Design

R. S. Crane ([1950] 1952) moves the discussion of plot from (what he

perceives as) the neoclassical checklist of the well-formed plot to a bet-
ter understanding of the intrinsic connectedness of plot with other fea-
tures of narrative. He distinguishes between three “synthesizing princi-
ples”: action (a change in the protagonist’s situation brought about by
her actions), character (a change in the moral character of the protago-
nist) and thought (a change in the protagonist’s mode of thinking). Plots
of action, of character and of thought constitute the “working power” of
a narrative, and it is thus, according to Crane, a key requirement of crit-
icism to study the form of plot as it unfolds. Crane’s own analysis of
Tom Jones does not establish a fixed structure but traces how Fielding
714 Karin Kukkonen

builds up the plot of his narrative, taking into account what readers
know at any given point in the narrative and what their expectations
are. Also Brooks and Warren (1943) emphasise the need for such close
attention to authorial design.
Two strands of narratology in particular stress plot’s aspect of au-
thorial design: rhetorical narratology and unnatural narratology.
Rhetorical narratology focuses on how plot is arranged to engage
readers and their judgements as the narrative unfolds. Phelan takes up
Crane’s analytical perspective when he develops his own notion of
“progression” (1989). “Progression” looks in particular at the authorial
design directing readers’ exposure to story events and the temporal se-
quence and structuration through the plot in reading. It describes both
the internal development of a narrative (“textual dynamics”) and the
response of readers as this development unfolds (“readerly dynamics”).
Each of these dynamics applies both to story and discourse levels, leav-
ing Phelan (2007) with four tracks of “progression.” For each of these
dynamics, he distinguishes between positions of beginning, middle and
end. In their contribution to Herman et al. 2012, Phelan and Rabinowitz
confine plot, termed “plot dynamics,” to the story-level in “textual dy-
namics.”
Unnatural narratology focuses on how plot design challenges and
confounds readers’ expectations through the wilful deformation of an-
ticipated plot events, narrative sequences that have to be reassembled
by readers themselves, unnatural temporalities and forking-path plots
(Richardson 2005; Herman et al. 2012; but see Bordwell 2002 on how
forking-path narratives can be naturalised). Both of these strands of
narratology, rhetorical and unnatural, favour the term “progression”
because it seems to be a more adequate way to capture the dynamic na-
ture of plot development, as becomes apparent in Herman et al. (2012:
57–81) in a section devoted to time, plot and progression. However,
Warhol’s discussion (in the same collection) of the gender implications
of plot as a structure or constellation of options for action and roles un-
derlines the continuing importance of considering all aspects of plot.

3.5 Plot beyond Fictional Narrative

Philosophically inflected treatments of plot stress the interaction be-

tween plot as structure and structuration and its importance for shaping
human thought. Discussing Ricœur and White, Dorrit Cohn highlights
the “signposts of fictionality” when she differentiates between histori-
cal narrative, which “emplots” the actual events, and fictional narrative,
which is simply “plotted” without reference to actual events (1990:
 Plot 715

781). White defines plot as “a structure of relationships by which the

events contained in the account are endowed with a meaning by being
identified as part of a whole” (1981: 9). According to White, this dou-
ble nature of plot relates the (historical) text to the social and moral sys-
tem it endorses and which it reveals to be already immanent in reality
(19). Ricœur ([1983–85] 1984–88) creates a comprehensive model of
the hermeneutic loop between designing and understanding narrative on
the basis of plot. The experience of time, according to Ricœur, needs to
be articulated in narrative through the process of emplotment (“mise en
intrigue”). Emplotment describes how the everyday experience of mi-
mesis 1 (“prefigured time”) is integrated—structurally, symbolically
and temporally—into the meaningful narrative constellations of mime-
sis 2 (“configured time”). The narrative design of mimesis 2, “the king-
dom of the as if,” is then the basis of the hermeneutic process which
translates back into a refined grasp of the real world, mimesis 3. In
Ricœur’s model, the process of emplotment facilitates the transitions
between the levels of mimesis. The social and political dimension of
such “emplotment” is inscribed in Ricœur’s model (Abbott → Narrativ-
ity). Ricœur is careful to stress that he is interested in the dynamics of
plot rather than in its fixed structure, i.e. the pattern that will have
emerged at the end of the narrative; however, his culturally embedded
model also offers a framework for how masterplots can emerge and
why authors might draw on the sedimented configurations of estab-
lished plot patterns as short-cuts to cultural relevance.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

At the core of narrative inquiry since Aristotle, reconceptualised and

refined (sometimes beyond recognition) since, it seems that there might
not be a lot left to say about plot. Nevertheless, plot remains a key con-
stituent of narrative. As new kinds of narrative, such as the large narra-
tives of TV series and serialised comic books or the ludic interactions
of computer games, gain cultural relevance, their plot structures and
structurations need to be explored (Neitzel → Narrativity of Computer
Games).
The mutual dependence between plot and the constitution of the fic-
tional world, already at the core of the plot concept of Dannenberg
(2008), can be reconsidered from the perspective of cognitive probabil-
ity theory (Kukkonen forthcoming). Plot is understood as part of a
“probability design” in which the pacing of how story events are re-
vealed to readers and the verisimilitude of the fictional world form a
716 Karin Kukkonen

feedback loop that leads to the (sometimes) profound change in what

readers accept as likely outcomes between the beginning and the end of
a narrative.
Introducing the notion of “negative plotting,” Lanser (2011) outlines
how competing plots, “one shadowing the other,” become meaningful
in their mutual contrast, negotiate different narrative perspectives and
broker the struggle for interpretive dominance. She distinguishes be-
tween explicit, implicit and imposed kinds of negative plotting.
Despite the rich repertoire of narratives which play with different
plot types, or reject a well-wrought plot altogether, and apart from un-
natural narratology and a few forays into plot tricks and plot holes (see
Ryan 2009) as well as plotless narratives (see Pettersson 2012), most
critical attention has been directed to successful and prototypical plots.
The dark underbelly of negative plots, failed plots and plotless narra-
tives offer a vast, yet largely untapped area open for narratological in-
quiry.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter ([2002] 2008). The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP.
Aristotle (1996). Poetics. Trans. M. Heath. London: Penguin.
Baroni, Raphaël (2007). La tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris:
Seuil.
Barthes, Roland ([1966] 1977). “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.”
R. Barthes. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 79–124.
– ([1970] 1985). S/Z: An Essay. New York: Hill and Wang.
Booker, Christopher (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London:
Continuum.
Bordwell, David (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge.
– (2002). “Film Futures.” SubStance 31.1, 88–104.
Boyd, Brian (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap.
Bremond, Claude (1973). Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil.
Brooks, Cleanth & Robert Penn Warren (1943). Understanding Fiction. New York:
Crofts.
Brooks, Peter ([1984] 1992). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard UP.
Carroll, Joseph (1999). “The Deep Structure of Literary Representations.” Evolution
and Human Behavior 20.3, 159–173. doi:10.1016/S1090-5138(99)00004-5.
 Plot 717

Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Cohn, Dorrit (1990). “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” Poetics
Today 11.4, 775–804.
Crane, R. S. ([1950] 1952). “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones.” R. S.
Crane. Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 62–
93.
Dannenberg, Hilary P. (2008). Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and
Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Dryden, John (1668). “Essay of Dramatick Poesie.” J. Lynch (ed.). New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP. Accessed Dec. 19, 2013.
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/drampoet.html
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau (1985). Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of
Twentieth-century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Forster, E. M. ([1927] 1953). Aspects of the Novel. London: E. Arnold.
Freytag, Gustav (1908). Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic
Composition and Art. 4th ed. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co.
Frye, Northrop (1957). Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Gottschall, Jonathan (2008). The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of
Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Grodal, Torben Kragh (1997). Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feel-
ings and Cognition. Oxford: Clarendon P.
Gutenberg, Andrea. (2000). Mögliche Welten: Plot und Sinnstiftung im englischen
Frauenroman. Heidelberg: C. Winter.
Herman, David et al. (2012). Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates.
Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Hogan, Patrick Colm (2003). The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Hu-
man Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
– (2011). Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln/ Lon-
don: U of Nebraska P.
James, Henry ([1884] 1999). “The Art of Fiction.” Literature Online. Accessed Dec.
19, 2013.
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:lion&rft_id=xri:lion:ft:pr:Z000731381:0
Kafalenos, Emma (2006). Narrative Causalities. Ohio State UP.
Kermode, Frank (1967). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Ox-
ford: Oxford UP.
Kukkonen, Karin (forthcoming). “Bayesian Narrative: Probability, Plot and the Shape
of the Fictional World.” Anglia.
Lanser, Susan (2011). “‘The Shadow Knows’: Negative Plotting and Feminist
Thought.” Keynote Lecture, 2nd ENN Conference, Kolding.
Le Bossu, René ([1675] 1708). Traité du poëme épique. Paris. Electronic resource.
BNF: Gallica. Last accessed 29 Jan 2014.http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148-
/bpt6k6275412r.r=+Le+Bossu%2C+Ren%C3%A9.langEN
718 Karin Kukkonen

Lotman, Juri M. ([1970] 1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P.
Miller, Nancy K. (1980). The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English
Novel, 1722-1782. New York: Columbia UP.
OED Online (2013) “Plot, n.” Oxford UP. Electronic Resource. Accessed July 31,
2013. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/145915
Page, Ruth E. (2006). Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pettersson, Bo (2012). “What Happens When Nothing Happens: Interpreting Narrative
Technique in the Plotless Novels of Nicholson Baker.” M. Lehtimäki et al. (eds.).
Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 43–56.
Phelan, James (1989). Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the
Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
– (2007). Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical The-
ory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Pier, John (2003). “On the Semiotic Parameters of Discourse: A Critique of Story and
Discourse.” T. Kindt & H.-H. Müller (eds.). What is Narratology? Questions and
Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: de Gruyter, 73–99.
– (2008). “After This, Therefore Because of This.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa
(eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 109–140.
Propp, Vladimir J. ([1928] 1968). Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: U of Texas P.
Richardson, Brian (1997). Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Nar-
rative. Newark: U of Delaware P; London: Associated UP.
– (2005). “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression
and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses.” J. Phelan & P. Rabinowitz (eds.). A
Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Electronic Version. Ac-
cessed July 31, 2013. doi: 10.1111/b.9781405114769.2005.00012.x
Ricœur, Paul ([1983–85] 1984–88). Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Chicago/London: U of
Chicago P.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
– (2009). “Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design.” Narrative 17.1,
56–75. doi:10.1353/nar.0.0016.
Scanlan, Timothy M. (1977). “Racine’s ‘Bajazet’: ‘Nœuds’ and ‘Dénouement’.” South
Atlantic Bulletin 42.4, 13–20. doi:10.2307/3199021.
Scherer, Jacques (1950). La Dramaturgie classique en France. Paris: Nizet.
Schmid, Wolf (2009). “‘Fabel’ und ‘Sujet’.” W. Schmid (ed.). Slavische Erzähltheorie,
Russische und tschechische Ansätze. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–45.
Scott, Walter ([1815] 2009). “Review of Emma in Quarterly Review, Oct 1815.” C.
Nixon (ed.). Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688-
1815. Peterborough: Broadview P, 306–313.
Scudéry, Georges de ([1638] 1899). “Observations sur Le Cid” A. Gasté (ed.). La Que-
relle du Cid: Pièces et Pamphlets. Paris: Welter, 71–111.
 Plot 719

Šklovskij, Viktor (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1925] 1990). “The Relationship between De-
vices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style.” V. Š. Theory of Prose.
Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 15–51.
Sternberg, Meir (1978). Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins UP.
Swedenberg, H. T. (1944). The Theory of the Epic in England, 1650-1800. Berkeley: U
of California P.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1969). “Structural Analysis of Narrative.” NOVEL: A Forum on
Fiction 3.1, 70–76. doi:10.2307/1345003.
– (1971). Poétique de la prose. Paris: Seuil.
Tomaševskij, Boris (Tomashevsky) ([1925] 1965). “Thematics.” L. T. Lemon & M. J.
Reis (eds.). Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
61–95.
Warhol, Robyn R. (2003). Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture
Forms. Ohio State UP.
Wellek, René & Austin Warren ([1949] 1968). Theory of Literature. London: Peregrine
Books.
White, Hayden (1981). “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” W.
J. T. Mitchell (ed.). On Narrative. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1–23.

5.2 Further Reading

Abbott, H. Porter (2007). “Story, plot, and narration.” D. Herman (ed.). Cambridge
Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 39–51.
Bordwell, David (1988). The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Pro-
duction to 1960. London: Routledge.
Dannenberg, Hilary (2005). “Plot.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 435–439.
Dipple, Elizabeth (1970). Plot. London: Methuen.
Sternberg, Meir (2008). “If-Plots: Narrativity and the Law-Code.” J. Pier & J. Á. Gar-
cía Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 29–107.
 Poetic or Ornamental Prose
Wolf Schmid

1 Definition

The term poetic or ornamental prose denotes the result of an over-

determination of the narrative text with specifically poetic devices such
as rhythmicizing and sound repetition.

2 Explication

Such overdetermination generally occurs with the creation of thematic

and formal equivalence, i.e. with the strengthening of the paradigmatic
order or even the dominance of non-temporal over temporal linking
(Schmid → Non-temporal Linking in Narration). In ornamental prose it
is as though the author, behind the narrator’s back, so to speak, were to
cast a net of formal and thematic linkages over the text, overruling the
narrator and his point of view and conferring on the text a poetic fabric
with the effect of neutralizing all individual linguistic points of view.
Such poetization of narrative takes place during epochs in which the
poetic pole dominates, i.e. when the equivalence principle, characteris-
tic of poetry (Jakobson 1960), tends to extend its reach into the field of
narrative prose.

3 History of the Phenomenon and of its Study

3.1 Manifestations in Various Literatures

In Russian literature between 1890 and 1930, ornamental prose took the
lead among narrative genres. Originally used as a negative label for the
plotless prose of Pil’njak’s novel The Naked Year (1921), “ornamental
prose” became a neutral term. So stated Šklovskij in [1924] 1991:
“Contemporary Russian prose is to a large extent ornamental in charac-
 Poetic or Ornamental Prose 721

ter.” Many of the later “socialist realists” also paid homage to ornamen-
talism in their earlier work, during the 1920s.
Whereas realism and its world view, shaped by the empirical scienc-
es, found their expression in the hegemony of “narrative art,” post-
realist modernism tended to generalize the poetic principle, realized as
“verbal art” (on this dichotomy, cf. Hansen-Löve 1978; Schmid 2008).
In contrast to realist prose, characterized by consequent perspectiviza-
tion, psychological motivation, and stylistic diversification, verbal art
unfolds the archaic, mythic-unconscious imagination. In texts of verbal
art, the difference of points of view is abolished, the psychological mo-
tivation is, at best, weakened, and the style is homogenized in a poetic
way.
Being a “hypertrophy of literariness” (Koževnikova 1971, 115–
117), Russian ornamental prose in the 1920s paradoxically tended to
combine with the opposite, or “hypertrophy of characterization,” i.e.
skaz (Schmid → Skaz), and this led to a highly complex structured hy-
brid texture.
In English literature, forms of ornamental prose can be found as an
ingredient in D. H. Lawrence’s novels The Rainbow (1915) and Women
in Love (1920). A high-water mark for the poetization of narrative
prose is Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). In these examples, how-
ever, perspectivization remains active.
In French literature the most comparable example is the “poème en
prose” starting with Baudelaire. But whereas this hybrid genre ultimate-
ly remains poetry written in prose form, ornamental prose incorporating
poetic devices remains prose narrative.
In German literature, the high point of this type of narrative, charac-
terized in German philology as “lyrical,” “poetical,” or “rhythmical,”
coincides with the epoch of symbolism, at a time when the genre sys-
tem was dominated by the poetic pole. Ornamental traces are borne par-
ticularly by the narrative prose of lyricists such as Stefan George, Hugo
von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke. An example of German
ornamentalism is Rilke’s The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Chris-
topher Rilke (1906). This text, in “verse-infected prose,” as Rilke later
called it, is an extreme case of poetic stylization of a narrative text, with
its dense instrumentation of sounds in which rhythmicizing, alliteration,
assonance and paronomasias play a large part. In the Rilke text, one can
observe the aperspectivism of ornamental prose and weakening of the
expressive function. The ascription of text segments to the narratorial or
figural perspective is barely perceptible. This is because the opposition
of narrator’s text and characters’ text is, when at all present, only weak-
ly marked, since overdetermining ornamentalization largely abolishes
722 Wolf Schmid

the function of ideological and linguistic expression of narrating and

speaking subjects. The narrative text directs the reader’s attention to-
ward the authorial poetic principle, which organizes both of its two
components in the same way. This principle is not the expression of
realistic, objective thinking, but rather evokes a poetic, mythical mode
of thought.

3.2 Ornamentalism and Mythical Thought

Ornamentalism is an artistic icon of myth whereby poetic experience

and mythical thought are assumed to be in close harmony. What makes
poetic and mythical thought analogous is their common tendency to
abolish the non-motivation of signs adhered to in realism. The word,
which in the realistic approach to language is only an arbitrary symbol
determined by convention, tends to become, in ornamentalism as well
as in mythical thought, an icon, an image of its own meaning. The
iconicity that poetry imparts to prose partakes of magical speaking in
myth. There is no mediative convention between name and thing, not
even a relationship of reference or representation: the name does not
mean the thing, it is the thing (Cassirer [1925] 1971: 38). The pre-
semiotic approach of myth to language and the mythical identification
of word and thing are displayed in ornamental prose as a result of the
narrative text’s tendency to favor iconicity and literalize tropes and im-
ages, as well as to take proverbs and sayings literally (Hansen-Löve
1982).
The iconicity of ornamental prose results from co-occurrence or
isotopy between the orders of discourse and story. This means that eve-
ry equivalence of the signantia suggests an analogous or contrasting
equivalence of the signata (Jakobson 1960). Paronomasia becomes the
basic form, a sound repetition that produces an occasional relationship
of meaning between words that, in themselves, have neither a genetic,
etymological nor semantic connection. It is in paronomasia that the law
of mythical thought, as formulated by Cassirer ([1925] 1971: 67), takes
effect, according to which “every perceptible similarity is an immediate
expression of an identity of essence.” The tendency toward iconicity,
indeed toward the reification of all signs, ultimately results in a relaxa-
tion of the border, strictly drawn in realist narrative, between words and
things, between discourse and story. Ornamental prose forms crossing
points between the two levels: metamorphoses of pure sound patterns
into characters and objects (the best examples of this are provided by
the prose of Andrej Belyj, particularly his novel Petersburg [1916]; cf.
 Poetic or Ornamental Prose 723

Holthusen 1979), and the narrative transformation of verbal figures into

sujet motifs (Puškin’s Tales of Belkin [1830]; cf. Schmid 1991 [2013]).

3.3 Ornamentalizing Prose or Ornamental Narrative

The ornamentalization of prose inevitably results in the weakening of

narrativity. The restriction of narrativity can go so far that no eventful
story is formed at all, so that the text merely denotes fragments of a sto-
ry whose interrelations are no longer narrative-syntagmatic but only
poetic-paradigmatic, produced in line with principles of association,
similarity and contrast. In purely ornamental prose, a story is no longer
being told, as is the case in Andrej Belyj’s “Symphonies” (1902–04)
which, according to Belyj himself ([1934] 1969: 228–234), were in-
spired by the “decorative ornamentality” of Nikolaj Gogol’s prose and
by the “musical prose” and “Asian style” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. In
purely ornamental prose, the techniques of iteration and equivalence
remain the only factors of the text’s cohesion and thus serve as decisive
guarantors of thematic coherence and crucial semantic operators.
Ornamental prose does not attain great semantic complexity in the
total dissolution of its narrative substratum, but rather there where par-
adigmatization encounters the successful resistance of an eventful nar-
rative. This intermediate type can be called ornamentalizing prose or
ornamental narrative (Schmid 1992a). When poetic techniques con-
structively reshape the narrative, the possibilities of meaning in the two
text types enrich each other by way of mutual determination and rela-
tivization. On the one hand, the poetic links which, as it were, draw a
net over the narrative substratum disclose new aspects and relationships
among the narrated situations, characters and actions, while on the oth-
er hand, the archaic, imaginative thought of verbal art, where it is inte-
grated into a fictional-narrative context, is subordinated to perspectivi-
zation and psychological motivation. Before the heyday of hypertrophic
ornamentalization (Belyj), we find this intermediate type in the
postrealist prose of Anton Čexov, and after that in the prose of the
1920s (Evgenij Zamjatin, Isaak Babel’). Russian ornamental narrative
uses the hybridization of verbal art and narrative art for the modeling of
a complex, simultaneously archaic and modern image of man.

3.4 History of the Concept and its Study

Poetic or ornamental prose was studied intensely by the Russian for-

malists. Žirmunskij ([1921] 1962) called it “poetic prose” or “purely
esthetic prose,” and Tynjanov ([1922] 1977) “poeticized prose.” Only
724 Wolf Schmid

in Šklovskij ([1924] 1991: 180) do we find the term “ornamental

prose,” defined by him as an art where “the imagery prevails over the
plot.” A term used in Western Slavic philology is “dynamic prose”
(Struve 1951; Oulanoff 1966: 53). Nevertheless, in Russia, the prob-
lematic term “ornamental prosa” has become conventional and is now
generally accepted. For the equivalent phenomenon in Western litera-
tures, however, one should prefer the term “poetic prose.”
The most important contributions to the study of poetic or ornamen-
tal prose, by Koževnikova (1971, 1976), reopened examination of a
phenomenon which, by then, had become politically unwelcome in the
Soviet Union. Koževnikova explored the structures of ornamental
prose, paying particular attention to the relationship between ornamen-
tal prose and skaz. Levin (1981) examined the position of this “non-
classical” type of narration in the history of Russian literary language
from the viewpoint of linguistics and stylistics. Jensen (1984) studied
the relationship between the archaic traits of ornamentalism and analo-
gous trends in avant-garde culture. Szilárd (1986) stressed the im-
portance of the symbolist tradition and investigated the typical themes
and world views of ornamental prose. Schmid (1992b) outlined the ho-
mology between ornamental prose, mythical thought and subliminal
structures, and he demonstrated (1992c) the connection between orna-
mental structure and archaic world view using the example of Zam-
jatin’s story “The Flood” (1929).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

To date, the spread of ornamentalism in various cultures and literatures

remains unexplored. Is the development of this type of prose peculiar to
Russian literature, or has the lack of corresponding research outside
Russian scholarship made it seem that other literatures are less affected
by the poetization of story and discourse?

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Belyj, Andrej ([1934] 1969). Masterstvo Gogolja. München: Fink.

Cassirer, Ernst ([1925] 1971). The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. 2: Mythical
Thought. New Haven: Yale UP.
 Poetic or Ornamental Prose 725

Hansen-Löve, Aage (1978). Der russische Formalismus. Wien: Verlag der öster-
reichischen Akad. der Wissenschaften.
– (1982). “Die ‘Realisierung’ und ‘Entfaltung’ semantischer Figuren zu Texten.”
Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 10, 197–252.
Holthusen, Johannes (1979). “Andrej Belyj: Peterburg.” B. Zelinsky (ed.). Der russi-
sche Roman. Düsseldorf: Bagel, 265–289.
Jakobson, Roman (1960). “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Th. A. Sebeok
(ed.). Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 350–377.
Jensen, Peter Alberg (1984). “The Thing as Such: Boris Pil’njak’s ‘Ornamentalism’.”
Russian Literature 16, 81–100.
Koževnikova, Natal’ja (1971). “O tipach povestvovanija v sovetskoj proze.” Voprosy
jazyka sovremennoj russkoj literatury. Moskva: Nauka, 97–163.
– (1976). “Iz nabljudenij nad neklassičeskoj (‘ornamental’noj’) prozoj.” Izvestija
AN SSSR. Serija literatury i jazyka 35, 55–66.
Levin, V. (1981). “‘Neklassičeskie’ tipy povestvovanija načala XX veka v istorii russ-
kogo literaturnogo jazyka.” Slavica Hierosolymitana 5–6, 245–275.
Oulanoff, Hongor (1966). The Serapion Brothers. Theory and Practice. ’s-Gravenhage:
Mouton.
Schmid, Wolf ([1991] 2013). Proza Puškina v poėtičeskom pročtenii. ‘Povesti Belkina’
i ‘Pikovaja dama’. S-Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo S-Peterburgskogo gos. un-ta.
– (1992a). Ornamentales Erzählen in der russischen Moderne. Čechov—Babel—
Zamjatin. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang.
– (1992b). “Ornament—poėzija—mif—podsoznanie.” V. Š. Proza kak poėzija.
Puškin—Dostoevskij—Čexov—avangard. S.-Peterburg: Inapress, 297–308.
– (1992c). “Ornamental’nyj tekst i mifičeskoe myšlenie v rasskaze E. I. Zamjatina
‘Navodnenie’.” V. Š. Proza kak poėzija. Puškin—Dostoevskij—Čexov—
avangard. S.-Peterburg: Inapress, 328–344.
– (2008). “‘Wortkunst’ und ‘Erzählkunst’ im Lichte der Narratologie.” R. Grübel &
W. Schmid (eds.). Wortkunst—Erzählkunst—Bildkunst. Festschrift für Aage A.
Hansen-Löve. München: Sagner, 23–37.
Šklovskij, Viktor ([1924] 1991). “Bely and Ornamental Prose.” Theory of Prose. Tr. by
B. Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 171–188.
Struve, Gleb (1951). Soviet Russian Literature 1917–1950. Norman: U of Oklahoma P.
Szilárd, Léna (1986). “Ornamental’nost’/ornamentalizm.” Russian Literature 19, 65–78.
Tynjanov, Jurij ([1922] 1977). “‘Serapionovy brat’ja.’ Al’manax I.” Ju. Tynjanov.
Poėtika. Istorija literatury. Kino. Moskva: Nauka, 132–136.
Žirmunskij, Viktor ([1921] 1962) “Zadači poėtiki.” V. Žirmunskij. Voprosy teorii liter-
atury. Stat’i 1916–1926. Reprint: ’s-Gravenhage: Mouton 1962, 17–88.

5.2 Further Reading

Browning, Gary (1979). “Russian Ornamental Prose.” Slavic and East European Jour-
nal 23, 346–352.
Carden, Patricia (1976). “Ornamentalism and Modernism.” G. Gibian & H. W. Tjalsma
(eds.). Russian Modernism. Culture and Avantgarde. 1900–1930. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 49–64.
 Possible Worlds
Marie-Laure Ryan

1 Definition

The concept of possible worlds (henceforth PW), loosely inspired by

Leibniz’ philosophy, was developed in the second half of the 20th cen-
tury by philosophers of the analytic school (Kripke, Lewis, Hintikka
[1989], Plantinga [1976], Rescher) as a means to solve problems in
formal semantics. These problems are the truth conditions of counter-
factual statements (“If a couple hundred more Florida voters had voted
for Gore in 2000, the Iraq war would not have happened”) and of sen-
tences modified by modal operators expressing necessity and possibil-
ity (hence the close relationship between possible worlds theory and
modal logic). Other modal systems have been built around operators
expressing what is known as “propositional attitudes” such as beliefs,
obligation, and desires. Starting in the mid-70s, PW theory was adapted
to the fictional worlds of narrative by the philosopher David Lewis, as
well as by a number of literary theorists, including Eco, Pavel, Doležel,
and Ryan. Through the questions they ask, PW-inspired approaches
have also influenced critics such as McHale, Margolin, Palmer, and
Dannenberg. A thorough exposition of the philosophical applications of
the notion of possible worlds, as well as a critique of the use of the con-
cept by literary theorists, can be found in Ronen 1994.

2 Explication

The foundation of PW theory is the idea that reality—conceived as the

sum of the imaginable rather than as the sum of what exists physical-
ly—is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct worlds. This uni-
verse is hierarchically structured by the opposition of one element,
which functions as the center of the system, to all the other members of
the set (Kripke 1963). The central element is known as the “actual” or
“real” world (henceforth AW) while the other members of the system
are alternative, or non-actual possible worlds (APWs). For a world to
 Possible Worlds 727

be possible, it must be linked to the actual world by a relation of acces-

sibility. The boundaries of the possible depend on the particular inter-
pretation given to this notion of accessibility. The most common inter-
pretation associates possibility with logical laws: every world that
respects the principles of non-contradiction and of the excluded middle
is a possible world. On the basis of this model, we can define a proposi-
tion as necessary if it is true in all worlds linked to the actual world (in-
cluding this actual world itself); as possible if it is true in only some of
these worlds; as impossible (e.g., contradictory) if it is false in all of
them; and as true, without being necessary, if it is verified in the actual
world of the system but not in some other possible world.
The major question raised by this model concerns the nature of the
properties that make one of the worlds of the system the actual world.
Two main theories of actuality have been proposed. According to the
first, which could be called the absolutist view, the actual world differs
in ontological status from merely possible ones in that this world alone
presents an autonomous existence (Rescher [1973] 1979). All other
worlds are the product of a mental activity, such as dreaming, imagin-
ing, foretelling, promising, or storytelling. The other interpretation,
proposed by Lewis (1973: 84–91), regards actuality as an indexical no-
tion with variable reference, similar in this respect to linguistic expres-
sions such as “I,” “you,” “here,” “now.” According to Lewis, “the actu-
al world” means “the world where I am situated,” and all PWs are
actualized from the point of view of their inhabitants. This view, known
as “modal realism,” makes a distinction between “real” and “actual”:
for Lewis, all possible worlds are real in the sense that they exist inde-
pendently of whether or not a member of AW imagines them, but only
one world can be actual from a given point of view.

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Applications of PW theory to narrative fall into two main categories:

the theory of fiction, and the semantic description of storyworlds (or
rather, narrative universes), whether fictional or not. The discussion
that follows focuses on literary, i.e. language-based narrative and fic-
tion, but the observations and concepts developed by the various advo-
cates of PW theory can now be seen as equally valid for narratives real-
ized in other media such as drama, film, comics, or video games.
728 Marie-Laure Ryan

3.1 Pioneering Scholars

3.1.1 David Lewis

In a 1978 article titled “Truth in Fiction,” Lewis applied PW theory to

the problem of defining under what conditions a statement concerning a
fictional world which is not necessarily included in the text, such as
“Emma Bovary despised her husband,” can be regarded as true. He de-
fines fiction as stories “told as true” of a world other than the one we
regard as actual. Fictional stories differ from counterfactual statements
in that they are told from the point of view of an APW which readers
regard as the actual world in make-believe, while counterfactuals de-
scribe an APW—say, the world in which Al Gore is elected US presi-
dent in 2000—from the point of view of AW, acknowledging their al-
ternative status through markers of irreality such as if… then operators,
or the conditional mode. Despite this difference, however, Lewis adapts
his account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals to the case of fic-
tion. According to him, a statement in the form of “if p then q” is true
for an evaluator if the APW where both p and q are true is closer, on
balance, to AW than the world where p is true and q is false. For in-
stance, people will agree with the statement “If a couple hundred more
Florida voters had voted for Gore in 2000, the Iraq war would not have
happened” if they think that George Bush was personally responsible
for the Iraq war; on the other hand, if they believe that Al Gore would
also have declared war on Iraq, they will think that the world where (a)
“a couple hundred more Florida voters vote for Gore in 2000” (thereby
electing Gore US President) and (b) “the Iraq war happens” is closer to
AW, and they will regard the counterfactual as false. According to
Lewis, this criterion can also be applied to statements about fictional
worlds (Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Factual Narration). For instance,
“Emma Bovary admired her husband” is false because a world where a
woman behaves like Emma Bovary and admires her husband is far
more remote from AW in its human psychology than the world where
Emma despises her husband.
This analysis has important consequences for literary theory for the
following reasons: (1) it regards statements about fiction as capable of
truth and falsity, against the formerly prevalent views among philoso-
phers that they are either false (for lack of referent) or indeterminate;
(2) it assumes that the real world serves as a model for the mental con-
struction of fictional storyworlds; but (3) it does not limit the fictional
text to an imitation of reality, maintaining, on the contrary, that texts
are free to construct fictional worlds that differ from AW. Readers im-
 Possible Worlds 729

agine fictional worlds as the closest possible to AW, and they only
make changes that are mandated by the text. For instance, if a fiction
mentions a winged horse, readers will imagine a creature that looks like
real world horses in every respect except for the fact that this creature
has wings. Ryan (1991) calls this interpretive rule “the principle of
minimal departure,” and Walton (1990) calls it “the reality principle.”

3.1.2 Thomas Pavel

Pavel was the first literary critic to understand the potential of the con-
cept of PW for narrative theory. In his 1975 article “Possible Worlds in
Literary Semantics” (further developed in his 1986 book Fictional
Worlds), he sees in the concept of PW a way to put an end to the struc-
turalist moratorium on questions of reference. In creating what is objec-
tively an APW, the literary text establishes for the reader a new actual
world which imposes its own laws on the surrounding system, thereby
defining its own horizon of possibilities. In order to become immersed
in this world, the reader must adopt a new ontological perspective,
thereby entailing a new model of what exists and what does not. “In
this precise sense,” writes Pavel, “one can say that literary worlds are
autonomous.” Any comparison between art and reality is legitimate but
“logically secondary to the unique ontological perspective posited by
the work” (1975: 175). By placing fictional worlds at the center of its
modal system, the literary semantics envisioned by Pavel avoids the
extreme isolationism imposed by the structuralist and deconstructionist
doctrine of textual immanence without falling into the pitfall of a naïve
realism which would reduce fictional worlds to representations of the
actual world. While naïve realism (a stance that is more a strawman
than a view which is actually defended) would divide the fictional text
into propositions that are true or false with respect to AW and use this
truth value as a criterion of validity, a literary semantics based on the
concept of PW regards all propositions originating in a fictional world
as constitutive of this world and therefore as automatically true in it.
(Under this view, an exception must be made for the declarations of
unreliable narrators.) But Pavel also warns against a “segregationist”
view that erects an impermeable boundary between fictional worlds and
the actual world, for such a boundary would prevent fictions from
providing insights about our world, thereby depriving literature of any
ethical, existential, political, or didactic value. Moreover, since, accord-
ing to PW theory, the truth value of a proposition can be evaluated with
respect to different worlds, nothing prevents readers from assessing the
truth within AW of ersatz propositions stripped of their mark of origin.
730 Marie-Laure Ryan

In a work like Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann, for instance, we are

entitled to regard the musicological discussions as (potentially) reliable
information about aspects of AW with which we are unfamiliar. It is the
possibility of varying the reference world of propositions that enables
fictions to make relevant statements about the actual world. Yet while
fiction can provide valuable insights about reality, literary characters
such as Don Quixote and Emma Bovary exemplify the danger of uncrit-
ically inverting minimal departure and constructing reality as the clos-
est possible to a fictional world.

3.1.3 Lubomír Doležel

In a series of articles starting in 1976 (1976a, 1976b) and culminating

in the 1998 book Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Doležel
proposes a conception of fictional semantics quite different from the
view that emerges from Lewis’ analysis of truth in fiction and from its
implication, the principle of minimal departure. While minimal depar-
ture assumes that fictional entities possess the same ontological fullness
as real objects, Doležel invokes PW theory in support of a semantic
model that stresses the radical incompleteness of fictional worlds: be-
cause it is impossible for the human mind to imagine an object (much
less a world) in all of its properties, every fictional world presents areas
of radical indeterminacy. It is a waste of time to ask how many children
Lady Macbeth had, because the number of her children is never speci-
fied. As can be seen from this example, such a lack of information con-
stitutes an ontological gap inherent to fictional worlds. (Minimal depar-
ture, by contrast, would regard Lady Macbeth as compatible with many
different worlds: one in which she had a single child, another in which
she had two children, and so on, up to the number of children a woman
can be reasonably expected to bear. It would also regard the number of
her children as unknowable information.) Doležel’s conception of liter-
ary meaning is based on an opposition between what he calls an “exten-
sional” and an “intensional” (not to be confused with intentional) narra-
tive world. The extensional narrative world consists in a set of
“compossible narrative agents” (i.e., agents created by the same text)
together with the actions and properties ascribed to these agents. The
intensional narrative world is the sum of all the meanings expressed by
the text; for instance, “Hamlet” and “the Prince of Denmark” refer to
the same individual in the extensional narrative world, but they carry
different intensional meanings. (One recognizes here Frege’s opposi-
tion between sense and reference.) The reader passes from the inten-
sional to the extensional narrative world by assuming the existence of
 Possible Worlds 731

an “intensional function” that links referring expressions to fictional

existents. The relation between the intensional and the extensional nar-
rative world determines what Doležel calls the “texture” of the text.
Against theories that advocate the filling in of the gaps in the text,
Doležel stresses the aesthetic importance of the strategies of showing
and hiding that regulate the disclosure of narrative information. It is not
insignificant, for instance, that Goethe’s Elective Affinities “suppresses
the material and organic levels and constructs explicitly only the mental
and spiritual levels” (1998: 184). While Doležel’s model accounts
much better than theories based on minimal departure for the aesthetic
significance of the formal features of the text, it leaves unresolved the
location of the incompleteness of fictional objects: is it a feature of the
extensional or of the intensional narrative world? Despite the lack of
information concerning the realm of the physical, readers do not imag-
ine Goethe’s characters as disembodied minds floating ghostlike in the
fictional world. While Doležel’s stated purpose is to prevent a reduction
of fictional worlds to “the uniform structure of the complete, Carnapian
world” (1998: 171), one could argue that it is by assuming the com-
pleteness of the extensional world that the gaps in its representation
(i.e., in the intensional world) become noticeable and acquire signifi-
cance.
Another aspect of narrative semantics that Doležel (1976b) explores
with the help of PW theory is the typology of plot. He proposes a clas-
sificatory system based on various possible interpretations of modal
logic: the alethic system, based on the operators possible, impossible,
and necessary; the deontic system (permitted, prohibited, and obligato-
ry); the axiological system (good, bad, indifferent); and the epistemic
system (known, unknown, believed). Doležel links each of these sys-
tems to a different type of plot. The alethic system is shown to be re-
sponsible for the division of the population of fictional worlds into
groups of different abilities (gods versus humans, the seeing among the
blind, etc.), as well as for the categorization of fictional worlds as a
whole as realist, fantastic, or nonsensical. Constraints of the deontic
type generate plots of obligation, crime, and punishment; the axiologi-
cal system underlies stories of quest and moral dilemma; and the ma-
nipulation of the categories of the epistemic system produces mystery
stories, narratives of learning (the Bildungsroman), comedies of errors,
as well as the all-important function of deceit.
732 Marie-Laure Ryan

3.1.4 Umberto Eco

Developing a very short but dense and highly influential article by

Vaina (1977), Eco regards the semantic domain of narrative not as a
possible world, but as a universe made up of a constellation of possible
worlds. A literary text, he writes, is not a single possible world, but “a
machine for producing possible worlds (of the fabula, of the characters
within the fabula, and of the reader outside the fabula” (1984: 246; ital-
ics original). These three types of worlds can be defined as follows:

1. The possible worlds imagined and asserted by the author. These

worlds correspond to all the states of the fabula.
2. The possible subworlds that are imagined, believed, wished,
and so on by the characters of the fabula.
3. The possible worlds that, at every disjunction of probability, the
Model Reader imagines, believes, wishes, and so on, and that
further states of the fabula must either approve or disapprove.

The first type of worlds describes the fabula as a succession of distinct

states mediated by events. These states correspond to objectively occur-
ring physical states, and they can be regarded as the actual world of the
narrative system. The second type of worlds corresponds to the mental
activity of the characters, a mental activity through which they react to
the changes of state that occur in the physical world or to their idea of
what happens in the mind of other characters. The third type of worlds
describes the dynamic unfolding of the story in the reader’s mind.
When type-3 worlds are disapproved by the fabula, they disappear from
the narrative universe but remain as “ghost chapters” in a wider seman-
tic domain that encompasses not only the events narrated as fact, but all
the virtual stories brought to mind by the text. By monitoring the con-
struction of possible worlds by the reader, the narrative text creates
such effects as suspense, curiosity, and surprise, or it may trick the
reader into false assumptions. A text, claims Eco, tells at least three sto-
ries: (a) the story of what happens to the dramatis personae; (b) the sto-
ry of what happens to the naïve reader; and (c) the story of what hap-
pens to itself as text (this third story being potentially the same as what
happens to the critical reader). The possible differentiation of (b) and
(c) is demonstrated by trick texts that leads the reader to false assump-
tions.
 Possible Worlds 733

3.2 Areas of Application

In a second wave of development, the concept of PW gradually emanci-

pates itself from its origins in logic and analytic philosophy and comes to
designate more broadly the imaginary, the virtual, the mental, and the po-
tential. Below is an overview of these developments organized by topic.

3.2.1 Narrative Semantics

Inspired by Eco’s view of the narrative text as “a machine for produc-

ing possible worlds” as well as by models used in artificial intelligence,
Ryan (1985, 1991) describes narrative universes—whether fictional or
not—as modal systems in which the external (i.e., physical) facts as-
serted by the narrator play the role of “textual actual world.” Surround-
ing this ontological center are the little solar systems formed by the pri-
vate universes of the characters. Each of these subsystems is centered
around an epistemic world, or K (for knowledge) world, which contains
the character’s representation of the entire system—that is, of both the
actual world and the private worlds of the other characters (which
themselves contain images of the private worlds of the character under
consideration in a mirroring process that would lead to endless recur-
sion if it weren’t for the limitations of the human mind). From the read-
er’s point of view, the K-world of characters contains a potentially in-
accurate image of the actual world of the narrative universe, but from
the character’s point of view this image is the actual world itself. The
private universes of characters also include model worlds, such as de-
sires (W-world) and obligations (O-world), which capture how the
character would like the actual world to be: active goals and plans,
which capture projected courses of actions leading to the fulfillment of
the model worlds; and fantasy worlds such as dreams, hallucinations,
and stories within stories which embed, recursively, new modal sys-
tems.
A narrative, however, cannot be reduced to a static snapshot of a
certain state of a modal system. During the course of the story, the dis-
tance between the various worlds of the system undergoes constant
fluctuations. Whenever a proposition in a model world is not satisfied
in the actual word, the narrative universe falls into a state of conflict.
The motor that operates the narrative machine is the attempt by charac-
ters to eliminate conflict by reducing the distance between their model
worlds and the actual world. Conflict can also exist between the model
worlds of different characters. For instance, the hero and the villain are
antagonists because they have incompatible W-worlds and work toward
734 Marie-Laure Ryan

incompatible states. Or a character may experience conflict between her

W-world and her O-world and have to choose which one to try to satis-
fy. PW theory thus models narrative dynamics as the movement of in-
dividual worlds within the global narrative universe. This movement
does not end when all conflicts are resolved, for conflict is a permanent
state of any universe, but when all the remaining conflicts cease to be
productive because their experiencer is no longer willing or able to take
steps toward their resolution. Trying to establish what holds as fact in
the actual domain of the narrative universe, distinguishing the factual
and physical from the possible and virtual located in the mental repre-
sentations of characters, and building an image of these mental repre-
sentations as a way to grasp the human significance of physical events
and actions are some of the most fundamental of the cognitive opera-
tions that lead to the construction of narrative meaning. Readers are not
always—indeed, rarely—able to fill out all of the component worlds of
the narrative universe, but the better they fill them out, the better they
will grasp the logic of the story and the better they will remember the
plot.

3.2.2 Poetics of Plot

Plot is traditionally—and superficially—conceived as a sequence of

physical events that take place in a certain world. The concept of PW
expands this vision by regarding plot as a complex network of relations
between the factual and the non-factual, the actual and the virtual. The
French structuralists Bremond and Todorov were the first to point out
the importance of the non-factual for the understanding of plot. While
Bremond (1973) described plots as possibility trees representing the
various courses of action open to characters at crucial decision points,
Todorov (1969) anticipated the propositional operators of modal logic
by constructing a narrative grammar that distinguishes a factual mode
from a variety of hypothetical modes: optative, predictive, conditional,
and obligatory.
The importance of the strategic opposition between the actual and
the merely possible is demonstrated by the quintessential narrative of
knowledge, the mystery story. The art of writing a mystery story lies in
suggesting a variety of possible sequences of events, one of which
gradually emerges as actual, thanks to the sagacity of the detective.
Ryan (1991) regards the ability of a narrative to evoke multiple non-
actual possible worlds as a major principle of tellability (Baroni →
Tellability). For instance, a narrative based on deception is usually
more interesting than a narrative based on cooperation, because decep-
 Possible Worlds 735

tion relies on a contrast between a feigned and a real intent, while ask-
ing for collaboration requires only the consideration of an actual goal.
Similarly, a goal achieved in an unexpected way is narratively more
interesting than a goal achieved through the successful execution of a
plan, because the unexpected solution contrasts with the anticipated
events. In this way, the reader is led to contemplate a richer semantic
universe.
The various functions and manifestations of counterfactual events in
narrative plots have been systematically studied by Dannenberg (2008).
She identifies the major narrative strategies that underlie the design of
plot as coincidence and counterfactuality. While coincidence knots to-
gether the destinies of characters and creates networks of interpersonal
relations, counterfactuality is a principle of divergence that makes visi-
ble a vast horizon of alternative stories. As Dannenberg shows, the
counterfactual in narrative can take many forms and fulfill many func-
tions. In realist narrative, it appears as the “what if” reasoning through
which the narrator or the characters themselves evaluate situations or
ponder the future. In alternative history (i.e., narrative ascribing a dif-
ferent life to historical figures), counterfactuality invites the reader to
make a comparison between the fictional world and the actual world
that precludes total immersion in the fictional world, since the reader
must keep an eye on actual history. In 20th-century literature, the clas-
sical ontological model that underlies realism gives way to an ontology
that questions its central tenet: the hierarchical relation that places a
single actual world at the center of the system and subordinates merely
possible worlds to this actual world. Some science fiction texts build an
ontology inspired by the so-called “many-worlds” interpretation of
quantum mechanics (see also Ryan 2006). In this ontology, which relies
on the idea of parallel universes, all possibilities are realized in some
world, and the distinction between the factual and the counterfactual
disappears. This distinction is also challenged when a postmodern nar-
rative presents many incompatible versions of certain events without
singling out one of these versions as corresponding to the actual world
(cf. Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” or films like The But-
terfly Effect).

3.2.3 Theory of Fictional Characters

As Margolin, a leading theorist of fictional characters (Jannidis →

Character), has shown, the individuals whose actions, experience, and
destiny form the central concern of narrative fiction can be approached
in a number of different ways: (1) as the referents of linguistic expres-
736 Marie-Laure Ryan

sions (names, pronouns, definite descriptions); (2) as aggregates of

“semes,” i.e. of properties specified by the text; (3) as bearers of gen-
eral ideas, a view that turns characters into allegories; (4) as entities
fulfilling actantial functions within the plot such as agent, desired ob-
ject, helper, and opponent; and (5) as “non-actual individuals, designat-
ed by means of referring expressions,” who are “members of some non-
actual state of affairs or possible world” (Margolin 1989: 4). The last
conception, inspired by PW theory, differs from the first four in that it
does not regard characters as purely semiotic constructs, as did struc-
turalism, but as make-believe life-like persons “endowed with inner
states, knowledge, and belief sets, memories, attitudes and intentions—
that is, a consciousness, interiority and personhood” (Margolin 1990:
455). Each of these conceptions accounts for different aspects of fic-
tional characters—presentation, identification, thematic function, func-
tion within the plot, and ontological status—but it is only the fifth that
explains their ability to arouse emotions in the reader, an aspect of nar-
rative that is currently generating considerable interest (Keen → Narra-
tive Empathy).
In recent years, the conception of characters as non-actual individu-
als has led to new approaches to the representation of minds. Studies of
fictional minds used to be concerned with explicit forms of representa-
tion, such as stream of consciousness or free indirect discourse (Cohn
1978). These studies are based on the assumption that we can know the
mind of fictional characters much better than the mind of real people,
because thought is something contained within the head. Omniscient
narrators can penetrate into the mind of characters, while we cannot do
so with actual individuals. Invoking what is known in cognitive psy-
chology as “theory of mind” or “mental simulation,” Palmer (2004) has
denied the view that it takes some form of psycho-narration to enable
readers to know the thoughts of fictional characters. According to cog-
nitive psychologists, we have an innate ability to attribute thoughts and
motivations to other people on the basis of their external behavior. The
mind, in Palmer’s felicitous expression, is not contained within the
skull but manifests itself in interpersonal relations and in people’s in-
teraction with the surrounding world. It is the same inferential skills
that enable us to construct the mind of real people and fictional people.
To apply to literary characters our innate mind-reading abilities, or
“theory of mind,” amounts therefore to subjecting them to the principle
of minimal departure. It could be objected that minimal departure im-
poses a uniform realistic frame that denies distinctions between round
and flat characters, or between life-like ones and conventional literary
types or fantastic creatures. But the behavior of non-realistic character
 Possible Worlds 737

types such as space aliens, vampires, and zombies, of anthropomor-

phized animals, or of standard literary types such as invincible superhe-
roes, femmes fatales, and detectives able to solve any problem would
not make sense to the reader without assuming that their mode of think-
ing is similar to ours in its broad strategies for implementing their val-
ues in AW, however different these values may be from ours.

3.2.4 Transfictionality

Transfictionality (Saint-Gelais 2005; Ryan 2008) is the migration of

elements such as characters, plot structures, or setting from one fiction-
al text to another. It can be thought of as a relation between possible
worlds. PW philosophy provides tools for describing this phenomenon
through the concept of counterparts relations (Lewis 1986) and through
the so-called “causal theory” of names (Kripke 1972). The causal theo-
ry holds that names do not stand for clusters of properties but are “rigid
designators” inalienably attached to individuals through an original act
of baptism. As rigid designators, names refer to individuals regardless
of changes in their properties. Since the function of names, in a PW
model, is to pick one and only one individual in every PW where this
individual exists, the same name can refer to individuals in different
worlds with different properties: in world 1, Napoleon loses the battle
of Waterloo; in world 2 (perhaps created by a novelist), he wins; in
world 3, he never leaves his native Corsica. All these Napoleons are
linked to each other by counterpart relations. (A dog named Napoleon,
by contrast, would not be perceived by the reader of a novel as a coun-
terpart of the emperor, because he would lack the essential property of
being human). The same variations can obtain with fictional characters:
if an author writes a novel about Anna Karenina in which she finds a
new lover after her break with Vronsky rather than throwing herself in
front of a train, this new Anna Karenina will be regarded as a counter-
part of Tolstoy’s heroine rather than as a simple homonym. The reader
will consequently imagine her according to the principle of minimal
departure with respect to Tolstoy’s novel.
Transfictionality is a phenomenon as old as print narrative (one need
only think of the multiple apocryphal versions inspired by popular early
modern novels such as Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe), perhaps even
as old as narrative itself (cf. the multiple tellings of myths in oral cul-
tures), but it has become particularly prominent in postmodern culture.
In his 1998 book Heterocosmica, Doležel presents a theory of what he
calls “postmodern rewrites” which can be extended to all forms of
transfictionality. This theory distinguishes three types of relations be-
738 Marie-Laure Ryan

tween fictional worlds. The first, “expansion,” “extends the scope of the
protoworld by filling its gaps, constructing a prehistory or posthistory,
and so on” (1998: 207). This operation manifests itself in prequels, se-
quels, or in narratives that borrow a secondary character from another
work and turn it into a main character. The example of expansion pro-
posed by Doležel is Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the life
story of the “madwoman hidden in the attic” in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre. The second type of transfictional relation is what Doležel calls
“displacement” (I would suggest calling it “modification”): here the
setting, the characters, and most of the plot are taken over from another
fictional world, but the fate of the characters is modified. For instance,
the Robinson of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe never engages in the civilizing ac-
tivities of his 18th-century counterpart, and he does not write a diary.
The third relation, “transposition,” transports the plot of a story to a
different historical or geographical setting. Doležel’s example of this
operation is Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of
Young W.) by Ulrich Plenzdorf (1973), a novel which relocates the plot
of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sufferings of Young
Werther) into the German Democratic Republic of the 1960s. These
three operations provide a solid theoretical basis for the study of a prom-
inent phenomenon of contemporary culture (Jenkins 2006): the exploita-
tion of popular narratives by multi-media franchises as well as the delib-
erate creation of narrative worlds that spread across multiple media.

3.2.5 Text Typology

As Maître (1983) and Ryan (1991) have shown, relations between AW

and fictional worlds are constitutive of certain types of text. Taking
possibility in AW as criterion, Maître distinguishes four basic types of
text: (a) works that refer to historical events; (b) works that deal with
imaginary states of affairs which could be actual; (c) works in which
there is an oscillation between could-be-actual and could-never-be-
actual worlds; (d) works that deal straight away with states of affairs
which could never be actual. Ryan (1991) builds a typology based on
various interpretations of accessibility. In fictionalized history, accessi-
bility ties the fictional world to AW through a common past history,
geography, and inventory of individuals; in realism (including histori-
cal fiction), laws of nature are respected, but additional individuals are
added to the population of the fictional world; in medieval fantasy and
fairy tales, natural laws are broken but the laws of logic hold; and in
nonsense rhymes and in some postmodernist fictions, logic itself is
transgressed, resulting in impossible worlds.
 Possible Worlds 739

3.2.6 Poetics of Postmodernism

According to McHale (1987), the dominant feature of postmodernist

fiction is its preoccupation with ontological questions (“what exists?”),
as opposed to the epistemological questions (“what can I know?”) that
dominated modernism. This preoccupation can take many forms: a re-
jection of classical ontology through the assertion of mutually incom-
patible facts; the meeting in the same world of non-compossible charac-
ters originating in different fictional worlds (e.g., in Jasper Fforde’s
novels); the creation of impossible objects (e.g., Borges’ Aleph and
Book of Sand in the stories by the same name); or the entanglement of
ontological levels through metalepsis (Pier → Metalepsis).

3.2.7 Digital Culture

In digital culture, “world” (whether “online” or “virtual”) stands for im-

mersive/interactive environments that allow a much more active partici-
pation of the experiencer—and consequently a different kind of member-
ship—than the worlds of literary or cinematic fiction, which limit the
role of the experiencer to that of an observer. The term “possible worlds”
has been used to describe virtual reality technology (Schroeder 1996) in
a loose way that is not particularly indebted to PW theory. But the ability
of interactive texts and games to generate multiple different worlds, de-
pending on the actions of the user, predisposes them to an approach in-
spired by PW theory (cf. Bell 2010 on hypertext fiction). The PW model
can also strengthen the theoretical basis of the notion of “world,” wheth-
er it is conceived as digital virtual world or as narratological storyworld.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

4.1. The “worldness” of fictional worlds needs to be explored from a

phenomenological rather than a purely logical point of view. The thesis
of the radical incompleteness of fictional worlds is undoubtedly correct
from a logical perspective, but we also need to describe fictional worlds
as a lived imaginative experience. The dilemma here is between a con-
ception of fictional worlds as “small worlds” defined over a limited
number of facts (pace minimal departure) or as “full worlds” which,
like the real world, can never be completely explored and known. Is it
the smallness of its world that makes E.M. Forster’s example of plot,
“The king died then the queen died of grief,” narratively so uninterest-
ing, as compared to the rich world of a novel like War and Peace? Do
740 Marie-Laure Ryan

we imagine some fictional worlds as ontologically incomplete and oth-

ers as complete, or should the same ontological model apply to all fic-
tions? If ontological fullness varies from text to text, is this fullness
purely a matter of quantity of information, or can a short story create a
world so rich that the reader feels it will never yield all of its secrets?
4.2.The problems investigated by the PW school of narratology need
to be placed in a wider context—a context that will relate fiction-
making and narrative to phenomena such as play, make-believe, imper-
sonation, simulation, and the use of counterfactual scenarios in reason-
ing (cf. Schaeffer [1999] 2010). While the philosophical tradition of
PW theory can be an inspiration for such a project, it should not be a
limitation: it is through a collaboration of PW theory with cognitive
science (Herman → Cognitive Narratology), evolutionary psychology,
philosophy of mind, speech act theory, and the study of games (ludolo-
gy) that we will be able to understand the importance of the non-factual
and of that which “does not count” for human thought and behavior.
4.3.The applications of PW theory to narrative have relied for many
years on an invariant core of philosophical writings (especially Kripke
and Lewis). This basis needs to be revisited and possibly expanded or
revised by taking into consideration more recent philosophical devel-
opments in PW philosophy. A return to the philosophical sources may
not only provide new ideas, but also help resolve the question of the
legitimacy of associating fictional worlds with PWs: is this association
a rather loose metaphorical transfer between objects of a distinct nature
(as Ronen 1994 and Monneret 2010 have argued), or is the philosophi-
cal concept of PW broad enough to accept fictional worlds as full
members? Yet even if the relation between the philosophical concept of
PW and narrative worlds turns out to be a metaphorical transfer, the
narratological applications of PW theory will not be invalidated, for the
value of the concept of PW for narratology depends not on a literal ap-
plication, but on whether or not “specific features of fictional worlds
can be identified only against the background of this model frame”
(Doležel 1988: 486).
 Possible Worlds 741

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Bell, Alice (2010). The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. New York: Palgrave
McMillan.
Bremond, Claude (1973). Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil.
Cohn, Dorrit (1978). Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Conscious-
ness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Dannenberg, Hilary (2008). Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and
Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Doležel, Lubomír (1976a).”Extensional and Intensional Narrative Worlds.” Poetics 8,
193–212.
– (1976b). “Narrative Modalities.” Journal of Literary Semantics 5, 5–14.
– (1988). “Mimesis and Possible Worlds.” Poetics Today 9, 475–496.
– (1998). Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP.
Eco, Umberto (1984). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Hintikka, Jaakko (1989). “Exploring Possible Worlds.” S. Allén (ed.). Possible Worlds
in Humanities, Arts and Science: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65. New
York: de Gruyter, 52–73.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New
York: New York UP.
Kripke, Saul (1963). “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic.” Acta Philosophica
Fennica 16, 83–94.
– (1972). “Naming and Necessity.” D. Davidson & G. Harman (eds.). Semantics of
Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel, 253–355.
Lewis, David (1973). Counterfactuals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.
– (1978). “Truth in Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly 15, 37–46.
– (1986). On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.
Maître, Doreen (1983). Literature and Possible Worlds. Middlesex: Middlesex UP.
Margolin, Uri (1989). “Structuralist Approaches to Character in Narrative: The State of
the Art.” Semiotica 75.1-2, 1–24.
– (1990). “The What, the When, and the How of Being a Character in Literary
Narrative.” Style 24, 453–468.
McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen.
Monneret, Philippe (2010). “Fiction et croyance: les mondes possibles fictionnels
comme facteurs de plasticité des croyances.” F. Lavocat (ed.). La Théorie litté-
raire des mondes possibles. Paris: CNRS Editions, 259–292.
Palmer, Alan (2004). Fictional Minds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Pavel, Thomas (1975). “Possible Worlds in Literary Semantics.” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 34, 165–176.
– (1986). Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Plantinga, Alvin (1976). “Actualism and Possible Worlds.” Theoria 42, 139–160.
742 Marie-Laure Ryan

Rescher, Nicholas ([1973] 1979). “The Ontology of the Possible.” M. Loux (ed.). The
Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP, 166–181.
Ronen, Ruth (1994). Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
UP.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1985). “The Modal Structure of Narrative Universes.” Poetics
Today 6.4, 717–756.

– (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Blooming-

ton: U of Indiana P.
– (2006). “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds : Ontological Pluralism in
Physics, Narratology and Narrative.” Poetics Today 27.4, 633–674.
– (2008). “Transfictionality Across Media.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa (eds.).
Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 385–417.
Saint-Gelais, Richard (2005). “Transfictionality.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 612–613.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie ([1999] 2010). Why Fiction? Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Schroeder, Ralph (1996). Possible Worlds: The Social Dynamics of Virtual Reality
Technology. Boulder: Westview P.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1969). Grammaire du Décameron. The Hague: Mouton.
Vaina, Lucia (1977). “Les Mondes possible du texte.” Versus 17, 3–13.
Walton, Kendall (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Repre-
sentational Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

5.2 Further Reading

Allén, Sture, ed. (1989). Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Science: Proceedings
of Nobel Symposium 65. New York: de Gruyter.
Divers, John (2002). Possible Worlds. London: Routledge.
Lavocat, Françoise (2010). “Les Genres de la fiction : état des lieux et propositions.” F.
Lavocat (ed.). La Théorie littéraire des mondes possibles. Paris : CNRS Editions,
15–51.
Martin, Thomas (2004). Poesis and Possible Worlds. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
Saint-Gelais, Richard. (2011) Fictions transfuges: La transfictionalité et ses enjeux.
Paris: Seuil.
Semino, Elena (1997). Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. Lon-
don: Longman.
Traill, Nancy H. (1996). Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal
in Fiction. Toronto: Toronto UP.
Werth, Paul (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Lon-
don: Longman.
 Reader
Gerald Prince

1 Definition

A reader is a decoder, decipherer, interpreter of written (narrative) texts

or, more generally, of any text in the broad sense of signifying matter.

2 Explication

Real, concrete readers—who have been studied from a variety of points

of view (Groeben 1977; Manguel 1996; Franzmann et al., eds. 1999;
Schneider 2004)—should be distinguished from more abstract readers.
These include, inter alia, the authors’ ideal readers, who understand
perfectly and approve entirely every authorial word or intention
(Schönert → Author). They include the various readers posited by stu-
dents of texts and constituting interpretive devices, like Riffaterre’s su-
perreader (1966: 215) or the plain “reader” invoked by so many critics.
In addition, they include readers inferrable from texts or explicitly
characterized as their addressees, such as Booth’s postulated reader
([1961] 1983: 137–144, 177), Gibson’s mock reader (1950), Iser’s im-
plied reader ([1972] 1974), or the narratee discussed by Genette ([1972]
1980: 259–262, [1983] 1988: 130–134) and Prince (1971, [1973]
1980).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

In the Western tradition, concern with the reader has a long history. It
goes back to Plato (e.g. the attack against the negative influence of poet-
ry) and Aristotle (the concept of catharsis), famously manifests itself in
Horace, Longinus, the Greco-Roman rhetoricians and their descendants,
is found throughout the Renaissance, and persists in the modern period.
In fact, though it decreased with the New Criticism’s focus on the text
itself and denunciation of the intentional and affective fallacies, concern
744 Gerald Prince

with the reader acquired unprecedented critical prominence in the 1970s.

For most of this history, interest in readers pertains more specifically
to the effects of texts on real audiences. Depending on views of the na-
ture and power of language, literature, or art, these effects are thought
to be moral, sociopolitical, psychological, intellectual, esthetic; and real
readers are seen as passive instead of active, objects rather than sub-
jects, creatures to entertain, teach, move, reform, or redeem. This orien-
tation changes radically in the second half of the 20th century, when
attention is also paid to textually inscribed addressees as well as to the
role of audiences in interpretation and evaluation.

3.1 Precursors

Paradoxically, one important precursor of this change is Richards

(1929), who is widely regarded as the father of the New Criticism and
its objectivist poetics. In a study which also deals with the influence of
poetry on the reader and proposes tools for the analysis of literature,
Richards analyzed students’ interpretive reactions to poems and isolat-
ed some of the factors that lead to misreadings, such as critical precon-
ceptions, stock responses, and irrelevant associations. Another im-
portant precursor of this change is Rosenblatt (1938). Her preoccupa-
tion with the teaching of literature and with the real reader’s ability to
take part in the literary experience led her to examine that experience,
to reject the objectivist position of the New Criticism, and to underline
in her transactional theory the interaction between what the reader con-
tributes to the text and the latter’s specificity. For Rosenblatt, interpre-
tation crucially depends on the reader’s experience and, to be valid, it
must not contradict the text or yield conclusions that have no textual
basis. Gibson (1950) is a third critic whose work anticipates the reader-
oriented theory and criticism of the 1970s. By focusing on the mock
reader—a figure implied by the text, a part which flesh-and-blood read-
ers are asked to play and in terms of which they situate themselves vis-
à-vis the text and its values—Gibson also pointed to the real audience’s
interpretive and evaluative role.
Among other students of literature who, before the flowering of
audience-oriented criticism, similarly drew attention to readers and
their relation to textual meaning, at least Booth ([1961] 1983), Ingarden
([1931] 1973, [1937] 1973), and Sartre ([1948] 1949) should be briefly
discussed. Like Gibson, Booth distinguished the real reader of fiction
from what he called the reader’s second self, a figure created by the
author and postulated by the text, which the real reader must be willing
to become and with whose views and beliefs s/he must agree in order to
 Reader 745

enjoy that text. By emphasizing the rhetorical dimension of fiction,

Booth departed from the New Critical formalist stance and its attention
to texts severed from their authors and readers. Ingarden belonged to a
very different tradition, since it is as a phenomenologist that he consid-
ered questions of poetics and esthetics. As early as [1931] 1973, he
studied the ways in which readers (adequately) realize or concretize a
work of art, the ways in which they transform a text or mere series of
sentences into an esthetic object by filling gaps or places of indetermi-
nacy in that text. As for Sartre, in seeking to define literature and the
necessary commitment it constitutes and entails, he argued that writers
write for their time, for real, historical readers whose freedom they ad-
dress and depend upon rather than for universal, eternal, ideal readers.
He further argued that writing and reading are intimately connected and
that the literary object results from their combined action. Indeed, he
insisted that, while every text contains the image of the reader toward
whom it is directed, every concrete reader is a creator, necessary for the
renewed emergence of the literary object and situated between what is
given by the writer and what is not.

3.2 The Blossoming of Reader-oriented Criticism

If these various precursors (and others, like Baxtin [1929] 1984 or

Burke 1931: 38–56) explore fundamental questions pertaining to the
nature of readers and reading, it is in the 1970s that audience-oriented
theory or criticism flourishes and that the reader becomes a central fig-
ure for many students of literature. Of the many possible reasons for
this flourishing, perhaps the most general one is the rejection promoted
by various sociopolitical movements in Europe and the United States
(the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the
German student movement, May 68) of established institutions and au-
thority figures. The spread of anti-authoritarianism and attendant calls
for democratizing the academy, aspirations to relevant curricula, rea-
nalyses of the construction, circulation, or distribution of knowledge
would result in the questioning of various entrenched principles and
methods of textual interpretation and evaluation (New Critical stric-
tures, Marxist injunctions, humanist directives). Indeed, there is no uni-
ty among reader-oriented theorists and critics. They differ not only in
terms of national origins or contexts but also in terms of presupposi-
tions, programs, aims, and, more particularly, interest in narrative and
narratology. As a matter of fact, many of them are not (specifically)
concerned with narrative and their work has no (specifically) narrato-
logical implications.
746 Gerald Prince

Riffaterre (1959, 1966, 1971, 1978), for example, who argued that
the style of a text is revealed by the reactions of the “superreader”—a
composite of the text’s real readers, akin to what he once called the
“average reader” (1959: 164–165)—to textual unpredictabilities, was
trying to establish objective criteria for the analysis of style, to develop
a structural stylistics, and to account more generally for the semiotics of
literature. Culler (1975), much of whose work can also be regarded as
semiotico-structuralist, focused on characterizing literary (rather than
narrative) competence and conventions of reading. Similarly, the psy-
choanalytic critic Holland (1968, 1975), whose investigations led him
to conclude that the meaning of a literary text is a function of the real
reader’s basic “identity theme” or psychological makeup (1975: 56–
62), was primarily interested in the effects of personality on interpreta-
tion. Another proponent of “subjective criticism,” Bleich (1975, 1978),
who emphasized the influence of reading on self-understanding and the
links between reader response and interpretation, was interested in the
bases of humanistic knowledge and the reform of the teaching of litera-
ture. Jauss (1970, [1977] 1982, 1978), the highly influential advocate of
Rezeptionsästhetik—which is different from the German tradition of
empirical research on real readers (e.g. Groeben 1977; Franzmann et
al., eds. 1999)—wanted to reinvigorate literary history when he called
for the study of readers’ horizons of expectations and for the elabora-
tion of a history of esthetic response. Like these critics or theorists, Fish
(1967, 1980) was not concerned with narratological issues, but with the
nature of literature, the goals of criticism, the bases of interpretation.
Proposing a feminist approach, Fetterley (1978) developed the notion
of a “resisting reader”: according to her, American literature “immascu-
lates” its readers (forces them to think and feel in masculine terms), and
she encourages resistance to this male rhetoric by devising ways of
reading not as a man but as a woman. Last though by no means least,
Radway (1984), who directed her attention to readers of narrative ro-
mances, insisted on the different reading assumptions of (lower middle
class) women and (academic) men.

3.3 The Implied Reader

Although not working in a narratological vein and although primarily

aiming to revitalize literary study by concentrating on readers instead of
texts or authors, some theorists and critics in the 1970s produced work
of considerable significance for narratology. Perhaps the most influen-
tial reader figure in this context is Iser’s implied reader. A leader of the
Constance School along with Jauss, Iser, who used a phenomenological
 Reader 747

approach and a corpus of prose fiction, investigated the act of reading

and the contributions of both text and reader to textual meaning ([1970]
1971, 1972, [1976] 1978). Much like Ingarden, he distinguished be-
tween the text, its concretization by the reader, and the work of art re-
sulting from their convergence. He argued that the text pre-structures
and guides the production of meaning by gradually supplying skeletal
aspects or schematized views of what will become the work of art,
while leaving between them areas of indeterminacy or gaps to be filled
by the reader completing the artwork. The implied reader, which is not
to be confused with a real reader ([1976] 1978: 34), allows Iser to take
the text as well as the reading activity into account. Patterned, at least
terminologically, after Booth’s implied author (Schmid → Implied Au-
thor), the implied reader ([1972] 1974: xii) is both a textual element, an
entity deducible from the text, and a meaning-producing mechanism, a
set of mental operations involved in sense-making (selecting and organ-
izing information, relating past and present knowledge, anticipating
facts and outcomes, constructing and modifying patterns). It includes
the schematized aspects, the gaps, and the processes eliminating them,
the constraints and directions set by the text as well as the mental ac-
tivities of reading. Iser was criticized for distinguishing unproblemati-
cally between determinate and indeterminate parts of texts (Fish 1981)
and for not sufficiently specifying the nature of the gaps or studying
their raison d’être (cf. Kloepfer [1979] 1982; Stierle [1975] 1980). He
was also criticized for overemphasizing textual input and inadequately
exploring the freedom (and variable results) that reading may entail
(Mailloux 1982: 51–53). Indeed, the implied reader could even be con-
sidered a kind of equivalent to authorial intention and textual meaning
or to a set of preferred (Iserian) interpretations. Whatever the validity of
these criticisms—and others, directed at Iser’s liberal ideological as-
sumptions (Holub 1984: 97–100) or at his failure to give his reader fig-
ure a (significant) historical dimension (Suleiman 1980: 25–26)—it
remains that the implied reader not only supplied a handy term for stu-
dents of narrative; it also pointed to the room any (narrative) text pro-
vides for the reader and often came to represent the counterpart of the
implied author in the structure of narrative transmission (from real au-
thor to real reader through implied author, narrator, narratee, and im-
plied reader). Moreover, it helped to emphasize the dynamics of narra-
tive semiosis, to characterize a number of narrative techniques or
strategies, to draw attention to the role of virtuality in narrative, and to
promote taxonomies of narrative according to the number (or kind) of
gaps obtaining.
748 Gerald Prince

3.4 The Model Reader

While Iser was more interested in narrative fiction than in narrative and
drew mainly on phenomenology to elaborate his implied reader, Eco
(1979) explicitly claimed to be interested in narrativity (12) and drew
primarily on semiotics to develop the model reader (7–10). Paradoxi-
cally, the latter resembles the Iserian figure in many ways. According to
Eco, a text is the result of two components, the information which the
author supplies and the information which the model reader adds and
which is more or less strictly determined by the author’s input (206).
The model reader, which corresponds to the set of felicity conditions
that must be satisfied for the text’s potential to be actualized (11), re-
moves indeterminacies. It fills in blanks with (modifiable and replacea-
ble) sets of propositions or “ghost chapters” (214–215) that derive from
codes, conventions, interpretive procedures, and knowledge shared with
the author. Though Eco may not always succeed in distinguishing
clearly between the model reader and actual readers (including himself
as reader), between description, interpretation, and prescription, his
analysis, like that of Iser, directs attention to the play of narrative semi-
osis. More notably, through its characterization of “ghost chapters” and
the “possible worlds” they constitute, it underlines the role of virtuality
in narrative and foreshadows significant developments in narrative se-
mantics (Ryan 1991: 169–174).

3.5 The Voice of Reading

Another famous semiotician (or semiologist), Barthes, proclaimed the

author’s death and the reader’s birth as the locus of textual meaning, the
place where the various texts constituting a text are united ([1967]
1977). Moreover, he drew attention to the erotic quality of reading and
distinguished between pleasurable and rapturous texts ([1973] 1975),
just as he had previously distinguished between readerly and writerly
texts ([1970] 1974). The former as opposed to the latter make room for
the voice of reading ([1970] 1974: 151–152). They are “traditional” and
can be read or understood in terms of established codes and modes. The
latter are “modern,” unfamiliar, strange; they can be written, but they
cannot be grasped in terms of these codes and modes. In his reading of
“Sarrasine,” Barthes ([1970] 1974) characterized five major codes
through which Balzac’s novella (or, presumably, any narrative) is inter-
pretable: the proairetic code, according to which narratives can be
structured as sequences of actions; the hermeneutic code, according to
which they can be structured as paths leading from questions or enig-
 Reader 749

mas to (possible) answers or solutions; the referential code, in terms of

which they are related to various bodies of knowledge and cultural ob-
jects; the semic code, which allows for the construction of characters
and settings; and the symbolic code, which governs the production and
reception of symbolic meaning. Barthes’s account exerted considerable
influence on theorists and critics interested in poetics as a theory of
reading and in the rules and operations underlying literary competence
or the ability to read texts literarily (cf. Culler 1975). Though it was
widely taken to reject the assumptions and goals of narratology (e.g. the
view of texts as structured products rather than productive structu-
rations, or the ambition to develop a science of narrative), it was also
highly influential on narratologists. They viewed many of its arguments
as elaborations of points made in Barthes’s earlier “Introduction to the
Structural Analysis of Narrative” ([1966] 1975). In particular, they re-
garded its comments on the voice of reading as developments of the
brief remarks through which Barthes had drawn attention, in that fa-
mous narratological manifesto, to the signs of “the reader’s presence
[…] within the narrative itself” ([1966] 1975: 260) as well as to the nar-
ratively signified communication between narrator and audience (249,
260–261, 264; Margolin → Narrator).

3.6 The Narratee

These brief remarks—along with similar comments by Todorov (1966:

146–147) and parallel work by Genette in his outstanding investigation
of narrative discourse ([1972] 1980) as well as Gibson’s notion of the
mock reader and Booth’s discussion of the reader’s second self—
proved particularly relevant for Prince’s exploration of the narratee, a
reader figure explicitly tied to narrative and developed in terms of nar-
ratological parameters (1971, [1973] 1980). Guided by formalist, struc-
turalist, and semiotic principles, Prince sought to describe more accu-
rately the structural properties of narrative and the nature of its
constitutive elements. Specifically, he argued that, just as narrators are
distinguished from real or implied authors, narratees should be distin-
guished from real, implied, or other kinds of readers. The narratee is the
audience (of one or more than one) that the narrator in a given narrative
addresses. Like the enunciatee (or inscribed addressee of the textual I)
in any text, the narratee is different from the real reader (the flesh-and-
blood person actually reading the text) and the implied reader (since it
is neither the equivalent of the reader’s second self nor the counterpart
or complement of the implied author and since it has no privileged po-
sition or role with regard to interpretation). The narratee also differs
750 Gerald Prince

from the ideal reader (who grasps and approves every aspect of the
text), the virtual reader (for whom the real author believes s/he is writ-
ing and to whom s/he assigns various characteristics and abilities) and
from such interpretive notions as superreaders, informed readers, or
competent readers (inscribed in the text, it may, in fact, prove incompe-
tent and uninformed). It is constituted and signified by textual signs of
the “you” narrated to (just as the narrator is constituted and signified by
textual signs of the “I” narrating): second-person pronouns and other
forms of address designating that “you” as well as signs functioning in
more intricate ways, such as negative passages explicitly contradicting
its stated beliefs or correcting its mistakes and metanarrative explana-
tions emphasizing the gaps in its understanding or knowledge. Analyz-
able along the same lines as narrators, narratees can prove more or less
(temporally, intellectually, morally, emotionally) distant from the latter
and more or less prominent, dramatized, familiar with the situations and
events narrated, or changeable. As part of the makeup of any narra-
tive—and in addition to representing a fundamental link and relay be-
tween real author and real reader, calling attention to the communica-
tion circuits within texts, and allowing for a more precise typology of
narrative based on the kind of audience they constitute—they always
help to characterize narrators through their links with them and can
contribute to plot development as well as underscore various themes.
Besides the narratee, Prince (1982: 103–143) discussed the real readers
of narratives and the act of reading narratively—stressing not only the
constraints imposed by the text, but also the ways in which the readers’
nature, interests, and goals partly determine the assumptions they make
about texts, the questions they ask of them, the answers they formu-
late—and he also discussed how (narrative) texts partly read them-
selves, as it were, by commenting explicitly on some of their constitu-
ents (1980).

3.7 Other Audiences

The narratee, which was examined further by Piwowarczyk (1976), in-

tegrated into Chatman’s account of the various participants in narrative
transactions (1978: 147–151, 253–262) and revisited by Prince (1985),
who distinguished a narration’s enunciatee from its ostensible (though
not real) addressee and from its receiver, resembles what Rabinowitz
(1977, 1987) called the “narrative audience” in his characterization of
audiences of fictional narratives. Working in Booth’s rhetorical tradi-
tion, Rabinowitz explored the beliefs, values, and reception positions
that readers (must) have or adopt when reading fiction. Rabinowitz dis-
 Reader 751

tinguished between the actual audience, the authorial audience or hypo-

thetical audience for whom the text is composed, the ideal narrative
audience for whom the narrator (rather than the real author or the im-
plied author) wishes s/he were narrating, and the narrative audience for
whom s/he is narrating. As opposed to the actual audience and the au-
thorial audience, the narrative audience considers the represented char-
acters and events to be real and believes that the fiction narrated is a
history. As opposed to the narratee, it is not so much a figure “out
there” in the text as a role that the text asks (or requires) the real reader
to play. Rabinowitz’s model was largely adopted by Booth ([1961]
1983: 422–431) and clarified by Phelan (1996: 135–153). It not only
constitutes a tool for discussing various kinds of mimetic effects, vari-
ous types of narrative ambiguity, various sources of misreading, but
also captures the interplay of different belief systems at work in the act
of reading narrative fiction.
Alhough the prominence of reader-oriented criticism began to abate
by the mid-1980s, partly because many of its views of texts, their inter-
pretation, and their evaluation became commonplace, interest in readers
and reading continues to be significant (cf. Nardocchio ed. 1992;
Machor & Goldstein eds. 2001; Schweickart & Flynn eds. 2004;
Schmid 2007). In the area of narrative study, in particular, second-
person narrative (and its blurring of distinctions between, say, the pro-
tagonist, the narratee, and the narrative audience) has been further ex-
plored (Fludernik ed. 1994), different manifestations of textual audi-
ences have been further examined (Richardson 1997), and the reader’s
gradual construction of narrative meaning has been further investigated
(Kafalenos 2006). Through the integration of research in cognitive sci-
ence and discourse processing, “natural” narratology has linked read-
ers’ narrativization of texts with parameters derived from their real-life
experience (Fludernik 1996); psychonarratology has studied the psy-
chological factors and operations underlying readers’ immersion in and
understanding of narrative (Gerrig 1993; Bortolussi & Dixon 2003);
cognitive narratology (Herman → Cognitive Narratology) has aimed to
analyze and characterize narrative situations and moves in terms of
scripts, schemata (Emmott & Alexander → Schemata), and preference-
rule systems activated during the reading process (Jahn 1997); and, in
general, postclassical narratology has paid considerable attention to the
interface between narratives and their readers (Herman 2002).
752 Gerald Prince

4 Topics for Further Investigation

The various lines of inquiry mentioned above should be elaborated and

complemented by further experimental studies of the different kinds of
effect (physical, intellectual, emotional) produced by different kinds of
text (narrative or non-narrative, literary or non-literary, fictional or non-
fictional, in a book or online) and different kinds of (narrative) tech-
nique on readers differing in terms of class, gender, race, sexuality, aim,
or ability. As for narratologists in particular, they should develop for-
mal accounts of narrative and its functioning that explicitly make room
for the voice of the real reader. In other words, they should devise mod-
els indicating how, for instance, certain (portions of) texts can function
as iterative or singulative narrative, as free indirect or narratized dis-
course, as presenting synchronous or asynchronous events, and there-
fore can yield different meanings depending on the interpretive deci-
sions of that reader.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Barthes, Roland ([1966] 1975). “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narra-
tive.” New Literary History 6, 237–262.
– ([1967] 1977). “The Death of the Author.”R. Barthes. Image, Music, Text. New
York: Hill & Wang, 142–148.
– ([1970] 1974). S/Z. New York: Hill & Wang.
– ([1973] 1975). The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill & Wang.
Baxtin, Mixail (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1929] 1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Bleich, David (1975). Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism.
Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
– (1978). Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Bortolussi, Marisa & Peter Dixon (2003). Psychonarratology: Foundations for the
Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Burke, Kenneth (1931). Counter-Statement. New York: Harcourt.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Culler, Jonathan (1975). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study
of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Eco, Umberto (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
 Reader 753

Fetterley, Judith (1978). The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fic-
tion. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Fish, Stanley (1967). Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost.” New York: St.
Martin’s P.
– (1980). Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities.
Cambridge: Harvard UP.
– (1981). “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser.” Diacritics 11, 2–13.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‛Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
– ed. (1994). “Second-Person Narrative.” Special Issue of Style 28, 281–479.
Franzmann, Bodo et al., eds. (1999). Handbuch Lesen. München: Saur.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Gerrig, Richard J. (1993). Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activ-
ities of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP.
Gibson, Walker (1950). “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers.” College
English 11, 265–269.
Groeben, Norbert (1977). Rezeptionforschung als empirische Literaturwissenschaft:
Paradigma- durch Methodendiskussion an Untersuchungspielen. Kronberg/Ts.:
Athenäum.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Holland, Norman (1968). The Dynamics of Literary Response. New York: Oxford UP.
– (1975). 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP.
Holub, Robert C. (1984). Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. London: Methuen.
Ingarden, Roman ([1931] 1973). The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the
Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature. Evanston: Northwest-
ern UP.
– ([1937] 1973). The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Evanston: Northwest-
ern UP.
Iser, Wolfgang ([1970] 1971). “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response” J. H. Miller
(ed.). Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute. New
York: Columbia UP, 1–45.
– ([1972] 1974). The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
– ([1976] 1978). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP.
Jahn, Manfred (1997). “Frames, References, and the Reading of Third-Person Narra-
tives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology.” Poetics Today 18, 441–468.
Jauss, Hans Robert (1970). “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” New
Literary History 2, 7–37.
– ([1977] 1982). Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P.
Jauss, Hans Robert (1978). “Theses on the Transition from the Aesthetics of Literary
Works to a Theory of Aesthetic Experience.” M. J. Valdés & O. J. Miller (eds.).
Interpretation of Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 137–147.
754 Gerald Prince

Kafalenos, Emma (2006). Narrative Causalities. Columbus: Ohio State UP.

Kloepfer, Rolf ([1979] 1982). “Escape into Reception: The Scientistic and Hermeneutic
Schools of German Literary Theory.” Poetics Today 3, 47–75.
Machor, James L. & Philip Goldstein, eds. (2001). Reception Study: From Literary
Theory to Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge.
Mailloux, Steven J. (1982). Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of Amer-
ican Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Manguel, Alberto (1996). A History of Reading. New York: Viking.
Nardocchio, Elaine F., ed. (1992). Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Di-
mension. Berlin: Mouton.
Phelan, James (1996). Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology.
Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Piwowarczyk, Mary Ann (1976). “The Narratee and the Situation of Enunciation: A
Reconsideration of Prince’s Theory.” Genre 9, 161–177.
Prince, Gerald (1971). “Notes towards a Preliminary Categorization of Fictional ‘Nar-
ratees.’” Genre 4, 100–106.
– ([1973] 1980). “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.” J. P. Tompkins (ed.).
Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 7–25.
– (1980). “Notes on the Text as Reader.” S. R. Suleiman & I. Crosman (eds.). The
Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 225–240.
– (1982). Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin: Mouton.
– (1985). “The Narratee Revisited.” Style 19, 299–303.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. (1977). “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Criti-
cal Inquiry 4, 121–141.
– (1987). Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation.
Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Radway, Janice (1984). Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Liter-
ature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P.
Richards, I. A. (1929). Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement. London: K.
Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Richardson, Brian (1997). “The Other Reader’s Response: On Multiple, Divided, and
Oppositional Audiences.” Criticism 39, 31–53.
Riffaterre, Michael (1959). “Criteria for Style Analysis.” Word 15, 154–174.
– (1966). “Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire’s ‘Les
Chats.’” Yale French Studies No. 36–37, 200–242.
– (1971). Essais de stylistique structurale. Paris: Flammarion.
– (1978). Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. (1938). Literature as Exploration. New York: Appleton.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Sartre, Jean-Paul ([1948] 1949). What is Literature? New York: Philosophical Library.
Schmid, Wolf (2007). “Textadressat.” Th. Anz (ed.). Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft.
Stuttgart: Metzler, vol. 1, 171–181.
Schneider, Jost (2004). Sozialgeschichte des Lesens. Berlin: de Gruyter.
 Reader 755

Schweickart, Patrocinio P. & Elizabeth A. Flynn, eds. (2004). Reading Sites: Social
Difference and Reader Response. New York: Modern Language Association of
America.
Stierle, Karlheinz ([1975] 1980). “The Reading of Fictional Texts.” S. R. Suleiman & I.
Crosman (eds.). The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 83–105.
Suleiman, Susan R. (1980). “Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism.”
S. R. Suleiman & I. Crosman (eds.). The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience
and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 3–45.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1966). “Les Catégories du récit littéraire.” Communications No. 8,
125–151.

5.2 Further Reading

Bennett, Andrew, ed. (1995). Readers and Reading. London: Longman.

Corti, Maria ([1976] 1978). An Introduction to Literary Semiotics. Bloomington: Indi-
ana UP.
Culler, Jonathan (1981). The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
– (1982). On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism. Ithaca:
Cornell UP.
Eder, Jens (2003). “Narratology and Cognitive Reception Theories.” T. Kindt & H.-H.
Müller (eds.). What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status
of a Theory. Berlin: de Gruyter, 277–301.
Herman, David, ed. (2003). Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford:
CSLI Publications.
Ong, Walter J. (1975). “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA: Publica-
tions of the Modern Language Association of America 90, 9–21.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. (1978). The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional The-
ory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.
Rousset, Jean (1986). Le Lecteur intime: de Balzac au journal. Paris: Corti.
Smith, Frank (1971). Understanding Reading. Mahwah: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2004.
Suleiman, Susan R. & Inge Crosman, eds. (1980). The Reader in the Text: Essays on
Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. (1980). Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-
Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
 Schemata
Catherine Emmott & Marc Alexander

1 Definition

Schemata are cognitive structures representing generic knowledge, i.e.

structures which do not contain information about particular entities,
instances or events, but rather about their general form. Readers use
schemata to make sense of events and descriptions by providing default
background information for comprehension, as it is rare and often un-
necessary for texts to contain all the detail required for them to be fully
understood. Usually, many or even most of the details are omitted, and
readers’ schemata compensate for any gaps in the text. As schemata
represent the knowledge base of individuals, they are often culturally
and temporally specific, and are ordinarily discussed as collective
stores of knowledge shared by prototypical members of a given or as-
sumed community. The term was used in the 1930s in both psychology
and literary theory, but entered wider currency in the 1970s in Artificial
Intelligence research, later being re-incorporated into psychology and
thence into linguistics, within the general area of cognitive science.

2 Explication

The terms used in this area have historically been highly variable and
differ across disciplines. The term “schema” is often used as a superor-
dinate label for a broad range of knowledge structures, including
frames, scenarios, scripts and plans, as described below. “Schema” is
also used as a synonym for “frame” (Minsky 1975) to refer to mental
representations of objects, settings or situations. A restaurant sche-
ma/frame, for example, would contain information about types of res-
taurants, what objects are to be found inside a restaurant, and so on.
The term “scenario” is also sometimes used for situational knowledge
(Sanford & Garrod 1981). A “script” (Schank & Abelson 1977) is a
temporally-ordered schema; it describes a reader’s knowledge of stereo-
typical goal-oriented event sequences “that define a well-known situa-
 Schemata 757

tion” (422), so that a restaurant script would contain knowledge of the

actions and sequence of ordering food, paying bills, and so on. In addi-
tion to a sequence of events, most scripts have further “slots” to de-
scribe the “roles” (customers, waiters, chefs, etc.), “props” (menu, ta-
ble, food, money, bill, etc.), “entry conditions” (customer is hungry,
restaurant has food, etc.) and “results” (customer is no longer hungry,
restaurant has less food, etc.) within the script. A “plan” (Schank &
Abelson 1977) consists of knowledge about sets of actions needed to
accomplish objectives and is used in non-stereotypical situations where
there is no adequate script available.
Linguists, psychologists and narrative scholars employ schema theo-
ry to account for the interpretation of a text where the discourse itself
does not provide all the information necessary for the discourse to be
processed. Consider the following example: “John went to a restaurant
for lunch. He ordered a salad, had a coffee and then went to the park for
a walk.” This short text cannot describe all the actions, activities and
situational information which a reader requires to comprehend it.
Schemata and scripts supply the gaps in reader knowledge (that, for
example, a restaurant is a place which serves food, that food once or-
dered is supplied, and that one must pay before leaving). The general
notion of gap-filling has long been recognized in literary studies.
Ingarden ([1931] 1973) refers to “spots of indeterminacy,” an idea later
adopted by Iser ([1976] 1978), and Sternberg (1978, 1985) discusses
“expositional gaps.” Research in Artificial Intelligence on schemata
adds a detailed explanation of how inferences are made by utilizing ge-
neric knowledge in processing specific parts of a text. As schemata are
situational and socioculturally dependent, some readers may supply
more information from their schemata than others.
Schemata are therefore essential for establishing the coherence of a
text (Toolan → Coherence). Furthermore, schemata are dynamic
(Schank 1982) to the extent that they accumulate details and are altered
in the course of experience. If changing circumstances and new events
contradict existing schemata or make them appear inadequate in a rela-
tively minor way, they can be “tuned” (Rumelhart 1980: 52) to accom-
modate new generalizations. The relationship between texts and sche-
mata is two-way: while schemata tend to lay the ground rules for how a
discourse will be interpreted, discourses themselves may prompt read-
ers to “tune” existing schemata and create new ones (Rumelhart &
Norman 1978; Cook 1994: 182–184).
758 Catherine Emmott & Marc Alexander

3 History of the Concept and its Study

Some schema researchers (e.g. Cook 1994; Semino 1997) trace the
philosophical notion of schemata back to Immanuel Kant. Another an-
tecedent is Gestalt theory in psychology (Wertheimer [1923] 1938,
[1925] 1938; Köhler 1930; Koffka 1935). Also in psychology, Bartlett
(1932) used the term (which he credits to the earlier work of the neu-
rologist Sir Henry Head) to explain speakers’ unknowing alteration of
folktale details during retellings, with such alterations being made in
line with the speakers’ schemata. In literary theory in the 1930s,
Ingarden ([1931] 1973) argued that there was a stratum of “schematized
aspects” in the perception of literary works of art. After a lull of many
years, schema theory re-emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when sche-
mata were refined within Artificial Intelligence as mental constructs of
knowledge derived from an individual’s experience and learning (in
this sense often called “frames,” e.g. Minsky 1975). While scripts were
first identified by Schank and Abelson (1977), the focus of their work
was mainly on computational aspects of comprehension. Bower et al.
(1979) then provided evidence within cognitive psychology that readers
employed scripts during their processing of a discourse. Later, Schank
(1982) employed scripts in more detail as dynamic tools for discourse
processing, breaking scripts down into component parts (Memory Or-
ganization Packets, MOPs) which could be combined into larger struc-
tures when required.
In narrative studies, schema theory has been important not only for
its role in explaining gap-filling in reading, as discussed above, but also
in relation to a reader’s knowledge of the overall structure of stories,
termed “story schemata” (e.g. Rumelhart 1975; Mandler & Johnson
1977; Mandler 1984), the cognitive equivalent of text-based story
grammars. According to their proponents, story schemata contain sets
of expectations about how stories will continue, although some psy-
chologists (e.g. Black & Wilensky 1979; Johnson-Laird 1983) have
questioned whether special cognitive structures are required beyond
general reasoning. Knowledge of the form of texts has also been stud-
ied in the analysis of “super-coherence,” de Beaugrande’s (1987) term
for thematic awareness, in postulating schemata for specific genres
(Fludernik 1996; Herman 2002) and in the examination of knowledge
of intertextual links (Eco 1984; Genette [1982] 1997).
Schema theory has also been used to construct new theories about
the nature of narrative. Fludernik (1996) employs it to redefine narrativ-
ity (Abbott → Narrativity), suggesting that cognitive parameters which
are “constitutive of prototypical human experience” (12) are the main
 Schemata 759

criteria for what makes a story a story, not action sequences as tradi-
tionally thought. In her model, “there can therefore be narratives with-
out plot, but there cannot be any narratives without a human (anthro-
pomorphic) experiencer” (13). Herman (2002: 85–86) defines
“narrative-hood,” his term for the difference between narratives and
non-narratives, using scripts. As scripts represent only stereotypical and
expected information, the gaps in a text which a script can supply are
not unique and hence do not produce narratives in their own right. By
contrast, where a gap cannot be filled by stereotypical information, it
“focus[es] attention on the unusual and the remarkable” (90) and re-
quires a narrative explanation. For Herman, narrativehood is a binary
distinction in contrast to the scalar nature of narrativity, the property of
being more or less prototypically a narrative. He argues (91) that max-
imal narrativity is achieved by balancing the appropriate amount of
“canonicity and breach,” using Bruner’s (1991) terms. If the majority of
events in a story are too stereotypical, they will be untellable and/or
uninteresting, but if events are too unusual, the text may not readily be
interpreted as a story. Hühn and Kiefer (2005) use the term “eventful-
ness” for deviations from scripts, viewing these deviations as both un-
expected events and instances when an expected event does not occur
(Hühn → Event and Eventfulness). For them, deviations must be
judged by viewing sequences in the context of cultural and historical
factors, using schemata to assess the degree of deviation (see also Hühn
2010).
Another important theoretical contribution of schema theory lies in
discussions of literariness. Cook (1994) has defined “literariness” as
“discourse deviation,” stating that a narrative acquires literary status
when it “bring[s] about a change in the schemata of a reader” (182).
Cook sees literary discourse as “schema refreshing,” meaning that old
schemata may be destroyed, new ones constructed and that new con-
nections may be made between existing schemata (191), in contrast to
“schema preserving” or “schema reinforcing” forms of discourse. His
theory echoes the Russian formalist idea of defamiliarization as an es-
sential aspect of literary writing and comprehending. Cook’s definition
is controversial because texts which are not literary may nevertheless
disrupt existing schemata, as Cook himself admits (47, 192) in relation
to journalism, science writing and conversation. In addition, Semino
(1997: 175) argues that literary texts can both challenge and confirm
existing beliefs, suggesting a scale of schema refreshment for those
which are challenging. This does, however, depend on the historical
period: during medieval times, confirmation seems to have dominated,
whereas in modern times deviation is generally more prominent (see
760 Catherine Emmott & Marc Alexander

Lotman’s ([1970] 1977: 288–296) concepts of “aesthetics of identity

and opposition”). Jeffries (2001), though, highlights the extent to which
particular sub-cultures nowadays may still delight in “schema affirma-
tion,” her term for a reader’s “thrill of recognition” of familiar experi-
ence in literary texts. A different perspective on the role of schemata is
provided by Miall (1989), who argues that it is a reader’s emotions that
primarily help the reader make sense of a defamiliarizing literary text,
suggesting that affect is primary in reading and that emotions drive the
construction of new schemata rather than being an after-effect of cogni-
tive processing.
One major use of schema theory has been in the description of
“mind style” (Fowler [1986] 1996) by stylisticians, who use linguistic
analysis to study the thought representations of characters who have
difficulty comprehending the world around them, such as primitive
humans, the mentally impaired, and those alien to a culture (see Semino
2006 for a summary). Often the technique used by writers is to under-
specify (Emmott 2006) the references to key aspects of the focalizing
character’s context so that the character’s lack of understanding is con-
veyed, but nevertheless writers still need to give readers enough clues
to construe the situation by using familiar schemata. Palmer (2004)
goes beyond the focus on special types of mind style by suggesting that
all fictional minds need to be cognitively constructed by means of “con-
tinuing-consciousness frames” in order to bring together diverse men-
tions of the thoughts of individual characters and groups of characters
throughout a story.
In addition to the above theoretical and descriptive uses, the notion
of schemata has an extremely wide range of applications in narrative
studies. In feminist stylistics, Mills (1995: 187–194), has used it to
challenge the sexist schemata that she claims are needed to read some
literary texts written by men. In humor studies, oddly incongruous
frames are often regarded as the source of humor (e.g. Semino 1997;
Hidalgo-Downing 2000; Simpson 2003; Ermida 2008). In detective and
mystery stories, clues can be buried by making descriptions heavily
schema consistent, then subsequently highlighted by adding infor-
mation over and above the schema (Alexander 2006; Emmott et al.
2010). In the analysis of science fiction (Stockwell 2003) and absurdist
texts (Semino 1997; Hidalgo-Downing 2000), schema theory can ex-
plain how alternative and bizarre worlds are created. In educational
psychology, schemata and scripts explain how children develop their
storytelling and comprehension skills (e.g. McCabe & Peterson eds.
1991). In film studies (Kuhn & Schmidt → Narration in Film), schema
theory has been used in discussions of text coherence, genre, and char-
 Schemata 761

acter construction (Bordwell 1989: 129–195; Branigan 1992: 1–32).

This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but gives an indication of
the importance of schema theory across a number of areas.
In recent years, the emphasis within the cognitive study of narrative
has shifted somewhat (Herman → Cognitive Narratology). Schema
theory is still viewed as important, but there has been a growing interest
in how a reader needs to supplement general knowledge with the
knowledge accumulated from the text itself. So readers will normally
gather together a large store of information about characters and con-
texts as they read a text. Emmott (1997) calls this “text-specific
knowledge” and argues that readers must not only build mental repre-
sentations (termed “contextual frames”) using this knowledge, but up-
date these representations where necessary and utilize the information
at later stages in a text. Similar ideas can be found in Gerrig’s (1993)
examination of narrative worlds, Werth’s (1999) text world theory, and
Herman’s (2002) study of storyworlds.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) The inter-relation between schema knowledge and other knowledge

(e.g. expert, autobiographical, and text world knowledge) needs to be
explored further and built into an overall model with empirical testing
of texts which are more complex than traditional psychological and Ar-
tificial Intelligence materials. (b) More psychological research is need-
ed to establish how generic knowledge derived from the real world is
utilized in building counterfactual worlds, since the findings from cur-
rent empirical work are not consistent (Nieuwland & van Berkum 2006;
Ferguson & Sanford 2008; Sanford & Emmott 2012). (c) There needs
to be additional investigation of how readers use schemata similarly or
differently in reading factual and fictional texts. (d) Frames based on
“intertextual knowledge” (Eco 1984; Genette [1982] 1997) need further
empirical study.
762 Catherine Emmott & Marc Alexander

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Alexander, Marc (2006). Cognitive-Linguistic Manipulation and Persuasion in Agatha

Christie, M.Phil. thesis. Glasgow: U of Glasgow.
Bartlett, Frederick C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psy-
chology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Black, John B. & Robert Wilensky (1979). “An Evaluation of Story Grammars.” Cog-
nitive Science 3, 213–230.
Bordwell, David (1989). Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation
of Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Bower, Gordon, John B. Black & Terrence J. Turner (1979). “Scripts in Memory for
Text.” Cognitive Psychology 11, 177–220.
Branigan, David (1992). Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge.
Bruner, Jerome (1991). “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18,
1–21.
Cook, Guy (1994). Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind. Oxford:
Oxford UP.
de Beaugrande, Robert (1987). “Schemas for Literary Communication.” L. Halász
(ed.). Literary Discourse: Aspects of Cognitive and Social Psychological Ap-
proaches. Berlin: de Gruyter, 49–99.
Eco, Umberto (1984). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Emmott, Catherine (1997). Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Ox-
ford: Oxford UP.
– (2006). “Reference: Stylistic Aspects.” K. Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Lan-
guage and Linguistics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Elsevier, vol. 10, 441–450.
– Anthony J. Sanford & Marc Alexander (2010). “Scenarios, Characters’ Roles and
Plot Status. Readers’ Assumtions and Writers’ Manipulations of Assumtions in
Narrative Texts.” J. Eder, F. Jannidis & R. Schneider (eds.). Characters in Fic-
tional Worlds. Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other
Media. Berlin: de Gruyter, 377–399.
Ermida, Isabel (2008). The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in
Short Stories. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Ferguson, Heather J. & Anthony J. Sanford (2008). “Anomalies in Real and Counter-
factual Worlds: An Eye-Movement Investigation.” Journal of Memory and Lan-
guage 58, 609–626.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Fowler, Roger ([1986] 1996). Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Genette, Gérard ([1982] 1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Gerrig, Richard J. (1993). Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activ-
ities of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP.
 Schemata 763

Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura (2000). Negation, Text Worlds, and Discourse: The Pragmat-
ics of Fiction. Stamford: Ablex.
Hühn, Peter (2010). Eventfulness in British Fiction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
– & Jens Kiefer (2005). The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in
English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Ingarden, Roman ([1931] 1973). The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the
Borderlines of Ontology, Logic and Theory of Literature. Evanston: Northwestern
UP.
Iser, Wolfgang ([1976] 1978). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Jeffries, Lesley (2001). “Schema Theory and White Asparagus: Cultural Multilingual-
ism among Readers of Texts.” Language and Literature 10, 325–343.
Johnson-Laird, Philip (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Koffka, Kurt (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner.
Köhler, Wolfgang (1930). Gestalt Psychology. London: Bell.
Lotman, Jurij ([1970] 1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: U of Michi-
gan P.
Mandler, Jean M. (1984). Scripts, Stories and Scenes: Aspects of Schema Theory.
Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
– & Nancy S. Johnson (1977). “Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure
and Recall.” Cognitive Psychology 9, 111–151.
McCabe, Allyssa & Carole Peterson, eds. (1991). Developing Narrative Structure.
Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Miall, David S. (1989). “Beyond the Schema Given: Affective Comprehension of Lit-
erary Narratives.” Cognition and Emotion 3, 55–78.
Mills, Sara (1995). Feminist Stylistics. London: Routledge.
Minsky, Marvin (1975). “A Framework for Representing Knowledge.” P. H. Winston
(ed.). The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York: McGraw-Hill, 211–277.
Nieuwland, Mante S. & Jos J. A. van Berkum (2006). “When Peanuts Fall in Love:
N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
19, 1098–1111.
Palmer, Alan (2004). Fictional Minds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Rumelhart, David E. (1975). “Notes on a Schema for Stories.” D. G. Bobrow & A.
Collins (eds). Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science.
New York: Academic P, 211–235.
– (1980). “Schemata: The Building Blocks of Cognition.” R. Spiro, B. Bruce & W.
Brewer (eds.). Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension. Hillsdale: Law-
rence Erlbaum, 33–58.
– & Donald A. Norman (1978). “Accretion, Tuning and Restructuring: Three
Modes of Learning.” J. W. Cotton & R. Klatzky (eds.). Semantic Factors in Cog-
nition. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 37–53.
Sanford, Anthony J. & Catherine Emmott (2012). Mind, Brain and Narrative. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP.
764 Catherine Emmott & Marc Alexander

– & Simon C. Garrod (1981). Understanding Written Language: Explorations in

Comprehension Beyond the Sentence. Chichester: Wiley.
Schank, Roger C. (1982). Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
– & Robert P. Abelson (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. Hillsdale:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Semino, Elena (1997). Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. Lon-
don: Longman.
– (2006). “Mind Style.” K. Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language and Linguis-
tics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Elsevier, vol. 8, 142–148.
Simpson, Paul (2003). On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satiri-
cal Humour. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Sternberg, Meir (1978). Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins UP.
– (1985). The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama
of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Stockwell, Peter (2003). “Schema Poetics and Speculative Cosmology.” Language and
Literature 12.3, 252–271.
Werth, Paul (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Lon-
don: Longman.
Wertheimer, Max ([1923] 1938). “Laws of Organization in Perceptual Forms.” W. D.
Ellis (ed). A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 71–88.
– ([1925] 1938). “Gestalt Theory.” W. D. Ellis (ed). A Source Book of Gestalt Psy-
chology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1–11.

5.2 Further Reading

Emmott, Catherine, Marc Alexander & Agnes Marszalek (2014). “Schema Theory in
Stylistics.” M. Burke (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. London:
Routledge, 268–283.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Semino, Elena (2001). “On Readings, Literariness and Schema Theory: A Reply to
Jeffries.” Language and Literature 10, 345–355.
Stockwell, Peter (2006). “Schema Theory: Stylistic Applications.” K. Brown (ed.).
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Elsevier, vol.
11, 8–73.

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council
for funding for this work, which was conducted as part of the STACS
Project (Stylistics, Text Analysis and Cognitive Science: Interdiscipli-
nary Perspectives on the Nature of Reading).
 Sequentiality
Herbert Grabes

1 Definition

Sequentiality is the linear, unidirectional succession of elements or

events, either reversible (as with motion in space) or irreversible (as in
the flow of time). Regarding language texts, it is the irreversible se-
quence of signs from beginning to end, i.e. the succession of “these
words in this order” (Cameron 1962: 145). In narration it is the se-
quence in which events are presented (discourse); also essential are the
sequence of the narrated events in the real or imagined world (story)
and the sequence in which they are received by listeners or readers.

2 Explication

Sequentiality is an essential trait of narration and narrative on every

level of investigation: on that of the author or production (in terms of
the processes of telling or writing); on that of the presentation or dis-
course (in terms of the sequence of signifiers); on that of the presented
events in their individual shape or story (in terms of their chronological
or otherwise meaningful sequence); on that of the underlying bare
scheme of successive narrative events or fabula (as defined by Bal
[1985] 1997); on that of the listener or reader (in terms of the processes
of listening or reading); and on that of the relations between these lev-
els. Closer inspection reveals that the identity of any narrative depends
on its particular sequentiality on all these levels—with the exception of
the process of writing on the level of production.
Verbal narration is a temporal medium: telling or writing as well as
listening or reading are temporal processes that take place in time, and
the real or imagined world in which narrated events are placed is held
to be governed by temporality. Consequently, the important relation
between the sequence of presentation and that of presented events is
mostly discussed in temporal terms. In the case of a concurrence of
these sequences, one speaks of ‘chronological’ telling; otherwise,
766 Herbert Grabes

‘anachrony’ obtains (Genette [1972] 1980). This seems logical and is

indeed perfectly adequate with regard to oral narration. However, when
narratives are recorded or written, they are to a considerable extent
freed of that temporal anchoring. Not only can they be made accessible
at different times in different places in the story, but it is also possible
for listeners or readers to deviate from the notational sequence of
presentation and approach the various parts of a narrative text in a se-
quence of their own determination. Although authors usually structure
their narratives in the expectation that readers will read them in the se-
quence in which they are written, they also know that, for instance,
more than a few readers of detective stories read the ending early on in
order to know ‘whodunnit.’ What is rarely realized is that, owing to the
dynamic character of the construction of meaning in the process of
reading, such a change in the sequence of reception actually results in
the creation of a new text from the elements of a given one—hence, of
a different narrative of the reader’s own making. It follows that it is
more appropriate to discuss discursive sequence in terms of sequentiali-
ty than in terms of temporality.
On closer inspection, this can also be seen to hold true regarding the
order of events on the story level. Of course, the assumption that, in
analogy to real-life experience, this order must be temporal—events
occurring either simultaneously or in chronological sequence—is well
founded, and the construction of this temporal order in the process of
listening or reading is not only commonplace but also conducive to the
further assumption that succession implies causality (Chatman 1978;
Kafalenos 2006; Pier 2008). Temporal sequence is not the only way of
meaningfully arranging narrated events, however. Sternberg (1990,
1992) has listed the further options of simultaneity (e.g. in terms of ad-
dition or alternation of multiple strands), non-temporal sequentiality (as
in case of a hierarchical order, e.g. proceeding from the more general to
the particular, or vice versa), functional sequentiality (e.g. in terms of
multiperspectivity), and ‘suprasegmentiality’ (e.g. ‘spatiality’ or, rather,
a strategy for creating the illusion of spatial arrangement). It has also
been shown that with “polychronic narration” (Herman 1998, 2002),
the creation of order becomes problematic.
 Sequentiality 767

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Narrative Uses of Sequence

Thanks to the impressive amount of historical writing, from diaries,

autobiographies and biographies to chronicles and historiography prop-
er, as well as to fictional autobiographies, biographies and historical
tales and novels, the most common kind of narrative sequentiality is
concurrence between the sequence of presentation and the temporal
sequence of narrated events or ‘chronology.’ From Thucydides in the
5th century BC to Gibbon in the 17th and Ranke in the 19th century,
the writing of history has been marked by a chronological presentation
of the past “as it really was” (Ranke [1824] 1909)—at least in intention.
The same holds true for biographical writing from late antiquity (Plu-
tarch, Suetonius, Tacitus) to the present day, for fictional biographies
and autobiographies such as Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) and a host of
fictitious biographies from Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1669)
and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1709) onwards. Even when the presen-
tational sequence in a narrative frame happens not to be chronological,
it is normally thus in the framed stories (of which there are many ex-
amples from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1378) to Brautigan’s 1970
postmodern Trout Fishing in America).
On the other hand, ever since the Homeric epic (8th century B.C.),
authors have deviated from this concurrence between the sequence of
presentation and that of the events told; the Homeric method of begin-
ning in medias res was long the norm for the epic genre. A yet more
audacious and even playful experimentation with narrative sequence
was encouraged by the novel because of its rather loose generic form.
Significant interruptions of chronological telling can be found in Brit-
ain from Fielding onwards; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) is already
an example of deliberate and excessive play with presentational se-
quence.
It was, however, only with the turn to modernism, when authors be-
gan to write with the deliberate aim of making reading difficult, that
experimenting with the sequence of presentation became a prominent
feature of literary narrative. A major tendency was to write “against
time” (cf. Grabes 1996), a practice that led to weakening sequential
structure through fragmentation and collage and the concomitant devia-
tion from the traditional rule of apprehension. Well-known examples of
what Frank (1945, 1991) was to call “spatial form” are Belyj’s cubist
novel Petersburg (1913) with its attempt to achieve a ‘spatial’ effect,
Faulkner’s sequential creation of the effect of synchronicity in The
768 Herbert Grabes

Sound and the Fury (1929) and of multi-perspectivity in As I Lay Dying

(1930), and the use of the collage by Dos Passos in his trilogy USA
(1930–36) to display a broad panorama of the United States during the
first three decades of the 20th century.
Even more radically experimental was some postmodern writers’
willful avoidance of a definite narrative sequence by adopting particular
kinds of notation, a strategy exploited by offering the option of reading
the parts of a literary text in several sequences and thus creating several
works on the basis of one written text (cf. McHale 1987: 190–193, on
the “schizoid text”). In the blurb to the 1962 Weidenfeld and Nicholson
edition of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the book is fittingly called a “do-it-
yourself detective story” because the reader can choose among the sev-
eral possible sequences in which the various parts of a novel (disguised
as a critical edition of a narrative poem) are read. Cortázar, in the intro-
duction to his novel Rayuela (trans. Hopscotch, 1966), suggests two
sequential patterns, making two works created from the same text. A
similar strategy is used by Michel Butor in Boomerang (1978) by hav-
ing parts of the text printed in different colors, so that one may either
follow the sequence of parts in one color only or read the whole book
without paying any heed to the colors. Even in such cases, however,
“[t]he author is the one who proposed a number of possibilities which
had already been rationally organized, oriented, and endowed with
specifications for proper development” (Eco [1962] 1989: 19). This,
however, no longer obtains when the potential sequences of apprehen-
sion become practically countless, as was the case when experimenta-
tion reached a further stage. B.S. Johnson, for instance, went so far as
to present the 29 chapters of his novel The Unfortunates (1969) loosely
in a box, with only the first and last marked as such, and Mark Saporta
in his Composition No. 1 (1962) offered his readers no more than a
batch of unnumbered pages, printed on one side, which, according to
the author’s instruction on the cover of the box, “may be read in any
order. The reader is requested to shuffle them like a deck of cards.”
A much more elegant and widespread option was the appearance of
hypertext, an interactive kind of textuality, embedded in a digital envi-
ronment, which permits the generation of multiple stories by leaving
the sequential order of textual elements or events to the ‘reader’ (or,
rather, co-author). In a Storyspace hypertext like Michael Joyce’s af-
ternoon: a story (1987), a great number of textual units, called ‘lexias’,
were offered for various kinds of arrangement, though conditions could
be placed on the activation of links. In such web-based HTML-Frames
from the 1990s as Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the
War (1996), a computer page is subdivided into several frames that re-
 Sequentiality 769

main synchronically given, so that the sequence in which they are ex-
plored and manipulated is left to the discretion of the user. In artificial
intelligence-driven texts like Façade (2002) by Michael Mateas and
Andrew Stern, not only can the user act as co-author but he or she can
‘enter’ the created artificial world and move around in it like a character
in a play. No wonder that particular kinds of computer games are also
regarded as narratives!
What must be kept in mind, however, is the fact that both a particu-
lar sequence of presentation and a particular sequence of events are
such important structuring devices of a narrative that we are actually
dealing with different narratives when one or both of these sequences
are changed. Postmodern textual experiments like those by Johnson or
Saporta and, even more so, the various kinds of hypertexts and comput-
er games, are therefore programs for the creation of a multiplicity of
narratives, not narratives per se.

3.2 Sequentiality in Narratology I: Theorizing Structural Sequence

Attention to sequence was already given in the rhetoric and poetics of

classical antiquity (Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herrenium, 55 B.C.; Horace,
Ars poetica, 14 B.C.) when dealing with disposition, or the order of
speech, and the distinction between ordo naturalis and ordo artificialis,
thus anticipating the later differentiation between chronological and
non-chronological narrating. Another, albeit indirect, focus on sequence
is found later in Lessing’s Laokoon ([1766] 1901), where literature is
defined as a temporal art, the domain of which, from a mimetic point of
view, is therefore the rendering of actions and events. And although this
definition may be too narrow to apply to literature in general, it fits well
for narrative, where the presentation of some sort of change seems in-
dispensable.
Beginning with the discovery by Propp ([1928] 1968) that, in a cor-
pus of 100 Russian folktales, invariant functions are linked in particular
sequences, sequentiality—often under the name of temporality or caus-
al sequence (in the sense of causa efficiens)—has played a crucial role
in the various attempts to explain narrative structure, ranging from the
assumption of a “universal plot” (Raglan 1936) or a “monomyth”
(Campbell [1949] 1990) to that of an underlying “narrative grammar”
(Todorov 1969; Greimas 1971), and the models inspired by generative-
transformational linguistics (Prince 1973; Pavel 1976, 1985; van Dijk
1976; Doležel 1979) and schema theory (Rumelhart 1975; Schank &
Abelson 1977; Ryan 1991; Herman 1997; Emmott 1997; Hühn 2008).
This pertains in particular to the relation between the chronological se-
770 Herbert Grabes

quence of told events and the sequence of their presentation in a narra-

tive, a relation discussed by the Russian formalists in the 1920s in terms
of the distinction between fabula and sjužet and defined by Genette
([1972] 1980) as that between histoire (or narrative content) and récit
(or narrative discourse). Using different terms for distinctions already
made by Müller ([1948] 1968) and Lämmert (1955), Genette ([1972]
1980: 35, 40) distinguished between “the temporal order of succession
of the events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their ar-
rangement in the narrative,” drawing attention to “anachronies,” or
“forms of discordance between the two temporal orders of story and
narrative” that result from “analepses” (flashbacks) and “prolepses”
(flashforwards), as well as to the special case known as “achrony,” an
incident deprived of any temporal anchoring in the chronological se-
quence (84). Richardson (2002) was able to show how great the variety
of temporal sequences of told events in a narrative can actually be: cir-
cular, contradictory, antinomic, differential, conflated, and dual or mul-
tiple. He also introduced the term “metatemporal” for unusual or im-
possible temporalities (or, rather, sequences which cannot be imagined
in terms of temporal relations). A narrative text allowing the imagining
of multiple sequences of events became for Barthes in S/Z ([1970]
1974) the ideal of a “writerly text” that turns the reader from a consum-
er into a producer. After a few attempts by authors to reach this goal
with printed texts by leaving the sequence of discourse undetermined to
some extent, readers generally become co-producers with the advent of
interactive hypertexts that require subjective choices or interaction be-
tween concurrent processes instead of following a particular, fully au-
thor-determined line of discourse (cf. Ryan 1991, 2006). Even comput-
er games, with their guided text production yet still wide-open
sequentiality, are treated by some narratologists as narratives (Neitzel
→ Narrativity of Computer Games; cf. Ryan 2006).
More recently, the emphases of structuralist narratology have been
influenced by including the perspective of the reader, who is held to
construct the fabula from the discourse, and this has led to bringing the
traditionally more text-oriented structuralist view of sequentiality into
line with the theory of reading (see Rimmon-Kenan 1977; Sternberg
1978; Perry 1979; Bremond [1966] 1980; Culler 1980; Ryan 1991 and
2006; Ireland 2001; Dannenberg 2004; Kafalenos 2006; Baroni 2007;
Pier 2008). Sternberg, Ireland and Kafalenos, in particular, have exten-
sively discussed sequence in a way in which the structuralist paradigm
is opened to the more comprehensive one of a theory of reading.
 Sequentiality 771

3.3 Sequentiality in Narratology II: Theory of Reading

While the linearity of the discourse of written narratives (cf. Miller

1992) suggests reading word by word, line by line, and page by page
according to the culturally determined code of writing and reading, it is
often forgotten that, once written, all these words, lines and pages of a
text exist synchronously in a spatial arrangement and can be ap-
proached in a temporal sequence more or less determined by the reader.
This ‘spatiality’ of the written text tends to obscure the fact that a par-
ticular discursive sequentiality is an essential feature of the identity of a
narrative and that readers who do not stick to the conventional rule of
approaching the text in the sequence presented by the author will actu-
ally read a different narrative of their own making (Grabes 2013). This
has to do with the dynamic character of sequential perception: apart
from the ‘primacy’ and ‘recency’ effect (Luchins 1957; Perry 1979),
cognitive psychology has shown that later deviations from schemata or
semantic models, once they have been introduced, tend to be distrusted
or wholly overlooked (Hovland, ed. 1957; Grabes 1978). To be reck-
oned with is what Iser ([1976] 1978) has termed the “wandering view-
point,” with its continuously changing “retentions” (or looks back at
what has already been read) and “protentions” (or assumptions of what
may happen in the future; cf. Toolan 2004, 2009) and the ongoing pro-
cess of re-evaluation motivated by new information (cf. Grabes 1978,
2004, 2013; van Dijk 1980; Sternberg 1992, 2001; Margolin 1999;
Kafalenos 2006).The stance taken by earlier structuralist narratology
that tends to keep in view all features and parts of a narrative “at the
same time” is therefore an artificial one designed to obtain valuable
scientific insights but which remains far removed from the actual expe-
rience of reading a narrative. The perspective of the reader had already
been introduced by Kermode (1967, 1978) and by Eco (1979), but the
processual and dynamic character of imaginary worldmaking during
reading has also been investigated by reception theory, following up the
insights of Ingarden ([1937] 1973), Iser ([1976] 1978), and Ruthrof
(1981). Also to be mentioned are the investigations into the creation of
fictional “characters” during the reading process (Grabes 1978, 2004;
Margolin 1987, 1995). With the advent of interactive hypertexts, the
processual character of narration has by necessity become foreground-
ed, since the ‘reader’ or consumer is also a ‘writer’ or producer (cf.
Barthes [1970] 1974;Yellowlees 2000). This is a field which is still un-
der discussion, and the growth of digital media will ensure than it re-
mains in focus. A most useful survey of the various forms of interactive
narrative texts has already been provided by Ryan (2006).
772 Herbert Grabes

4 Topics for Further Investigation

The more recent tendency of having authors present their narratives in

the form of public readings has strengthened the general awareness that
narration is a processual and thus a sequential art, and it is to be hoped
that this aspect of narration (“performance-culture orality”) will receive
more attention in narratological research.
One question that deserves more attention is the sequential building
up of varieties of imaginary space and of more or less static objects in
space. The fact that the particular sequential creation of such varieties
in discourse has an impact on the imagined products has not been suffi-
ciently studied. It will thus be fruitful to develop models of how partic-
ular sequences of signs are transformed into synchronous systems of
meaning by processes in which each succeeding stage incorporates all
previous stages. Due to the sequentiality of language in general and its
importance for the study of literature (cf. Grabes 2013), such models
are of particular interest for narratology, since the sequences of signs in
narratives, which can be quite lengthy, require potent strategies for
keeping track of earlier stages of the story and revising them as the text
advances. They are, in fact, indispensable, not least for the critic, who,
in interpreting particular works, must remain highly attentive to se-
quence—not merely in detective stories but in narratives at large.
Among the early attempts to tackle this problem was work on the pri-
macy-recency effect (Luchins 1957; Perry 1979), but also Holloway
(1979) who, using set theory, described each phase in the reading pro-
cess as a set of sets, a continually actualized reconfiguration of the en-
tire sequence of information up to that point. More recently, important
aspects of this process have also been studied from a cognitive perspec-
tive by Emmott (1997) on the basis of “contextual frames” and from a
text semiotic perspective by Pier (2004) in his study of “narrative con-
figurations” as well as within the framework of “narrative progression,”
notably by Toolan (2004, 2009) employing advances in corpus linguis-
tics, and by Phelan (2007) in his work on rhetorical narratology.
 Sequentiality 773

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

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Cameron, J. M. (1962). The Night Battle. Essays. London: The Catholic Book Club.
Campbell, Joseph ([1949] 1990). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Harper
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Dannenberg, Hilary P. (2004). “Ontological Plotting: Narrative as a Multiplicity of
Temporal Dimensions.” J. Pier (ed.). The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in
Anglo-American Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter, 159–190.
Dijk, Teun A. van (1976 ). “Narrative Macro-Structures: Logical and Cognitive Foun-
dations.” Poetics and Theory of Literature 1, 547–568.
– (1980). “Cognitive Processing of Literary Discourse.” Poetics Today 1, 143–159.
Doležel, Lubomír (1979). Essays in Structural Poetics and Narrative Semantics. To-
ronto: Victoria University.
Eco, Umberto ([1962] 1989). The Open Work. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
– (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloom-
ington: Indiana UP.
Emmott Catherine (1997). Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Ox-
ford: Oxford UP.
Frank, Joseph (1945). “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review 53, 221–
240; 433–456; 643–653.
– (1991). The Idea of Spatial Form. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Grabes, Herbert (1978). “Wie aus Sätzen Personen werden… Über die Erforschung
literarischer Figuren.” Poetica 10, 405–428.
– (1996). “Writing Against Time: The Paradox of Temporality in Modernist and
Postmodern Aesthetics.” Poetica 28, 368–385.
– (2004). “Turning Words on the Page into ‘Real’ People.” Style 38.2, 221–235.
[rev. and trans. of Grabes 1978]
– (2013). “The Processualities of Literature.” Journal of Literature and Art Studies
3.1, 1–8.
774 Herbert Grabes

Greimas, Algirdas Julien (1971). “Narrative Grammar: Units and Levels.” Modern
Language Notes 86, 793–806.
Herman, David (1997). “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical
Narratology.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America 112, 1046–1059.
– (1998). “Limits of Order: Toward a Theory of Polychronic Narration.” Narrative
6, 72–95.
– (2002). Story Logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Ne-
braska P.
Holloway, John (1979). Narrative and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Hovland, Carl I., ed. (1957). The Order of Presentation in Persuasion. New Haven:
Yale UP.
Hühn, Peter (2008). “Functions and Forms of Eventfulness in Narrative Fiction.” J. Pier
& J. Á. García Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 141–144.
Ingarden, Roman ([1937] 1973). The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Evanston:
Northwestern UP.
Ireland, Ken (2001). The Sequential Dynamics of Literature. Madison: Farleigh Dickin-
son UP; London: Associated U Presses.
Iser, Wolfgang ([1976] 1978). The Act of Reading. Theory of Aesthetic Response. Bal-
timore: The Johns Hopkins UP.
Kafalenos, Emma (2006). Narrative Causalities. Theory and Interpretation of Narra-
tive. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Kermode, Frank (1967). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New
York: Oxford UP.
– (1978). “Sensing Endings.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33, 144–158.
Lämmert, Eberhard (1955). Bauformen des Erzählens. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim ([1766] 1901). Laokoon. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Luchins, Abraham S. (1957). “Primacy-Recency in Impression Formation.” C. I.
Hovland (ed.). The Order of Presentation in Persuasion. New Haven: Yale UP.
Margolin, Uri (1987). “Introducing and Sustaining Character in Literary Narrative. A
Set of Conditions.” Style 21, 107–124.
– (1995) “Characters in Literary Narrative: Representation and Signification.” Se-
miotica 106, 373–92.
– (1999). “Of What Is Past, Is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Aspectuality,
Modality, and the Nature of Literary Narrative.” D. Herman (ed.). Narratologies:
New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 142–166.
McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen.
Miller, J. Hillis (1992). Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines. New Haven: Yale UP.
Müller, Günther ([1948] 1968). “Erzählzeit und erzählte Zeit.” E. Müller & H. Egner
(eds.). Günther Müller: Morphologische Poetik. Darmstadt: WBG, 269–286.
Pavel, Thomas G. (1976). La syntaxe narrative des tragedies de Corneille. Paris:
Klincksieck.
– (1985). “Literary Narratives.” T. A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse and Literature.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 85–103.
Perry, Menakhem (1979). “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates its
Meanings.” Poetics Today 1.1, 35–64; 311–361.
 Sequentiality 775

Phelan. James (2007). Experiencing Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP.

Pier, John (2004). “Narrative Configurations.” J. Pier (ed.). The Dynamics of Literary
Form. Berlin: de Gruyter, 239–268.
– (2008). “After this, therefore because of this.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa (eds.).
Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 109–140.
Prince, Gerald (1973). A Grammar of Stories. The Hague: Mouton.
Propp, Vladimir ([1928] 1968). Morphology of the Folk Tale. Bloomington: Indiana
UP.
Raglan, Lord (1936). The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama. New York:
Vintage.
Ranke, Leopold von ([1824] 1909). History of Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514.
London: George Bell & Sons.
Richardson, Brian (2002). “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmod-
ern and Nonmimetic Fiction.” B. Richardson (ed.). Narrative Dynamics. Colum-
bus: Ohio State UP, 47–63.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (1977). The Concept of Ambiguity – The Example of James.
Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Rumelhart, David E. (1975). “Notes on a Schema for Stories.” D. G. Bobrow & A.
Collins (eds.). Representations and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science.
New York: Academic P, 211–236.
Ruthrof, Horst (1981). The Reader’s Construction of Narrative. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
– (2006). Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P.
Schank, Roger & Robert P. Abelson (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding.
Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Sternberg, Meir (1978). Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins UP.
– (1990). “Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative Theory.” Poetics Today
11, 901–948.
– (1992). “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity.” Poetics To-
day, 13, 463–541.
– (2001). “Why Narrativity Makes a Difference.” Narrativ, 9, 115–122.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1969). Grammaire du Décaméron. The Hague: Mouton.
Toolan, Michael (2004). “Graded Expectations: On the Textual and Structural Shaping
of Readers’ Narrative Experience.” J. Pier (ed.) The Dynamics of Narrative
Form. Berlin: de Gruyter, 214–237.
– (2009). Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A corpus stylistic approach.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Yellowlees, Douglas J. (2000). The End of Books, or Books without End? Reading
Interaction Narratives. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.
776 Herbert Grabes

5.2 Further Reading

Branigan, Edward (1992). Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge.

Grabes, Herbert (2008). “Encountering People Through Literature.” J. Schlaeger & G.
Stedman (eds.). REAL—Yearbook of Research in English and American Litera-
ture 24: The Literary Mind. Tübingen: Narr, 125–140.
Kroeber, Karl (1992). Reading/Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
Middeke, Martin, ed. (2002). Zeit und Roman. Zeiterfahrung im historischen Wandel
und ästhetischer Paradigmenwechsel vom sechzehnten Jahrhundert bis zur Post-
moderne. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann.
Schlaeger, Jürgen & Gesa Stedman, eds. (2008). REAL—Yearbook of Research in Eng-
lish and American Literature 24: The Literary Mind. Tübingen: Narr.
Strasen, Sven (2008). Rezeptionstheorien. Literatur-, sprach- und kulturwissenschaftli-
che Ansätze und kulturelle Modelle. Trier: WVT.
 Simultaneity in Narrative
Uri Margolin

1 Definition

In the strict, literal sense simultaneity is the property of two or more

events, actions or processes which satisfy the following formula for
temporal location: x is simultaneous with y if and only if for every time
point or interval in which x is (or was or will be) present, y is (or was or
will be) present (Le Poidevin [1996] 2011: 55). In other words, events
are simultaneous if they are isochronous or occupy exactly the same
temporal interval. In a more relaxed sense, if the time interval of event
b is a proper subset of that of event a, b can be said to be simultaneous
with a, but not vice versa. In the context of narrative, simultaneity may
refer to events on the histoire or the discours levels as well as to the
relation between events or actions on these two levels.

2 Explication

In narrative, simultaneity is a relation which can obtain between two or

more events/actions on the level of the narrated, of narration (= concur-
rent acts of speech by two or more narrating instances) and at the nexus
of the two levels (= concurrent narration).
On the narrated level, the simultaneous events or actions can be
physical, mental (including focalization) or verbal and may involve one
or more agents. In the case of one agent, it is usually the pairing of sim-
ultaneous mental and physical, mental and verbal, and physical and
verbal activities which is portrayed, because it is obviously possible to
carry out at the same time more than one physical or mental act, or even
activities of all three kinds. When two or more agents are concerned,
comparisons and contrasts are meaningful only if the same kind of sim-
ultaneous activity is undertaken by all of them. Collective narratives
(Margolin 2000) emphasize the identity or at least marked similarity of
the activities of any kind undertaken by all agents involved in a given
scene, thus creating the image of a supra-individual collective agent. In
778 Uri Margolin

the majority of cases, however, such as in big city novels or in crowd

and battle scenes, it is the diversity or contrast of the simultaneous ac-
tions of the participants which is of the essence. Multi-strand narratives,
especially novels, are based on several long-term chains of events (e. g.
the Anna and Levin strands in Anna Karenina involving different
groups of people (such as families), sometimes at different locations,
running in parallel, and intersecting every now and again.
While simultaneous actions by themselves are a most obvious phe-
nomenon, their scenic representation in a unilinear medium, where only
one action can be represented at any given moment (i.e. in any given
text segment), has been a major challenge to writers from the Iliad to
postmodernist narratives. It is true that coexisting static rather than dy-
namic elements (e.g. features of a complex object, landscape, etc.) can
also be represented one at a time only. But in this case there is not the
sense of missing out, of loss of immediacy, which is inevitable when
simultaneous transitory activities have to be rendered in succession.
The scenic representation of simultaneous narrated acts, or of acts of
narration for that matter, can proceed in one of the following three
manners:

(1) Alternating block presentation in different successive para-

graphs, chapters or even books of different concurrent process-
es or activities, the successive textual parts thus retracing the
same temporal interval. This obvious and rather unsophisticated
procedure is mockingly referred to as “Meanwhile, back on the
ranch.”
(2) Repeated intercutting, sometimes with ever increasing frequen-
cy, between two or more simultaneous narrated actions or acts
of narration (Flaubert’s commice agricole in Madame Bovary,
book 22 of the Iliad).
(3) Turning the text on the page from a one- into a two-
dimensional object by splitting the page into two or more dis-
tinct rows or columns running in parallel, each representing one
of the concurrent activities or acts of narration (Butor’s Niaga-
ra, Josipovici’s “Mobius the Stripper”).

Concurrent narration, “I say it as I see it” in Beckett’s terms, whether

hetero-, homo- or autodiegetic, is faced with the inexorable difficulty of
configuring into a meaningful whole that which is still in the process of
becoming at narration time.
 Simultaneity in Narrative 779

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Studies of Simultaneity

There seems to be no systematic study of the different kinds of simulta-

neous actions in narrative and the modes of their presentation, even
though close readings of individual texts involving this issue abound.
The first scholar to tackle this phenomenon explicitly, more than a cen-
tury ago, seems to have been Zielinski (1901). In newer scholarship,
several fundamental distinctions are made by Harweg ([1991] 2011:
159), who distinguishes between the following: a “longitudinal” se-
quence, where events are presented in chronological order; a “latitudi-
nal” sequence, where isochronous strands of events run in parallel, i.e.
in a point-by-point co-presentation of isochronous, parallel fact-
sequences occurring in different places or with different agents, result-
ing in “spatial” distribution (159); and an “altitudinal,” side-by-side or
intermittent presentation without distinction of different tokens of the
same type of event located at the same place with the same agents but at
different points in time. This is telescoping, synchronization or blend-
ing of events, often produced by acts of recollection and giving an im-
pression of simultaneity, while at the same time creating an occasional
paradigm with an underlying abstract arch-event. De Toro ([1991]
2011: 130–131) enlarges on this, noting that any side-by-side presenta-
tion of events from different times and, one might add, without clear
temporal indexing, tends to create the impression that everything is nar-
rated as happening at the same time. Present-tense narration tends to
enhance this impression. De Toro also alludes to the possibility of sim-
ultaneous narrations, as when a story is presented through several narra-
tors whose perspectives and speech cannot be separated, when different
speech acts merge into one speech act and hence into one single tem-
poral interval. This can occur on the highest level of embedding, but it
is more frequent on the level of the narrated, where different intercut-
ting voices would be reporting on or reacting to one and the same re-
cent occurrence. (One example is Wittig’s Les guérillères.) Frank’s
much celebrated essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” ([1945]
1991) is concerned in part with the rendering of simultaneous actions.
The author notes modern writers’ desire to force readers to perceive
story elements as juxtaposed in space rather than unfolding in time. In
the famous agricultural fair scene in Madame Bovary, for example,
“The flow of time is thus stopped and one’s attention is directed to the
interplay between the levels inside the scene. The significance of the
scene resides precisely in the interrelations between these levels and in
780 Uri Margolin

the simultaneous perception of all three” (16–17). On a much larger

scale, it was Joyce’s purpose in Ulysses to create an overall portrayal of
a city in one day, juxtaposing people, locations, sights and voices, and
thus to project a sense of simultaneous activity occurring in different
places. And it is to this end that Joyce created the elaborate network of
cross-references subtending his novel (17–18).

3.2 Narrating Simultaneous Events

The representation of simultaneous events in a unilinear medium is

most problematic when the scenic representation of two or more ongo-
ing activities or sequences of events is at stake, while both the summary
presentation of simultaneous durative activities as well as the scenic
presentation of momentary/punctual ones can be accomplished within
the confines of a single complex sentence. An adequate profile of any
given set of simultaneous activities would involve numerous parame-
ters. These include the number of agents involved: one, two or three, or
a multiplicity; the nature of their actions (physical, mental, verbal); and
the unity or multiplicity of location(s). In drama and opera, the simulta-
neous activities, verbal or physical, of multiple agents are usually in the
same location and are necessarily presented on the page sequentially.
But in performance they all take place at the same physical and repre-
sented time, while the unitary actual space of the stage can be parti-
tioned into different represented sub-spaces so that the different agents
cannot see or hear each other, while the full effect of the multiple sim-
ultaneous actions is preserved for the audience. In the cinema, with its
split-screen option, simultaneous actions in different locations, or an
agent’s actual speech and the mental images crossing his mind at the
same time, can be presented side by side as a matter of course.
When the intercutting method of presentation, rather than the block
or split page, is employed, several more considerations come into play.
First is the total duration of the simultaneous action sequence and sec-
ond is the frequency of switching from one agent to another or between
different kinds of activities of the same agent. Equally important is the
degree of markedness of each transition (how easily it can be identi-
fied), and closely related to this is the ability to construct a coherent
longitudinal sequence for each of the intermittently presented action
strands. When simultaneous actions or events in a single but extended
space (such as a battlefield) are concerned, the position of the observer
(unrestricted, internal-fixed or internal-variable) is of major signifi-
cance, since it determines how fine-grained any given action descrip-
tion can be. And the same applies to simultaneous actions or events oc-
 Simultaneity in Narrative 781

curring in different locations. On the thematic level, one of series, rang-

ing from close affinity to randomness. No less important are the cogni-
tive and emotive effects of juxtaposing simultaneous activities: from
reinforcement to sharp irony and deflation or even a global effect of
fragmentation and chaos.
Not all logically possible combinations of parameters have been ac-
tualized in literary practice, or at least not to the same extent, possibly
because they are not all equally effective mimetically or aesthetically.
When two simultaneous actions of one individual are in focus, the jux-
taposition of outer speech and inner mental activity, necessarily repre-
sented as inner speech, is the most frequent. The method of presentation
is intercutting, the duration is minutes or at most several hours, and the
switches from inner to outer and vice versa are frequent. The contents
of the two sequences may be closely related (e.g. thinking what to say
next) or entirely unrelated. In some cases, a different kind of font is
employed for each sequence, and when this is not done and the two se-
ries are related in content, it may become progressively more difficult
to tell them apart—a confusion which may well be intended by the au-
thor. When the simultaneous speech activities of two or more agents are
involved and no clear speaker identification is provided, distinguishing
them may become well-nigh impossible, sometimes creating the effect
of verbal overload, cacophony, etc. (Tjupa → Heteroglossia). A multi-
plicity of activities by numerous agents who are all in the same location
and whose activities, both verbal and physical, may be coordinated or
uncoordinated is the standard fare of battle and crowd scenes from
Homer to Tolstoi and Zola. And with the total space being divided into
distinct sub-spaces, this is also the case of the big city novels of Dos
Passos, Döblin and many other 20th-century novelists. Here, too, inter-
cutting is the preferred method, and the diverse actions are designed to
create an impression of fragmentation, alienation and randomness or,
conversely, that of a vast network of underlying interconnections, an
overall unified mechanism. However, since intercutting excludes linear
coherence between any two adjacent action-descriptions, any overall
unified patterns can be grasped only in retrospect. The block represen-
tation of the simultaneous activities of (groups of) agents is typically
associated with multi-strand narratives. By its very nature, it creates a
much weaker sense of simultaneity, since distinct scenes or groups of
scenes are frequently encountered here, each with its own location and
set of characters, and of a duration that may extend over days or weeks.
The simultaneity of events often needs to be foregrounded at the
switching point through such expressions as “at the same time that…,”
“while…,” and the like.
782 Uri Margolin

3.3 Simultaneity of Acts of Narration

Multiple simultaneous acts of narration are encountered in the narrated

domain whenever several characters, all talking at once, but each in his
own words, report on a recent event or action, something frequently
encountered in daily life. Choric narration, i.e. several narrative agents
talking in unison and reporting on the same event, is rare, but examples
can be found in Wittig’s Les guérillères in the passages starting “Elles
disent.” On the cusp between narrator and narrative agent is the chorus
in Greek tragedy, which speaks in unison and refers to itself sometimes
as an “I,” i.e. a supra-individual collective body, and sometimes as
“we,” i.e. a group of like-minded individuals. In modern literature, one
encounters novels (e.g. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying) consisting of a se-
ries of monologues by narrators reporting different phases or aspects of
an extended action in which they themselves are participants or observ-
ers. But in the absence of any indication of an overall situation of narra-
tion, it is doubtful whether one can regard this series as an instance of
simultaneous narration.
Simultaneous narration of sorts occurs in Butor’s Niagara, which
looks more like a script for a stereophonic radio play for a collection of
voices: here, the two constant voices, those of the Announcer and the
Reader, alternate with the voices of various other characters, who
change from one section to the next. Each of the voices relates some
fact or event, past or present, associated with the Niagara Falls. Gabriel
Josipovici’s short story “Mobius the Stripper” tells in the upper part of
each page and in the third person the story of Mobius, and in the lower
part in the first person the story of a young writer suffering from writ-
er’s block. Mobius’ suicide, with which the upper part concludes, re-
leases the writer’s block and he starts writing—presumably the text of
the story just read in the upper part of the page. Two sequences of
events which occupy the same time frame are now also told at the same
time and within the bound of the same page(s). Yet the text which re-
lates the events of Mobius’ life just read could be generated only after
Mobius’ death! Simultaneity and succession thus seem to clash here
and to form a strange loop known as the Möbius strip. And a Möbius
strip is by definition non-orientable! Succession, simultaneity and the
activity of writing are all thematized and problematized in this brilliant
postmodern story.
 Simultaneity in Narrative 783

3.4 Concurrence of Narration and the Narrated

The difficulty of representing two or more simultaneously occurring

events in a verbal medium stems from the medium’s inability in princi-
ple to reflect temporally overlapping occurrences iconically, irrespec-
tive of the narrating instance’s temporal position relative to the narrated
events. On the other hand, when concurrent narration is concerned, the
problem clearly becomes one of the use of deixis, created precisely by
the narrating instance’s temporal position relative to the action se-
quence. This is due to the fact that the events are still ongoing (inchoa-
tive or incomplete) at the time they are being represented, and the ensu-
ing epistemic impossibility of fully representing, and especially
configuring, that which is not yet concluded at the time of reporting.
Moreover, when the concurrent narration of two or more simultaneous
ongoing processes is involved, both kinds of problems and attendant
limitations inevitably come into play.
Concurrent narration is by necessity durative, scenic and cotermi-
nous with the events being reported (cf. Genette [1972] 1980: 216–217:
“simultaneous narration,” defined as “narrative in the present contem-
poraneous with the action”). It consists of a series of NOW intervals
which, put together, make up the ongoing narrational process; in con-
trast, the object of this process is an unfolding sequence of concurrent
temporal stages or intervals which, put together, make up the course of
events being reported (Margolin 1999: 151). Stages of the narration are
accordingly matched with those of the narrated, and these matched
pairs define the overlapping NOW of discursive and reported situations.
The correlated ongoing stepwise passage of time on the two levels is
the specific constitutive factor of concurrent narration. Since the action
is inevitably represented as a series of successive events as they occur,
the reporting is endowed with scenic immediacy, which in turn lends it
superior immersive power with respect to the reader, who can imagine
himself as being on the scene then and there, viewing the events as they
unfold, experiencing them together with narrator and characters.
Being viewed from within and in the midst of the action, the narrat-
ed domain is necessarily represented as a succession of unconfigured
particulars, while narration itself becomes the gradual figuring out of
what the case is as it evolves. Narration here is a record of what is seen,
of what is happening at the moment, and is the antithesis of the histori-
an’s narrative statements which, retrospectively, invest acts and actions
with meaning (Margolin 1999: 151). Accordingly, individual constitu-
tive acts or occurrences can be reported, but their role in the overall
action sequence and their significance in it, as well as the shape and
784 Uri Margolin

outcome of this sequence, are not known as yet. Even the certain and
complete reporting of immediate scenes and of punctual (as opposed to
durative) actions that occur in these scenes is normally restricted to re-
porting them as mere doings or happenings, since they cannot as yet be
defined in terms of action type, motivation, human significance and
value. A situation can thus be recorded as it takes place but not inter-
preted as, say, an error or a brilliant move. Since events are reported as
they occur, as a sequence of NOW moments, the sequence as a whole
may have an additive, paratactic quality. Local cohesion between adja-
cent events can often be established, but not macro-coherence, since the
series as a whole has not yet reached its terminal point. In concurrent
narration, the reporting instance does not possess any temporal distance
from the actions or events nor any external, later vantage point from
which the structuredness and significance of the reported sequence can
be surveyed and defined as an integrated whole. The narrated domain
takes shape as it is being narrated and is not a bounded whole. One
cannot yet elicit a pattern from the incomplete succession, but only pro-
ject one tentatively, if at all.
Finally, it is necessary to distinguish between authentic and apparent
concurrent narration, the criterion being whether or not the ostensible
concurrent narration is embedded in a higher deictic frame. Thus in
Greek tragedy we have teichoscopy, where a character such as a
watchman on a tower observes events occurring in a location inaccessi-
ble to his co-agents and the audience alike, reporting on them in ‘real
time’ to these co-agents and hence indirectly to the audience, as well.
Speech time overlaps here with event time, and there is no higher tem-
poral frame or level. Not only are the events being reported as they oc-
cur, but their immediate impact on the co-agents is also of major im-
portance. Apparent concurrent narration involves a deictic shift in that
the events being ostensibly reported in real time as they unfold are in
fact past or future with respect to the speaker’s temporal position. Past
events may be re-lived by the speaker or conjured before his mind’s eye
(the clairvoyant), while future events may be experienced in their full
immediacy by a speaker-prophet, as is the case of Cassandra’s vision at
the conclusion of the Agamemnon. The so-called historical present may
also be understood as a case of the highest narrating instance in a third-
person retrospective narration performing a temporary deictic shift
whereby it places itself in the time and place of the events being report-
ed, becoming the immediate observer of the events as well as their re-
porter. Now in all cases of apparent concurrent narration (unlike au-
thentic ones), a coherent, well-configured sequence of events can be
presented, since the apparently on-going, open sequence is in fact a
 Simultaneity in Narrative 785

rounded-off unit, embedded in a higher-level and more all-embracing

discourse with a different temporal anchoring (Pier → Narrative Lev-
els).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

As remarked above, block alternation among simultaneous strings of

actions is not particularly challenging to either author or reader. Inter-
cutting, on the other hand, seems to be worthy of further detailed inves-
tigation. One fascinating topic would be to investigate this variety of
the narration of the simultaneous events throughout the ages, from the
Iliad up to at least Modernism. Another topic would be the correlation
between intercutting and a fixed or moving observer’s position, espe-
cially in scenes of wider spatial scope such as battle scenes or big city
activities. A related question would be whether each of the interwoven
strands of simultaneous events or actions is rendered through a different
narrator, or whether one voice is reporting on all of them. And finally,
the relations between simultaneously occurring inner and outer speech
of a character or between concurrently running streams of thought with-
in an individual mind are worth examining both historically and typo-
logically.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Primary Sources

Aeschylus (1979). Agamemnon. Tr. H. Lloyd-Jones. London: Duckworth.

Butor, Michel (1965). Niagara. Tr. E. Miller. Chicago: Henry Regency.
Faulkner, William (1964). As I Lay Dying. New York: Random House.
Flaubert, Gustave (1951). Madame Bovary. Ed. A. Thibaudet & R. Dumesnil. Oeuvres,
Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard.
Homer (2011). Iliad. Tr. A. Verity. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Josipovici, Gabriel (1974). “Mobius the Stripper.” In: Mobius the Stripper: Stories and
Short Plays. London: Gollancz.
Joyce, James (1997). Ulysses. Ed. D. Rose. London: Picador.
Tolstoi, Lev (1999). Anna Karenina. Moscow: Exmo-Press.
Wittig, Monique (1969). Les guérillères. Paris: Éditions de minuit.
786 Uri Margolin

5.2 Works Cited

Frank, Joseph ([1945] 1991). “Spatial Form in Literature.” J. Frank. The Idea of Spatial
Form. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
Genette, Gerard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Harweg, Roland ([1991] 2011). “Story Time and Fact-sequence-time.” J. Ch. Meister
& W.Schernus (eds.). Time. From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 143–170.
Le Poidevin, Robin ([1996] 2011). “Time, Tense and Typology.” J. Ch. Meister & W.
Schernus (eds.). Time. From Concept to Narrative Construct: A Reader. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 49–65.
Margolin, Uri (1999). “Of What Is Past, Is Passing or to Come.” D. Herman (ed). Nar-
ratologies. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 142–166.
– (2000). “Telling in the Plural: From Grammar to Ideology.” Poetics Today 21:
591–618.
Toro, Alfonso de ([1991] 2011). “Time Structure in the Contemporary Novel.” J. Ch.
Meister & W. Schernus (eds.). Time. From Concept to Narrative Construct. A
Reader. Berlin: de Gruyter, 109–142.
Zielinski, Thaddeus (1901). “Die Behandlung gleichzeitiger Ereignisse im antiken
Epos.” Philologus, Suppl. 8, 405–449.
 Skaz
Wolf Schmid

1 Definition

Skaz (from Russian skazat’ “to say, to tell”) is a special type of narra-
tion cultivated particularly in Russian literature since 1830 (although,
with certain differences, it can also be found in other Slavic as well in
Western European and American literatures) whose roots date back to
oral folklore traditions. It is characterized by a personal narrator, a sim-
ple man of the people with restricted intellectual horizons and linguistic
competence, addressing listeners from his own social milieu in a mark-
edly oral speech.

2 Explication

Although skaz has enjoyed particular interest ever since the work of the
Russian formalists, who thought of it as a form of defamiliarization,
there is still no consensus today on what is meant by the term and what
characteristics should be ascribed to it.
According to tradition, two basic types of skaz can be distinguished:
(1) characterizing skaz, which is motivated by the narrator’s linguistic-
ideological point of view; (2) ornamental skaz, which does not indicate
a particular personal narrator but must be referred to an entire spectrum
of heterogeneous voices and masks and often shows traces of authorial
(not narratorial!) ornamentalization (Schmid → Poetic or Ornamental
Prose). However, the ornamental type can be reasonably assigned to
skaz only if the discourse spread out among heterogeneous voices and
visions retains marks of a personal narrator who is clearly dissociated
from the author. The internationalized concept of skaz refers mainly to
the first, perspectivized type.
788 Wolf Schmid

3 Aspects of the Phenomenon and History of its Study

3.1 Features of Characterizing Skaz

Characterizing skaz can be referred to when the following features are

present:

1. Narratoriality
Skaz should be understood as an exclusively narratorial phenomenon. It
appears in the text of the narrating entity (regardless of whether this is a
primary, secondary or tertiary instance), and not in a character’s text.
This basic definition excludes from the domain of skaz all semantic-
stylistic phenomena that have their origins in the text of a narrated
character and are based on an “infection” of the narrator with the style
of his protagonist (or of the narrated milieu) or on a conscious repro-
duction of individual features of the characters’ discourse. The interpre-
tation of skaz as a manifestation of free indirect discourse and similar
techniques as suggested, for instance, by Titunik (1963, 1977) and
McLean (1985), must be rejected.

2. Restrictedness of intellectual horizons

An obligatory feature of characterizing skaz is the intellectual distance
between the author and the narrator, a non-professional teller, a man of
the people, whose narration stands out due to a certain naiveté and
clumsiness. This inexperienced narrator does not control all shades of
his discourse. The result is a tension, characteristic of skaz, between
what the narrator would like to say and what he actually reveals unin-
tentionally (Šklovskij [1928] 1970: 17).

3. Double-voicedness
The distance between narrator and author determines a narratorial-
authorial double-voicedness of the narrator’s text. In it, the naive narra-
tor and the author, who presents the former’s discourse with particular
semantic—not rarely ironic or humorous—accentuation, express them-
selves simultaneously. The double-voicedness also means there is a bi-
functionality in the narrator’s discourse: it functions as both the repre-
senting medium and as represented discourse.

4. Orality
Oral presentation of the narrator’s text has been regarded as a funda-
mental feature of skaz since the beginning. Naturally, oral discourse
does not preclude the imitation of written discourse. Many skaz narra-
 Skaz 789

tors, such as Mixail Zoščenko, like to use forms of expression belong-

ing to official written discourse. However, this practice bears traces of
non-authentic, sometimes awkward reproduction.

5. Spontaneity
Skaz should be understood as a spontaneous oral discourse, and not as
something consciously thought-out. Spontaneity means the representa-
tion of the discourse as a developing process that is not necessarily lin-
ear, consistent or goal-oriented.

6. Colloquialism
The spontaneous oral discourse of a narrator who is a man of the people
bears, as a rule, the characteristics of colloquial language and often
takes on features of vulgar, non-grammatical or slightly aphasic speech.
On the other hand, colloquialism in no way rules out the occasional use
of written style. Zoščenko’s “little man” likes to employ the Soviet idi-
om he has learned from newspapers and propaganda. The use of literary
or official language in his mouth is “defamiliarizing,” however, and
receives ironic authorial accentuation.

7. Dialogicity
The orientation of the speaker toward his listener and his reactions is
characteristic of skaz. So long as the narrator assumes a well-disposed
listener from the same milieu, dialogicity does not, as a rule, create any
particular tension. In any case, the speaker will give explanations, antic-
ipate questions and answer them. However, as soon as the skaz-speaker
ascribes a critical stance to his public, tension will build between him
and the addressee.

The features listed above do not all have the same relevance. Orality,
spontaneity, colloquialism and dialogicity are developed to varying de-
grees in works traditionally classified as skaz. A weaker development
of one does not mean the work is necessarily not skaz. However, the
first three features should be seen as obligatory: narratoriality, restricted
intellectual horizons and double-voicedness. Without them, the term
(characterizing) skaz loses its meaning.
In Russian literature the main representatives of skaz are N. Gogol’,
N. Leskov, A. Remizov, M. Zoščenko, I. Babel’, A. Platonov, V.
Šukšin, V. Belov. Phenomena comparable to characterizing skaz can
also be found in Western literatures. The lyric sub-genre of the dra-
matic monologue in 19th-century Britain features an unreliable speaker
(Shen → Unreliability) with a restricted view in a communication situa-
790 Wolf Schmid

tion, although he neither speaks dialect nor does he come from an infe-
rior social class (cf. Rohwer-Happe 2011). Examples are Robert
Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess.” In American
literature, examples of a skaz-like narration are Mark Twain’s Huckle-
berry Finn, Ring Lardner’s “Haircut” and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in
the Rye (cf. Prince 1987; Banfield 2005). In contemporary German lit-
erature, Christian Kracht’s novel Faserland is a clear example of skaz
stylisation. Although the teller is no simple man of the people, his shal-
low drivel about parties and bars, brand names and celebrities makes
him an equivalent of the Russian simple-minded “democratic hero” (cf.
Schmid [2005] 2008: 177–178).

3.2 Ornamental Skaz

Ornamental skaz is a hybrid phenomenon based on a paradoxical mix-

ture of the mutually excluding principles of characterization and poeti-
zation (Koževnikova 1971, 1976, 1994: 64–74). In contrast to charac-
terizing skaz, ornamental skaz does not indicate a personal narrator
endowed with non-professional characteristics, but rather calls into be-
ing an impersonal narrating entity which appears in various roles and
masks. Of the features of characterizing skaz, the basic oral tone, traces
of colloquialism and the narrative gestures of a personal narrator can
remain in ornamental skaz; however, these traits no longer indicate the
unified figure of a teller, but are oriented toward a broad spectrum of
heterogeneous voices. Ornamental skaz is thus multi-faceted and poly-
stylistic, fluctuating between orality and literacy, colloquialism and po-
etry, folklore and literature.
Ornamental skaz combines narrativity with poeticity. To the extent,
however, that poeticity, along with the non-temporal links (Schmid →
Non-temporal Linking in Narration) that constitute it, supplants the sto-
ry’s temporal links, ornamental prose moves from the domain of “nar-
rative art” into that of “verbal art” (on this dichotomy, cf. Hansen-Löve
1978; Schmid 2008). The impersonal narrator then appears only as the
intersection of heterogeneous verbal gestures, as the point at which dif-
ferent stylistic lines converge. In ornamental skaz, not only is the ex-
pressive function (sensu Bühler [1934] 1990: 35) of the text in refer-
ence to the narrator decreased, but the role of perspective is generally
weakened. Characters’ discourses tend to remain stylistically subordi-
nated to homogenizing poetization and to display no linguistic individ-
uality. Whereas characterizing skaz is conclusively motivated by the
ideological and linguistic physiognomy of the concrete speaker, orna-
mental skaz distinguishes itself by reduced, diffuse perspective and
 Skaz 791

weak characterological motivation. To speak of a variety of skaz in the

case of ornamental texts, however, makes sense only when the text
comprises at least some traces of the above-mentioned obligatory fea-
tures of characterizing skaz.

3.3 History of the Concept and its Study

The forms and functions of skaz were a central topic in Russian formal-
ist narrative theory (Hansen-Löve 1978: 274–303). The discussion was
opened with Ėjxenbaum’s “The Illusion of Skaz,” one of the key essays
of early formalism. Here, skaz is regarded above all as the emancipation
of verbal art from “literariness, which is not always valuable for the
verbal artist,” as a means of introducing into literature the word as “a
living, dynamic act which is formed by voice, articulation, and intona-
tion and is also accompanied by gestures and mimicry” (Ėjxenbaum
[1918] 1978: 233). In the subsequent famous essay “How Gogol’s
‘Overcoat’ is Made,” Ėjxenbaum underlines the shift of the center of
gravity from the plot to devices which make language as such “percep-
tible.” In this essay, Ėjxenbaum distinguishes two types of skaz: (1)
“narrating skaz” and (2) “reproducing skaz” ([1919] 1974: 269). The
first type refers to skaz motivated by the narrator, his language and ide-
ology. The second type consists of “devices of verbal mimicry and ver-
bal gesture, in the form of specially devised comic articulations, word-
plays based on sounds, capricious arrangements of syntax and so on”
(ibid.). Analyzing the “Overcoat,” with its montage-structure and or-
namental stylization, Ėjxenbaum is interested only in the second type.
By contrast, in the later work on Leskov ([1925] 1975: 214), he defines
skaz as a “form of narrative prose which, in vocabulary, syntax, and
choice of speech rhythms, displays an orientation toward the narrator’s
oral speech.” Here, he explicitly excludes from skaz all narrative forms
“which have a declamatory character or the character of ‘poetic prose’
and which at the same time are not oriented toward telling, but toward
oratorical speech or lyrical monologue.” With this definition, he re-
stricts skaz to the first, characterizing, perspectivized type. Neverthe-
less, he does concede the existence of such paradoxical forms as “or-
namental skaz,” which preserves “traces of a folkloric foundation and
of skaz intonation,” but where there is actually “no narrator as such”
([1925] 1975: 221). In the end, however, skaz does not interest Ėjxen-
baum as a specific narrative phenomenon, but as a “demonstration” of
the more general principle of verbal art: “Skaz in itself is not important;
what is important is the orientation toward the word, toward intona-
tion, toward voice, be it even in written transformation. […] We are
792 Wolf Schmid

starting in large measure from the beginning, as it were […] Our rela-
tionship toward the word has become more concrete, more sensitive,
more physiological” ([1925] 1975: 223; italics in the original).
Tynjanov also distinguishes two variants of skaz in the literature of
his time: (1) the older, humorous skaz, which goes back to Leskov and
was cultivated by Zoščenko; (2) the “Remizov-skaz,” a “lyrical, almost
poetical” variant. In the same way as Ėjxenbaum, Tynjanov sees the
function of skaz, in one variant as in the other, as making the word per-
ceptible, “palpable,” but he places his emphasis somewhat differently
insofar as he stresses the role of the reader: “The entire narrative be-
comes a monologue and the reader enters into the narration, starts to
intone, to gesticulate, to smile. He does not read skaz, he plays it. Skaz
introduces into prose not the hero, but the reader” (Tynjanov [1924]
1977: 160–161).
Vinogradov calls it inadequate to define the technique with orienta-
tion toward oral or colloquial speech, since skaz was also possible
without any kind of orientation on these types of language: “Skaz is a
self-willed literary, artistic orientation toward an oral monologue of the
narrative type; it is an artistic imitation of monological speech which
contains a narrative plot and is constructed, as it were, as if it were be-
ing directly spoken” (Vinogradov [1925] 1978: 244).
Similarly to Ėjxenbaum and Tynjanov, Vinogradov distinguishes
two types of skaz: (1) skaz that is bound to a character; (2) “authorial
skaz,” “preceding from the author’s ‘I’.” Whereas in the first type, “the
illusion of an everyday situation is created, […] the amplitude of lexical
oscillations grows narrow [and] the stylistic motion leads a secluded
life within the narrow confines of a linguistic consciousness that is
dominated by the conditions of the social mode of life that is to be pre-
sented,” in the second type, authorial skaz, the author is “free”: “In the
literary masquerade the writer can freely change stylistic masks within
a single artistic work” (Vinogradov [1925] 1978: 248–249).
Ėjxenbaum’s conception of skaz as an orientation toward oral
speech is contradicted by Baxtin, who sets new emphasis on the phe-
nomenon by focusing only on the “narrating” type (in Ėjxenbaum’s
terminology): “[Ėjxenbaum] completely fails to take into account the
fact that in the majority of cases skaz is above all an orientation toward
someone else’s speech, and only then, as a consequence, toward oral
speech. […] It seems to us that in most cases skaz is introduced precise-
ly for the sake of someone else’s voice, a voice socially distinct, carry-
ing with it precisely those points of view and evaluations necessary to
the author” (Baxtin [1929] 1984: 191–192; italics in the original).
 Skaz 793

For Baxtin, someone else’s speech is, above all, the bearer of a dif-
ferent “evaluative position” (smyslovaja pozicija). If, however, the ori-
entation toward someone else’s speech is elevated to a basic feature of
skaz, phenomena will be ascribed to it that could not be reconciled with
it according to a traditional understanding. To these phenomena be-
longs, for example, the intellectual, oratorical speech that appeals di-
rectly to the listener’s evaluative position, as is the case in Dostoev-
skij’s Notes from the Underground. Koževnikova (1971: 100) is right
to state that, in Baxtin’s conception, “skaz disappears as an independent
narrative form.”

3.4 Relevance to Narratology

Skaz is not simply a stylistic or rhetorical issue. In its sharp linguistic

and ideological dissociation of implied author, narrator, fictive address-
ee, and implied reader, it lays bare the fundamental communicative
structures of narrative. The relationship between the skaz-teller and his
fictive listener(s) mirrors communication in an exemplary way. Particu-
larly relevant to narratology is the shift in the center of gravity from the
story to the discourse, a move which, as a rule, says more about the
teller than he intended, thus bringing the telling process, with all its
conscious and unconscious motives, into sharp focus.
One important issue is the functions of skaz in its different varieties.
Formalists concentrated on the aesthetic function: defamilarization, in-
crease of the text’s perceptibleness, deviation from literary tradition by
introduction of non-traditional, low narrators and language material,
activization of the reader. Baxtin emphasized the conflict of values ac-
companying multivoicedness and heteroglossia (Tjupa → Hetero-
glossia). Zoščenko, one of the main representatives of skaz in Russian
literature of the 1920s, used the technique as a means to criticize either
the official political ideology that could not be understood by the sim-
ple man or the philistine thinking that was not able to fathom the revo-
lutionary changes in the Soviet Union (cf. Günther 1979). Narratolo-
gists should be interested in the aspects of embedded narration, in the
demonstration of the process of telling with its clearly pronounced
functions of representation, expression, and appeal. Of particular inter-
est for narratology are cases of an active feedback of the imagined ad-
dressee on the skaz-teller and his narration.
794 Wolf Schmid

4 Topics for Further Investigation

An issue not yet sufficiently explored is empirical research on readers’

interest and reactions with regard to skaz. Does characterizing skaz imi-
tating the simple man’s intellectual and linguistic behavior really reach
uneducated readers, or is it rather typical reading material of the well-
educated strata? A related question would be to analyze to what degree
the implied reader as an ideal recipient (Schmid → Implied Reader) is
to identify with the narrator’s fictive addressee, and whether the rela-
tionship between implied reader and fictive addressee echoes the rela-
tionship between author and narrator.
Also underexplored is the question of the genesis of skaz, its devel-
opment and its social functions in varying cultural and political situa-
tions.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Banfield, Ann (2005). “Skaz.” D. Herman et al. (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Nar-
rative Theory. London: Routledge, 535–536.
Baxtin, Mixail (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1929] 1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.
Minneapolis: Manchester UP.
Bühler, Karl ([1934] (1990). Theory of Language. The Representational Function of
Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ėjxenbaum, Boris (Eikhenbaum) ([1918] 1978). “The Illusion of Skaz.” Russian Lit-
erature Triquarterly 12, 233–236.
– ([1919] 1974). “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ is Made.” R. A. Maguire (ed.). Gogol’
from the Twentieth Century. Eleven Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 269–291.
– ([1925] 1975). “Leskov and Contemporary Prose.” Russian Literature Triquar-
terly 11, 211–224.
Günther, Hans (1979). “Zur Semantik und Funktion des Skaz bei M. Zosčenko.” G.
Erler (ed.). Von der Revolution zum Schriftstellerkongreß. Berlin: Harrassowitz,
326–353.
Hansen-Löve, Aage (1978). Der russische Formalismus. Wien: Verlag der österreichi-
schen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Koževnikova, Natal’ja (1971). “O tipax povestvovanija v sovetskoj proze.” Voprosy
jazyka sovremennoj russkoj literatury. Moskva: Nauka, 97–163.
– (1976). “Iz nabljudenii nad neklassicheskoj (‘ornamental’noj’) prozoj.” Izvestija
AN SSSR. Serija literatury i jazyka 35, 55–66.
– (1994). Tipy povestvovanija v russkoj literature XIX–XX vv. Moskva: Institut
russkogo jazyka RAN.
 Skaz 795

McLean, Hugh (1985). “Skaz.” V. Terras (ed.). Handbook of Russian Literature. New
Haven: Yale UP, 420.
Prince, Gerald (1987). “Skaz.” A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
87–88.
Rohwer-Happe, Gislind (2011). Unreliable Narration im dramatischen Monolog des
Viktorianismus: Konzepte und Funktionen. Bonn: University Press.
Schmid, Wolf ([2005] 2008). Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin/New York: de Gruy-
ter.
– (2008). “‘Wortkunst’ und ‘Erzählkunst’ im Lichte der Narratologie.” R. Grübel &
W. Schmid (eds.). Wortkunst – Erzählkunst – Bildkunst. Festschrift für Aage A.
Hansen-Löve. München: Sagner, 23–37.
Šklovskij, Viktor ([1928] 1970). Material i stil’ v romane L’va Tolstogo Vojna i mir.
Reprint: The Hague: Mouton.
Titunik, Irwin (1963). The Problem of Skaz in Russian Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation.
Univ. of California.
– (1977). “The Problem of Skaz: Critique and Theory.” B. A. Stolz (ed.). Papers in
Slavic Philology. Vol. 1. Ann Arbor, MI: Dept. of Slavic Languages and Litera-
tures, 276–301.
Tynjanov, Jurij ([1924] 1977). “Literaturnoe segodnja.” Ju. T. Poėtika. Istorija litera-
tury. Kino. Moskva: Nauka, 150–166.
Vinogradov, Viktor ([1925] 1978). “The Problem of Skaz in Stylistics.” Russian Lit-
erature Triquarterly 12, 237–250.

5.2 Further Reading

Čudakov, Aleksandr & Mariėtta Čudakova (1971). “Skaz.” Kratkaja literaturnaja

ėnciklopedija. Vol. 6. Moskva: Sovetskaja enciklopedija, 876.
Hodel, Robert (1994). Betrachtungen zum skaz bei N. S. Leskov und Dragoslav Mihai-
lović. Bern: Lang.
Hodgson, Peter (1983). “More on the Matter of Skaz: The Formalist Model” V. Mar-
kov & D. S. Worth (eds.). From Los Angeles to Kiev. Columbus: Slavica Publish-
ers, 119–154.
Muščenko, E. G. et al. (1978). Poėtika skaza. Voronež: Izd. Voronežskogo un-ta.
Schmid, Wolf (2003). “Skaz.” Russian Literature 44, 267–278.
Szilárd, Léna (1989). “‘Skaz’ as a Form of Narration in Russian and Czech Literature.”
J. Bessiere (ed.). Fiction, texte, narratologie, genre. New York: Lang, 181–189.
 Space
Marie-Laure Ryan

1 Definition

Kantian philosophy regards time and space as the two fundamental cat-
egories that structure human experience. Narrative is widely recognized
as the discourse of human experience (Fludernik 1996); yet most defi-
nitions, by characterizing stories as the representation of a sequence of
events, foreground time at the expense of space. Events, however, are
changes of state that affect individuated existents, which are themselves
bodies that both occupy space and are situated in space. Representa-
tions of space are not necessarily narratives—think of geographical
maps, landscape paintings, etc.—but all narratives imply a world with
spatial extension, even when spatial information is withheld (as in For-
ster’s: “The king died, and then the queen died of grief”). The insepara-
bility of space and time in narrative is suggested, among other ideas, by
Baxtin’s ([1938] 1981) polysemic concept of chronotope, by Werth’s
(1999) “text world,” by Herman’s (2005) “storyworld,” and by Ge-
nette’s ([1972] 1980) “diégèse.” All of these concepts cover both the
space-occupying existents and the temporally extending events referred
to by narrative discourse (Hühn → Event and Eventfulness).
When speaking of space in narratology and other fields, a distinction
should be made between literal and metaphorical uses of the concept.
As an a-priori form of intuition, space is particularly difficult to capture
in its literal sense. The OED defines it, somewhat tautologically (since
it uses the spatial concept “within”), as “the dimensions of height,
width and depth within which all things exist.” The Cambridge Dic-
tionary of Philosophy’s more mathematical definition avoids tautology,
but its greater abstraction does not capture our intuitive sense of space
as the universal container of things: “An extended manifold of several
dimensions, where the number of dimensions corresponds to the num-
ber of variable magnitudes needed to specify the location in the mani-
fold” (DiSalle [1996] 1999: 866–867).
Many of the spatial concepts developed in literary and cognitive
theory (Herman → Cognitive Narratology) are metaphorical because
 Space 797

they fail to account for physical existence. Among such uses are Fau-
connier’s (1985) mental spaces, which are constellations of meanings
held together in the mind; his notion of mapping (1997), whose origin
in the visual representation of space has been overshadowed by its ex-
tension to any kind of analogical thinking; Friedman’s “spatial reading”
of narrative (1993), an approach which she describes as paying atten-
tion not only to a “horizontal axis” of plot, but also to a “vertical axis”
standing for a variety of other literary dimensions: author-reader rela-
tions, literary-historical considerations, and intertextual allusions.
Turner’s concept of “spatial stories” (1996) is metaphorical for another
reason: the term designates expressions based on space-implying
movements (e.g. “the stockmarket sank”) and it is “story” rather than
“spatial” that functions metaphorically.

2 Explication

The importance of the concept of space for narratology is not limited to

the representation of a world (a notion to be refined below) serving as
container for existents and as location for events. We can distinguish at
least four forms of textual spatiality. Of these four forms, the first will
be the main focus of this entry.

2.1 Narrative Space

This is the physically existing environment in which characters live and

move (Buchholz & Jahn 2005). We may call it “setting,” but this intui-
tive notion of setting needs to be further refined: just as, in the theater,
we can distinguish the stage on which events are shown from the
broader world alluded to by the characters, in written narrative we can
distinguish the individual locations in which narratively significant
events take place from the total space implied by these events (Ronen
1986). Since there is no established terminology to distinguish the lam-
inations of narrative space, I will synthesize existing work through the
following categories, illustrating them all with the short story “Eveline”
by James Joyce:

(a) Spatial frames: the immediate surroundings of actual events, the

various locations shown by the narrative discourse or by the
image (cf. Ronen’s [1986] “settings”; Zoran’s [1984] “fields of
vision”). Spatial frames are shifting scenes of action, and they
may flow into each other: e.g. a “salon” frame can turn into a
798 Marie-Laure Ryan

“bedroom” frame as the characters move within a house. They

are hierarchically organized by relations of containment (a room
is a subspace of a house), and their boundaries may be either
clear-cut (the bedroom is separated from the salon by a hallway)
or fuzzy (e.g. a landscape may slowly change as a character
moves through it). Examples of spatial frames in “Eveline” are
the living room of Eveline’s house and the Dublin harbor.
(b) Setting: the general socio-historico-geographical environment in
which the action takes place. In contrast to spatial frames, this is
a relatively stable category which embraces the entire text. We
may for instance say that the setting of “Eveline” is early 20th-
century lower-middle-class Dublin.
(c) Story space: the space relevant to the plot, as mapped by the ac-
tions and thoughts of the characters. It consists of all the spatial
frames plus all the locations mentioned by the text that are not
the scene of actually occurring events. In “Eveline,” the story
space comprises not only Eveline’s house and the Dublin har-
bor, but also South America, where Eveline dreams of escaping
with her lover.
(d) Narrative (or story) world: the story space completed by the
reader’s imagination on the basis of cultural knowledge and real
world experience (cf. Ryan’s [1991] principle of minimal de-
parture). While story space consists of selected places separated
by voids, the narrative world is conceived by the imagination as
a coherent, unified, ontologically full and materially existing
geographical entity, even when it is a fictional world that pos-
sesses none of these properties (Schaeffer → Fictional vs. Fac-
tual Narration). In Eveline’s world, we assume that Dublin and
South America are separated by the Atlantic, even though the
ocean is not mentioned by name. In a story that refers to both
real and imaginary locations, the narrative world superimposes
the locations specific to the text onto the geography of the actu-
al world. In a story that takes place in wholly imaginary land-
scapes (e.g. Lord of the Rings), readers assume that the narra-
tive world extends beyond the locations named in the text and
that there is continuous space between them, even though they
cannot fill out this space with geographic features.
(e) Narrative universe: the world (in the spatio-temporal sense of
the term) presented as actual by the text, plus all the counterfac-
tual worlds constructed by characters as beliefs, wishes, fears,
speculations, hypothetical thinking, dreams, and fantasies. The
narrative universe of “Eveline” contains one world where she
 Space 799

boards a ship to South America and lives happily ever after with
her lover, and another where she is emotionally unable to leave
Dublin. For a possible world to be part of the metaphorical con-
cept of narrative universe, it must be textually activated (e.g. the
world where Eveline becomes Queen of England does not be-
long to the narrative universe of the story because it is never
mentioned or presupposed by the text).

All of these levels are described here from a static perspective as the
final products of interpretation, but they are progressively disclosed to
the reader through the temporal unfolding of the text. We may call the
dynamic presentation of spatial information the textualization of space
(cf. Zoran’s “textual level” of space [1984]). This textualization be-
comes a narrativization when space is not described for its own sake, as
it would be in a tourist guide, but becomes the setting of an action that
develops in time.

2.2 The Spatial Extension of the Text

Chatman (1978: 96–107) proposes a distinction between “story space”

and “discourse space” through which he tries to transpose into the spa-
tial domain the well justified distinction between “story time” (“the du-
ration of the purported events of the narrative”) and “discourse time”
(“the time it takes to peruse the discourse”; 62). “Discourse time” is a
useful concept because language (or film) is a temporal medium. But
Chatman’s notion of “discourse space” does not involve space in the
same way as “discourse time” involves time, for it does not concern the
space physically occupied by narrative discourse but, rather, describes
the disclosure by discourse of the space in which the story takes place
(3.2). The concept of “spatial extension of the text” offers a more satis-
factory spatial correlate of the notion of “discourse time,” since it refers
to the spatiality of the text as material object and to the dimensionality
of the interface with the reader, spectator or user. Spatial extension
ranges from zero spatial dimensions (oral narratives, excluding gestures
and facial expressions; music) to quasi one-dimensionality (a text dis-
played on a single line with letters moving from right to left, as in tele-
vision news lines, electronic billboards, and some digital literary texts),
two-dimensionality (printed narratives, film, painting) all the way to
genuine three-dimensionality (theatre, ballet, sculpture) (Ryan → Nar-
ration in Various Media).
Particularly relevant to narrative is the organization of two-
dimensional space. Topics of interest include the integration of text into
800 Marie-Laure Ryan

image and the division of time into distinct frames in comics and car-
toons (McCloud 1993); the integration of image into text in illustrated
books; and the “hypermediated displays” (i.e. distribution of infor-
mation into separate windows) of newspapers, avant-garde fiction, Web
pages, and digital narratives, especially computer games (Bolter &
Grusin 1999). In pictorial narratives, the study of spatial organization
distinguishes paintings that capture a single moment, leaving it to the
spectator to reconstruct the temporal sequence that makes it part of a
story (cf. Lessing’s notion of “pregnant moment”), from images that
distribute narrative content into multiple scenes separated from each
other by framing devices, such as architectural features (Steiner [1988]
2004).

2.3 The Space that Serves as Context and Container for the Text

Narratives are not only inscribed on spatial objects, they are also situat-
ed within real-world space, and their relations to their environment go
far beyond mimetic representation. When a nonfictional story is told
where it happened, gestures and deictic elements may be used to point
to the actual location of events. By telling us how certain striking land-
scape features came into being or what happened on certain sites, narra-
tives of myth, legend and oral history build a “spirit” of place, what the
Romans called genius loci. In aboriginal Australia, stories, known as
song lines, marked salient landscape features and helped people re-
member routes through what may look to outsiders as a monotonous
desert. Another form of spatial situatedness for narrative are museum
commentaries transmitted though earphones: each part of the text re-
lates to a certain object, and users must coordinate playing the tape with
their own progression through the space of the exhibit. With historical
landscapes, memorial areas or heritage sites, the spatial situation of the
narrative corresponds to the real-world location of the commemorated
events, and the design of the visitor’s tour must take into consideration
the constraints of historical reality (Azaryahu & Foote 2008). More re-
cently, GPS and wireless technology have made it possible to create
stories on mobile phones, attach them to particular geographic loca-
tions, upload them on the Internet, and make them accessible only to
people who happen to be in the right place (Ryan 2003a). Whereas or-
dinary print narratives are nomadic texts that can be taken anywhere
because they describe absent objects, the new digital technologies re-
connect stories with physical space by creating texts that must be read
in the presence of their referent.
 Space 801

As Page (2011) and Herman (2009) have shown, when narrators and
their audience are situated on location, narrators can use narrative tech-
niques that are not available in distant storytelling, such as gestures and
deictic expressions. Pointing at certain object or areas in space can for
instance take the place of extended descriptions, or allow audiences to
better imagine character movements.

2.4 The Spatial Form of the Text

The term “spatial form” was introduced by the literary critic Frank
([1945] 1991) to describe a type of narrative organization characteristic
of modernism that deemphasizes temporality and causality through
compositional devices such as fragmentation, montage of disparate el-
ements, and juxtaposition of parallel plot lines. The notion of spatial
form can be extended to any kind of design formed by networks of se-
mantic, phonetic or more broadly thematic relations between non-
adjacent textual units. When the notion of space refers to a formal pat-
tern, it is taken in a metaphorical sense, since it is not a system of di-
mensions that determines physical position, but a network of analogical
or oppositional relations perceived by the mind. It is the synchronic
perspective necessitated for the perception of these designs and the ten-
dency to associate the synchronic with the spatial that categorizes them
as spatial phenomena.
In digital texts, the notion of spatial design rests upon the hyperlink,
a machine-language command that instructs the computer to display a
certain fragment of text in response to a certain user action: clicking on
specially marked buttons. Rather than forming a synchronically per-
ceived pattern, digital links are navigational tools that control the tem-
poral unfolding of the text. Yet hypertext narratives have been widely
described as spatial (Bolter 1991) because the multiple connections be-
tween textual units prevent a linear progression through the text and
thus disturb the chronological presentation of the story.

3 History of Approaches to Narrative Space

3.1 Spatial Imagery

The study of spatial imagery was pioneered by Bachelard’s Poetics of

Space ([1957] 1994). Despite its title, this work is not a systematic
study of how literature represents space, but a highly personal medita-
tion on certain images that “resonate” in the imagination of the author,
802 Marie-Laure Ryan

conjuring a quasi-mystical sense of connectedness to the environment

and of the presence of things. In recent years, the study of spatial im-
agery has become increasingly focused on the basic spatial schemata
that underlie language and cognition (Emmott & Alexander → Schema-
ta). As early as 1970, Lotman argued that “the language of spatial rela-
tions” is a “basic means for comprehending reality” ([1970] 1977: 218).
He showed that in literary texts, especially poetry, spatial oppositions
such as high and low, right-left, near-far or open-closed are invested
with non-spatial meaning, such as valuable-non-valuable, good-bad,
accessible-inaccessible, or mortal-immortal. While Lotman concen-
trates on verbal art, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Turner (1996) focus
their attention on spatial metaphors frozen into ordinary language. True
to phenomenologist doctrine, these authors believe that the most fun-
damental human experience consists of apprehending oneself as a body
located in space. The embodied nature of mind is reflected in language
by families of metaphors that concretize abstract concepts in terms of
bodies moving through or situated in space. Words like up and down,
front and back, high and low, organize space using the body as point of
reference. Due to the erect position of the body, up and down are the
most prolific sources of metaphors: e.g. happy is up, sad is down; more
is up, less is down; etc. Front and back are mainly used as metaphors of
time: in our culture, the future is ahead and the past is behind. Other
spatial schemata that provide important sources of metaphors are the
conduit, the journey, the path, and the container (space as a whole can
be seen as a container). Though these approaches are not specifically
narratological, they can be applied to narrative texts as well as to poetry
or to language in general. A case in point is Dannenberg’s (2008) study
of the spatial schemata of the portal and the container in narrative
scenes that involve the recognition of identity. On a meta-narrative lev-
el, the blending of two common metaphors, “life is a story” and “life is
a journey,” produces a widespread spatial conceptualization of narrative
as a journey (Mikkonen 2007).

3.2 The Textualization of Space

The various techniques of space presentation (Niederhoff → Perspec-

tive – Point of View) give flesh and shape to the visualizations that
immerse the reader in the narrative world. Though description is often
regarded by text typologists as the antithesis of narration, it is also the
major discourse strategy for the disclosure of spatial information. In
description, the report of the narrative action is temporarily suspended
to afford the reader a more or less detailed glimpse at the current spatial
 Space 803

frame. This interruption can, however, be minimized by more dynamic

ways of constructing narrative space such as object or character move-
ments (“he left his house, and turned right toward the harbor”); charac-
ters’ perceptions (“from the balcony, a tree blocked her view”); narra-
tivized descriptions (e.g. revealing the floor plan of a house by
describing the building process); and implications from reports of
events (“the bullet missed its target, crossed the town square and broke
a window of the church”). Zubin and Hewitt’s (1995) notion of deictic
shift explains how narratives transport the reader’s imagination from
the “here and now” of the illocutionary act—the normal reference of
deictic expression—to the place and time of the narrated scene.
Through effects of zooming in and out, narrative texts may vary the
distance between the observer’s spatial situation and the narrated
events, and through shifts in focus, they can move objects of descrip-
tion from the foreground to the background or vice versa (Herman
2002: 274–277). Perspective itself, as Uspenskij ([1970] 1973: 57–65)
observes, is a particular positioning of the narrator within the story
space; this positioning may coincide with the location of a specific
character whose movements are followed by the narrator, or it may
move across a certain area that contains several characters as the focus
of the discourse alternates between different individuals. In film (Kuhn
& Schmidt → Narration in Film), the presentation of space encounters
the problem of giving the spectator a sense of what lies beyond what is
framed by the current screen, and of how the individual frames are in-
terconnected. This can be done through techniques such as panning and
zooming, mounting a camera on a moving support, providing a shot
establishing a general location before zooming in, or showing the same
location in a shot-reverse shot sequence from the perspective of differ-
ent characters.
On the macro-level, spatial information can be organized according
to two basic strategies: the map and the tour (Linde & Labov 1975),
also known as the survey and the route. In the map strategy, space is
represented panoramically from a perspective ranging from the disem-
bodied god’s eye point of view of pure vertical projection to the pano-
ramic view of an observer situated on an elevated point. In this mode of
presentation, space is divided into segments and the text covers them in
systematic fashion, e.g. left to right, north to south, front to back. The
tour strategy, by contrast, represents space dynamically from a mobile
point of view. Thus an apartment will for instance be described room
by room, following the itinerary of somebody who is showing the
apartment. In contrast to the pure vision of the map view, the tour simu-
lates the embodied experience of a traveler. Of the two strategies, the
804 Marie-Laure Ryan

tour is the more common in narrative fiction, although some postmod-

ern texts have experimented with the map view: e.g. Georges Perec’s
La Vie mode d’emploi describes the parallel lives of the inhabitants of
an apartment building by jumping across the building as if the narrator
were a knight on a chessboard—a strategy that presupposes a map-like
vertical projection—rather than creating a natural walkthrough.
As readers or spectators progress through the narrative text, they
gather spatial information into a cognitive map or mental model of nar-
rative space (Ryan 2003b). Through a feed-back loop effect, these men-
tal models, which are built to a large extent on the basis of the move-
ments of characters, enable readers to visualize these movements within
a containing space. Mental maps, in other words, are both dynamically
constructed in the course of reading and consulted by the reader to ori-
ent himself in the narrative world. The various landmarks shown or
mentioned in the story are made into a coherent world through an
awareness of the relations that situate them with respect to each other.
To understand events, the reader may for instance need to know that the
hero’s house is located on the town square and close to the harbor. But
media that temporalize the release of information, such as language and
film, do not facilitate the mental construction of spatial relations be-
cause, unlike paintings or the stage setting of drama, they display ob-
jects successively rather than simultaneously. A mental model of narra-
tive space is a construct held in long-term memory, but it is built from
images of individual spatial frames that replace each other in short-term
memory. This explains why readers are not always able to situate indi-
vidual frames within the narrative world. But a mental map does not
have to be nearly as consistent as a graphic map in its representation of
spatial relations. While some locations need to be precisely situated
with respect to each other because they are the stage of events that in-
volve space in a strategic way, others may occupy free-floating posi-
tions in the reader’s mind. In many cases, readers will be able to under-
stand stories with only a rudimentary representation of their global
geography because, as Schneider (2001) observes, space in narrative
usually serves as a background for characters and their actions, and not
as a focus of interest. When topography is of prime importance for the
logic of the plot, as it may be in detective fiction, the limitations of lan-
guage as a medium of spatial representation can be remediated by a
graphic map of the narrative world. Another function of graphic maps,
particularly prominent in children’s narratives, travel stories and fantas-
tic literature, is to spare the reader the effort of building a cognitive
map, thereby facilitating the mental visualizations that produce immer-
sion.
 Space 805

3.3 The Thematization of Space

An important aspect of the cognitive mapping of narrative texts is the

attribution of symbolic meaning to the various regions and landmarks
of the narrative world. This meaning should not be considered a meta-
phorization of the concept of space, since it is attached to specific areas
of the narrative world, contrary to spatial metaphors, which suppress
connections to particular territories. In the cosmology of archaic socie-
ties, space is ontologically divided into a profane world, the realm of
everyday life, and a sacred world, inhabited by supernatural beings,
with holy sites functioning as portals between the two. The narrative
response to these cosmologies and topologies is a symbolic geography
diversified into regions where different events and experiences take
place—where life, in other words, is governed by different physical,
psychological, social or cultural rules. In fairy tales or computer games,
for instance, the symbolic map of the narrative world may associate the
castle with power, mountain tops with confrontations between the forc-
es of good and evil, open areas with danger, closed areas with security,
etc. This symbolic organization of space is not limited to fantastic texts:
narrative worlds can be structured by oppositions between colonizing
countries and colonized regions; between town and country (Tolstoj’s
Anna Karenina); between life in the capital and life in the province
(Balzac’s Comédie Humaine); between home and away from home
(The Odyssey); between the knowable and the unknowable (the town
vs. the castle in Kafkas’ Das Schloss); or between landscapes that speak
differently to the imagination (Swann’s way vs. Guermantes’s way in
Proust’s À La Recherche du temps perdu). According to Lotman, narra-
tive is born when a character crosses the boundary between these sym-
bolically charged spaces: “A plot can always be reduced to a basic epi-
sode—the crossing of the basic topological border in the plot’s spatial
structure” ([1970] 1977: 238).
Architecturally as well as plot-functionally, narrative space can be
described in terms of the partitions, both natural and cultural, that or-
ganize it into thematically relevant subspaces: walls, hallways, political
boundaries, rivers and mountains, as well as in terms of the openings
and passageways that allow these subspaces to communicate: doors,
windows, bridges, highways, tunnels and passes. Besides horizontal
partitions, narrative can also present vertical ones, corresponding to
what Pavel (1986) calls “salient ontologies”: these ontologies can op-
pose the world of everyday life to a world of magic, dreams to reality,
images to existents or, in narratives with embedded stories, the different
levels of fictionality. Whereas horizontal partitions divide the geogra-
806 Marie-Laure Ryan

phy of the narrative world, vertical partitions create ontological layers

within the narrative universe.
The lived experience of space offers a particularly rich source of
thematization. Some stories present space as closed and confining
(prison narratives; Anne Frank’s diary), others as open and liberating
(narratives of exploration; many travel narratives), and still others as
open and alienating (stories of wandering aimlessly in a hostile envi-
ronment). Confined space occasionally turns into a field of endless dis-
coveries, as does Robinson Crusoe’s island. Through its immensity,
space may be perceived as separating (narratives of exile; Odyssey), or
its existence may be denied by technology (telecommunications; travel
through teletransportation). Narrative may also focus on place, a con-
cept commonly opposed to space by geographers, by immersing the
reader in a particular landscape or cityscape. And finally, narratives
may highlight the importance of our sense of embodiment for the expe-
rience of space by featuring a protagonist whose body grows or shrinks
out of human proportions. Novels like Gulliver’s Travels or Alice in
Wonderland de-automatize our relation to space by showing how
movement, navigation, the handling of objects and interpersonal rela-
tions are affected by a change of scale.
The most radical thematizations of space are those that involve al-
ternative or logically inconsistent worlds. While the mind can theoreti-
cally conceive spaces of any number of dimensions (string theory pos-
tulates 9 or 10, depending on the version), the “imagining imagination”
can only picture objects within a space of three dimensions or less. An
example of experimentation with the dimensionality of space is Edwin
Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, a narrative that depicts everyday life
and cognition issues within a world of two dimensions: how, for in-
stance, do the members of this world distinguish each other, since the
recognition of flat shapes normally involves an elevated point of view
that presupposes a third dimension? The narrator then migrates to a
one-dimensional world, and his puzzlement mirrors the reader’s experi-
ence of two-dimensional reality. He is finally transported into a three-
dimensional world and describes in amazement an experience that is
taken for granted by the members of this world (as well as by the read-
er); but when he asks to visit a four-dimensional world, the three-
dimensional creatures tell him that no such thing exists. One way for a
text to circumvent the limitations of the imagination is to project a cos-
mology with multiple parallel worlds. This cosmology, inspired by the
“many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics and explored by
many science-fiction texts, does not strain our faculties of mental visu-
alization because every one of the parallel realities is itself a standard
 Space 807

three-dimensional space. By allowing the existence of multiple coun-

terparts of the same individual and by staging transworld travel that
allow these counterparts to meet, the many-worlds cosmology is a
goldmine of intriguing narrative situations (Ryan 2006).
Logically impossible story spaces are the narrative equivalent of
M.C. Escher’s pictorial representations of worlds that violate the laws
of perspective. The most common form of logical impossibility in liter-
ature is metalepsis, the transgression of ontological boundaries through
which imaginary creatures of pen and paper can penetrate into the fic-
tionally “real” world of their creator, or vice-versa (Pier → Metalepsis).
Metalepsis can lead to a spatial effect described by Hofstadter (1979:
passim) as a strange loop: rising higher and higher through the levels of
a hierarchical system, only to find oneself right where one began. But a
narrative space cannot be wholly inconsistent, for fear of preventing
any kind of mental representation—for fear, in other words, of losing
its spatial quality. Logical contradiction is normally limited to some
areas of the narrative world, piercing the fabric of space like the holes
in a Swiss cheese. In Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, for in-
stance, a certain house is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and
the inside is the gateway to a seemingly infinite alternative space where
horrific events occur; even so, readers can still draw on their normal
experience of space in some regions of the narrative world, despite its
topological heterogeneity.

4 Recent Trends

Of all the types of space defined in section 2, the one that has recently
inspired the greatest creative and theoretical activity is 2.3: the real-
world space that serves as context and referent to narrative texts.
One form of spatial situatedness for narrative are museum commen-
taries transmitted though earphones: each part of the text relates to a
certain object, and users must coordinate the playing of the tape with
their own progression through the space of the exhibit. With historical
landscapes, memorial areas or heritage sites, the spatial situation of the
narrative corresponds to the real-world location of the commemorated
events, and the design of the visitor’s tour must take into consideration
the constraints of historical reality (Azaryahu & Foote 2008). These so-
called “landscape narratives” can be relatively punctual, when the
events took place in a restricted area or spread out in space, when the
events took place over large areas or periods of time; they can be either
808 Marie-Laure Ryan

thematically arranged, leaving the visitor a choice of itinerary, or they

can guide her along a chronologically arranged storyline.
Whereas ordinary print narratives are nomadic texts that can be tak-
en anywhere because they describe absent objects, the new digital tech-
nologies reconnect stories with physical space by creating texts that
must be read in the presence of their referent (Ryan 2003b). For in-
stance, the Canadian project [murmur] consist of oral stories told by
citizens of Toronto and other cities about urban features. The locations
of stories in the actual city are marked by visible signs that display
phone numbers where the stories can be accessed. Equipped with a
paper map that shows these locations, participants walk through the city
in search of the landmarks to which stories are connected. The purpose
of this project, which exemplifies a genre known as “locative narrative”
(Ruston 2010) is to capture the genius loci of a city by giving partici-
pants an appreciation of its rich narrative legacy. Just as legends from
the past and tales about the ancestors create a sense of place, the stories
told by citizens about seemingly ordinary buildings and neighborhoods
make the everyday captivating and give a soul to the city.
A type of project greatly facilitated by digital technology is the crea-
tion of large archives that map literary texts on real-world geography on
the basis of the actual place names found in the narratives. An early,
print form of this kind of project was the Atlas of the European Novel
edited by Franco Moretti (1998). More recently, an Atlas of European
Literature that maps hundreds of texts, using advanced cartographic
methods, and associated with interactive tools, has been developed by
the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation, ETH Zuric in collabo-
ration with the Georg August University in Göttingen and the Karl
University in Prague. As Barabara Piatti (2009) argues, the mapping is
not an end in itself but a research tool that should help the investigation
of many new questions: for instance, how do landscapes imprint them-
selves in the human imagination, what areas are heavily populated with
literary texts and which ones are relatively empty, or how far-ranging
is the network of place-names mentioned in the stories inspired by a
certain area. (A comparative study shows that stories whose main ac-
tion is located in Prague cast a much wider network than North Fries-
land stories.) Such databases—which could include folklore and narra-
tives in visual media as well as literature—will be essential to the
development of a type of investigation that the French literary scholar
Bertrand Westphal (2011) calls geocriticism.
 Space 809

5 Topics for Further Investigation

Because narratologists have long privileged time over space, narrative

space remains a relatively unexplored territory. The most promising
areas of investigation appear at the present time to be: (a) the anchoring
of stories in real-world space, as described in section 2.3; (b) the design
of “spatial architectures” (Jenkins 2004) for computer games, allowing
players to participate actively in a story while exploring a fictional
world more or less freely; (c) comparative studies of the medium-
specific techniques that enable people to construct mental images of
narrative space; (d) empirical studies of the importance of mental visu-
alizations and cognitive mapping for the understanding of plot and the
experience of immersion; (e) studies of the historical and cultural varia-
bility of the semiotic oppositions (such as “high-low,” “inside-outside,”
“closed-open”) that determine the topology of narrative worlds.

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Azaryahu, Maoz & Kenneth E. Foote (2008). “Historical Space as Narrative Medium:
On the Configuration of Spatial Narratives of Time and Historical Sites.” Geo-
Journal 73, 179–194.
Bachelard, Gaston ([1957] 1994). The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We
Experience Intimate Places. Boston: Beacon P.
Baxtin, Mixail (Bakhtin, Mikhail) ([1938] 1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Es-
says. Austin: U of Texas P.
Bolter, Jay David (1991). Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of
Writing. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
– & Richard Grusin (1999). Remediations: Understanding New Media. Cambridge:
MIT P.
Buchholz, Sabine & Manfred Jahn (2005). “Space.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 551–554.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Dannenberg, Hilary (2008). Convergent and Divergent Lives: Plotting Coincidence
and Counterfactuality in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
DiSalle, Robert ([1996] 1999). “Space.” R. Audi (ed.). The Cambridge Dictionary of
Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 866–867.
Fauconnier, Gilles (1985). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural
Language. Cambridge: MIT P.
– (1997). Mapping in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
810 Marie-Laure Ryan

Frank, Joseph ([1945] 1991). “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” J. Frank. The Idea
of Spatial Form. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
Friedman, Susan Stanford (1993). “Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative.”
Narrative 1, 12–23.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
– (2005). “Storyworld.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narra-
tive Theory. London: Routledge, 569–570.
– (2009). Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hofstadter, Douglas (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New
York: Vintage Books.
Jenkins, Henry (2004). “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” N. Wardrip-Fruin et
al. (eds.). First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cam-
bridge: MIT P, 118–130.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chica-
go P.
Linde, Charlotte & William Labov (1975). “Spatial Networks as a Site for the Study of
Language and Thought.” Language 51, 924–939.
Lotman, Jurij M. ([1970] 1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P.
McCloud, Scott (1993). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper
Perennials.
Mikkonen, Kai (2007). “The ‘Narrative is Travel’ Metaphor: Between Spatial Se-
quence and Open Consequence.” Narrative 15, 286–305.
Moretti, Franco (1998). Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso.
Page, Ruth (2011). Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction. London:
Routledge.
Pavel, Thomas (1986). Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Piatti, Barbara (2009). "Mapping Literature: Toward a Geography of Fiction."
ftp://cartography.ch/pub/pub_pdf/2009_Piatti_Geography_of_Fiction.pdf
Ronen, Ruth (1986). “Space in Fiction.” Poetics Today 7, 421–438.
Ruston, Scott (2010). "Storyworlds on the Move: Mobile Media and Their Implications
for Narrative." Storyworlds 2.1, 101–119.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative The-
ory. Bloomington: U of Indiana P.
– (2003a). “Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps.” Dichtung Digital
<http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/1-Ryan.htm>.
– (2003b). “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space.” D. Herman
(ed.). Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CLSI, 214–242.
– (2006). “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in
Physics, Narratology and Narrative.” Poetics Today 27, 633–674.
Schneider, Ralph (2001). “Towards a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The
Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction.” Style 35, 607–640.
 Space 811

Steiner, Wendy ([1988] 2004). “Pictorial Narrativity.” M.-L. Ryan (ed.). Narrative
across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 145–
177.
Turner, Mark (1996). The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford UP.
Uspenskij, Boris (Uspensky) ([1970] 1973). A Poetics of Composition. Berkeley: U of
California P.
Westphal, Bertrand (2011). Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces. New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Werth, Paul (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Lon-
don: Longman.
Zoran, Gabriel (1984). “Towards a Theory of Space in Fiction.” Poetics Today 5, 309–
335.
Zubin, David A. & Lynne E. Hewitt (1995). “The Deictic Center: A Theory of Deixis
in Narrative.” J. Duchan et al. (eds.). Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science
Perspective. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 129–155.

6.2 Further Reading

Bridgeman, Teresa (2007). “Time and Space.” D. Herman (ed.). The Cambridge Com-
panion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 52–65.
Dennerlein, Katrin (2009). Narratologie des Raumes. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Esrock, Ellen (1994). The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging and Reader Response. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins UP.
Grishakova, Marina (2006). The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s
Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames. Tartu: Tartu UP.
Hamon, Philippe (1993). Du descriptif. Paris: Hachette.
Herman, David (2001). “Spatial Reference in Narrative Domains.” Text 21, 515–541.
Mosher, Harold F. (1991). “Towards a Poetics of Descriptized Narration.” Poetics To-
day 12, 425–445.
Nünning, Ansgar (2007). “Towards a Typology, Poetics and History of Description in
Fiction.” W. Wolf & W. Bernhart (eds.). Description in Literature and Other
Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 91–128.
Ronen, Ruth (1997). “Description, Narrative, and Representation.” Narrative 5, 274–
286.
Zwaan, Rolf A. (1993). Aspects of Literary Comprehension. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
 Speech Representation
Brian McHale

1 Definition

Verbal narrative, it has long been assumed, is especially qualified to

represent speech events because in this case, unlike any other, the ob-
ject and the medium of representation are identical―language. The
speech of characters can be represented directly, through quotation:
“She said, ‘No, no, I can’t just now, but tomorrow I will.’” Or it can be
paraphrased by a narrator and represented indirectly: “She said that she
couldn’t just then, but that the next day she would.” There is also the
option to narrate speech acts in an intermediate mode, called free indi-
rect discourse: “No, no, she couldn’t just now, but tomorrow she
would.” Consciousness, at least that part of it that resembles unspoken
interior speech, can be represented using the same three forms: directly,
as quoted interior monologue; indirectly, as thought report, also called
psycho-narration (cf. Cohn 1978); or using free indirect discourse. It
has been clear for some time, however, that the three discrete forms fall
far short of exhausting the range of speech representation in narrative,
much less the representation of consciousness, so that analysts have
become increasingly willing to consider more diffuse and generalized
effects of voice (e.g., Baxtin [1934/35] 1981) and fictional mind (e.g.
Palmer 2004).

2 Explication

Speech representation in verbal narrative can be conceived in terms of a

relationship between two utterances, a framing utterance and an inset
(framed) utterance (Sternberg 1982), or alternatively in terms of inter-
ference or interaction between two texts, the narrator’s text and the
character’s text. (For further details on the Textinterferenz approach
advocated by Schmid and others, see section 3.3 below.) In direct dis-
course (DD), whether it represents a speech event or an unspoken
thought, the transition from frame to inset is clearly visible, typically
 Speech Representation 813

signaled typographically and/or by an introductory verb of speech or

thought: “She said,” “She thought.” DD is conventionally understood to
replicate exactly what the quoted character is supposed to have said or
thought, preserving (for instance) expressive elements of the original
utterance: “No, no.” Of course, the “originality” of direct quotation in
fiction is entirely illusory (Fludernik 1993: 409–414); moreover, so is
the independence of the quoted inset, which is always controlled by the
framing context. DD shorn of its introductory clause, which some call
free direct discourse (FDD), is the basis of interior monologues, and a
staple of modernist novels.
In indirect discourse (ID), the narrator is much more evidently in
control. Here the inset is grammatically subordinated to the framing
utterance, with person, tense, and deixis adjusted to conform to those of
the frame. According to some authorities (e.g. Banfield 1982), expres-
sive and dialectal or idiolectal features are excluded from ID, but in fact
such features are well-attested in actual narrative texts (Vološinov
[1929] 1973: 131–132; McHale 1978, 1983). Types and degrees of par-
aphrase and summary vary widely in ID, from instances that appear
quite faithful to the original utterance (though of course, no such “orig-
inal” exists), through instances that preserve only its content or gist to
those that minimally acknowledge that a speech event took place (Vo-
lošinov [1929] 1973: 129–133; Leech & Short 1981: 318–351). In rep-
resenting consciousness, ID shades off into psycho-narration (Cohn
1978: 21–57) where the narrator analyzes the content of the character’s
mind, potentially including its habitual and/or subliminal (unconscious)
aspects.
Free indirect discourse (FID) is the most problematic and, no doubt
for that very reason, still the most widely discussed form for represent-
ing speech, thought, and perception. (For further details on the free in-
direct representation of perception, see section 3.4 below.) Here frame
and inset become much harder to distinguish. FID handles person and
tense as ID would (though in French it is identifiable by a distinctive
past-tense form, the imparfait, in narrative contexts where the passé
simple would be expected). On the other hand, it treats deixis as DD
would, reflecting the character’s rather than the narrator’s position:
“she couldn’t just now, but tomorrow she would.” FID also tolerates
many of the expressive elements characteristic of direct quota-
tion―how many, and which ones, remains controversial. In terms of
the Textinterferenz model, person and tense evoke the narrator's text,
while deictic, expressive and other features evoke the character’s text.
To further complicate matters, many instances of FID entirely lack the
form’s defining features so that, taken out of context, they appear indis-
814 Brian McHale

tinguishable from non-quoting narrative sentences. Manifestly, it is

contextual cues more than formal features that determine, in many cas-
es, whether or not a sentence will be interpreted as a free indirect repre-
sentation of speech, thought or perception (McHale 1978; Ehrlich
1990).
In view of the range and diversity of each of these forms, especially
ID and FID, and the evidence of intermediate or ambiguous instances,
some analysts have concluded that a scale of possibilities would be
more adequate than the three-category model (McHale 1978; Leech &
Short 1981). Such scalar approaches, however, are hardly an improve-
ment on the three-category model when it comes to capturing those dif-
fuse and transient effects of “voice” that are such a regular experience
of reading novels. Especially pointed is the dissatisfaction of some ana-
lysts with the mapping of categories deriving from speech representa-
tion onto the phenomena of represented consciousness. Consciousness
in fiction, it has been compellingly argued (e.g. Palmer 2004), is much
more ubiquitous and variegated than speech and is not adequately cap-
tured by speech-based models of interior discourse. (For further discus-
sion, see section 3.4 below.)

3 History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Genealogy

The foundation for the categorical approach to speech representation,

and the source for many of the conceptual difficulties that continue to
beset it, can be traced back to the ancient world. Plato in Republic III
distinguishes between situations in which the poet speaks in his own
voice (Plato calls this “pure narration,” haple diegesis) and those in
which the poet mimics a character’s voice. Classical rhetoric recog-
nized two categories of speech representation proper, oratio recta and
oratio obliqua, direct and indirect discourse; however, FID, though al-
ready present in ancient Greek and Latin literature and in biblical narra-
tive, would not be identified until the last decades of the 19th century.
Pervasive in the 19th-century novel, from Austen to Flaubert, Zola,
James and beyond (Pascal 1977), FID did not attain the threshold of
visibility until, arguably, the 1857 trial of Madame Bovary, which
hinged on whether certain free indirect expressions of indecent and an-
ti-social sentiments were attributable to the author (LaCapra 1982;
Toolan 2006). In any case, French and German Romance philologists
identified this “new” form around the turn of the nineteenth century,
 Speech Representation 815

calling it erlebte Rede, verschleierte Rede, or style indirect libre (Tobler

1887; Kalepky 1899, 1913; Bally 1912; Lorck 1914; Lerch 1914; Lips
1926). In English, FID has also been called “narrated monologue”
(Cohn) and “represented speech and thought” (Banfield); Israeli schol-
ars call it “combined discourse.” A prescient critique of grammar-based
descriptions of FID was mounted as early as 1929 by Vološinov, Bax-
tin’s collaborator and/or alter ego. However, Vološinov’s contribution
dropped out of sight until the “rediscovery” of the Baxtin circle in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, and in the meantime the forms of speech
representation continued to be treated less as narratological than as
grammatical phenomena, whether according to traditional models of
grammar (e.g. Ullmann 1957) or in terms of the transformational- gen-
erative paradigm (Banfield 1982).
Over the course of the 20th century, scholars of FID gradually ex-
panded the range of what had initially been perceived as a rather local
and specialized phenomenon limited to third-person (heterodiegetic)
literary narratives. It was identified in first-person, second-person, and
present-tense contexts as well as in non-literary prose and oral narrative
(Todemann 1930; Cohn 1969; Fludernik 1993: 82–104), and its histori-
cal roots were pushed back to the Middle Ages and earlier. Apart from
the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, it has been attested in
Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese, and Chinese, among others (Steinberg
1971; Coulmas ed. 1986; Hagenaar 1992; Tammi & Tommola eds.
2006). Above all, it has come to be recognized not only as a tool for
regulating distance from a character―from empathetic identification at
one extreme to ironic repudiation at the other―but also as one of the
primary vehicles of what modernist poetics taught us to call the stream
of consciousness.
Stream of consciousness is best thought of not as a form but as a
particular content of consciousness, characterized by free association,
the illusion of spontaneity, and constant micro-shifts among perception,
introspection, anticipation, speculation, and memory (Humphrey 1954;
Friedman 1955; Bickerton 1967). It can be realized formally by first-
person “autonomous” interior monologue (as in Molly Bloom’s solilo-
quy from Ulysses, or the first three sections of Faulkner’s The Sound
and the Fury), or by FID (as in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse), or
indeed by a combination of means. Modernist innovations in stream of
consciousness technique seemed to monopolize the agenda of scholarly
investigation of the representation of consciousness for much of the
20th century, at least until Cohn (1978) reasserted the importance and
ubiquity of less “glamorous” techniques, such as psycho-narration.
816 Brian McHale

Since then, cognitive narratologists in particular have taken up the chal-

lenge of investigating the presence of consciousness in fiction outside
the well-worn channels of the stream of consciousness (e.g. Fludernik
1993, 1996; Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006).

3.2 Mimesis

Progress in understanding speech and consciousness representation has

been hampered by fundamental confusion about the concept of mime-
sis. Two senses of mimesis are regularly conflated: on the one hand,
mimesis in the sense, derived ultimately from Plato, of the author’s
speaking in a character’s voice rather than his own; on the other hand,
mimesis in the sense of faithful reproduction of what we take to be real-
ity. An unexamined assumption throughout much of the discussion of
speech representation has been that mimesis in the sense of speaking
for the character should correlate with mimesis in the sense of faithful-
ness of reproduction―that the more direct the representation was, the
more realistic or life-like it would be (Sternberg 1982). Thus, DD
should be the most faithful to reality, and ID the least, with FID some-
where in between. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact,
speech representation is a classic illustration of what Sternberg (1982)
decries as the fallacy of “package deals” in poetics whereby forms and
functions are bundled together in one-to-one relationships. Actually, the
forms of speech representation stand in a many-to-many relationship to
their reproductive functions: some instances of DD are highly imitative
of “real” speech, while others are deliberately stylized and un-mimetic;
some instances of ID or FID are more imitative of “real” speech than
DD often is, while other instances are less so; etc. (Fludernik 1993:
312–315). Attempts to elaborate the three-category repertoire of speech
representation into a continuous scale from maximally to minimally
mimetic, in the faithfulness-of-reproduction sense (e.g. McHale 1978;
cf. Genette [1972] 1980), stumble at just this point. They invariably
place DD (or FDD) at the most-mimetic pole and ID at the opposite
pole. But no matter how many gradations such scales admit in between,
they obscure the fact that degree of faithfulness does not correspond to
formal categories: one scale cuts across the other.
Moreover, the very notion of “faithfulness to reality” here is highly
suspect. Another of the unexamined assumptions of speech representa-
tion scholarship is that verbal narrative is better able to represent speech
than anything else because narratives share one and the same medium,
namely language (e.g. Genette [1972] 1980: 169–174). But this, too, is
fallacious, as a glance at a transcription of spontaneous conversation
 Speech Representation 817

would immediately confirm. At one level of analysis, conversation in

novels may indeed reflect the “rules” of spontaneous real-world con-
versation (e.g. Toolan 1987; Thomas 2002; Herman 2002: 171–193).
But at a finer-grained level, speech in the novel appears utterly unlike
real-world speech. Novelistic speech is always highly schematized and
stylized, depending for its effects of verisimilitude on very limited se-
lections of speech-features, many of them derived not from actual
speakers’ behavior but from literary conventions, linguistic stereotypes,
and folk-linguistic attitudes. This is especially evident in representa-
tions of foreign accents, regional dialects, and specialized professional
registers (Page 1973). Perhaps the most powerful factor in producing
effects of “realistic” speech is textual context, which induces the reader
to accept thin sprinklings of conventional or possibly arbitrary features
as faithful representations of real-world speech behavior (McHale
1994). In short, the mimesis of speech in fiction is a “linguistic halluci-
nation” (Fludernik 1993: 453); it depends on our willingness to play a
“mimetic language-game” (Ron 1981).
If speech in fiction is not a faithful imitation but an effect produced
by a combination of convention, selection, and contextualization, then
this must also be the case for consciousness in fiction, only more so, for
consciousness is at best only partly linguistic. Nevertheless, the operat-
ing assumption of much recent cognitivist work on consciousness in
narrative is that fictional minds are modeled on real-world mental pro-
cesses (e.g. Palmer 2004: 11). But what if consciousness in fiction is
just as conventional, schematic, selective, and context-dependent as
speech in fiction―just as much an effect, just as much a hallucination
or language-game? Surely this is a hypothesis that ought to be enter-
tained (Mäkelä 2006).

3.3 Voices

If speech representation always involves a quoting frame and quoted

inset, this means that it involves two agents or instances of
speech―two voices. The two voices are readily distinguished in DD
and in content- paraphrase types of ID, but only with difficulty in FID.
In FID, the effects of voice all seem to derive from the quoted charac-
ter, with the narrator’s contribution reduced to the bare grammatical
minimum of tense and person. Indeed, an early controversy in the
scholarship on FID hinged on the question of the narrator’s putative
self-effacement and empathetic identification with the character. How-
ever, FID is just as likely to serve as a vehicle of irony, and it is in these
instances that the so-called dual-voice hypothesis (Vološinov [1929]
818 Brian McHale

1973; Baxtin [1929] 1984; Pascal 1977) seems most compelling. Ac-
cording to the dual-voice hypothesis, in sentences of FID (and some
instances of ID) the voice of the narrator is combined with that of the
character (hence “combined discourse”) or superimposed on it. “It par-
took, she felt, helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eterni-
ty”: in this famous sentence from To the Lighthouse, the parenthetical
clause (“she felt, helping Mr. Bankes,” etc.) introduces a plane of narra-
torial comment that ironizes Mrs. Ramsay’s experience of eternity. (Or
does it? This is actually an interpretative crux in the novel.) Irony of
this kind seems best accounted for in terms of the dual-voice hypothesis
(Uspenskij 1973: 102–105).
With the rediscovery of the Baxtin circle, the dual-voice analysis of
FID, already anticipated by Vološinov ([1929] 1973), came to be
viewed in the light of wider phenomena of dialogue in the novel. Ac-
cording to Baxtin and his school, the text of the novel is shot through
with more or less veiled dialogues between voices that “speak for” so-
cial roles, ideologies, attitudes, etc. The forms of dialogue range from
outright parody and stylization to implicit rejoinders and veiled polem-
ics (Baxtin [1929] 1984). FID is folded in among these categories, re-
flecting as it does (according to the dual-voice hypothesis) the internal
dialogization of the sentence of speech representation itself.
Related to the Baxtinian approach, but less ideologically driven, and
capable of much finer-grained analyses, is Schmid’s model of Tex-
tinterferenz ([1973] 1986, 2010: 137–174; see also Doležel 1973; de
Haard 2006). The Textinterferenz approach treats speech representation
as a matter of interference or interaction between two texts, the narra-
tor’s text and the character’s text. Textual segments display varying
kinds and degrees of interaction between these two texts, depending
upon how various features are distributed between the narrator’s and
the character’s voices. These features include thematic and ideological
(or evaluative) markers; grammatical person, tense and deixis; types of
speech acts (Sprachfunktion); and features of lexical, syntactical and
graphological style. In DD, all the markers point to the character’s
voice. In ID, person, tense and syntax can be assigned to the narrator’s
text, while thematic and ideological markers, deixis, and lexical style
point to the character’s voice; the speech-act level points both direc-
tions. Finally, in FID, person and tense evoke the narrator’s text, while
all the other features can be assigned to the character’s text.
In the light of dialogism and Textinterferenz, speech representation
comes to be reconceived as only more or less discrete instances of the
pervasive heteroglossia (Tjupa → Heteroglossia) of the novel, its mul-
tiplicity of voices (Baxtin [1934/35] 1981). According to the Baxtinian
 Speech Representation 819

account, samples of socially-inflected discourse―styles, registers, re-

gional and social dialects, etc. with their associated attitudes and ideo-
logies―are dispersed throughout the novel, appearing even where there
is no frame/inset structure of quotation to “legitimize” or naturalize
them. The language of a novel diversifies into various zones, including
zones associated with specific characters, even in the absence of syntac-
tical indications of quotation or paraphrase. This analysis of novelistic
discourse was paralleled in the Anglophone world, albeit in a casual
and pre-theoretical way, by Kenner’s (1978) jocular proposal of the
“Uncle Charles Principle,” named after a typical sentence from Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist: “Uncle Charles repaired to the outhouse.” The
sentence is attributable to the heterodiegetic narrator, but it is “colored”
by Uncle Charles’ characteristic periphrasis, “repaired.” The Uncle
Charles Principle, also called stylistic “contagion” or “infection”
(Spitzer [1922] 1961; Vološinov ([1929] 1973: 133–136; Stanzel
[1979] 1984; Fludernik 1993: 332–338), involves the dispersal of a
character’s idiom into the narrative prose in the proximity of that char-
acter (Koževnikova 1971).
At the opposite extreme from the dual-voice hypothesis and its ex-
tensions is the controversial no-narrator hypothesis advanced by Ban-
field (1982). According to Banfield, free indirect sentences of thought
representation (though not of speech) in third-person hetereodiegetic
contexts entirely lack a narrator, and so could hardly be dual-voiced. In
effect, Banfield has revived the empathetic reading of FID endorsed by
early commentators, but in a way calculated to scandalize anyone
committed to a communications-model approach to narrative. Indeed, it
might be argued that in certain FID representations of thought, those
representing what Banfield calls non-reflective consciousness, there is
no discernible voice at all: “It was raining, she saw” (Banfield 1982:
183–223; Fludernik 1993: 376–379). Whereas sentences of reflective
consciousness express what the character is aware of as passing through
her mind―what she “thought to herself”―sentences of nonreflective
consciousness express what the character perceives or apprehends
without being aware of perceiving or apprehending. At this point, is-
sues of voice shade off into even more diffuse issues of fictional minds.

3.4 Minds

Pervasive voice in the novel is mirrored by a parallel pervasiveness of

consciousness. Investigating the presence of fictional consciousness,
cognitive narratologists have become impatient with the so-called
“speech-category approach,” which in effect limits consciousness in
820 Brian McHale

fiction to varieties of inner speech. Not all consciousness in fiction is

inner speech, they argue―perhaps relatively little of it. As we have
already seen, however, even approaches to the representation of con-
sciousness using speech categories eventually run up against phenome-
na that exceed those categories in various ways. Speech categories
“bleed” at their edges, trailing off into less category-bound forms of
fictional mind. At one edge, for instance, ID bleeds into psycho-
narration, whereby the narrator takes charge of analyzing the charac-
ter’s mind, including subconscious levels that might not be accessible
to the character herself, or habitual dispositions that might not manifest
themselves in inner speech. At the other edge, FID bleeds into nonre-
flective consciousness. Indeed, almost from the earliest days of scholar-
ship on FID, it was recognized that the speech category of FID was in-
timately related to a form of so-called “substitutionary perception”
(Fehr 1938; see also Bühler 1937), sometimes called “represented per-
ception” (Brinton 1980) or even “free indirect perception” (Palmer
2004): “She opened the door and looked out. It was raining harder. The
cat would be around to the right. Perhaps she could go along under the
eaves.” The third and fourth of these sentences are unmistakably FID
(as indicated by the past-tense modals would and could, and the adver-
bial of doubt, perhaps), but the second is substitutionary perception.
Reorienting the study of represented consciousness away from
speech categories opens up new areas of inquiry. For instance, charac-
ters can be shown to read each other’s minds―not in any science-
fiction sense, but in the sense that they develop working hypotheses
about what others are thinking, inferring interior states from speech and
external behavior, just as one does in everyday life; they do “Theory of
Mind,” in other words (Zunshine 2006). Indeed, all actions of charac-
ters in a narrative fiction must be animated by mental states or acts;
otherwise, we might not be disposed to call them “actions” at all. So
thought ought not to be viewed as separable from action, but rather as
forming together with action a “thought-action continuum” whereby
actions are animated by consciousness throughout (Palmer 2004: 212–
214).
The most radical statement of this reorientation of analysis away
from the speech-category approach and toward “mind in action” must
surely be Fludernik’s redefinition of narrativity itself as experientiality
(Fludernik 1996: 20–43; compare Antin 1995). According to Fluder-
nik’s account, narrativity is not adequately defined in terms of sequenc-
es of events or even in terms of causal connections among events, but
only in terms of the experiencing of events by a human (or anthropo-
 Speech Representation 821

morphic) subject. In other words, it is ultimately the presence of con-

sciousness that determines narrative, and not anything else.
This is a far cry from the carving up of blocks of prose into discrete
units labeled DD, ID, FID. Nevertheless, it is not as unprecedented a
development as some cognitive narratologists have claimed. For in-
stance, the analysis of informational gaps and gap-filling, as practiced
by exponents of the Tel Aviv school (Perry & Sternberg [1968] 1986;
Perry 1979), is every bit as finely attuned to characters’ ventures in
mind-reading and the thought-action continuum as anything to be found
in the new cognitivist narratology (Palmer 2004: 182; Herman → Cog-
nitive Narratology). But if cognitive narratology sometimes overesti-
mates its own novelty and underrates its precursors, this does not pre-
vent it from standing at the cutting edge of research into the
representation of fictional mind at the present time.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) One is tempted to recommend (albeit facetiously) a moratorium on

further research into FID proper until other, more diffuse and pervasive
effects of mind and voice in fiction are better understood. Among other
advantages, this might give us the opportunity to evaluate critically
some of the bold claims of the cognitive narratologists with respect to
fictional minds, and of the Baxtin school with respect to “dialogue”
(Shepherd → Dialogism). Baxtin, in particular, has become a victim of
his own (posthumous) success; serial (mis)appropriations of his ap-
proach by a diverse range of literary and cultural theories, coupled with
uncritical endorsement of his ideological positions, has made critical
evaluation of his account of dialogue virtually impossible. (b) Too little
is still known about the role of models (schemata, stereotypes, folk-
linguistic knowledge, etc.) in the production and recognition of repre-
sentations of language varieties (styles, dialects, registers, etc.) in fic-
tion. (c) Similarly, there is still much that remains to be clarified about
the operation of textual context and its interaction with models of
speech and thought in producing the effect or illusion of mimesis
(though with respect to context see Ehrlich 1990). (d) “Currently, there
is a hole in literary theory between the analysis of consciousness, char-
acterization, and focalization […] a good deal of fictional discourse is
situated precisely within this analytical gap” (Palmer 2004: 186). Palm-
er perhaps underestimates the quantity and value of the work that has
already gone into knitting together consciousness, characterization and
focalization. Nevertheless, he is basically right: this is one of the holes
822 Brian McHale

that remain in narrative theory, and closing it should be a high priority

of future research.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

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154.
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Banfield, Ann (1982). Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and representation in the
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Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
– ([1934/35] 1981). “Discourse in the Novel.” M. B. The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas P, 259–422.
Bickerton, Derek (1967). “Modes of Interior Monologue: A Formal Definition.” Mod-
ern Language Quarterly 28, 229–239.
Brinton, Laurel (1980). “‘Represented Perception’: A Study in Narrative Style.” Poet-
ics 9, 363–381.
Bühler, Willi (1937). Die “erlebte Rede” im englischen Roman, ihre Vorstufen und
ihre Ausbildung im Werke Jane Austens. Zürich: Niehans.
Cohn, Dorrit (1969). “Erlebte Rede im Ich-Roman.” Germanisch-Romanische
Monatsschrift 19, 305–313.
– (1978). Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in
Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Coulmas, Florian ed. (1986). Direct and Indirect Speech. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Doležel, Lubomír (1973). Narrative Modes in Czech Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto
P.
Ehrlich, Susan (1990). Point of View: A Linguistic Analysis of Literary Style. London:
Routledge.
Fehr, Bernhard (1938). “Substitutionary Narration and Description: A Chapter in Sty-
listics.” English Studies 20.3, 97–107.
Fludernik, Monika (1993). The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction:
The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London: Routledge.
– (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Friedman, Melvin (1955). Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method. New
Haven: Yale UP.
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nell UP.
Haard, Eric A. de (2006). “On Narration in Voina i Mir.” Amsterdam International
Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology 3 <http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology-
/a05_haard.html>.
 Speech Representation 823

Hagenaar, Elly (1992). Stream of Consciousness and Free Indirect Discourse in Mod-
ern Chinese Literature. Leiden: Centre of Non-Western Studies.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Humphrey, Robert (1954). Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. Berkeley: U
of California P.
Kalepky, Theodor (1899). “Zur französischen Syntax.” Zeitschrift für romanische Phi-
lologie 2, 491–513.
– (1913). “Zum ‘style indirect libre’ (‘verschleierte Rede’).” Germanisch- Romani-
sche Monatsschrift 5, 608–619.
Kenner, Hugh (1978). Joyce’s Voices. Berkeley: U of California P.
Koževnikova, Natal’ja A. (1971). “O tipax povestvovanija v sovetskoj proze.” Voprosy
jazyka sovremennoj russkoj literatury. Moskva: Nauka, 97–163.
LaCapra, Dominick (1982). Madame Bovary on Trial. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Leech, Geoffrey N. & Michael H. Short (1981). Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduc-
tion to English Fictional Prose. London: Longman.
Lerch, Eugen (1914). “Die stylistische Bedeutung des Imperfektums der Rede (‘style
indirect libre’).” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 6, 470–489.
Lips, Marguerite (1926). Le Style indirect libre. Paris: Payot.
Lorck, Etienne (1914). “Passé defini, imparfait, passé indefini I, II et III.” Germanisch-
Romanische Monatsschrift 6, 43–57, 100–113, 177–191.
Mäkelä, Maria (2006). “Possible minds: Constructing―and reading―another con-
sciousness as fiction.” P. Tammi & H. Tommola (eds.). FREE language INDI-
RECT translation DISCOURSE narratology. Tampere: Tampere UP, 231–260.
McHale, Brian (1978). “Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts.” PTL:
A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3, 249–278.
– (1983). “Unspeakable Sentences, Unnatural Acts: Linguistics and Poetics Revis-
ited.” Poetics Today 4, 17–45.
– (1994). “Child as Ready-Made: Baby-Talk and the Language of Dos Passos’s
Children in U.S.A.” E. Goodenough et al. (eds.). Infant Tongues: The Voice of
the Child in Literature. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 202–224.
Page, Norman (1973). Speech in the English Novel. London: Longman.
Palmer, Alan (2004). Fictional Minds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Pascal, Roy (1977). The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the
Nineteenth- Century European Novel. Manchester: Manchester UP.
Perry, Menakhem (1979). “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates its
Meaning.” Poetics Today 1.1–2, 35–64, 311–361.
– & Meir Sternberg ([1968] 1986). “The King Through Ironic Eyes: Biblical Narra-
tive and the Literary Reading Process.” Poetics Today 7, 275–322.
Ron, Moshe (1981). “Free Indirect Discourse, Mimetic Language Games and the Sub-
ject of Fiction.” Poetics Today 2.2, 17–39.
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terdam: Grüner.
– (2010). Narratology. An Introduction. Berlin: de Gruyter.
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Klangphantasie.” L. Spitzer. Stilstudien II. München: Hueber, 84–124.
824 Brian McHale

Stanzel, Franz K. ([1979] 1984). A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Steinberg, Günther (1971). Erlebte Rede: ihre Eigenart und ihre Formen in neuerer
deutscher, französischer und englischer Erzählliteratur. Göppingen: Kümmerle.
Sternberg, Meir (1982). “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Re-
ported Discourse.” Poetics Today 3, 107–156.
Tammi, Pekka & Hannu Tommola, eds. (2006). FREE language INDIRECT translation
DISCOURSE narratology: Linguistic, Translatological and Theoretical Encoun-
ters. Tampere: Tampere UP.
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Talk in a Scene from Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief.” Poetics Today 23, 657–
684.
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für romanische Philologie 11, 433–461.
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schungen 44, 103–184.
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– (2006). “The ‘irresponsibility’ of FID.” P. Tammi & H. Mommola (eds.). FREE
language INDIRECT translation DISCOURSE narratology. Tampere: Tampere
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phy of Language. New York: Seminar P.
Zunshine, Lisa (2006). Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Colum-
bus: Ohio State UP.

5.2 Further Reading

Ginsburg, Michal Peled (1982). “Free Indirect Discourse: A Reconsideration.” Lan-

guage and Style 15, 133–149.
Hernadi, Paul (1972). “Appendix: Free Indirect Discourse and Related Techniques.” P.
Hernadi. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP, 187–205.
Lintvelt, Jaap ([1981] 1989). Essai de typologie narrative. Le ‘point de vue’. Theórie et
analyse. Paris: Corti.
Neumann, Anne Waldron (1986). “Characterization and Comment in Pride and Preju-
dice: Free Indirect Discourse and ‘Double-Voiced’ Verbs of Speaking, Thinking,
and Feeling.” Style 20, 364–394.
Patron, Sylvie (2009). Le narrateur. Introducion à la théorie narrative. Paris: Armand
Colin.
Rivara, René (2000). La langue du récit: Introduction à la narratologie énonciative.
Paris: L’Harmattan.
 Story Generator Algorithms
Pablo Gervás

1 Definition

The term story generator algorithms (SGAs) refers to computational

procedures resulting in an artifact that can be considered a story. In the
field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the automated generation of stories
has been a subject of research for over fifty years. An algorithm is un-
derstood as a set of instructions that, when applied to a given input,
produces an output. In the present context, the desired output is a story.
The underlying concept of “story” in SGAs is functional and does not
imply any aesthetic notion. This is important because it sets the context
for evaluation of generated stories, for which having a surface realiza-
tion as a readable and appealing text is not necessarily a core issue.

2 Explication

Research on storytelling systems (computational systems capable of

telling a story) has experienced considerable growth over the years.
More recently, the number of systems developed has increased signifi-
cantly. These systems initially arose as part of the general trend in AI to
build computational solutions that could achieve the kind of tasks that
are easy for humans and difficult for machines. Other examples of this
trend include computer vision, speech processing and natural language
understanding. Of all these examples, the first two have achieved suc-
cess and given rise to commercial applications. Natural language under-
standing and story generation still remain at the exploratory research
stage.
For story generation in particular, a large part of the problem is the
fact that the task is not well defined in an AI / computational perspec-
tive. If an algorithm is to be devised for a given task, it should be very
clear what the inputs must be and what characteristics are expected of
the output. In the generation of stories, none of these are clearly de-
fined. When humans produce stories, it is often not transparent what
826 Pablo Gervás

inputs they are bringing to bear on the process. Moreover, saying what
makes a good story remains a question open for debate. As a conse-
quence, existing story generation systems tend to be exploratory with
regard not only to the algorithms they employ but also to the set of in-
puts they start from as well as the characteristics their output stories are
expected to produce. From the point of view of narratology, this is im-
portant, since different views on these fundamental decisions give rise
to altogether different concepts of story generation. One of the main
benefits of SGA-research is to under-defined narratological concepts.

3 History of the Term / the Concept

The term Story Generator Algorithms is of relatively recent coinage,

first appearing in 2004 as the name of a project of the Hamburg Narra-
tology Research Group ([<http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/story-gene-
rators//index_en.html>]). The more abstract concept can be identified as
an implicit assumption of the many storytelling systems developed
since the 1950s.

3.1 Generating Systems

There is currently a large number of storytelling systems in existence.

For this review, systems that generate classic sequential stories have
been selected. Examples of story output are given for some systems
where small enough significant fragments were available (for further
detail, see Gervás 2009).
The first storytelling system on record is the Novel Writer system,
developed by Sheldon Klein (Klein et al. 1973). Novel Writer created
murder stories in a weekend party setting. This system is reputed to
have generated “2100-word murder mystery stories, complete with
deep structure, in less than 19 seconds.” A description of the world in
which the story was to take place was provided as input, together with
the characteristics of the participating characters (which included emo-
tional links between them and their predisposition towards violence or
sex). The particular murderer and victim depended on character traits
specified as input (with an additional random ingredient). The motives
arose as a function of the events in the course of the story. Possible mo-
tives for murder were restricted to greed, anger, jealousy or fear. The
story was generated based on two different algorithms: 1) a set of rules
that encodes possible changes from the current state of the world to the
next; and 2) a sequence of scenes corresponding to the type of story to
 Story Generator Algorithms 827

be told. The set of rules is highly constraining and allows for the con-
struction of only one very specific type of story. Though more than one
story could be built by the program, differences between them were
restricted to who murders whom with what and why and who discovers
them.
TALESPIN (Meehan 1977) was a system which generated stories
about the lives of simple woodland creatures. To create a story, a char-
acter was given a goal, and then the plan was developed to solve the
goal. TALESPIN introduced character goals as triggers for action. It
also introduced the possibility of having more than one problem-
solving character in the story, introducing separate goal lists for each of
them. Complex relations between characters were modeled (competi-
tion, dominance, familiarity, affection, trust, deceit and indebtedness).
These relations acted as preconditions to some actions and as conse-
quences of others, thus constituting a simple model of character motiva-
tion. The characters’ personalities were modeled according to degrees
of kindness, vanity, honesty and intelligence.
A sample TALESPIN story is given below: John Bear is given
knowledge about the world and a goal to satisfy his hunger:

John Bear is somewhat hungry. John Bear wants to get some berries.
John Bear wants to get near the blueberries. John Bear walks from a
cave entrance to the bush by going through a pass through a valley
through a meadow. John Bear takes the blueberries. John Bear eats
the blueberries. The blueberries are gone. John Bear is not very
hungry.

Dehn’s AUTHOR (1981) was a program intended to simulate the au-

thor’s mind as she makes up a story. Dehn’s assumption is that story
worlds are developed by authors as a post hoc justification for events that
the author has already decided will be part of the story. An author may
have particular goals in mind when he sets out to write a story, but even
if he does not, it is accepted that a number of metalevel goals drive or
constrain the storytelling process. These are issues such as ensuring that
the story is consistent, that it is plausible, that the characters are believa-
ble, that the reader’s attention is retained throughout the story, etc. These
may translate at a lower level into subgoals concerning situations into
which the author wants to lead particular characters, or the role that par-
ticular characters should play in the story. A story is understood as “the
achievement of a complex web of author goals.” These goals contribute
to structuring the story, and to guiding the construction process. In the
final story, however, these goals are no longer visible.
828 Pablo Gervás

Lebowitz’s UNIVERSE (1983) modeled the generation of scripts

for a succession of TV soap opera episodes in which a large cast of
characters plays out multiple, simultaneous, overlapping stories that
never end. UNIVERSE was the first storytelling system to devote spe-
cial attention to the creation of characters. Complex data structures
were used to represent characters, and a simple algorithm was proposed
to fill these in, partly in an automatic way. But the bulk of characteriza-
tion was left for the user to provide.
UNIVERSE was aimed at exploring extended story generation, a
continuing serial rather than a story with a beginning and an end. It was
initially intended as a writer’s aid, with additional hopes to later devel-
op it into an autonomous storyteller. UNIVERSE addressed a question
of procedure by making up a story about a fictional world: whether the
world should be built first with a plot added afterwards, or whether the
plot should drive the construction of the world, with characters, loca-
tions and objects being created as needed. Lebowitz declared himself in
favor of the first option, which is why UNIVERSE included facilities
for creating characters independently of plot, in contrast to Dehn, who
favored the second option.
An interesting point about UNIVERSE is that, being a story with no
recognizable ending, the system alternated between generating a new
episode to continue the story and telling the most recent episode it had
generated.
MINSTREL (Turner 1993) was a computer program that told stories
about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Each run of the
program was based on a moral that was used as a seed to build the sto-
ry, e.g.: “Deception is a weapon difficult to aim.” MINSTREL created
stories about one-half to one page in length. According to its author,
MINSTREL could tell about ten stories of this length and it could also
create a number of shorter story scenes.
MINSTREL used building units consisting of goals and plans to sat-
isfy them. These operated at two different levels: author goals and
character goals. Story construction in MINSTREL operated as a two-
stage process involving a planning stage and a problem-solving stage
which reused knowledge from previous stories.
Pérez y Pérez’s MEXICA (1999) was a computer model whose pur-
pose was to study the creative process. It was designed to generate short
stories about the early inhabitants of Mexico. During the engagement
phase, new story material was progressively generated, with no con-
straints imposed. During the reflection phase, the generated material
was revised to ensure that generic constraints are met.
 Story Generator Algorithms 829

MEXICA was a pioneer in that it took into account emotional links

and tensions between the characters as a means for driving and evaluat-
ing ongoing stories.

Jaguar knight was an inhabitant of the Great Tenochtitlan. Princess

was an inhabitant of the Great Tenochtitlan. Jaguar knight was walk-
ing when Ehecatl (god of the wind) blew and an old tree collapsed,
injuring badly Jaguar knight. Princess went in search of some medi-
cal plants and cured Jaguar knight. As a result, Jaguar knight was
very grateful to Princess. Jaguar knight rewarded Princess with
some cacauatl (cacao beans) and quetzalli (quetzal) feathers.

BRUTUS (Bringsjord & Ferrucci 1999) was a program that wrote short
stories about betrayal. BRUTUS was interesting because it based its
storytelling ability on a logical model of betrayal. The richness of this
model and the inferences that can be drawn from it enabled it to pro-
duce very rich stories. The system was also designed to take into ac-
count a large body of knowledge about literature and grammar.
BRUTUS was capable of creating a story of impressive quality, with
most of the features (in terms of literary tropes, dialogue, identification
with the characters, etc.) one would find in a human-authored story.
However, the authors make it clear that BRUTUS is not creative at all
but the result of reverse engineering a program out of a story in order to
see whether it can build that particular story.
FABULIST (Riedl & Young 2010) was an architecture for automat-
ed story generation and presentation. The Fabulist architecture split the
narrative generation process into three tiers: fabula generation, dis-
course generation, and media representation. The fabula generation
process used a planning approach to narrative generation. AI planners
are applications that, given a description of an initial state of the world
and a specific goal, identify the optimal sequence of actions to reach the
goal. They rely on detailed descriptions of the preconditions and post-
conditions of all the possible actions. The planning approach to narra-
tive generation is based on the assumption that a sequence of actions
leading from an initial state to a goal is a good approximation of a sto-
ry. In the case of FABULIST, inputs provided included a domain model
describing the initial state of the story world, possible operations that
can be enacted by characters and an outcome.
830 Pablo Gervás

3.2 Algorithm Types

The systems reviewed above include various types of algorithm to gen-

erate the stories they produce. Individual systems sometimes combine
more than one type of algorithm. This section reviews the types of algo-
rithm and explains in each case how a given algorithm is applied in
each storytelling system.
A large number of existing storytelling systems rely on solutions
based on planning. These solutions take as input an initial state of the
world and a desired goal and then produce a sequence of actions that
will lead from one to the other. Such solutions are applied to storytell-
ing in different ways. Some systems use authorial goals to drive the
story planning process while others simply consider character goals.
The simplest versions just generate actions that may follow previous
events, with no particular notion of goal. The Novel Writer system
(Klein et al. 1973) relied on a micro-simulation model where the behav-
ior of individual characters and events were governed by probabilistic
rules that progressively changed the state of the simulated world (repre-
sented as a semantic network). The flow of the narrative arises from
reports on the changing state of the world model. Because it had no ex-
plicit notion of goal, this procedure required additional information to
guide it (see below). TALESPIN combined forward-chaining (from
events to their consequences) and backward-chaining (from desired
outcomes expressed as goals that resulted from an event previous to the
particular events that will lead to the outcome). A large part of the work
of making up a story in AUTHOR is the perpetual reformulation of au-
thor goals. Both the UNIVERSE (Lebowitz 1983) and MINSTREL
(Turner 1993) storytelling systems involve a planning stage that keeps
track of a set of pending goals which drive the expansion of a partial
draft of the story until a complete plot is obtained. The “Intent-Driven
Partial Order Causal Link” (IPOCL) planning algorithm used by Fabu-
list (Riedl & Young 2010) simultaneously reasoned about causality and
character intentionality and motivation in order to produce narrative
sequences that are causally coherent (in the sense that they drive to-
wards a conclusion) (Toolan → Coherence) and have elements of char-
acter believability. Fabulist first generates a narrative plan that meets
the outcome objective, ensuring that all character actions and goals are
justified by events within the narrative itself.
Another typical solution is to rely on a set of resources that abstract
key elements of story structure, similar to story grammars. Although
the major driving mechanism of the Novel Writer system (Klein et al.
1973) was planning, the sequence of scenes used to build up the story
 Story Generator Algorithms 831

was already spelt out and hard-wired in the code to correspond to the
expected development of a weekend party, with the simulation only
accounting for the interplay between the characters that fleshes out the
plot. This sequence of scenes could be considered an instance of a
primitive story grammar. The operation of BRUTUS (Bringsjord &
Ferrucci 1999) involved both a simulation process (where characters
attempt to achieve a set of pre-defined goals) and the application of a
hierarchy of grammars (story grammars, paragraph grammars, sentence
grammars) that define how the story is constructed as a sequence of
paragraphs which are themselves sequences of sentences.
Other systems apply solutions that mine a set of previous stories to
obtain material they can reuse in building new ones. The actual story
generation process of UNIVERSE (Lebowitz 1983) uses snippets of
plot that include information about goals and actions to generate plot
outlines. The problem-solving stage of MINSTREL (Turner 1993)
solved author-level goals by querying the system’s episodic memory
(where instances of previous stories are stored) in order to instantiate a
set of partially complete character schemas derived from the input.
MEXICA (Pérez y Pérez 1999) searches a set of knowledge structures
to find possible continuations to an ongoing plot, based on matching the
set of emotions and tensions between one and the other (Emmott & Al-
exander → Schemata).

3.3 Interactive and other Storytelling Applications

In addition to classic storytellers, there has been a very significant

growth of interactive storytelling applications. These are interactive
computer applications that allow the user to dictate the behavior of a
given character involved in a simulated environment. The interactivity
involved ranges from plain text interaction (as in Interactive Fiction, or
IF, where the computer produces a rendition of the story as text, inter-
spersed with the text commands that the user has written) to 3D simu-
lated worlds similar to video games (where the story generation module
is used to drive the behavior of virtual characters and the story is only
rendered visually). These interactive storytelling applications are too
numerous to be included in the present review, but they clearly deserve
a separate study and deserve a specific reviewing effort.
Another related family of applications is that of systems designed to
construct story text from a conceptually represented story discourse, as
in Charles Callaway and James Lester’s STORYBOOK (2002), or to
construct story discourse from an underlying fabula, as in Nick Mont-
fort’s Narrator module in the nn system (Montfort 2007), now known
832 Pablo Gervás

as Curveship (Montfort 2011), or the Suspenser (Cheong 2007) and

Prevoyant (Bae & Young 2008) systems, which aim for discourses
showing evidence of specific characteristics such as suspense or sur-
prise. All of these types constitute examples of computational algo-
rithms for tasks that are clearly important in the construction of stories.
However, they have been considered separately from the other systems
reviewed above for the reason that they are not aimed at actually gener-
ating a story, but rather at telling it in particular ways. A related family
of applications aims to develop cinematic visual discourse from an un-
derlying fabula (Jhala & Young 2010). These applications also rely
heavily on narratological concepts and constitute a significant research
field that brings together computation and narratology.
Together with existing efforts at automating analysis of narrative in
various ways (Mani 2010), this set of research lines is collectively be-
coming known as Computational Narratology (Mani → Computational
Narratology), which has recently experienced a very significant growth.

4 Relevance for Narratology

Story generator systems are clearly at an early stage of development. In

their current state, they are obviously not producing the depth and rich-
ness of narrative that narratology is mostly concerned with. However,
the engineering principles that must be applied when designing and
constructing such systems force the consideration of issues that narra-
tology has not focused on, but which may benefit enormously from tak-
ing them into consideration. From a narratological point of view, the
main relevance of this research lies in the “testing” of narratological
concepts for their unambiguity and applicability, which are absolute
criteria for an algorithm-driven system to function (Lönneker et al.
2005; Meister 2005). Whereas analysis of literary texts invites a broad
array of concepts to ensure applicability over a large variety of texts
and contexts, the design of algorithm-driven systems requires precise
definitions on which story construction decisions are based. Storytell-
ing systems may be used to identify prototypes of narratological con-
cepts in actual use to support story building decisions. This may be
helpful both in allowing identification of existing concepts that may be
under-defined or ambiguous in their present formulation, and in putting
forward additional concepts concerned with the process of composition
of stories that may be worthy of further attention.
 Story Generator Algorithms 833

5 Topics for Further Investigation

Research on story generator algorithms is very much an ongoing effort.

To date, the interaction between narratology and artificial intelligence
on this subject has been limited and inconclusive. This is slowly chang-
ing, however, as evidenced by the rise of Computational Narratology.
This frontier still needs to be explored, as each field could contribute
significantly to the other. The algorithmic implementation of story gen-
eration systems requires not only a clearly defined set of concepts on
which to base the implementation, but also a clear division of the over-
all effort of story generation into particular tasks that are easier to mod-
el. This may require a distinction between the process of constructing a
story and the process of telling it once it has been constructed. These
two processes are obviously interrelated in the case of fiction, but they
are also conceptually different from the point of view of what their in-
puts and outputs are. A clear contribution from narratology to clarifying
the relations and interactions between these two processes would con-
stitute a significant contribution to storytelling. As mentioned above,
story generation research may provide a very interesting benchmark for
practical testing of the extent to which narratological concepts are clear
and precise enough to be transformed into working implementations of
storytellers.

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Bae, Byung-Chull & R. Michael Young (2008). “A use of flashback and foreshadowing
for surprise arousal in narrative using a plan-based approach.” U. Sperling & N.
Szillas (eds.). Interactive Storytelling. First Joint International Conference on
Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2008, Erfurt, Germany, 26–29. Proceedings Series:
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5334. Berlin: Springer, 156–167.
Bringsjord, Selmer & David A. Ferrucci (1999). Artificial Intelligence and Literary
Creativity Inside the Mind of BRUTUS, a Storytelling Machine. Hillsdale: Law-
rence Erlbaum.
Callaway, Charles B. & James C. Lester (2002). “Narrative prose generation.” Artifi-
cial Intelligence 139.2, 213–252.
Cheong, Yun-Gyung (2007). A Computational Model of Narrative Generation for Sus-
pense. PhD Thesis, North Carolina State University.
834 Pablo Gervás

Dehn, Natalie (1981). “Story Generation after Tale-Spin.” A. Drinan (ed.). Proceedings
of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August
24–28, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Los Altos: Kauf-
mann, vol. 116–118.
Gervás, Pablo (2009). “Computational approaches to storytelling and creativity.” AI
Magazine 30.3, 49–62.
Jhala, Arnav & R. Michael Young (2010). “Cinematic visual discourse: Representation,
generation, and evaluation.” IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence
and AI in Games 2.2: 69–81.
Klein, Sheldon et al. (1973). Automatic novel writing: A status report. Technical Re-
port 186, Computer Science Department, The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Lebowitz, Michael (1983). “Creating a Story-Telling Universe.” A. Nundy (ed.). Pro-
ceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
August 8–12, Karlsruhe, Germany. Los Altos: Kaufmann, vol. 1, 63–65.
Lönneker, Birte et al. (2005). “Story Generators: Models and Approaches for the Gen-
eration of Literary Artefacts.” ACH/ALLC 2005 Conference Abstracts. Proceed-
ings of the 17th Joint International Conference of the Association for Computers
and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing,
Victoria, BC, Canada, June 15–18, 126–133.
Mani, Inderjeet (2010). The Imagined Moment: Time, Narrative, and Computation.
Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Meehan, James R. (1977). “Tale-Spin, an interactive program that writes stories.” Pro-
ceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
MIT, Cambridge, MA, August 22–25. Los Altos: Kaufmann, 91–98.
Meister, Jan Chistoph (2005). “Computational approaches to narrative.” D. Herman et
al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narratology. London: Routledge, 78–80.
Montfort, Nick (2007). Generating narrative variation in interactive fiction. PhD Dis-
sertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
– (2011). “Curveship’s automatic narrative variation.” Proceedings of the 6th In-
ternational Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’11), Bor-
deaux, France, June 29–July 1. New York: ACM, 211–218.
Pérez y Pérez, Rafael (1999). MEXICA: A Computer Model of Creativity in Writing.
PhD Dissertation, The University of Sussex.
Riedl, Mark O. & R. Michael Young (2010). “Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and
Character.” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 39, 217–68.
Turner, Scott R. (1993). Minstrel: a computer model of creativity and storytelling. PhD
Dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles.

6.2 Further Reading

Bailey, Paul (1999). “Searching for storiness: Story generation from a reader’s perspec-
tive.” Narrative Intelligence. Papers from the 1999 AAAI Fall Symposium. North
Falmouth, MA, November 5–7. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 157–163.
Lebowitz, Michael (1985). “Story-telling as planning and learning.” Poetics 14, 483–502.
Meehan, James R. (1981). “Tale-Spin.” R. Schank (ed.). Inside Computer Understand-
ing. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 197–225.
 Story Generator Algorithms 835

Pérez y Pérez, Rafael & Mike Sharples (2004). “Three computer-based models of sto-
rytelling: BRUTUS, MINSTREL and MEXICA.” Knowledge-Based Systems 17,
15–29.
Riedl, Mark O. & Neha Sugandh (2008). “Story planning with vignettes: Toward over-
coming the content production bottleneck.” U. Sperling & N. Szillas (eds.). In-
teractive Storytelling. First Joint International Conference on Digital Storytell-
ing, ICIDS 2008, Erfurt, Germany, 26–29. Proceedings Series: Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, Vol. 5334. Berlin: Springer, 168–179.
Turner, Scott R. (1994). The Creative Process: A Computer Model of Storytelling and
Creativity. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
 Tellability
Raphaël Baroni

1 Definition

Tellability is a notion that was first developed in conversational storytell-

ing analysis but which then proved extensible to all kinds of narrative,
referring to features that make a story worth telling, its “noteworthiness.”
Tellability (sometimes designated “narratibility” or “reportability”) is
dependent on the nature of specific incidents judged by storytellers to be
significant or surprising and worthy of being reported in specific con-
texts, thus conferring a “point” on the story. The breaching of a canoni-
cal development tends to transform a mere incident into a tellable event,
but the tellability of a story can also rely on purely contextual parame-
ters (e.g. the newsworthiness of an event); in conversation it is often
negotiated and progressively co-constructed through discursive interac-
tion. Tellability may also be dependent on discourse features, i.e. on the
way in which a sequence of incidents is rendered in a narrative.

2 Explication

Publications devoted to tellability differ according to the importance

given to: (a) the concept of narrativity; (b) the nature of the story told
and its connection with narrative interest; (c) the discourse features of
tellability; and (d) the contextual parameters determining the “point” of
a narrative.

2.1 Relation to Narrativity

Scholars generally distinguish tellability from narrativity (Abbott →

Narrativity) because, firstly, tellability is perceived independently from
its textualization (e.g. tellability is involved when a potential narrator
wonders whether his or her story—lived or invented—is worth telling)
and secondly, because stories that meet formal criteria of narrativity
may remain pointless and simply fail to raise the interest of the audi-
 Tellability 837

ence (cf. Ryan 2005: 589; Herman 2002: esp. 100–109). However,
some scholars bring tellability and narrativity closer together by adding
to the various formal criteria defining narrativity its “value” in specific
contexts (e.g. Bruner 1991; Prince 2008: 23–25).

2.2 Interest of the Story

In light of the story/discourse distinction, it is generally assumed that

tellability pertains only to the story level and that it should thus be dis-
sociated from the broader concept of narrative interest as comprising
both story and discourse features. Since a good story poorly told can be
ruined or, conversely, the most insignificant incident can become capti-
vating when told by a skillful narrator, some critics find it difficult to
consider any aspect of narrative (sequence, plot, tellability, point, inter-
est, etc.) independently from its discursive or textual manifestation.
Consequently, narrative interest might be proposed as a term for tella-
bility when dealing with the interconnection between story and dis-
course.
Semantic and cognitive studies have provided interesting insights in-
to how salient events can transform a mere occurrence or a “something
happens” (type I event) into a “tellable” or “reportable” one (type II
event) (Hühn → Event and Eventfulness; cf. Hühn 2007). Bruner has
insisted on the fact that “to be worth telling, a tale must be about how
an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated, or deviated
from” (1991: 11). Such a “precepting event” can be linked to dynamic
conceptions of plot, and in particular to its complication phase (see
Baroni 2007: 167–224). At this level, it is assumed that there is a gen-
eral human interest for stories reporting events that have a certain de-
gree of unpredictability or mystery. In Ryan’s (1991: 148–174) possi-
ble worlds semantics approach, the more complex virtual outcomes are,
the more tellable the story is.

2.3 Discourse Structures of Tellability

According to Sacks, “the sheer telling of a story is something in which

one makes a claim for its tellability” (1992: 12). By combining formal
and functional descriptions, sociolinguistic approaches to conversation-
al storytelling have shown that the tellability and point of a narrative
are reflected in specific features of discourse structure. Thus evaluation
devices, for instance, form “part of the narrative which reveals the atti-
tude of the narrator towards the narrative by emphasizing the relative
importance of some narrative units” (Labov & Waletzky 1967: 37). In a
838 Raphaël Baroni

functionalist interpretation of those formal attributes of tellability, eval-

uation devices are described as a way to avoid a “so what?” reaction
from the audience. Nevertheless, a number of recent studies have ar-
gued that evaluation devices are quite difficult to pinpoint as actual nar-
rative structures, especially in cases of non-conversational or literary
stories, and that they are not sufficient to guarantee the tellability of a
story. As Prince puts it: “after all, claiming that (sequences of) events
are unusual, extraordinary, bizarre, unfortunately does not suffice to
make them so” (Prince 2008: 24).

2.4 Contextual Parameters of Tellability

General features of tellability remain on a level of description aimed at

singling out the universals of narrative. However, contextual approach-
es tend to insist on the importance of genre, historical or culture-
specific constraints and, for conversational storytelling, on the role of
the interaction in which storytelling takes place. Sacks associates tella-
bility with “local news” because stories generally begin with some ref-
erence to a new or unexpected event for the audience. Thus, the tellabil-
ity of the same event might change according to the knowledge of the
audience: we don’t tell the same stories to someone we see everyday as
compared to someone we see once in a while. As summarized by Nor-
rick, “the sort of news that makes a story salient today will no longer
make it salient tomorrow” (2004: 80). For Polanyi, describing the viola-
tion of a norm necessarily involves giving a minimal account of the
canonicity that has been breached. Bruner has pointed out that even
breaches “are often highly conventional and are strongly influenced by
narrative traditions” (1991: 12). Polanyi further maintains that tellable
materials can stimulate interest culturally, socially, personally or with
some combination thereof. In a different vein, Hühn stresses the fact
that eventfulness, which confers a “point” on a story, is “context-
sensitive and consequently culturally as well as generically specific and
historically variable” (2008: 143). Moreover, genre, as Ryan points out,
can also come into play: “whereas popular literature invests heavily in
the tellability of plots, high literature often prefers to make art out of
the not-tellable” (2005: 590). Other researchers (e.g. Norrick 2000,
2005; Ochs & Capps 2001) insist more on the negotiation and co-
construction of tellability in oral storytelling performance and have also
extended the concept to include “low tellable” and “untellable” stories.
 Tellability 839

3 History of the Concept and its Study

A forerunner to functionalist approaches of tellability can be found in

Aristotle’s discussion on what kind of events a drama should imitate.
Aristotle recommends portraying events that produce emotions such as
pity or fear (1449b); events with the greatest “cathartic” effect are those
whose development, even though causally connected, are unexpected
by the audience (1452a). However, such considerations are related only
to a specific genre of dramatic representation and cannot be incorpo-
rated as such into a general theory of tellability.
In their pioneering article published in 1967, Labov and Waletzky
stated that the formal properties of narrative should always be related to
the functions they fulfill in narrative communication. “Labov’s great
credit,” notes Bruner, “is to have recognized that narrative structures
have two components: ‘what happened and why it is worth telling’”
(1991: 12). By stressing narrative performance (Berns → Performativi-
ty), they addressed questions left out of account by the structuralists,
showing that narratives which serve only to recapitulate experience
“may be considered empty or pointless,” but that they also serve “an
additional function of personal interest determined by a stimulus in the
social context in which the narrative occurs” (Labov & Waletzky 1967:
13). The authors showed that “most narratives are so designed as to
emphasize the strange and unusual character of the situation” because a
“simple sequence of complication and result” does not necessarily suf-
fice to indicate the relative importance of the events told or the “point”
of the story (34). This led them to single out phrases and words that
contribute to fulfilling this contextual function, those parts of narrative
being named “evaluation devices” (37; cf. Labov 1972: 366−375).
They showed that evaluations can appear in various forms, such as di-
rect statements bearing on the unusual nature or significance of certain
incidents, lexical intensifiers, suspensions, repetitions, judgments, etc.
Sacks is another pioneer in the study of tellability. He has empha-
sized the contextual parameters of tellability and the dynamics of its co-
construction in the discursive interaction. As summarized by Karatsu:
“In contrast to researchers who relate tellability to the unexpectedness
or extraordinariness of events, Sacks (1992) discussed how ordinary
events that people experience in their daily life become worth telling as
a story (“storyable”) in everyday conversation, and how their orienta-
tion to tell their experiences as something worth telling affects their
way of telling. Sacks pointed out that a person learns what is tellable by
virtue of its “total currency,” for example, gossip value, or by virtue of
other people’s interests, and that a person learns to treat some items as
840 Raphaël Baroni

tellable because relating a story that is tellable is requested by others”

(Karatsu 2012: 32). Along the same line, Karatsu has deepened the
analysis of conversational storytelling by singling out four parameters
affecting tellability: “(a) the embeddedness of the story in the conversa-
tion, (b) the participants’ view of past events in the story, (c) the partic-
ipants’ knowledge in relation to the content or elements of the story,
and (d) the participants’ concern about the social circumstances” (Kar-
atsu 2012: 36).
Although the study of tellability has its roots in the analysis of con-
versational storytelling (Fludernik → Conversational Narration – Oral
Narration), the concept was quickly broadened to include all kinds of
narratives. Pratt (1977; see also van Dijk 1975) played a significant role
in expanding the pragmatic approach developed by Labov and Waletz-
ky to literary narratives. Stressing the context-dependency of narrative
left out of account by the structuralists, she demonstrates the pertinence
of point for “artificial” narratives. Furthermore, in applying Grice’s
Cooperative Principle to literary discourse, she showed that the maxim
of “relevance” can be associated with the notions of “evaluation” and
“point” (the unusual, the amusing, the terrifying, etc.).
Given the importance of situation of discourse, context, and cultural
conventions in the degree of tellability a story might possess, Polanyi
emphasized that “stories, whether fictional or non-fictional, formal and
oft-told, or spontaneously generated, can have as their point only cul-
turally salient material generally agreed upon by members of the pro-
ducer’s culture to be self-evidently important and true” (1979: 207).
For Polanyi, instead of “how” people structure their stories in order to
make them interesting, tellability raises the more basic question of
“What is worth telling, to whom and under what circumstances?”
(1979: 207). She further contended that the point of a story “may
change in the course of the narration” and that it is subject to negotia-
tion. She developed a simple methodology for “identifying and investi-
gating beliefs about the world held by members of a particular culture”
(213) by analyzing the negotiation between participants “about what is
to be taken as the point of the story” (214; cf. Prince 1983; Rigney
1992).
Ryan (1991) postulates that in addition to the features focused on by
traditional pragmatic studies on tellability (evaluation devices, unusual-
ness of facts placed in the speech situation, newsworthiness), it is pos-
sible to articulate a purely semantic and formal conceptualization of
tellability. For her, the fabula is a network of embedded narratives that
can be both actual and virtual. A character’s goal might be actualized as
successful, but its tellability depends on the fact that, virtually, it might
 Tellability 841

have been unsuccessful. Ryan concludes that “some events make better
stories than others because they project a wider variety of forking paths
on the narrative map” (2005: 590; cf. Ryan 1986).
Recently, the connection between narrativity and tellability has re-
ceived more attention. Herman has linked the degree of narrativity to
the degree to which expectations regarding the storyline are violated,
the former aspect being closely related to tellability (2002: 90–92).
More extreme is the position of Fludernik, who grounds her conception
of narrativity in “experientiality”: “For the narrator the experientiality
of the story resides not merely in the events themselves but in their
emotional significance and exemplary nature. The events become tella-
ble precisely because they have started to mean something to the narra-
tor on an emotional level. It is this conjunction of experience reviewed,
reorganized, and evaluated (‘point’) that constitutes narrativity”
(Fludernik 2003: 245; cf. Fludernik 1996: 70). On the other hand,
Sternberg has grounded his conception of narrativity in suspense, curi-
osity, and surprise, which contribute to “the three universal narrative
effects/interests/dynamics,” asserting that they necessarily rely on the
interplay between the temporalities of actional and discursive sequences
(2001: 117). Following his position, narrative interest may well be an
appropriate term for tellability when the concept embraces both story
and discourse instead of focusing only the discourse-independent fea-
tures of tellability.
Ochs and Capps (2001) distinguished two different poles in conver-
sational narratives. The first is identified with highly tellable accounts
and generally involves a single active teller with a passive audience.
This corresponds to the prototypical narrative studied by Labov and
Waletzky that involves, for example, a near-death experience. In such
cases, the story conveys a clear point and is more or less detachable
from its context of realization. The second pole can be exemplified by a
moderately tellable story which is embedded in surrounding discourse
and activity, is co-constructed by several active co-tellers, and conveys
an uncertain fluid moral stance (Ochs & Capps 2001: 18–24). This ap-
proach draws attention to conversational narratives with a low degree
of tellability in which “partners are grilled about their day’s activity and
reel out what happened reluctantly, without bothering to dress up the
events as particularly important” (34). The authors insist on the fact that
conversation “creates an opportunity to launch a personal narrative
whose storyline is not resolved” (35). They argue that the point of a
story and its relative tellability are not always characteristics found by
the narrator in the potential story before it is performed, but rather vari-
842 Raphaël Baroni

ables that must be factored in during the process of narrating, involving

several co-narrators cooperating in construction of the storyline.
Another interesting feature of the notion developed by Ochs and
Capps is the reflection on “untold stories.” Here, tellability serves to
explain negatively what cannot be narrated due to a selective memory
that filters experience, childhood amnesia or trauma, i.e. events that
“remain inaccessible for narration because they are too painful” (2001:
257). However, in this case, it might be more appropriate to distinguish
strictly between what is worthy of being narrated and what is accessible
to narration. Both phenomena are highly context-sensitive, the latter
depending specifically on psychological and cultural conditions (such
as psychic resistance or taboos). Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008)
have highlighted another kind of “untold stories.” In the course of a
conversation, some narrators may claim that they could tell a notewor-
thy story but that for some reason they won’t because, for example,
they promised to someone they wouldn’t. In this case, “alluding to the
potential of a story and rhetorically foreshadowing its potential content
as relevant and highly reportable, without even mentioning any event—
let alone event sequence—moves [the narrator] into the role of having
the potential to contribute to the topic under discussion in a relevant
way. Thus, while traditional narrative analysis relies heavily on the sto-
ry’s content (e.g. reportability of events and the breaching of expecta-
tions) to reason for its tellability, [these] interactive moves show tella-
bility as something that is interactively achieved” (2008 : 387–388).
In a related development, Norrick has defined what he calls the
“dark side of tellability,” exploring stories that are too personal, for in-
stance, or too embarrassing or obscene to be told. He concludes that
tellability is “a two-sided notion: Some events bear too little signifi-
cance to reach the lower-bounding threshold of tellability, while others
are so intimate (or frightening) that they lie on the dark side of tellabil-
ity” (2007: 136). Being situated on the dark side of tellability does not
mean that those stories are not told. Smith and Sparkes have studied
how a narrator, who became disabled after an accident, moved from a
narrative “both tellable and acceptable in terms of plot and structure”
toward a “chaos narrative that currently frames his daily experience”
but that is located on Norrick’s upper-bounding side of tellability. “Due
to its transgressive, unwelcome, and frightening nature, this is a narra-
tive that people prefer not to hear and find it very difficult to listen to
on those occasions when it confronts them” (Smith & Sparkes 2008 :
230–231).
Norrick has also drawn attention to situations where the rule “don’t
tell what the others know” is lifted, as in humor, where “the enjoyment
 Tellability 843

of group conarration and laughing together more than make up for a

lack of news in the story itself.” He concludes that “We might go on to
ask where else the general rule is lifted. Certainly, there are other occa-
sions where we tell stories with little or no claim to reportability, and it
would be of interest to identify such occasions and to investigate the
kinds of stories told in them” (Norrick 2004: 104).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Based on studies such as Ochs and Capps (2001), Bamberg and Geor-
gakopoulou (2008) and Norrick (2000, 2004, 2005, 2007), topics call-
ing for additional research are descriptions of interactional dynamics
related to specific kinds of narratives, ranging from “stories with little
or no claim to reportability” to untold, untellable, or hardly tellable nar-
ratives, those situated on the dark side of tellability. As advocated by
Karatsu, “in recent works, researchers paid close attention to various
kind of stories, e.g. shared stories (Norrick 2000) and hypothetical sto-
ries (Ochs & Capps 2001) as well as stories that are negotia-
ble/collaborative in nature. Going beyond the analysis of evaluation and
evaluative devices, they pointed out that unlike a story in a monologue
or in a written text, the tellability of a story in everyday conversation
does not necessarily rest on the ‘sensational nature of events’ (Ochs &
Capps 2001: 34) or on the teller’s skill in rhetorical composition. The
tellability of a story also rests on how the story is introduced, on ‘inter-
actional dynamics’ (Norrick 2000), and on the participants’ common
interests and values in their daily lives (Georgakopoulou 2007; Ochs &
Capps 2001; Sacks 1992)” (Karatsu 2012: 6).
As Norrick has shown when dealing with “humor” (2004), tellability
must be explored in close connection with generic conventions, espe-
cially when the concept is used beyond conversational analysis. It is
clear that parameters defining tellability differ completely when a story
is told to captivate the audience, explain a fact, justify a behavior, re-
flect on a life trajectory, or assert one’s identity. The breach of a canon-
ical order is more relevant in popular fiction or in personal anecdotes
told to amuse than in experimental literature or in testimony before a
judge (cf. Baroni 2009: 66–71). On the other hand, despite Sternberg’s
(2003) reservations, there is a need to further clarify the relation be-
tween tellability and narrative interest. Finally, due to its connection
with experienciality (Fludernik 1996), tellability could become a key
concept for exploring the interface between life experience and its nar-
844 Raphaël Baroni

rativisation, because it addresses directly the question of how and why

some incidents become the object of a narration and others do not.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Bamberg, Michael & Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2008). “Small stories as a new per-
spective in narrative and identity construction.” Text & Talk 28, 37–96.
Baroni, Raphaël (2007). La Tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris:
Seuil.
– (2009). L’œuvre du temps. Poétique de la discordance narrative. Paris: Seuil.
Bruner, Jerome (1991). “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18,
1–21.
Dijk, Teun A. (1975). “Action, Action Description, and Narrative.” New Literary His-
tory 6, 273–294.
Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
– (2003). “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters.” D. Herman (ed.) Narra-
tive Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI, 243–267.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amster-
dam: John Benjamins.
Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P.
Hühn, Peter (2007). “Event, Eventfulness and Tellability.” Amsterdam International
Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology No. 4, http://cf.hum.uva.nl-
/narratology/a07_huhn.htm
– (2008). “Functions and Forms of Eventfulness in Narrative Fiction.” J. Pier & J.
Á. García Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 141–163.
Karatsu, Mariko (2012). Conversational Storytelling among Japanese Women: Conver-
sational Circumstances and Tellability of Stories. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Labov, William (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Ver-
nacular. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.
– & Joshua Waletzky (1967). “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Expe-
rience.” J. Helm (ed.). Essays on Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle: U of Washing-
ton P, 12–44.
Norrick, Neal R. (2000). Conversational Narrative. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
– (2004). “Humor, Tellability, and Co-Narration in Conversational Storytelling.”
Text 24.1, 74–111.
– (2005). “The Dark Side of Tellability.” Narrative Inquiry 15.2, 323–343.
– (2007). “Conversational Storytelling.” D. Herman (ed.). The Cambridge Com-
panion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 127–141.
Ochs, Elinor & Lisa Capps (2001). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Story-
telling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
 Tellability 845

Polanyi, Livia (1979). “So What’s the Point?” Semiotica 25, 207–241.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1977). Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse.
Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Prince, Gerald (1983). “Narrative Pragmatics, Message, and Point.” Poetics 12, 527–
536.
– (2008). “Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratability.” J. Pier & J. Á.
García Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 19–27.
Rigney, Ann (1992). “The Point of Stories: On Narrative Communication and Cogni-
tive Functions.” Poetics Today 13, 263–283.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1986). “Embedded Narratives and Tellability.” Style 20, 319–340.
– (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Blooming-
ton: Indiana UP.
– (2005). “Tellability.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narra-
tive Theory. London: Routledge, 589–591.
Sacks, Harvey (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, Brett, & Andrew C. Sparkes (2008). “Changing bodies, changing narratives and
the consequences of tellability: A case study of becoming disabled through
sport.” Sociology of Health and Illness 30.2, 217–236.
Sternberg, Meir (2001). “How Narrativity Makes a Difference.” Narrative 9, 115–122.
– (2003). “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes.” Poetics Today
24, 517–638.

5.2 Further Reading

Schmid, Wolf (2007). “Eventfulness as a Narratological Category”. Amsterdam Inter-

national Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology N. 4, http://cf.hum.uva.nl-
/narratology/a07_schmid.htm
Wilensky, Robert (1983). “Story Grammars versus Story Points.” Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 6, 579–623.
 Telling vs. Showing
Tobias Klauk & Tilmann Köppe

1 Definition

The telling vs. showing distinction captures two different modes of pre-
senting events in a narrative. In a first approximation, the distinction
can be taken quite literally: in the showing mode, the narrative evokes
in readers the impression that they are shown the events of the story or
that they somehow witness them, while in the telling mode, the narra-
tive evokes in readers the impression that they are told about the events.
Using a spatial metaphor, the showing mode is also called a narrative
with “small distance,” presumably because readers get the impression
that they are somehow near the events of the story, while the telling
mode correspondingly evokes the impression of a “large distance” be-
tween readers and the events.

2 Explication

In current narratology, the labels ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ are widely

used, but there appears to be little consensus as to the exact distinction
they are supposed to cover. Thus narratologists do not always agree on
the classification of examples, or even about the grounds for the classi-
fication. This can be seen when considering an example which has been
proposed to illustrate the distinction. Compare the sentences “John was
angry with his wife” and “John looked at his wife, his eyebrows pursed,
his lips contracted, his fists clenched. Then he got up, banged the door
and left the house” (Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002: 109). The first sen-
tence is introduced by Rimmon-Kenan as an example of telling and the
latter as an example of showing. However, whether one thinks that
these two sentences differ with respect to the telling vs. showing dis-
tinction depends on what criteria are taken to be decisive (for refer-
ences, see section 3 below):
If the presence or absence of a narrator is taken to be the decisive
criterion, then both sentences may be on a par. The same is true if the
 Telling vs. Showing 847

presence or absence of dialogue is considered crucial, or, arguably, if

the ‘partiality’ or ‘objectivity’ of the narration are regarded as lying at
the heart of the distinction.
A difference between the modes of presentation emerges if it is tak-
en for granted that both example sentences feature a narrator; hence, if
one compares the relations of a narrator to the events told, including the
narrator’s spatial, temporal or general epistemic position, then the first
sentence (“John was angry with his wife”) may count as an instance of
telling and the second as an instance of showing. Similarly, the first
sentence is explicit about at least one of John’s traits (“John was angry
with his wife”) and hence is in the telling mode, while the second
leaves any facts about John’s traits to be inferred by the reader. What is
more, the first sentence exhibits a higher degree of narrative speed, and
it conveys a comparatively less detailed description of the event (or
events) than the second; hence the first sentence may count as telling
and the second as showing. Similarly, the first sentence may invoke the
impression on the reader’s side that the events of the story are being
reported (telling), while the second may invoke the impression of
somehow witnessing the events, which constitutes showing. Finally, the
first sentence might be taken to draw the implied reader’s attention to
the storyteller, while the second sentence draws the implied reader’s
attention to the story.
It is not clear whether the different interpretations of the telling vs.
showing distinction share a common denominator. Also, while some
accounts can be easily combined, others cannot. Most notably, several
of the accounts take the fictional narrator to be important in one way or
the other. But this need not mean that the accounts basically establish
the same distinction. For instance, a clearly perceptible narrator, whose
presence constitutes ‘telling’ according to some interpretations, may,
but need not be explicit about the traits of the characters, which consti-
tutes ‘showing’ according to other interpretations of the distinction.
Moreover, two different accounts of ‘showing’ can be mutually exclu-
sive. For instance, if the absence of a narrator from the narration is tak-
en to constitute showing, as is the case in passages of pure dialogue,
then this is incompatible with the claim that showing is constituted by
the narrator’s particularly close temporal or spatial position relative to
the events of the story, as another account has it. Note also that the
presence or absence of dialogue suggests that neither ‘telling’ nor
‘showing’ are gradable predicates, while accounts relying on e.g. the
amount of narrative information, or the ‘speed’ of the narration, suggest
that telling and showing allow of degrees.
848 Tobias Klauk & Tilmann Köppe

Finally, there are a number of different labels attached to the distinc-

tions in question. Amongst them are ‘mimetic mode,’ ‘objectivity,’
‘impersonal mode,’ ‘scenic mode,’ ‘dramatic mode,’ ‘rendering’ or
‘small distance’ as (more or less) synonymous for ‘showing,’ and ‘die-
getic mode,’ ‘partiality’ or ‘large distance’ as (more or less) synony-
mous for ‘telling’ (cf. e.g. Booth [1961] 1983: 8; Rabinowitz 2005:
530; Wiesenfarth 1963; Genette [1972] 1980: 162–189; Stanzel [1979]
2008: 190–192).

3 Aspects and History of the Concept

Some variants of the telling vs. showing distinctions have been traced
back to the diegesis/mimesis-distinctions known from the writings of
Plato (Halliwell → Diegesis – Mimesis; Willems 1989).
An early modern treatment of distinguishing between commentary
(“Reflection”), on the one hand, and a detailed description of charac-
ters, events, and actions, on the other, can be found in Spielhagen
([1883] 1967). Spielhagen maintains that only the latter is in accord-
ance with the “laws of the epic” (“epische Gesetze”), and hence must be
rated superior to the former (ibid.: 67–69). This verdict is criticized by
Friedemann (1910), who argues that the “essence” of narrative fiction
consists precisely in the foregrounding of the narrator (“das Wesen der
epischen Form [besteht] gerade in dem Sichgeltendmachen eines Erzäh-
lenden”, ibid.: 3). Both Spielhagen and Friedemann thus deal with the
question to what extent the author (resp. a narrator) may intrude in the
narration, e.g. by commenting on the events, filling in narrative gaps or
taking a subjective stance. Friedemann (1910: 26) holds that by com-
menting on the events a narrator need not disturb the “epic illusion”;
rather, the narrator may become an “organic” part of the composition.
Moreover, Friedemann in effect shifts the theoretical focus from the
presence or absence of narratorial commentary to the effect such com-
mentary may have on the reader; thus for her, the real question is
whether, upon reading, our “illusion suffers damage” (“leidet unsere
Illusion Schaden”, ibid.: 27).
The modern popularity of distinguishing ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ is
usually said to be due to Lubbock. Lubbock underscores some norma-
tive implications of the distinction. Thus he holds that “the art of fiction
does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be
shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself” (Lubbock [1922] 1954:
62). He also compares Flaubert’s novels with a “picture” or “drama”
and states that a “writer like Flaubert—or any other novelist whose
 Telling vs. Showing 849

work supports criticism at all—is so far from telling a story as it might

be told in an official report, that we cease to regard him as reporting in
any sense. He is making an effect and an impression, by some more or
less skilful method” (ibid.: 63).
Lubbock was able to base his account of the distinction on the
comments of several authors of fiction. Henry James and Ford Madox
Ford likewise held that “showing” is clearly superior to “telling.” James
claims that “Processes, periods, intervals, stages, degrees, connexions,
may be easily enough and barely enough named, may be unconvincing-
ly stated, in fiction, to the deep discredit of the writer, but it remains the
very deuce to represent them […]” (James [1884] 1957: 94; see also
Wiesenfarth 1963, esp. ch. 1, for elaboration). Ford claims that the nov-
elist “has to render and not to tell.” And he explains: “If I say ‘The
wicked Mr. Blank shot nice Blanche’s dear cat!’ that is telling. If I say:
‘Blank raised his rifle and aimed it at the quivering, black-burdened
topmost bough of the cherry-tree. After the report a spattered bunch of
scarlet and black quivering dropped from branch to branch to pancake
itself on the orchard grass!’ that is rather bad rendering, but is still ren-
dering” (Ford [1930] 1983: 122). Neither of these authors really con-
tributes to the theoretical understanding of the phenomenon. Their
treatment, however, underscores the importance the distinction had in
the authors’ discourse about fiction, and this in turn explains why it has
been taken up by an evolving narratology.
Booth ([1961] 1983: 16, 154–155) criticizes clear-cut versions of the
showing vs. telling distinction. What he seems to be primarily interest-
ed in is the question of how an author manages to combine authorial (or
narratorial) comments and ‘showing’. Thus, Booth in effect tried to cor-
rect the view that the distinction hinges on the presence of explicit
commentary, be it the author’s or a narrator’s.
Genette introduces an influential new term into the debate, namely
“distance.” He explains that “the narrative can furnish the reader with
more or fewer details, and in a more or less direct way, and can thus
seem (to adopt a common and convenient spatial metaphor, which is
not to be taken literally) to keep at a greater or lesser distance from
what it tells” (Genette [1972] 1980: 162). Genette further maintains that
one needs to distinguish the ‘narrative of events’ from a ‘narrative of
words,’ for only the latter is said to be ‘mimetic’ in the full sense of the
word: “The truth is that mimesis in words can only be mimesis of
words. Other than that, all we have and can have is degrees of diegesis”
(ibid.: 164).
In sum, and as indicated in section (2) above, current narratology
shows a broad diversity of possible meanings of the telling vs. showing
850 Tobias Klauk & Tilmann Köppe

distinction. The label ‘telling vs. showing’ is taken to refer to the fol-
lowing distinctions:
First, the very presence of a narrator (telling) vs. the absence of a
narrator (showing) in the story is taken to be decisive (cf. Chatman
1978: 32, 146; Nünning & Sommer 2008: 341).
Second, the relations of a narrator to the events told, including his or
her spatial, temporal or general epistemic position, which can be remote
(telling) or close (showing), are said to constitute the distinction. Thus
Toolan explains that “[m]imesis [i.e. showing] presents ‘everything that
happened’ in one sense, but really only everything as it would be re-
vealed to a witness within the scene,” while “[d]iegesis [i.e. telling]
presents ‘everything that happened’ in another sense, but only every-
thing that a detached external reporter decides is worth telling” (Toolan
[1988] 2001: 134, cf. also Linhares-Dias 2006: 7).
Third, the presence (showing) or absence (telling) of dialogue in the
narrative are said to be involved in the telling vs. showing distinction
(cf. Fludernik [2006] 2009: 36 and 161; cf. already Chatman 1978: 32;
Genette [1983] 1988: 45). The reason for this is that only dialogue is
taken to constitute an ‘unmediated’ presentation, and hence ‘showing’,
of what happens in the story world.
Fourth, the explicitness (telling) or implicitness (showing) of e.g. a
character’s traits or dispositions as well as the themes, meanings or
morals of the story are taken to be decisive (cf. Friedman 1955: 1169–
1170, passim; Lubbock [1922] 1954: 67-68; Rimmon-Kenan [1983]
2002: 108). Again, one can argue that these features of a narrative indi-
cate the presence of a narrating subject whose presence in turn accounts
for a ‘mediated’ presentation of what happens in the story world.
The same holds true for, fifth, the ‘partiality’ (telling) or ‘objectivi-
ty’ (showing) of the narration (cf. Rabinowitz 2005: 530), since a ‘par-
tial’ rendering of the story that includes commentary and evaluation
also indicates the presence of a narrator. As a consequence, the direc-
tion of the implied reader’s attention either to the story (showing) or to
the storyteller (telling) may be affected (cf. ibid.).
Sixth, the ‘speed’ of the narration, which can be comparatively fast
(telling) or slow (showing), and which can convey more (showing) or
less detailed (telling) information, is taken to be decisive (cf. Genette
[1972] 1980: 166).
Seventh, the impression on the reader’s side that he or she is being
told about the events of the story (telling) or rather somehow witnesses
them (showing) is taken to lie at the core of the telling vs. showing dis-
tinction (cf., amongst others, Martínez & Scheffel [1999] 2012: 50;
 Telling vs. Showing 851

Stanzel 1964: 13; Stanzel [1979] 2008: 192; Linhares-Dias 2006; Wie-
senfarth 1963: 2).
It remains an open question whether, or to what extent, these ac-
counts allow for unification. A promising candidate for a unified ac-
count might be the idea that the telling vs. showing distinction captures
different impressions a reader may have upon reading the text. This
idea finds its predecessors, inter alia, in Socrates (Halliwell → Diegesis
– Mimesis, 131), Friedemann (1910: 26–27, 89, 91), Lubbock ([1922]
1954: 63), or Stanzel (1964: 13), to name but a few. What is more, this
way of setting up the distinction between telling and showing allows
for taking some, if not all, of the other items on the list to constitute
evidence for either ‘telling’ or ‘showing’ (rather than being identical
with it). Hence, for instance, the speed of the narration or explicit
commentary may be taken to be evidence for the presence of a fictional
narrator, whose presence can be taken to evoke the impression on the
reader’s side of being told about the events which, in turn, constitutes
telling. Finally, in this account, the distinction between ‘telling’ and
‘showing’ is by no means superfluous (cf. Genette [1983] 1988: 44), for
it does not reduce to any of the narrative phenomena (presence or prop-
erties of narrator, speed of narration, objectivity, dialogue, amount of
detail, etc.) that help establish it.

4 Related Terms

Which terms one takes to be related to the telling vs. showing distinc-
tion of course depends on what one takes the distinction to be in the
first place. Accordingly, possible candidates for related terms include:
Margolin → Narrator; Alber & Fludernik → Mediacy and Narrative
Mediation; McHale → Speech Representation. Proponents of the view
that ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ refer to the impression on the part of the
reader of witnessing the events of the story (as opposed to having the
impression of being told about the events) may want to explore connec-
tions to the concepts of ‘immersion,’ ‘transportation,’ or ‘aesthetic illu-
sion’ (cf. Gerrig 1993; Green & Brock 2000; Giovanelli 2008; Wolf →
Illusion (Aesthetic)).

5 Topics for Further Investigation

To date, there is no systematic study that explores connections as well

as distinctions between the major current accounts of the telling vs.
852 Tobias Klauk & Tilmann Köppe

showing distinction. The same holds true for a comprehensive study of

the history of the concepts. It seems that such studies are needed, not
least in order to evaluate the importance of the distinction(s). Some nar-
ratologists feel that the telling vs. showing distinction is superfluous,
mainly because they take it to refer to other narrative phenomena, such
as the speed of the narration or the presence or absence of a narrator,
which can be dealt with directly (cf. Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002: 109;
Bal 1983: 238–240; Genette [1983] 1988: 44). Others maintain that the
distinction lies at the very heart of narrative, showing in particular be-
ing regarded as a mode of presentation that is most peculiar and in need
of close scrutiny (cf. Linhares-Dias 2006).

6 Bibliography

6.1 Works Cited

Bal, Mieke (1983). “The Narrating and the Focalizing: A Theory of the Agents in Nar-
rative.” Style 17, 234–269.
Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago UP.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Fludernik, Monika ([2006] 2009). Introduction to Narratology. Abington: Routledge.
Ford, Madox Ford ([1930] 1983). The English Novel. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Friedman, Norman (1955). “Point of View in Fiction. The Development of a Critical
Concept.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
70, 1160–1184.
Friedemann, Käte (1910). Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik. Leipzig: Haessel.
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cor-
nell UP.
– ([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Gerrig, Richard J. (1993). Experiencing Narrative Worlds. On the Psychological Ac-
tivities of Reading. Yale: Yale UP.
Giovanelli, Alessandro (2008). “In and Out: The Dynamics of Imagination in the En-
gagement with Narratives.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, 11–
24.
Green, Melanie C. & Timothy C. Brock (2000). “The Role of Transportation in the
Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychol-
ogy 79, 701–721.
James, Henry ([1884] 1957). The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. R.P. Blackmur
(ed.). New York: Scribner.
Linhares-Dias, Rui (2006). How to Show Things with Words. A Study on Logic, Lan-
guage and Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Lubbock, Percy ([1922] 1954). The Craft of Fiction. London: J. Cape.
 Telling vs. Showing 853

Martínez, Matías & Michael Scheffel ([1999] 2012). Einführung in die Erzähltheorie.
München: Beck.
Nünning, Ansgar & Roy Sommer (2008). “Diegetic and Mimetic Narrativity. Some
Further Steps Towards a Narratology of Drama.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa
(eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: de Gruyter, 331–354.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. (2005). “Showing vs. Telling.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 530–531.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Routledge.
Spielhagen, Friedrich ([1883] 1967). Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Stanzel, Franz K. (1964). Typische Formen des Romans. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht.
– ([1979] 2008). Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Toolan, Michael ([1988] 2001). Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London:
Routledge.
Wiesenfarth, Joseph (1963). Henry James and the Dramatic Analogy. A Study of the
Major Novels of the Middle Period. New York: Fordham UP.
Willems, Gottfried (1989). Anschaulichkeit. Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Wort-
Bild-Beziehungen und des literarischen Darstellungsstils. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

6.2 Further Reading

Andringa, Els (1996). “Effects of ‘Narrative Distance’ on Reader’s Emotional In-

volvement and Response.” Poetics 23, 431–452.
Johansson, Christer (2012). “Telling and Showing: A Semiotic Perspective.” Jo-
hannson, Christer & Göran Rossholm (eds.). Disputable Core Concepts of Narra-
tive Theory. Bern: Lang, 147–182.
 Text Types
Matthias Aumüller

1 Definition

The notion of text type is an abstract category designed to characterize

the main structure of a particular text or one of its parts according to its
dominant properties. It is intended to integrate common features of his-
torically varying genres (novella, novel, short story, etc.) and thus to
reduce the complexity of the many overlapping kinds of texts to distinct
textual phenomena. In virtue of narratology’s traditional focus on time,
these phenomena are semantic properties that constitute the temporal
character of the text (passage). Thus, the text type ‘narrative’ is defined
by the property ‘change of state’ of concrete objects and the text type
‘description,’ accordingly, by the property ‘is about states’ of concrete
objects. The text type ‘argument’ is defined by logical-semantic rela-
tions between abstract objects instead of temporal-semantic properties.
There are many other typologies of text types, often including more
types. But for the sake of consistency, the following account will be
restricted to these three. One requirement of the notion is that the vari-
ous text types be mutually exclusive.
The term ‘modes (or types) of discourse,’ sometimes used synony-
mously with ‘text type,’ could be restricted to the characterization of
texts according to pragmatic properties (e.g. the speaker’s purpose).
Thus any text may be used to persuade somebody. Its mode of dis-
course is then persuasive, even though the text type being used may
vary (Virtanen 1992). The most appropriate text type in this case (or the
text type most often used in connection with the purpose to persuade)
may be the text type ‘argument.’ But it need not be. The persuasive
mode of discourse can be instantiated by any text type, depending on
pragmatic concerns. The notion ‘mode of discourse’ is thus context-
sensitive; that of ‘text type’ is not.
Another category that is closely related to the notion of text type is
‘genre.’ However, text type and genre should be kept strictly apart from
each other as well. Unlike the numerous historically generated sub-
classes of genre (such as novel, sonnet, recipe, homepage) that have
 Text Types 855

evolved by chance, typologies of text type include a limited number of

different items and aim at a complete set of all possible types that can
make up any text. Moreover, in contrast to genre, whose members are,
by definition, entire texts, single text types mainly refer to parts of texts
depending on whether the passage exhibits the semantic profile in ques-
tion or not. As a rule, the definition of text types is based on text-
internal data whereas definitions of (non-literary) genres follow various
text-external and text-internal criteria alike (consider the letter and its
many subclasses).
One important consequence that follows from this definition is that
narrative as a genre is distinguished from the text type ‘narrative.’ The
text type ‘narrative’ derives from the prevailing quality of texts consid-
ered to be prototypical for the genre narrative or fiction, members of
which are often not pure narratives in the sense of text type. While any
text that is called, say, a novel belongs to the genre narrative, probably
no novel is contains only the text type ‘narrative.’ Usually, novels ex-
hibit all text types. However, any experimental literary text that is
called a novel belongs to the genre narrative, even if it is mainly char-
acterized by the text type ‘description.’ The problem of equivocation
(one term denoting different notions) occurs in every case. This can be
avoided when another term is available: thus the term ‘ekphrasis’ de-
notes a descriptive genre whereas ‘description’ denotes the text type
usually dominating ekphrasis. Yet ‘description’ is by no means restrict-
ed to this latter use, and the term ‘ekphrasis’ mainly refers to literary
descriptions depicting pieces of visual art (Henkel 1997; Klarer 2005).

2 Explication

There are many varying classifications and typologies, each including

different types (Georgakopoulou 2005). The text types ‘description’
and ‘narrative’, though, seem to be part of almost all typologies (except
for Fludernik 2000; see below chap. 3.2). For example, in addition to
those mentioned in the definition above, exposition and instruction are
discussed as text types by Werlich (1976), van Dijk (1980) adds scien-
tific inquiries to the list of text types, and de Beaugrande and Dressler
(1981) include didactic texts. Sometimes, the notion of text type is
meant to characterize entire texts, sometimes not; some authors focus
on semantic features, others on pragmatic features. Heinemann’s
(2000b) survey of the notion of text type in linguistics shows that the
linguistic typologies of texts follow the application of different criteria:
grammatical properties of texts, semantic properties of texts, situational
856 Matthias Aumüller

context, function, etc. This practice has brought about a huge variety of
heterogeneous concepts. There is no agreement on which notion should
satisfy which criteria. And, what is more, even the use of particular
terms is not regular. Thus linguists often use our term in the sense of
what above was called a genre. For an extremely fine-grained classifi-
cation with hundreds of genres, termed “text types,” see Görlach
(2004: 23–88).
Linguistic research often aims at a classificatory system of its cate-
gories. An exception is Virtanen’s (1992, 2010) two-fold model of dis-
course types and text types, conceiving of types as functional catego-
ries. The definition above indicates that text types in the sense
suggested here are not classifying but functional or comparative con-
cepts, too (for this distinction, see Carnap 1950: 8; Strube 1993: 59–
65). Classifying concepts are applied according to “either–or” decisions
(a proposition is either true or not true); the application of a compara-
tive concept, by contrast, depends on to what extent it is appropriate.
Most typologies disregard the difference between classifying and com-
parative concepts. This leads to the construction of hierarchies of types
and subtypes that correspond to each other in the manner of species and
subspecies.
The notion of genre is a classifying concept: either the text t belongs
to the genre G or not. In this vein, the notion of text type classifies short
stretches of text according to the temporal meaning of the predicate
used in the passage. However, if applied to a text passage exceeding the
scope of a simple clause, the notion of text type is a comparative con-
cept because it is meant to characterize the temporal-semantic profile of
a text passage according to its dominant temporal-semantic properties.
The attribute ‘dominant’ means that in every text there are other tem-
poral-semantic properties of lesser intensity than the dominant property.
Thus a text (or passage) is not either descriptive or not but more or less
descriptive, depending on the extent to which it exhibits descriptive
markers (e.g. verbs that refer to states). A text is of a particular text type
to the extent it displays those properties that determine this text type.
The underlying reason for this conceptual ambiguity is that text
types are defined with regard to simple clauses that prototypically ex-
hibit the respective properties supposed to dominate the entire text. In
the reality of texts, however, the various properties that determine the
different text types can be instantiated even by a mere sentence. The
difficulty arises because the notion of text type, meant to characterize
aspects on the level of texts, is defined in terms that are derived from
the level of sentences.
 Text Types 857

As mentioned above, the comparative concept of text type must be

distinguished from the classifying notion of genre. While genres single
out entire texts according to heterogeneous features (e.g. formal fea-
tures in the case of sonnets and paratextual information in the case of
homepages), text types try to capture semantic relations between textual
surface structures (of items of discours) and content structures (of items
of histoire). In this sense, the division of text types follows a semantic
criterion. Therefore, single text types are to be distinguished from each
other by identifying not only what kind of linguistic device is used—
event verbs or static verbs (for a more fine-grained verb classification,
see Vendler 1957)—but also by what a text is about: time-bound
events, states, or timeless universals (abstract objects, relations, etc.).
The reason is that words are not always used according to their primary
meaning. For example, a particular text passage may predominantly
consist of static verbs that refer to states only prima facie but indirectly
or figuratively express a change of state. As a consequence, the notion
of text type has another component that has not been mentioned so far.
It depends not only on the extent to which a text is characterized by a
particular text type according to the number of words determining this
text type, but also on the degree to which these words express their di-
rect meaning. For example, a text is more descriptive the more its
meaning corresponds to the direct meaning of its static verbs; converse-
ly, the extent to which a text is descriptive curtails the function of static
verbs to indicate a change of state. This holds for elliptic contexts, for
example, where a description using static verbs refers to a change of
state without directly naming it. Take the static verb ‘to stand’: this
verb refers to a state, but if it is used in the context of, say, a murder
(‘after stabbing her victim, the murderer raised her head. Her daughter
stood in the door’), the state of standing in the door functions as (part
of) an event. (Even the murder could be expressed by static verbs.) An-
other example is the iterative use of event verbs (discours component)
that makes a passage descriptive from the point of histoire.
Text types are thus determined quantitatively as well as qualitative-
ly. First, all texts, not only narratives, usually do not deal with only one
kind of object. Even a single sentence may contain lexical items with
narrative as well as descriptive meanings. Second, these linguistic de-
vices may not always directly correspond to the object they actually
refer to in a given context, but may have an additional meaning that is
sometimes even opposed to its direct meaning with regard to its tem-
poral-semantic features. For this reason, text types supervene on texts,
and this is why the ascription of text types to texts is seldom unambig-
uous. Text types are not only bottom-up abstractions of texts but also
858 Matthias Aumüller

top-down structures that have an impact on the meaning of the text,

mainly with regard to the temporal characteristics of its con-
tents/meaning in relation to the lexical devices. Thus narrative is a type
of text that predominantly represents events featuring event verbs; de-
scription is a type of text that predominantly represents states (of ob-
jects) featuring static verbs; and argument is a type of text that predom-
inantly represents omnitemporal and logical relations (primarily
between abstract objects such as concepts), i.e. universal propositions
concerning objects outside time. These three text types do not cover all
forms of texts, however since, for a starter, they may be ascribed to as-
sertive sentences. Features of other text levels (e.g. grammatical mode
or dialogue) are not encompassed by this typology. Among others, ex-
planation is one more candidate for text type (Herman 2008) as it fo-
cuses on the causal characteristics of the represented events. No system
of text types has been generally accepted so far.
Text types makes it possible to link textual cues to interpretive as-
criptions. Thus they may help to answer questions as to how events are
represented in a particular passage: by naming the event directly or by
naming it indirectly through the depiction of related states that only hint
at the event. Interpretation sometimes benefits from the disadvantage of
ambiguity. Thus the two components that determine a text type—the
level of conventionalized meaning according to the dictionary and the
level of meaning actualized in a given text—can correspond just as they
may be inconsistent with each other. Other questions with a wider in-
terpretive focus might bear on why certain passages of a text are com-
posed narratively but others descriptively and what this means for dif-
ferent interpretive purposes such as the work’s aesthetic form or the
reception of the text.

3 History of the Concept

The present account primarily relies on research in literary studies and

narratology. As a linguistic notion, text types are rooted in the devel-
opment of text linguistics starting in the 1960s. The preferred objects of
text linguistics are functional texts, to the effect that literary texts are
often excluded from linguistic research. (For the wide range of compet-
ing concepts in linguistics, see Heinemann 2000a, 2000b, and Schlüter
2001: 67–144; for an overview focusing on literary studies, see Dam-
mann 2000). While the term “text type” came in the wake of this lin-
guistic tradition, the notion is much older. It existed under the disguise
 Text Types 859

of terms found in various languages and was not terminologically dif-

ferentiated.

3.1 Predecessors and Related Concepts

The first differentiation of notions that share features with the modern
concepts of genre and text type can be found in Plato and Aristotle. Pla-
to divides what he calls diegesis into three kinds (Republic, III,
392c ff.). A text of the first kind is directly ascribed to the author, a text
of the second kind to a character, and a text of the third kind is mixed
(Halliwell → Diegesis – Mimesis). The underlying criterion of the ty-
pology is the answer to the question “Who speaks?” The notions are
obviously classifiers and can be linked to genres such as drama. How-
ever, the third kind—“mixed”—is different from the other two in that it
is a hybrid, containing the features of both. Were this conception pur-
sued further, the first two kinds would function within the third kind as
text types in our sense.
Plato’s (and Aristotle’s) legacy is a long and complicated one (see
Trappen 2001). An influential reformulation of the division of literary
genres is suggested by Goethe ([1819] 1994: 206): “There are only
three natural forms of poetry: The clearly telling, the enthusiastically
excited, and the personally acting: Epic, Lyric, and Drama. These three
modes can work together or separately.” His understanding of the
“three natural forms of poetry” is similar to that of text types in several
aspects.
Referring to a number of literary genres (termed “Dichtarten”) such
as drama, elegy, novel, parody, and satire, Goethe assumes that all gen-
res can be reduced to those three forms which he conceives of as a kind
of deep structures (“wesentliche Formen”) that may be observed in eve-
ry literary work, independently of its genre. Every single work is char-
acterized by a particular compound of the three forms. In the present
context it is important to note that Goethe does not attach the three
forms to groups of texts, thereby dismissing the idea of classifying
texts. Instead, he suggests that the forms usually occur together (alt-
hough he refers to Homer’s epics as examples of pure Epic).
As in the case of text types, Goethe’s notions are not meant to clas-
sify texts but to characterize the special shape of individual texts. Like
text types, Epic, Lyric, and Drama are considered to be historically sta-
ble notions that refer to gradual properties. Furthermore, these terms are
apparently derived from the surface structures of texts, i.e. from histori-
cally varying genres that Goethe considered paradigmatic (such as
Homer’s epics). At the same time, they are supposed to refer to deep
860 Matthias Aumüller

structures that can be observed in texts of all genres. However, while

Goethe considers only works of literary art, text types are neutral to the
question of literariness.
Goethe’s conception remained influential up to the middle of the
20th century. Staiger (1946) develops a threefold typology of literary
modes on the basis of Goethe’s original conception. The genre triad is
replaced by the comparative/functional categories in the sense of ‘natu-
ral forms’ even though Staiger implicitly retains the classifying genre
notions. He refers to them using nouns and to the comparative catego-
ries using adjectives. On this basis, Staiger ([1943] 1957: 112) con-
cludes that Kleist’s narratives, being novellas, are epics in the gener-
ic/classifying sense, and dramatic in the comparative/functional sense,
thus blurring the conceptual shift between the two categories. While the
classifying notions, according to Staiger (1946: 8), refer to patterns that
underlie constant change and innovation, the comparative notions refer
to the “tonality” or mode of texts and are supposedly invariant. Staiger
ties the comparative categories to general anthropological attitudes such
that lyric texts allegedly reveal the lyric dimension of human nature.
Although the terms ‘natural forms’ and ‘text types’ as well as their
scopes are different, and although the criteria by which the notions are
determined diverge widely, Goethe’s idea of modifying the traditional
generic notions in a comparative/functional sense continues to be felt in
the modern concept of text type.
A related concept in recent/modern literary studies is Hempfer’s
(1973) ways of writing (“Schreibweisen”). His approach is worth men-
tioning because he distinguishes what Staiger and his followers amal-
gamate. Ways of writing are meant to be historically stable notions cap-
turing deep structures while genres (“Gattungen”) are historically
varying conventions. Hempfer’s examples of ways of writing are the
narrative (“das Narrative”), the dramatic (“das Dramatische”), the satir-
ical (“das Satirische”), etc. The transhistorical deep structures of the
narrative and the dramatic are determined by the communicative situa-
tion. The deep structures of satire, by contrast, are determined by dif-
ferent properties. While Hempfer’s distinction of the narrative and the
dramatic goes back to Plato, his notions are different from the point of
view of concept structure. Again, text types and ways of writing have in
common that they do not classify texts but characterize them. However,
in contrast to text types, Hempfer’s ways of writing, like Goethe’s and
Staiger’s, are obviously derived from generic notions and lack a unified
criterion. Hempfer’s structural approach is refined and naturalized by
Zymner (2003) who conceives of ways of writing as dispositions that
can have certain effects.
 Text Types 861

What all these conceptual variants, including text types, have in

common is that they are categories aimed at characterizing aspects of
style. They differ from one another in that they focus on different as-
pects. While text types, as defined here, refer to temporal structures,
Goethe’s natural forms and Staiger’s styles evoke traits of human na-
ture; as for Hempfer’s ways of writing, they are rooted in, among other
things, communicative situations.

3.2 Narratological Conceptions

The first conception of text type in the 20th century appears to have
originated from Russian formalism. In an article on Pushkin’s “The
Shot,” Petrovskij ([1925] 2009) analyzed the story’s narrative dynamics
and characterized various sections of the text according to their narra-
tive (temporal) and descriptive (static) structures. Similarly, Trubeckoj
([1926] 1980) used this distinction to characterize an Old Russian
travelogue by Afanasij Nikitin. However, these early examples have not
had any influence on recent developments.
Starting with Genette, the narratological discussion of text types has
long been devoted to the relation between the text types ‘narrative’ and
‘description’. Genette’s assertion that “description is naturally […] the
handmaiden of the narration” ([1966] 1976: 6) caused much ado in nar-
ratology (e.g. Klaus 1982; Chatman 1990: 6–37; Ronen 1997). One of
the main reasons was the lack of distinction between narrative as a ge-
neric or classifying concept covering kinds of texts and narrative as a
typological, comparative concept designed to capture deep structures,
functions, etc. Although he does not mention it explicitly and some-
times blurs the difference himself, Genette ([1966] 1976) seems to
think of narrative as a generic concept, and his conclusion as to what
description is in relation to narrative thus entails that description is not
on the same level as narrative in the generic sense. Thus description for
Genette is something like a text type while narrative is both a sort of
literary genre (in fact, “the only mode that literature knows” [4]) and a
text type (“the narration properly speaking”): “Every narrative includes
two types of representation, although they are blended together and al-
ways in varying proportions: representations of actions and events,
which constitute the narration properly speaking, and representations of
objects or people, which make up the act of what we today call ‘de-
scription’.” (5) Here, “narration” and “description” evidently denote
text types. However, Genette does not aim at a theory of these typolog-
ical notions but looks at whether the notion of description is suitable to
limiting the generic scope of narrative (in his opinion, not at all).
862 Matthias Aumüller

In the wake of Genette’s article narratologists and other literary

scholars began to investigate description and its manifestations and
functions in literary discourse (e.g. Hamon [1972] 1982, 1993). For
Hamon, description is a way to insert knowledge in narratives. He is
less interested in a theory of text types than in literary devices that im-
plement knowledge in narratives. Hamon’s model for descriptions is an
encyclopedia entry which literary descriptions expand in many ways.
Adam (1992) develops Hamon’s approach further and combines it with
text linguistics. Much of what is published on the subject is devoted to
differentiating description and its functions (e.g. Lodge 1977; Gelley
1979; Beaujour 1981; Kittay 1981; Mosher 1991). While Hamon inves-
tigated the role of description in 19th-century prose, Scherpe (1996)
and Pflugmacher (2007) focus on the practice of description in modern
writing. Ibsch (1982) contrasts examples of the two periods. A recent
study that uses other text types to explain a peculiarity of a literary text
is Abbott (2011).
One of the major contributions to the theory of text types is made by
Chatman (1990). He considers not only fiction but also film in terms of
a theory of text types. His first step is to modify the meaning of the
term ‘text’ according to the premise that narrative is a structure existing
independently of the medium. Chatman’s notion of text is not restricted
to pieces of spoken or written discourse but comprises “any communi-
cation that temporally controls its reception by the audience.” (1990: 7,
original emphasis) For Chatman, films and literary works are both texts.
His criterion, which has its roots in Lessing ([1766] 1984), is that works
of literature and films, contrary to pictures, are deployed in time.
Chatman defines three text types: narrative, description, and argu-
ment. However, he does not distinguish these types from each other by
using one and the same criterion. The text type ‘description’ is said to
“render the properties of things” with the subject as criterion while the
text type ‘argument’ is defined on the basis of the communicative goal
that a producer of a text pursues, namely, “to persuade an audience”
(9). Furthermore, “Argument is the text-type that relies on ‘logic,’ at
least in the informal sense.” (10) Finally, Chatman explicitly conceives
of text types as macro genres to which the known literary genres are
subordinated. “[…] Westerns are generic subclasses of the Narrative
text-type. A Theophrastian character is a subclass of Description. A
sermon is a subclass of Argument” (ibid.). He clearly considers text
types to be generic categories. Implicitly, however, his conception of
text types aims at a functional, not a generic account.
The problems of definition aside, Chatman’s idea is that “text-types
routinely operate at each other’s service.” (ibid., original emphasis)
 Text Types 863

The principle underlying this idea is that many texts display another
structure on the textual surface than they do on a deeper level. Thus a
fable is a narrative on the surface level. However, it is not only a narra-
tive but essentially something more because it includes a moral and as
such displays the underlying text type ‘argument’ at the service of
which the narrative structure at the surface operates.
It is clear, then, that Chatman investigates the functional relations
between generic ascriptions and ascriptions of underlying meaning
structures conceived of as text types. His is a fruitful approach in that it
helps to map interpretive ascriptions of meaning onto a system of inter-
related notions that can be used to lay bare semantic properties of texts.
More implicitly than explicitly, Chatman shows that the notion of text
type in the narratological sense is a Janus-faced thing. On the one hand,
text types capture semantic properties of texts according to lexical dis-
tribution (level of single words); on the other hand, they are meant to
link the results of this procedure to the overall meaning of the text. This
is what Chatman seems to have in mind when he models text types on
two levels. Sometimes the two levels correspond to each other (a de-
scriptive wording resulting in a description without any other function),
and sometimes they do not (descriptive wording resulting in a narrative:
in Chatman’s terms, the text type description “operating at the service
of” narrative). Similarly, Genette ([1966] 1976: 7) considers Robbe-
Grillet’s nouveau roman “an effort to constitute a narrative (a story) by
the almost exclusive means of description.”
In an alternative approach, Fludernik (2000) suggests a threefold
system intended to cover not only literary but also conversational/oral
discourse. She distinguishes three levels: macro genre, genre, and dis-
course mode. Her macro genres prima facie correspond to the notion of
text type in three ways. They are intended to systematically cover all
texts; they are mutually exclusive; and they are derived from linguistic
text typology. Fludernik adds three types and excludes description from
her list: in addition to narrative and argumentative, she enumerates in-
structive, conversational, and reflective macro genres. She criticizes the
assumption of the text type description “as a general text type, since
description is very rarely a unitype text type, i.e., there are extremely
few purely descriptive texts around” (2000: 280).
Aside from the question as to whether there are any texts at all that
display pure macro genres, Fludernik obviously conceives of macro
genres as classifying concepts. Texts either belong to one of the macro
genres or not. Hence she assigns particular genres of the second level to
the macro genres: novel, drama, and film are subordinated to narrative,
scientific text and historiography to argumentative text, and philosophy
864 Matthias Aumüller

to the reflective macro genre, to name but three of them. She also refers
to this second level as “text types,” a term not to be confused with the
notion of text type as explicated above. Neither this nor the first level
notion has anything to do with text types in our sense.
On the third level, “discourse modes” are determined by “the surface
structure of texts and the specific functional correlates within specific
genres” (281). Thus, for instance, exhortations (a discourse mode) are
subordinated to the genre of sermons which, in turn, are subordinated to
the macro genre of instructive texts. It is the notion of discourse mode
that corresponds to the notion of text type. This third level comes in
response to the need for a non-generic category that is more flexible in
order to capture the manifold typological heterogeneities within one
and the same text, let alone within one and the same macro genre. Con-
versely, this notion explains the fact that different macro genres may
display one and the same discourse mode; for instance, a narrative, un-
derstood as macro genre, may contain evaluative clauses typical for the
argumentative macro genre, while argumentative texts may contain
event phrases typical for the narrative macro genre as an illustration of
an argument. The similarity between Fludernik’s discourse modes and
text types is that both are comparative notions. Also, discourse modes
refer to passages of texts instead of entire texts and exhibit a functional
relation. However, they are derived from heterogeneous textual phe-
nomena and are not mutually exclusive. Fludernik’s enumeration of
discourse modes is an open list (of thirteen items) that lacks a unified
criterion. Her main interest concerns not discourse modes but macro
genres.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

The main problems with the notion of text type are that there are so
many competing approaches and terms with similar but not identical
meanings and that text types, as presented here, are not expressed by a
stable term. Basically, the theory of text types suffers from general dis-
agreement as to what text types are. Arguments are drawn to advancing
ever more suggestions for putative text types that have yet to be consid-
ered. As a result, no explication of text types has been achieved to cov-
er all aspects of the notion. What is required instead is that text types
should be explicated with regard to the purposes they are supposed to
serve. Are text types meant to describe the particular dynamics of a
text, its profile according to the represented temporal structure of the
histoire, of the discours, or of both?
 Text Types 865

Another problem is the discrepancy between the definition / explica-

tion of the concept and its application. Text types as explicated here are
derived from the properties of sentences. In what kind of relation to
textual properties do sentence properties stand? Even if text grammars
have studied this question in quite some detail, agreement has not been
achieved. Are concepts capturing those sentence properties appropriate
means to capture properties of texts? In other words: what exactly does
it mean when properties supervene on texts?

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter (2011). “Time, Narrative, Life, Death, & Text-Type Distinctions: The
Example of Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year.” Narrative 19.2, 187–200.
Adam, Jean-Michel (1992). Les textes: types et prototypes. Récit, description, argu-
mentation, explication et dialogue. Paris: Nathan.
Beaujour, Michel (1981). “Some Paradoxes of Description.” Yale French Studies 61
(“Towards a Theory of Description”), 27–59.
Carnap, Rudolf (1950). Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Dammann, Günter (2000). “Textsorten und literarische Gattungen.” K. Brinker et al.
(eds.). Text- und Gesprächslinguistik. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 1, 546–561.
de Beaugrande, Robert & Wolfgang U. Dressler (1981). Introduction to Text Linguis-
tics. London: Longman.
Dijk, Teun A. van (1980). Macrostructures: An Interdisciplinary Study of Global
Structures in Discourse, Interaction and Cognition. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Fludernik, Monika (2000). “Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes?” Style 34.2,
274–292.
Gelley, Alexander (1979). “The Represented World: Toward a Phenomenological Theory
of Description in the Novel.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37.4, 415–422.
Genette, Gérard ([1966] 1976). “Boundaries of Narrative.” New Literary History 8, 1–13.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2005). “Text-Type Approach to Narrative.” D. Herman et al.
(eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 594–596.
Görlach, Manfred (2004). Text Types and the History of English. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang ([1819] 1994). “Naturformen der Dichtung.” J. W. Goethe.
Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Bd. 3.1: West-östlicher Di-
van. H. Birus (ed.). Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 206–208 [“Natu-
ral Forms of Poetry.” H. B. Nisbet & C. Rawson (eds.). The Cambridge History
of Literary Criticism, Vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP 1997, 125].
866 Matthias Aumüller

Hamon, Philippe ([1972] 1982). “What is a Description?” T. Todorov (ed.). French

Literary Theory Today. A Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 147–178.
– (1993). Du descriptif. Paris: Hachette.
Heinemann, Wolfgang (2000a). “Textsorte – Textmuster – Textmuster.” K. Brinker et
al. (eds.). Text- und Gesprächslinguistik. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 1, 507–523.
– (2000b). “Aspekte der Textsortendifferenzierung.” K. Brinker et al. (eds.). Text-
und Gesprächslinguistik. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 1, 523–46.
Hempfer, Klaus W. (1973). Gattungstheorie: Information und Synthese. München:
Fink.
Henkel, Nikolaus (1997). “Descriptio.” K. Weimar et al. (eds.). Reallexikon der deut-
schen Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 1, 337–339.
Herman, David (2008). “Description, Narrative, and Explanation: Text-Type Catego-
ries and the Cognitive Foundations of Discourse Competence.” Poetics Today
29.3, 437–472.
Ibsch, Elrud (1982). “Historical Changes of the Function of Spatial Descriptions in
Literary Texts.” Poetics Today 3.4, 97–113.
Kittay, Jeffrey (1981). “Descriptive Limits.” Yale French Studies 61, 225–243.
Klarer, Mario (2005). “Ekphrasis.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 133–134.
Klaus, Peter (1982). “Description and Event in Narrative.” Orbis Litterarum 37, 201–
216.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim ([1766] 1984). Laocoön. An Essay on the Limits of Painting
and Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Lodge, David (1977). “Types of Description.” D. L. The Modes of Modern Writing.
Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 93–103.
Mosher, Harold F. (1991). “Toward a Poetics of ‘Descriptized’ Narration.” Poetics
Today 12, 425–445.
Petrovskij, Michail ([1925] 2009). “Die Morphologie von Puškins Der Schuss.” Wolf
Schmid (ed.), Russische Proto-Narratologie. Texte in kommentierten Überset-
zungen. Berlin, 67–89.
Pflugmacher, Torsten (2007). Die literarische Beschreibung. Studien zum Werk von
Uwe Johnson und Peter Weiss. München: Fink.
Ronen, Ruth (1997). “Description, Narrative and Representation.” Narrative 5, 274–
286.
Scherpe, Klaus (1996). “Beschreiben, nicht Erzählen! Beispiele zu einer ästhetischen
Opposition.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 2 [N. F.], 368–383.
Schlüter, Sabine (2001). Textsorte vs. Gattung. Textsorten literarischer Kurzprosa in
der Zeit der Romantik (1795–1835). Berlin: Weidler.
Staiger, Emil ([1943] 1957). Meisterwerke deutscher Sprache aus dem neunzehnten
Jahrhundert. Zürich: Atlantis.
– (1946). Grundbegriffe der Poetik. Zürich: Atlantis
Strube, Werner (1993). Analytische Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft. Untersu-
chungen zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Definition, Klassifikation, Interpretation
und Textbewertung. Paderborn: Schöningh.
 Text Types 867

Trappen, Stefan (2001). Gattungspoetik. Studien zur Poetik des 16. bis 19. Jahrhun-
derts und zur Geschichte der triadischen Gattungslehre. Heidelberg: Winter.
Trubeckoj, Nikolaj (Troubetzkoy, Nicolas) ([1926] 1980). “Une Œuvre littéraire: Le
Voyage au-delà des trois mers d'Athanase Nikitine.” L’Ethnographie 76, 116–
134.
Vendler, Zeno (1957). “Verbs and Times.” Philosophical Review 66.2, 143–160.
Virtanen, Tuija (1992). “Issues of Text Typology: Narrative – a ‘Basic’ Type of Text?”
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senschaft. Paderborn: mentis.

5.2 Further Reading

Adam, Jean-Michel (2011). Genres et récits. Narrativité et généricité des textes. Lou-
vain-la-Neuve: L’Harmattan Academia.
Bonheim, Helmut (1991). “Systematics and Cladistics: Classification of Text Types
and Literary Genres.” C. Uhlig & R. Zimmermann (eds.). Anglistentag 1990
Marburg. Proceedings. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 154–165.
Chaefer, Christina & Stefanie Rentsch (2004). “Ekphrasis. Anmerkungen zur Begriffs-
bestimmung in der neueren Forschung.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und
Literatur 114, 132–164.
Fishelov, David (1995). “The Structure of Generic Categories: Some Cognitive As-
pects.” Journal of Literary Semantics 24, 117–126.
Gülich, Elisabeth & Wolfgang Raible, eds. ([1972] 1975). Textsorten. Differenzie-
rungskriterien aus linguistischer Sicht. Wiesbaden: Athenaion.
Sternberg, Meir (1981). “Ordering the Unordered: Time, Space, and Descriptive Cohe-
rence.” Yale French Studies 61, 60–88.
Werlich, Egon (1975). Typologie der Texte. Entwurf eines textlinguistischen Modells
zur Grundlegung einer Textgrammatik. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.
Yacobi, Tamar (1998). “The Ekphrasis Model: Forms and Functions.” V. Robillard &
E. Jongeneel (eds.). Pictures into Words. Theoretical and Descriptive Approach-
es to Ekphrasis. Amsterdam: VU UP, 21–34.
 Time
Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

1 Definition

Broadly defined, time is a constitutive element of worlds and a funda-

mental category of human experience. Strictly speaking, time is not
observable but it becomes manifest and thus perceivable in various
changes (e.g. event). Together with the spatial parameters of height,
width, and depth, time is the fourth dimension which makes it possible
to locate and measure occurrences. Besides this general idea, time is
culturally constructed, and thus concepts of time vary as a result of his-
torical evolution.
In a narrower sense, from the perspective of narrative theory, time is
both a dimension of the narrated world (as conceived in the broader
sense) and an analytical category (‘tense’) which describes the relation
between different narrative tiers.

2 Explication

Due to its elementary quality, time is widely discussed in philosophy,

physics, and aesthetics. St Augustine claims that time is hard to grasp
even though one has an intuitional notion of it (Augustine 1992: 154).
This is not only one of the most prominent commonplaces referred to
throughout discussions about time, but also makes the inherent tension
in time apparent, i.e. its slippery, but basic nature. Against the back-
ground of ancient ideas of time as “a number of changes in respect of
the before and after” (Aristotle [1983] 2006: 44 [Physics IV.11, 219b]),
Kant’s philosophy of transcendental aesthetics sets a new benchmark
by understanding time as both an “empirical reality” and “transcenden-
tal ideality” (Kant [1781/1787] 1998: 181 [A35–36/B52]). Kant argues
that time is an a priori that is presupposed in all human experience.
Newton, however, establishes a fixed idea of time by stating that
“[a]bsolute time, without reference to anything external, flows uniform-
ly” ([1726] 1999: 408). This idea dominates everyday concepts of time,
 Time 869

even though relativity theory has since shown that an absolute under-
standing of time and space fails to explain the physical constitution of
the world and has to be replaced by a relational model. In classical aes-
thetics, time serves as a category to differentiate between types of art.
In contrast to the visual arts, which are associated with space, the art of
speech (poetry and fiction) takes place within time (Lessing [1766]
1962). In particular, narratives—understood as representations of event-
sequences—are defined and differentiated by their temporality. A cor-
relation is drawn especially between time and the novel (Lukács [1916]
1971; Pouillon [1946] 1993; Mendilow [1952] 1972; Jauß [1955] 2009;
Watt [1957] 1968; Baxtin [1975] 1988). Beyond this, different media
have their own ways of forming and presenting time (film: Chatman
1978; Kuhn 2011). Debates on time are, in general, situated at the point
of intersection between different disciplines, which in turn partly influ-
ence narrative theory (Bender & Wellbery 1991; Nünning & Sommer
2002).
In text-based narratives, time structures the narrated world (‘die-
gesis’) and is the effect of verbal evocation which emerges from use of
tense, deictic expressions, and literary techniques (e.g. leitmotifs). From
an analytical point of view, one has to distinguish between three levels
of reference which are characterised by their own temporality: ‘story,’
‘discourse,’ and ‘narrating’ (Genette [1972] 1980). First, ‘story time’
(‘diegetic time,’ Souriau 1951) is a constitutive phenomenon of the fic-
tional world (cf. 3.1.1). Like the narrated world, story time is the prod-
uct of the act of narration and is linked conceptually to ‘event’ (Hühn
→ Event and Eventfulness), ‘space’ (Ryan → Space), and ‘character’
(Jannidis → Character). Thus story time turns out to be a relative cate-
gory rather than a fixed one: it is formed by the interplay with other
elements of the narrated world (van Fraassen 1991; Weixler & Werner
2014). Second, ‘discourse time’ is the time of telling which is fixed by
the text (cf. 3.1.2). And thirdly, ‘narrating time’ is the time of the nar-
rating act which describes the spatiotemporal position of the narrative
voice (cf. 3.1.3).
Beyond these systematic differentiations, time per se plays a crucial
role for narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity). In discussions about se-
quentiality and eventfulness, time, along with causality, is considered
by some theoreticians to be a necessary condition for narrativity (e.g.
Tomaševskij [1925] 1965: 66; Todorov 1971: 38). The temporal di-
mension is thus used to differentiate between narrative and non-
narrative types of text (Herman 2009: 75–104). Moreover, time is not
only understood in a purely textual dimension, but also as the reader’s
mental construct. Temporal aspects play a crucial role in both reception
870 Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

orientated theories and cognitive theories of narrativity. For instance,

Sternberg’s concept of narrativity is based on the interplay “between
represented and communicative time” (Sternberg 1992: 529) which re-
sults in “three universal narrative effects/interests/dynamics of prospec-
tion, retrospection, and recognition,” in other words: “suspense, curiosi-
ty, and surprise” (2001: 117). By contrast, Herman’s cognitive theory
stresses that “[n]arrative representations cue interpreters to draw infer-
ences about a structured time-course of particularized events” (Herman
2009: 92).

3 Dimensions of the Concept and History of its Study

3.1 Time in the Context of Narrative Representation:

Story, Discourse, and Narrating

The following systematic overview of the phenomenology of time in

the context of narrative representation concentrates on temporal aspects
of verbal narration and follows Genette’s differentiation between ‘sto-
ry,’ ‘discourse,’ and ‘narrating’.

3.1.1 ‘Story Time’: Temporal Order in the Narrated World

‘Story time’ is (a) a world-constitutive dimension which is (b) based on

verbal evocation and interplay with other elements of the narrated
world and which (c) serves as reference parameter when it comes to
defining the relation between the chronological order of ‘story’ and
‘discourse’.
(a) By understanding a “world” as a “constellation of spatiotempo-
rally linked elements,” time becomes its constitutive part (Ronen 1994:
199). In this sense, time frames the setting for events, characters, and
action and simultaneously, due to its relational quality, is itself shaped
by these elements. Even though the “internal time” of a narrative is in-
dependent from extrafictional “external time” (de Toro [1986] 2011:
113)—thus allowing “radical deviations from the regularities of time in
the actual world” (Ronen 1994: 202; cf. Šklovskij [1921] 1965: 36)—it
is predominantly thought to be “marginally analogous to the system of
relations interrelating components of the real world” (Ronen 1994: 200)
and may be “pragmatically linked to empirical historical time” (de Toro
[1986] 2011: 114).
(b) Time is the product of several techniques of evocation.
Tomaševskij differentiates between the following techniques: first, ‘ab-
 Time 871

solute’ (‘12th Nov. 2012’) and ‘relative dating’ (‘five years later’); sec-
ond, the mentioning of a time period (‘they talked an hour’); and third,
the suggestion of ‘duration’ ([1925] 1965: 78). In contrast, de Toro dis-
tinguishes between two kinds of concretisation of time: on the one
hand, ‘selective concretisation’ as an “exact, almost chronometric, tem-
poral fixation of an event” ([1986] 2011: 138; e.g. ‘after two days,’ ‘he
is twelve years old,’ ‘it’s seven o’clock’) and, on the other hand, ‘non-
selective concretisation of time’ as “vague, metaphorical positioning”
which may be ‘implicit’ or ‘explicit’ (138–139; e.g. ‘Once, X was very
known, now he is a nobody’; or ‘a few weeks have passed’). According
to Hamburger, however, ‘story time’ is absent when there are no explic-
it temporal markers: “If time is not indicated by a term or image, then it
is not in the narration. For in poetry [Dichtung], only what is narrated
is existent” ([1955] 2011: 90). Yet if the narratological category ‘tense’
is to work, ‘story time’ has to be reconstructed analytically, or at least
assumed more implicitly.
In addition to phrases such as those listed above, ‘story time’
emerges from the interplay of space, events, characters, and plot struc-
ture. As Baxtin stresses: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and
temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete
whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically
visible” ([1975] 1988: 84). He points out that in the ‘adventure-time’ of
Greek romance, the passage of time “is not registered in the slightest
way in the age of the heroes” (90), and that since there are no ‘traces’
of temporal change, time remains “empty” in this pre-modern narrative
even though particular episodes are sometimes based on a last-minute
rescue scheme (91). From a modern perspective, however, it seems ob-
vious that time is linked to concepts of personhood and identity in gen-
eral (Bieri [1986] 2011; Currie 2007: 51–73) and thus to biographical
models in particular.
(c) ‘Story time’ is the product of these explicit and implicit forms of
evocation and is the measure which defines the artificiality of ‘dis-
course time.’ The standard case is that of a monotonous, linear, and
chronological time (Fludernik 2003: 117–118; Werner 2012: 150–151).
Narrative theory is only marginally interested in forms of ‘story time’
which differ from the mimetic Newtonian concept. Forms of narrated
time such as “circular,” “contradictory,” “antinomic”, “differential”,
“conflated,” or “dual/multiple” (Richardson 2002: 48–52), which ques-
tion the established taxonomy of narratological terms, have been large-
ly neglected (Herman 1998; cf. Richardson’s and Shen’s discussion on
temporal anomalies that challenge the story-discourse distinction: Rich-
ardson 2002, 2003; Shen 2002, 2003).
872 Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

3.1.2 ‘Discourse Time’ and its Relation to ‘Story Time,’

‘Order,’ ‘Duration,’ ‘Frequency’

‘Discourse time’ is (a) the time “it takes to peruse the discourse”
(Chatman 1978: 62), and in this sense is partly a spatial metaphor for
the narrating or reading process. Nevertheless, (b) there are several
terms for specific relations between ‘story time’ and ‘discourse time’.
(a) Assuming that “[i]n order to narrate a story, the narrator needs a
certain span of physical time,” Müller argues that even though this time
would normally be measured by a clock, “there is no basic difference
between counting the time of narration in minutes or in the number of
printed pages” ([1947] 2011: 75–76; cf. Tomaševskij [1925] 1965: 78).
Genette is aware of the metaphorical character of discourse time and
that the temporality of a text comes, “metonymically” from the process
of reading. He thus points out that “we must first take [this] displace-
ment for granted, since it forms part of the narrative game, and there-
fore accept literally the quasi-fiction of Erzählzeit, this false time stand-
ing in for a true time and to be treated—with the combination of
reservation and acquiescence that this involves—as a pseudo-time”
([1972] 1980: 34).
(b) In elaborating on time, Genette systematizes ideas propounded
by Metz ([1971] 1974), Müller ([1948] 1968), and Lämmert ([1955]
1967), employing the categories of ‘order,’ ‘duration,’ and ‘frequency.’
In relation to ‘order,’ Genette calls the deviations between story and
discourse ‘anachronies’ and distinguishes between ‘prolepsis’ (flash-
forward) and ‘analepsis’ (flashback). Both can vary in terms of their
‘distance,’ ‘extent,’ and relationship to the ‘main narrative.’ Genette
calls the deformation of ‘duration’ ‘anisochrony’ ([1972] 1980: 86). He
discerns four types of story-discourse relations: ‘pause,’ ‘scene,’ ‘sum-
mary,’ and ‘ellipsis’ (95). ‘Frequency’ outlines the relationship between
the number of occurrences in the story and the number of occurrences
narrated. In this regard, Genette distinguishes between three modes:
‘singulative’ (telling once what happened once), ‘repetitive’ (telling
many times what happened once), and ‘iterative’ (telling once what
happened several times [(114–116]). De Toro (1986) extends Genette’s
taxonomy by differentiating between ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ anachro-
nies and by taking into consideration further phenomena “such as the
explicit/implicit permutation of time, the explicit/implicit overlapping
of time, the explicit/implicit interdependence of time, [and] the explic-
it/implicit synchrony, simultaneity and circularity” of time ([1986]
2011: 109).
 Time 873

3.1.3 ‘Narrating Time’: The Narrative Voice’s Distance

As it is “almost impossible […] not to locate the story in time with re-
spect to [the] narrating act” (Genette [1972] 1980: 215), Genette distin-
guishes between four types of ‘narrating time’: ‘subsequent,’ ‘prior,’
‘simultaneous,’ and ‘interpolated.’ The first type is “the classical posi-
tion of the past-tense narrative”; the second is a “predictive narrative,
generally in the future tense”; the third type is a “narrative in the pre-
sent contemporaneous with the action”; and the last type is included
“between the moments of the action” (217).
In a broader sense, aspects of voice are examined implicitly within
discussions of narrative point of view (Pouillon [1946] 1993; Uspenskij
[1970] 1973: 65–80; Schmid 2010: 100–106). Traditionally, a narrative
combines two different epistemic perspectives of time: the perspective
of the characters as well as the analytical and retrospective perspective
of the narrator (Martínez & Scheffel [1999] 2012: 125). While Schmid
calls the former the ‘figural perspective’ and the latter the ‘narratorial
perspective’ (2010: 105), Weber—referring to Bühler ([1934] 2011)—
labels the epistemic perspective of the narrator and the character as two
‘centers of orientation’ (Orientierungszentrum I/II) or ‘me-here-now-
systems’ (Ich-Hier-Jetzt-Systeme; 1998: 43–48). Generally, the process
of narration is understood as a retrospective act of sense-making. In
matters of fictional narratives, however, this argument is called into
question: e.g. Hamburger and her followers argue that there is no tem-
poral difference per se between narration and the narrated (Hamburger
[1957] 1973; cf. Banfield 1982; Avanessian & Hennig 2012, ed. 2013).
With the standard case of narrative in mind, Currie points out that
the process of narration “in its mode of fictional storytelling and as a
more general mode of making sense of the world” is, paradoxically,
based on an “anticipation of retrospection” (referring to Brooks, Currie
2007: 29). Responding critically to Ricœur, amongst others (cf. Meister
2009), Currie outlines three types of prolepsis: ‘prolepsis 1’ is the ‘nar-
ratological prolepsis,’ “which takes place within the time locus of the
narrated,” thus corresponding to flash-forward in Genette’s sense
(2007: 31); ‘prolepsis 2’ is a ‘structural prolepsis,’ “which takes place
between the time locus of the narrated and the time locus of the narra-
tor;” and ‘prolepsis 3’ is a ‘rhetorical prolepsis,’ “which takes place
between the time locus of the narrator and the time locus of the reader”
(31). It is ‘prolepsis 3’ that transcends the textual level—and thus also
the Genettian system—by taking the empirical reader into considera-
tion.
874 Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

3.2 The Study of Time in Narrative Theory: A Historical Perspective

In literary and narrative theory, time has been approached following

two different traditions of research which overlap with regards to ques-
tions of the evocation of time. The first of these traditions centres on
the specificity of literary deixis and the use of tense with an interest in
grammatical or philosophical questions (Pouillon [1946] 1993; Barthes
[1953] 1968; Hamburger [1955] 2011, [1957] 1973; Weinrich 1964;
Banfield 1982; Fleischman 1990). The second tradition seeks to de-
scribe narratives in terms of temporal deviation between story and dis-
course. Pursuing the rhetorical differentiation between ordo naturalis
and ordo artificialis (Doležel 1990: 127–129; Ernst 2000), these dis-
cussions of time emerge primarily from the observation of the dichoto-
my of ‘narrating time’ (Erzählzeit) and ‘narrated time’ (erzählte Zeit,
Müller [1947] 2011) or one of its terminological derivatives (e.g. ‘nar-
rating/reading time’ [Erzählzeit] and ‘plot time’ [Handlungszeit], Hirt
1923: 27–31; ‘narrating time’ [vremja povestvovanija] and ‘fabula
time’ [fabul’noe vremja], Tomaševskij [1931] 1985: 226; ‘narrative
time’ [Erzählzeit] and ‘story time’ [erzählte Zeit], Genette [1972] 1980:
33; ‘represented time’ and ‘representational time,’ Sternberg 1978: 14;
‘discourse-time’ and ‘story-time,’ Chatman 1978: 62–84; ‘text time’
[Textzeit] and ‘act time’ [Aktzeit], de Toro [1986] 2011: 113–115). In-
sofar as narrative is understood to be “the product of a series of trans-
formations,” this classification is based on models of narrative constitu-
tion (Scheffel → Narrative Constitution) and presupposes an
autonomous, linear, and homogeneous narrated time which is artificial-
ly transformed by the act of telling. The following historical delineation
concentrates on this second tradition: analyzing the temporal deviation
between story and discourse.

3.2.1 Formalist and Morphological Approaches

The study of time in narration was pioneered by Russian formalist and

composition theorists as well as in German morphological approaches.
In general, these approaches assume that there is a chronological order
in a ‘story’ from which the arrangement of events in a narrated text de-
viates.
One element of Russian formalist Šklovskij’s aesthetics of ‘defamil-
iarization,’ for instance, is the differentiation between daily, prosaic
time and ‘literary time’ (literaturnoe vremja). The laws of the latter “do
not coincide with the laws of ordinary time” (Šklovskij [1921] 1965:
36). Šklovskij acknowledges the artificial and elaborate alignment of
 Time 875

events as ‘temporal re-setting’ (vremennye perestanovki) in the narra-

tion (29).
Whereas Šklovskij only considers time occasionally, it is a pivotal
aspect in the work of the so-called ‘composition theorists’ (cf. Aumül-
ler 2009: 92). Petrovskij analyzes two categorically different aspects:
on the one hand, he focuses on the interlacing of narration and time. On
the other hand, he regards time according to the relationship between an
abstract causal combination of the ‘material’ of a narrative and its con-
crete ‘presentation.’ For Petrovskij, each narrative has a temporal and
causal dimension, whereas a description has neither. He distinguishes
between ‘dispositional’ and ‘compositional’ modes of storytelling. In
the first case, the events are arranged chronologically; in the second
case, the main plot line is presented before introducing events (Petrov-
skij [1925] 2009: 71, 82). As these modes of presentation are not mutu-
ally exclusive, Petrovskij’s differentiation blurs the dichotomy of ‘fabu-
la’ and ‘sjuzhet’ (Aumüller 2009: 106). Petrovskij’s interest in
“Spannung” (suspense) transcends questions of textual composition by
focusing on the effects of perception (Aumüller 2009: 108). Refor-
matskij refines Petrovskij’s analysis of the temporal arrangement of
events by alluding to Aristotle’s theory of drama and in doing so sys-
temizes narrations according to the quantitative classification of an ei-
ther pronounced or an absent unity of time ([1922] 1973: 87–88).
Tomaševskij examines time on two levels. On the one hand, he re-
gards time as a basic element of the ‘fabula’ while on the other, he ana-
lyzes time under the heading of ‘sjuzhet building’ ([1931] 1985: 226).
He acknowledges that ‘fabula’ demands both chronological sequence
and causal connection ([1925] 1965: 66). Tomaševskij goes beyond
Reformatskij and Petrovskij, as he is the first to differentiate between
‘fabula time’ and ‘narrating time’ [1931] 1985: 226). He defines ‘fabula
time’ as the ‘hypothetical time’ (226) in which the presented events
take place; ‘narrating time’ is defined as the time it takes to read the
text, which thus corresponds to the “‘size’ of the work” ([1925] 1965:
78). Tomaševskij further explores the ways in which ‘fabula time’ is
constructed (cf. 3.1.1 supra). In doing so, he systematizes different
forms of time designations (i.e. ‘absolute,’ ‘relative,’ ‘explicit,’ and
‘implicit’ forms of dating), an idea which is mentioned but not devel-
oped by Petrovskij ([1925] 2009: 71).
Although focusing primarily on the different character of epic and
drama, Friedemann—the “founder of classical German narrative theo-
ry” (Schmid 2010: 1)—deals with time according to the arrangement of
narrative material. In contrast to a chronological order of events, and
contrary to the dramatic mode, it is the epic narrator’s specific ability to
876 Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

present events in a non-natural order. Friedemann claims that the con-

stitutive epic mode of composition can be seen in the juxtaposition of
events expressed through phrases like ‘meanwhile’ and ‘by now’
(Friedemann [1910] 1969: 99, 106).
Hirt is the first in German scholarship to introduce the dichotomy of
‘narrating/reading time’ (Erzählzeit) and ‘plot time’ (Handlungszeit;
Hirt 1923: 27–31). Petsch, in his 1934 examination of ‘essence and
form of narrative,’ devotes a section to time and space, acknowledging
the ‘high relevance of temporality within the narrated action’ ([1934]
1942: 167). He differentiates between three intertwined aspects of time,
although he does not elaborate on them in great detail: a) ‘longitudinal
extension’ (Längserstreckung); b) ‘duration’ (Dauer); and c) ‘density’
(Dichtigkeit/Dichte). ‘Longitudinal extension’ is defined as an ‘objec-
tive time’ in terms of a ‘chain’ in which all events of the plot are com-
bined and which can be seen as a virtually objective and chronological
order beyond the narrative (168). ‘Duration’ is specified by Petsch as
the relation between the ‘objective time span of concrete action’ and the
recited narration (172–173). Finally, ‘density’ is categorized as “the
strongest movement of the sequence or the peaks of the plot,” but it can
also describe the art of relation between a story and the particular his-
torical era (cf. 177). This third category, however, is not to be consid-
ered as a purely text-based feature, but rather as an ideological aspect.
Like Friedemann, Müller also explores the relation between events
of the narrated world and their presentation. While Friedemann concen-
trates, in particular, on the order of events, Müller focuses predominant-
ly on ‘time contraction’ (Zeitraffung; [1947] 2011: 75). Acknowledging
the fundamental significance of time for narration, Müller distinguishes
between ‘narrating time’ (Erzählzeit) and ‘narrated time’ (erzählte Zeit,
76). While ‘narrated time’ denotes the time span of a story, ‘narrating
time’ determines the ‘physical time’ a “narrator needs to tell the story”
according to the number of pages comprising a text (Müller [1948]
1968: 270). Müller pays particular attention to summaries and identifies
“three main sorts of narrative time contractions” ([1947] 2011: 77): the
explicit or implicit “skipping of time spans” (e.g. ‘a few years later’),
“the contraction of time in large steps or main achievements in the way
of ‘veni, vidi, vici’,” and the “iterative or durative traits” (e.g. ‘He rode
out daily’).
Müller’s study of duration was pursued by his student Lämmert. In
Lämmert’s view, the structure of a narrative is outlined by ‘deforming,
disrupting, reordering or even avoiding’ the monotonous succession of
the ‘narrated time’ ([1955] 1967: 32). Broadening Müller’s focus,
Lämmert centers on three aspects: the structuring and organizing func-
 Time 877

tion of the narrator, different types of analepsis (Rückwendung) and

prolepsis (Vorausdeutung) and the forms of speech within the narration.

3.2.2 Classical Structuralist Approaches

While French “high structuralists” Bremond, Barthes, and Greimas

concentrate above all on structures of the ‘histoire’ level of narratives,
Genette’s “low structuralism” (Scholes 1974: 157) systematizes, in par-
ticular, the relation between story and discourse. Todorov takes an in-
terest in both levels. Since high structuralists follow formalist and mor-
phological theory (i.e. Propp’s morphology of the folk tale) and pursue
Saussure’s linguistic theory as well as Levi-Strauss’ anthropology, they
focus mainly on subsurface structures. For them, time is primarily an
element of a surface structure and is therefore of secondary importance.
Bremond, for instance, focuses on the “logical possibilities of narra-
tive,” describing them with a both trinominal and binary model ([1966]
1980: 387). Aiming to create a model of principal ‘narrative roles,’ he
implements a “complete formalization” and “complete dechronologiza-
tion” of narrative (Ricœur [1984] 1985, vol. 2: 42). Greimas argues in
the same vein. Time, however, does not play a role in his ‘fundamental
semantics,’ which establishes a dichotomy of a surface structure (struc-
ture apparente) consisting of the linguistic material, and a subsurface
level (structure immanente) of semantics and grammar ([1966] 1983).
Barthes outlines time when differentiating between ‘cardinal func-
tions’ and ‘catalyzers.’ While ‘cardinal functions’ are comprised of
both chronological and logical dimensions, catalyzers have only a
“purely chronological functionality” ([1966] 1978: 94). Referring to
Lévi-Strauss’ assertion that “the order of chronological succession is
absorbed in an atemporal matrix structure” (98), Barthes stresses that
“[a]nalysis today tends to ‘dechronologize’ the narrative continuum and
to ‘relogicize’ it.” Therefore, structural analysis of narratives must
“succeed in giving a structural description of the chronological illu-
sion—it is for narrative logic to account for narrative time” (99). Alt-
hough time is marginalized by Barthes and Levi-Strauss (for both there
is just a ‘temporal illusion’), their use of terms shows significant tem-
poral implications. They always refer to chronology in terms of a linear
time, thus making concepts of ‘chronology’ and ‘temporality’ inter-
changeable.
In his application of the formalist dichotomy of ‘fabula’ and ‘sju-
zhet,’ Todorov differentiates between a ‘narrative as a story’ (récit
comme histoire) and a ‘narrative as a discourse’ (récit comme discours),
examining time in relation to the latter ([1966] 1980). According to
878 Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

Todorov, story time and discourse time are qualitatively different:

whereas the latter is, to a certain extent, a linear time, story time is
“multi-dimensional,” as several events can take place simultaneously
(20). Following the Russian formalists, Todorov identifies this multi-
dimensionality in the ‘temporal deformation’ (déformation temporelle)
as a general artistic means. Todorov’s study brings about a more analyt-
ical approach to time, thus departing from the ‘detemporalizing’
tendencies of Bremond, Greimas, and Barthes.
In his examination of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Ge-
nette presents a complex multilayered theory and new concepts which
make it possible to analyze the variety of temporal relations in narrative
discourse. In contrast to the purely theoretical studies of the high struc-
turalists, Genette sets out to analyze a particular work of literature and
develops his model from a close reading of Proust. In doing so, he syn-
thesizes existing paradigms of Russian and German narrative theory
and develops them into a more systematic model which employs specif-
ic terminology (cf. 3.1). Despite critical comments from proponents of
postclassical approaches (e.g. Fludernik 1996; Gibson 1996; Dannen-
berg 2004, 2008), the Genettian system has been disseminated through
pragmatic versions of this heuristic classification (cf. Schönert 2004:
138; e.g. Todorov [1968] 1981: 29–32; Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002:
43–58; Bal [1985] 1997: 37–43; Martínez & Scheffel [1999] 2012: 32–
49; Lahn & Meister [2008] 2013: 133–151; Fludernik [2006] 2009:
32-35). In addition to de Toro’s extensions of this taxonomy of time
(cf. 3.1.2), Genette’s system has also been adapted to specific media
such as film (Chatman 1978: 63–79; Kuhn 2011: 195–270).

3.2.3 Postclassical Approaches

3.2.3.1 Ricœur’s Narratological Hermeneutics

In contrast to high structuralists like Bremond and Greimas, who argue

in favor of the ‘logification’ and ‘dechronologization’ of narrative
(Ricœur [1984] 1985, vol. 2: 31–32, using Barthes’ terms), the connec-
tion between time and narrative is fundamental to Ricœur’s phenome-
nology. In his view, it is narration that enables the temporal nature of
human experience: “time becomes human to the extent that it is articu-
lated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning
when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” ([1983] 1984,
vol. 1: 52). Ricœur devotes his study Temps et récit ([1983/1985]
1984/88) to a detailed categorization of the relationship between time,
experience, and narrative, thus following up on basic considerations by
 Time 879

Aristotle and Augustine. One of the study’s core aspects is that narra-
tion—by envisioning the absent and arranging a sequence of events—
creates both a dissonance in the consonance of time and a consonance
in the dissonance of experience. Ricœur is describing a process in
which the narrated story and the act of narration are both necessarily
intertwined with time. Ricœur’s ‘narrative hermeneutics’ is predicated
on the idea that the relationship between narrative and experience can
be considered in terms of a temporal sequence. Analogous to Augus-
tine’s thesis of the threefold present—separated into the three aspects of
past, present, and future—and in referring to Aristotle’s principle of
mimesis, Ricœur highlights three dimensions in narratives which imply
a circle of understanding in a time sequence ([1983] 1984, vol. 1: 52–
87): ‘mimesis I’ (prefiguration) means, by and large, the world of ac-
tion that precedes the narrative; in turn, ‘mimesis II’ (configuration)
refers to this prefigured world of action. ‘Mimesis III’ (refiguration)
denotes the recipient’s activation of the narrated actions and his or her
realization of the ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’ which is manifested
in mimesis II. Subsequently, this activation may influence and change
the reader’s actions (including the models that determine his image of
himself and of the world in which people act) and may itself become
the subject of another narration, i.e. another ‘synthesis of the heteroge-
neous.’
Ricœur’s philosophical and theoretical examination is completed by
a broad analysis of “tales about time” in the second volume of Temps et
récit. Here, Ricœur explores the fundamentally different ways in which
temporal experience is configured and facilitated in literary narratives,
basing his investigation on three “tales about time” (101): Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway (1925), Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), and Proust’s À la
recherche du temps perdu (1913–27).

3.2.3.2 Cognitivist Approaches

While classical narratological studies focus almost exclusively on the

text, postclassical approaches such as cognitive studies, possible worlds
theory or computer-based models emphasize the reader’s constructive
activity. Sternberg, for instance, deals with the distribution of a story’s
material and its effect on the reader. Attention is therefore concentrated
on the temporal re-arrangement of events between ‘represented time’
and ‘communicative time,’ resulting, as Sternberg puts it, in “suspense,
curiosity, and surprise” (2001: 117). Sternberg also refers to suspense
as an instance of ‘prospection,’ to curiosity as ‘retrospection,’ and to
surprise as ‘recognition’ (117). These three effects all correlate with
880 Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

specific time structures: suspense “relates to the dynamics of the ongo-

ing action, curiosity to the dynamics of temporal deformation” (1978:
65). Surprise, however, is produced by a “generic interplay between
times, abruptly twisted,” and is thus affected by “the manner and point
of disordering” (1992: 523).
According to Herman’s cognitive model, there are four necessary
aspects of narrativity: ‘situatedness,’ ‘event sequencing,’ ‘worldmak-
ing/world disruption,’ and ‘what it’s like’ (Herman 2009: 9). Time is
central to event sequencing as the “temporal structure” of the content of
a story is crucial for the recipient to be able “to construct mental repre-
sentations of narrated worlds, that is, storyworlds” (19). For Herman,
“temporal structures” are not only a feature of the text, but a result of
the interaction between textual structures and the reader activating
them.

3.2.3.3 Possible Worlds Theory

Following Leibniz and influenced by Kripke’s relational semantics,

possible worlds theory is based on the notion that ‘fictional worlds’ are
‘possible worlds’ differing from the actual world by their “independent
parallel ontology” (Ronen 1994: 198). Ronen understands a ‘world’ as
a “constellation of spatiotemporally linked elements” and designates
“temporal relations” as the “primary criterion for drawing the dividing
line between worlds” (199). The basic condition for the entity of a
‘world,’ therefore, is defined by its temporal homogeneity. Although
Ronen emphasizes that within a ‘fictional world,’ ‘fictional time’ is
comparable to that of the ‘actual world’ and thus to ‘real time,’ she also
argues that since “one terminological system of time-notions is applied
to worlds of different ontological orders,” ‘fictional time’ actually devi-
ates from ‘real time’ (201). Since ‘fictional time’ is “subjected to points
of view and to discursive practices,” there is no objective time beyond a
specific point of view and beyond tenses and “textual devices” (201–
202).

3.2.3.4 Computer-based Research Approaches

Exploring how time in fictional and possible worlds is cognitively im-

agined, Meister develops a computer-based markup tool that tags and
analyzes temporal expressions in literary texts. Meister’s aim is “to de-
velop a new model of narrative time” in order to describe how readers
“build the complex mental image of a temporally structured world”
(2005: 109). Since the cognitive evocation of ‘represented time’ “feels
 Time 881

perfectly real” (109), Meister terms his project—alluding to Barthes’

‘reality effect’—“the temporality effect” (2005: 109; 2011: 171). He
presents an application that visualizes the marked-up textual construc-
tions of time.
Combining cognitive, psychological, and possible-worlds research,
Mani develops an Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework in order to
examine “reasoning about time and events an intelligent agent can carry
out” (2011: 235). Whether the AI method can succeed in altering “the
foundations of narrative theory” (235) is yet to be seen.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Narratological research still privileges a Newtonian concept of time

which cannot always be adequately applied to pre- and postmodern nar-
ratives. In order to address this shortcoming, the following areas of re-
search require further exploration: (a) on a textual level, a story-based
theory of diegetic time that analyzes the complex and manifold con-
cepts of time beyond an autonomous, linear and homogeneous narrated
time (e.g. in ancient, medieval, and postmodern literature, diegetic time
is often non-linear and heterogeneous and hence blurs classical narra-
tology’s time concepts); (b) an inclusive and systematic approach that
combines discourse- and story-centred studies; (c) a transhistorical and
comparative approach which systematizes non-chronological concepts
of time and examines how they are represented and constituted in pre-
and postmodern literature; (d) comparative studies exploring
transgeneric, transmedial and transcultural differences and similarities
in the concept and representation of time.

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Analyse, Geschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler, 150–158.

5.2 Further Reading

5.2.1 Medial Perspectives

Kukkonen, Karin (2013). “Space, Time, and Causality in Graphic Narratives. An Em-
bodied Approach.” D. Stein & J.-N. Thon (eds.). From Comic Strips to Graphic
Novels. Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 49–66.
Pochat, Götz (1996). Bild – Zeit. Zeitgestalt und Erzählstruktur in der bildenden Kunst
von den Anfängen bis zur frühen Neuzeit. Wien: Böhlau.
Powell, Helen (2012). Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: Tauris.
886 Michael Scheffel, Antonius Weixler & Lukas Werner

Richardson, Brian (1987). “‘Time is Out of Joint’. Narrative Models and the Temporal-
ity of the Drama”. Poetics Today 8, 299–309.

5.2.2 Historical Perspectives

Heise, Ursula K. (1997). Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and Postmodernism. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge UP.
Jong, Irene J. F. de & René Nünlist, eds. (2007). Time in Ancient Greek Literature.
Leiden: Brill.
Störmer-Caysa, Uta (2007). Grundstrukturen mittelalterlicher Erzählungen. Raum und
Zeit im höfischen Roman. Berlin: de Gruyter.
 Unnatural Narrative
Jan Alber

1 Definition

An unnatural narrative violates physical laws, logical principles, or

standard anthropomorphic limitations of knowledge by representing
storytelling scenarios, narrators, characters, temporalities, or spaces that
could not exist in the actual world. However, narratives are never whol-
ly unnatural; they typically contain ‘natural’ elements (based on real-
world parameters) and unnatural components at the same time. Fur-
thermore, the representation of impossibilities may not only concern the
level of the story but also the level of the narrative discourse: in you-
narratives, for example, a neutral and telepathic voice addresses the
central protagonist, somehow knows his innermost thoughts and feel-
ings, and tells him his own story.
The unnatural may exist in two different forms. On the one hand,
there are the physical, logical, or epistemic impossibilities found in
postmodernist narratives that have not yet been conventionalized, i.e.
turned into basic cognitive frames, and thus still strike us as odd,
strange, or defamiliarizing in the sense of Šklovskij ([1917] 1965). On
the other hand, there are also physical, logical, or epistemic impossibili-
ties that have over time become familiar forms of narrative representa-
tion (such as speaking animals in beast fables, magic in romances or
fantasy narratives, the omnimentality of the traditional omniscient nar-
rator, or time travel in science fiction).

2 Explication

Unnatural narratives are a subset of fictional narratives. The unnatural

(or impossible) is measured against the foil of ‘natural’ (i.e. real-world)
cognitive frames and scripts which are derived from our bodily exist-
ence in the world (see Fludernik 1996: 22) and involve natural laws and
logical principles as well as standard human limitations of knowledge.
The criterion for identifying unnaturalness is actualizability, which
888 Jan Alber

bears on the question of whether the represented scenario or event

could exist in the real world or not (see also Ronen 1994: 51). The is-
land in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), for example, is fic-
tional, but such an island could exist in the actual world: it is based on
‘natural’ parameters. The flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726/1735), on the other hand, could clearly not
exist in the real world; it therefore constitutes an unnatural phenome-
non.
An unnaturalness that concerns the level of the story can be found in
Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991). In this novel, intradiegetic time,
i.e. time within the storyworld, moves backwards. Hence, the first-
person narrator does not swallow his food; rather, he gulps it up:

You select a soiled dish, collect some scraps from the garbage, and settle
down for a short wait. Various items get gulped up into my mouth, and af-
ter skilful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for
additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon (Amis [1991] 1992:
11).

The novel’s retrogressive temporality contradicts our experience of

time in the real world; here, the scripts of daily life are reversed.
An impossibility that concerns the level of narrative discourse oc-
curs in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984). This novel con-
fronts us with a narrative voice which addresses the unnamed protago-
nist, knows his inner life, and tells him his own story in the following
manner:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of
the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entire-
ly unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking
to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard
Lounge (McInerney 1984: 1).

In the real world, we cannot tell our addressees detailed and compre-
hensive versions of stories that actually happened to them (rather than
us). Monika Fludernik thus describes the unnaturalness of you-
narratives in the following words: “Second-person fiction, which ap-
pears to be a prima facie fictional, nonnatural form of story-telling, en-
hances the options already available to conversational narrative and
extends the boundaries of the nonrealistically possible in emphatic
ways” (1994: 460).
 Unnatural Narrative 889

The represented impossibilities in unnatural narratives often lead to

modifications or extensions of existing narratological conceptions of
storytelling situations, narrators, characters, time, or space. Firstly, in
unnatural narratives, the narrator can be an impossibly eloquent child, a
baby without a brain, a female breast, an animal, or a tree. In other cas-
es, the narrator has already died or is still unborn. Further impossibili-
ties concern the telepathic first-person narrator (see Nielsen 2004,
2013; Heinze 2008); you-narratives; and we-narratives in which the
‘we’ comprises the minds of people who have lived over a period of
one thousand years (see also Richardson 2006; Alber et al. 2012). Sec-
ondly, in unnatural narratives, characters can be half-human, half-
animal or speaking corpses. Also, they may transform into other enti-
ties, or they can exist in numerous co-existing but incompatible variants
(see also Iversen 2013). Thirdly, unnatural temporalities challenge our
real-world ideas about time and temporal progression. Examples are
retrogressive temporalities (in which time moves backwards); eternal
temporal loops; conflated time lines or “chronomontages” (which yoke
different temporal zones together); reversed causalities (in which, say,
the present is caused by the future); contradictory temporalities (which
consist of mutually exclusive events or event sequences); and differen-
tial time lines (in which inhabitants of the same storyworld age at a dif-
ferent rate than others) (see also Richardson 2002; Ryan 2006, 2009;
Alber 2012; Heinze 2013). Fourthly, impossible spaces undo our as-
sumptions about space and spatial organization in the real world
through containers that are bigger on the inside than they are on the
outside; shape-shifting settings; non-actualizable geographies; visions
of the infinite and unimaginable universe; or metaleptic jumps between
zones that we know to be separate (see also Alber 2013c; Alber & Bell
2012; Ryan 2012).

3 The History of the Concept and its Study

3.1 Postmodernist Unnaturalness and its Precursors

In comparison to earlier narratives, postmodernist texts acquire their

specificity through the concentration and radicalization of unnatural-
ness. However, the unnatural scenarios and events of postmodernism
are not brand-new phenomena. Rather, they have been anticipated in a
wide variety of ways (see also Alber 2011). Many older narratives rep-
resent scenarios or events that are impossible in the real world as well.
There is no proper point at which the unnatural first enters literary his-
890 Jan Alber

tory; rather, fiction always already involves the representation of im-

possibilities. Unnatural scenarios and events can, for example, be found
in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Indian Vedas, the
ancient Sanskrit epic Ramayana, and the Old Testament.
During the course of literary history, numerous impossibilities have
been conventionalized and turned into familiar aspects of generic con-
ventions. In a surprising number of cases, the transformation of impos-
sibilities into cognitive frames goes hand in hand with the creation of
new generic configurations. The development of the genre of the beast
fable written in the manner of Aesop, for instance, closely correlates
with the conventionalization of the speaking animal. Similarly, the de-
velopment of the epic involves the conventionalization of supernatural
forces such as mythic monsters and superhuman heroes. Once an un-
natural element has been conventionalized, it can be used for a different
purpose, which typically leads to the creation of further genre configu-
rations. For instance, while beast fables use speaking animals as stand-
ins for humans to mock human follies, 18th-century circulation novels
and children’s stories focus on the suffering of animals and use talking
animals to critique cruelty against animals.
Analogously, impossibilities that have to do with supernatural forces
do not only occur in epics; rather, they continue to play a crucial role in
medieval romances, Gothic novels, nonsense fiction, and fantasy nov-
els. They may concern different aspects of human experience (such as
courtly manners or chivalric codes in the romance or the evocation of
fear and awe in the Gothic novel), but they typically involve the idea
that the struggle between good and evil forces in our world is somehow
regulated or determined by supernatural entities. Despite the deliberate
movement away from the supernaturalism of the romance, the omnisci-
ent narrator in realist novels and the narrative medium in the reflector-
mode narratives of literary modernism also involve a certain degree of
magic. Like wizards (such as Merlin), these narrators or narrative media
are capable of telepathy: in contrast to real-world agents, they can liter-
ally read the minds of the other characters (see also Alber 2013a).
The unnatural elements in science-fiction novels (aliens, rebelling
robots, time travel, many-world cosmologies, and spatial impossibili-
ties) also ultimately have their roots in the supernatural (see Todorov
[1973] 1975: 173). It is only that in these cases, unnatural elements are
no longer explained as supernatural occurrences; rather, they have to do
with extrapolations based on technological innovations, or simply with
the fact that the narratives are set in the distant future. In this sense,
there is a short distance between genres in which impossibilities can be
explained through magic or the supernatural, and science-fiction narra-
 Unnatural Narrative 891

tives in which similar phenomena are explained through technological

development (see also Miéville 2004: 338).
Numerous manifestations of satire also involve the unnatural be-
cause satirical exaggerations, distortions, or caricatures are frequently
so extreme that they merge with the impossible. Stableford, for exam-
ple, argues that “the artifice of satire,” which proceeds by means of “in-
congruous exaggeration,” was “crucial to the development of self-
conscious fabulation [i.e. postmodernism, J. A.], beginning with the
earliest fables” ([2005] 2009: 358). In the case of satire, represented
impossibilities (such as the speaking objects in the circulation novels of
the 18th century or the flying island of Laputa) typically serve a di-
dactic purpose: they mock and critique certain psychological predispo-
sitions or states of affairs.
The proliferation of the unnatural in earlier narratives suggests that
postmodernism is not the completely innovative and wholly unprece-
dented explosion of anti-mimeticism that certain critics consider it to
be. Rather, postmodernist narratives hark back to conventionalized im-
possibilities in well-known genres; they draw on features of earlier nar-
ratives via a shared concern with the unnatural. More specifically,
postmodernism can now be construed as being an intertextual endeavor
which blends our actual-world encyclopedia with the encyclopedias
(see Doležel 1998: 177) of established literary genres by using the im-
possible storytelling scenarios, narrators, characters, temporalities, or
spaces of earlier narratives in the context of otherwise realist frame-
works where we would not expect them.

3.2 Theoretical Conceptualizations of Unnaturalness

The systematic study of the unnatural begins with the work of Richard-
son, who discusses unnatural temporalities (2000, 2002) as well as un-
natural narrators and storytelling scenarios (2006), anticipated by
McHale’s analysis of metafictional strategies in postmodernist narra-
tives (1987, 1992) and Wolf’s more general work on anti-illusionism
from a diachronic perspective (1993). Recently, a number of younger
scholars such as Alber (2009, 2011, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c),
Heinze (2008, 2013), Iversen (2011, 2013), Mäkelä (2013), and Nielsen
(2004, 2010, 2013) have also begun to look at the ways in which un-
natural narratives move beyond real-world understandings of time,
space, and human beings (see also Alber et al. 2010; Richardson et al.
2012). This interest in the unnatural is a reaction to Fludernik’s ‘natu-
ral’ narratology (1996), which is critiqued from various different per-
spectives.
892 Jan Alber

Important in this context is the question of how to approach or make

sense of unnatural narratives. Alber argues that readers are ultimately
bound by their cognitive architecture, even when trying to make sense
of the unnatural. Hence, the only way to respond to narratives of all
sorts (including unnatural ones) is through cognitive frames and scripts.
On the basis of cognitive studies, frame theory, and possible-worlds
theory, he has outlined a number of reading strategies enabling readers
to come to terms with and make sense of the unnatural (Alber 2013b:
451–454).
Other researchers take exception to such reading strategies: they ar-
gue that the possibility should be left open that unnatural narratives
might contain or produce effects that are not easily (if at all) explaina-
ble or resolvable with reference to everyday phenomena or to the rules
of the represented storyworld. Richardson, for example, seeks to “re-
spect the polysemy of literary creations, and a crucial aspect of this
polysemy can be the unnatural construction of recalcitrant texts.” From
this perspective, “we need to recognize the anti-mimetic as such, and
resist impulses to deny its protean essence and unexpected effects”
(2011: 33). Similarly, for Iversen, “one major limitation inherent in a
full-blown cognitive approach to narrative [...] is that it runs the risk of
reducing the affective power and resonance of such narratives” (2013:
96). Mäkelä also points out that she “would not construe ‘the reader’ as
a mere sense-making machine but as someone who might just as well
opt for the improbable and the indeterminate” (2013: 145). Along the
same lines, Nielsen develops what he calls “un-naturalizing reading
strategies,” arguing that when confronted with the unnatural the reader
“can trust as authoritative and reliable what would in real life be impos-
sible.” Furthermore, the unnatural “cue[s] the reader to interpret in
ways that differ from the interpretation of real-world acts of narration
and of conversational storytelling” (2013: 91–92).
From this perspective, a cognitive approach cannot do justice to the
representation of impossibilities because it potentially leads to
normalizing or domesticating the unnatural. On the other hand, the
alternative approach involves the danger of monumentalizing the
unnatural by leaving it outside the bounds of the comprehensible: one
might argue that since represented impossibilities are created by
human authors, it makes sense to address the question of what they
have to say about us and the world we live in. This argument closely
correlates with what Stein Haugom Olsen calls the “‘human interest’
question” (1987: 67), i.e. the idea that fiction focuses on “mortal life:
how to understand it and how to live it” (Nagel 1979: ix). The unnatural
 Unnatural Narrative 893

is a human phenomenon, rather than a transcendental or godly pheno-

menon that human beings cannot even begin to make sense of.

4 Topics for Further Investigation

Open questions concern (1) the role of impossibilities in poetry, film,

painting, religious texts, computer games, and so forth, as well as (2)
the functions of the unnatural in literatures written in other languages
than English. (3) The fusion of the study of the unnatural with feminist,
queer, and/or postcolonial approaches appears to be a promising en-
deavor and, more generally, the ideological underpinnings and/or polit-
ical implications of represented impossibilities. (4) The unnatural
should be investigated from the perspective of the rhetorical approach
to narrative, and the place of implied authors behind representations of
impossibilities and the question of what is to be understood by the au-
thorial audience should be determined.

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Alber, Jan (2009). “Impossible Storyworlds – and What To Do with Them.” Story-
worlds 1, 79–96.
– (2011). “The Diachronic Development of Unnaturalness: A New View on Gen-
re.” J. Alber & R. Heinze (eds.). Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 41–67.
– (2012). “Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism, Science
Fiction, and the Fantastic.” M. Lehtimäki et al. (eds.). Narrative Interrupted: The
Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature, Festschrift for Pekka Tam-
mi. New York: de Gruyter, 174–191.
– (2013a). “Pre-Postmodernist Manifestations of the Unnatural: Instances of Ex-
panded Consciousness in Omniscient Narration and Reflector-Mode Narratives.”
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 61.2, 137–153.
– (2013b). “Unnatural Narratology: The Systematic Study of Anti-Mimeticism.”
Literature Compass 10.5, 449–460.
– (2013c). “Unnatural Spaces and Narrative Worlds.” J. Alber et al. (eds.). A Poet-
ics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 45–66.
– & Alice Bell (2012). “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology.” Jour-
nal of Narrative Theory 42.2, 166–192.
– Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen & Brian Richardson (2010). “Unnatural
Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18.2,
113–136.
894 Jan Alber

– Henrik Skov Nielsen & Brian Richardson (2012). “Unnatural Voices, Minds, and
Narration.” J. Bray et al. (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Experimental Lit-
erature. London: Routledge, 351–367.
Amis, Martin ([1991] 1992). Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence. New York:
Vintage.
Doležel, Lubomír (1998). Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins UP.
Fludernik, Monika (1994). “Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology:
The Limits of Realism.” Style 28.3, 445–79.
– (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Heinze, Rüdiger (2008). “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narra-
tive Fiction.” Narrative 16.3, 279–297.
– (2013). “The Whirlgig of Time: Toward a Poetics of Unnatural Temporality.” J.
Alber et al. (eds.). A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP,
31–44.
Iversen, Stefan (2011). “‘In flaming flames’: Crises of Experientiality in Non-Fictional
Narratives.” J. Alber & R. Heinze (eds.). Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Nar-
ratology. Berlin: de Gruyter, 89–103.
– (2013). “Unnatural Minds.” J. Alber et al. (eds.). A Poetics of Unnatural Narra-
tive. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 94–112.
McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen.
– (1992). Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
McInerney, Jay (1984). Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage.
Mäkelä, Maria (2013). “Realism and the Unnatural.” J. Alber et al. (eds.). A Poetics of
Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 142–166.
Miéville, China (2004). “Marxism and Fantasy: An Introduction.” Fantastic Literature:
A Critical Reader. D. Sandner (ed.). Westport, CN: Praeger, 334–343.
Nagel, Thomas (1979). Moral Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Nielsen, Henrik Skov (2004). “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fic-
tion.” Narrative 12.2, 133–150.
– (2010). “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration.” J. Alber & M. Fludernik (eds.).
Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Columbus: Ohio State UP,
275–301
– (2013). “Naturalizing and Un-naturalizing Reading Strategies: Focalization Re-
visited.” J. Alber et al. (eds.). A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: Ohio
State UP, 67–93.
Olsen, Stein Haugom (1987). The End of Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Richardson, Brian (2000). “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theoriz-
ing the Collapse of Time, Voice, and Frame.” Narrative, 8.1, 23–42.
– (2002). “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Non-
mimetic Fiction.” B. Richardson (ed.). Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time,
Plot, Closure, and Frames. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 47–63.
– (2006). Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary
Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
– (2011). “What is Unnatural Narrative Theory?” J. Alber & R. Heinze (eds.). Un-
natural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter, 23–40.
 Unnatural Narrative 895

– David Herman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, & Robyn Warhol (2012). Nar-
rative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State UP.
Ronen, Ruth (1994). Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2006). “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological
Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative.” Poetics Today 27.4, 633–674.
– (2009). “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative.” Style 43.2, 142–164.
– (2012). “Impossible Worlds.” A. Bray et al. (eds.). The Routledge Companion to
Experimental Literature. London: Routledge, 368–379.
Šklovskij, Viktor (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1917] 1965). “Art as Technique.” L. T. Lemon
& M. J. Reis (eds.). Russian Formalist Criticism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 3–
24.
Stableford, Brian ([2005] 2009). The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Lanham, MA:
Scarecrow P.
Todorov, Tzvetan ([1973] 1975). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve U.
Wolf, Werner (1993). Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der
Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illu-
sionsstörenden Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

5.2 Further Reading

Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen & Brian Richardson (2012). “How
Unnatural is Unnatural Narratology? A Response to Monika Fludernik.” Narra-
tive 20.3, 371–382.
– (2013). “What Really is Unnatural Narratology?” Storyworlds 5, 101–118.
Fludernik, Monika (2012). “How Natural is ‘Unnatural Narratology’; or, What is Un-
natural about Unnatural Narratology?” Narrative 20.3, 357–370.
Petterson, Bo (2012). “Beyond Anti-Mimetic Models: A Critique of Unnatural Narra-
tology.” S. Isomaa et al. (eds.). Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of
Literary Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 73–92.
Klauk, Tobias & Tilmann Köppe (2013). “Reassessing Unnatural Narratology: Prob-
lems and Prospects.” Storyworlds 5, 77–100.
 Unreliability
Dan Shen

1 Definition

In its narratological sense, unreliability is a feature of narratorial dis-

course. If a narrator misreports, -interprets or -evaluates, or if she/he
underreports, -interprets or -evaluates, this narrator is unreliable or un-
trustworthy.

2 Explication

In literary narratives, narratorial unreliability is usually encoded by the

author as a rhetorical device. Only occasionally is this due to the au-
thor’s own slips or failings in contrast to non-literary narratives, where
narratorial unreliability is more often a result of the author’s own limi-
tations. The concept of unreliability was proposed by Booth ([1961]
1983), who was concerned with intentionally encoded unreliability in
fiction. Booth discusses unreliability in relation to the concept of the
implied author (Schmid → Implied Author; Shen (2011, 2013)) and to
that of narrative distance. In Booth’s view, a narrator is “reliable when
he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which
is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not”
([1961] 1983: 158–159). If the reader discovers unreliability as encoded
by the implied author for the purpose of generating irony, she/he expe-
riences a narrative distance between the narrator and the implied author,
and a secret communion occurs between the latter and the reader behind
the narrator’s back (300–309).
While Booth focuses on the narrator’s misreporting and ethical
misevaluation, Phelan refines and extends Booth’s distinction of kinds
of unreliability (Phelan & Martin 1999; Phelan 2005). Phelan points out
that narrators “perform three main roles—reporting, interpreting, and
evaluating; sometimes they perform the roles simultaneously and some-
times sequentially” (2005: 50). In light of these three roles, Phelan clas-
sifies unreliability by focusing on three axes: the axis of facts; the axis
 Unreliability 897

of values or ethics; and the axis of knowledge and perception, the last
having received less attention from Booth than the other two axes.
Phelan identifies six types of unreliability which fall into two larger
categories: (1) misreporting, misinterpreting (misreading) and miseval-
uating (misregarding); (2) underreporting, underinterpreting (under-
reading), and underevaluating (underregarding). The contrast between
the “mis-”category and the “under-”category is basically a contrast be-
tween being wrong and being insufficient (2005: 34–37; 49–53). Sig-
nificantly, one type of unreliability, Phelan points out, often interacts
with other types. For instance, misreporting may be a result of the nar-
rator’s insufficient knowledge or mistaken values, and therefore it may
concur with misinterpreting or misevaluating. But of course, the narra-
tor may be reliable in one way and unreliable in another: e.g. it is very
common for the narrator to report the events accurately but misinterpret
and/or misevaluate them (see also Lanser 1981: 170–172; Phelan &
Martin 1999: 96).

3 History of the Concept and its Study

As a significant feature of homodiegetic narration, unreliability has

gradually become a key concept in narratological investigations. Critics
discussing unreliability in literature fall essentially into two groups,
with a certain degree of overlap between them. The first group, which
far exceeds the second in number, treats unreliability as a textual prop-
erty encoded by the implied author for the implied reader to decode;
this group adopts a rhetorical approach. By contrast, the second group,
which favors a constructivist/cognitivist approach, focuses on the inter-
pretive process and regards unreliability as being dependent on actual
readers’ divergent readings for its very existence. The following discus-
sion will deal with the two approaches in a less historical than system-
atic way.

3.1 The Rhetorical Approach to Unreliability

3.1.1 Basic Understanding of the Concept

Most narrative theorists follow Booth’s “canonized” rhetorical defini-

tion of fictional unreliability (Nünning 1997a: 85). Chatman (1978)
rightly points out that the domain of unreliability is the narrator’s view
on the level of discourse, not the personality of the narrator (234), since
the narrator’s problematic personality only forms a possible cause of
898 Dan Shen

unreliable narration. But Chatman’s preoccupation with the story-

discourse distinction has led him to narrow down the concern to the
narrator’s erroneous reporting of story facts. When unreliability occurs,
the story undermines the narrator’s erroneous discourse through the
implied reader’s inference of the true facts (233).
In terms of the narrator’s unreliable reporting of story elements, it is
truly a clash that occurs between story and discourse; but as regards the
narrator’s mis- or underinterpretation and evaluation of events and
characters, it is rather between the narrator’s explicit discourse and the
author’s implicit discourse that the clash can be found. Thus, in
Bierce’s “Oil of Dog” (1911), the first-person narrator in his boyhood
helped his “honest” mother to throw babies into a river which, he ex-
plicitly assumes, nature “had thoughtfully provided for the purpose”
([1911] 1946: 800–801). Here the narrator’s evaluation of the facts
(“honest”) and his interpretation of the facts (attributing this purpose to
nature) is apparently at odds with the implied author’s implicit dis-
course (see Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002: 103).
In terms of intentionally encoded fictional unreliability, even along
the axis of facts, there is still an implicit clash between the narrator’s
discourse and the implied author’s discourse. This calls into question
Cohn’s distinction between “unreliable narration” and “discordant nar-
ration” (2000: 307), the former only concerning the axis of facts and
the latter, by contrast, having to do with the axis of values, a kind that
involves a discordance between narrator and author. But as regards the
factual unreliability that sets in behind the clash between story facts and
discourse presentation, we still have “discordant narration,” since there
is also a gap between the “mis-” or “disinformed narrator” and the ac-
curately or adequately informed (implied) author whose norms consti-
tute a standard by which narratorial unreliability can be judged along
any axis by the rhetorical critic.
Since the gap between implied author and extradiegetic or hetero-
diegetic narrator is usually limited, with some exceptions (see e.g. Cohn
1999, 2000; Yacobi 2001; Pettersson 2005), narratologists have mainly
dealt with unreliability in homodiegetic narration. In this kind of narra-
tion, however, the text only contains the first-person narrator’s account,
and insofar as the decoding process is concerned, the “implied author’s
norms” can only be a matter of the reader’s inference and judgment (see
Booth [1961] 1983: 239–240). As Phelan (2005: 48) points out, flesh-
and-blood readers can only try “to enter the authorial audience” with or
without success.
Hansen (2007: 241–244) offers a taxonomy of four types of unrelia-
bility. The first is intranarrational, occurring within a single narrator’s
 Unreliability 899

discourse. The second is internarrational, where one narrator’s unrelia-

bility is “unveiled by its contrasts” with other narrators’ versions. The
third is intertextual unreliability, “based on manifest character types”
such as naïfs and madmen. But we find a narrator naïve or mad primari-
ly through the deviant features of the narrator’s own discourse in light
of world knowledge and genre expectations instead of through a com-
parison of this narrator with similar narrators in other texts. The last
type is extratextual unreliability, which depends on “the knowledge the
reader brings to the text” for its very existence. Because the criteria
here involve a shift from text to reader (raising the question of incom-
patible criteria—see below), Hansen’s (2007) classification of the
fourth type does not fit with his classification of the previous types,
since readers with different reading strategies, conceptual frames or in
different contexts may interpret the same intranarrational or internarra-
tional phenomena quite differently.

3.1.2 Features and Causes of Unreliability

Given the difficulties in arriving at the implied author’s norms, Rim-

mon-Kenan ([1983] 2002: 7–8) draws attention to various textual fea-
tures that may indicate the narrator’s unreliability: (a) contradiction
between the narrator’s views and the real facts; (b) a gap between the
true outcome of the action and the narrator’s erroneous earlier report;
(c) consistent clash between other characters’ views and the narrator’s;
and (d) internal contradictions, double-edged images and the like in the
narrator’s own language. Wall (1994) highlights the first-person narra-
tor’s peculiar verbal tics or “mind-style” (Fowler 1977; see also Shen
2005a) which “form discursive indicators of preoccupations” that
“might be one of the most readily available signals that the narrator is
unreliable” (Wall 1994: 20). However, as different types of texts tend to
foreground different features of narratorial unreliability, Wall’s empha-
sis is applicable to certain texts but not necessarily to others.
As for the cause of the narrator’s unreliability, Chatman (1978: 233)
mentions that it may stem from various factors such as cupidity (Jason
Compson), cretinism (Benjy), gullibility (Dowling, the narrator of The
Good Soldier), perplexity and lack of information (Marlow in Lord
Jim), and innocence (Huck Finn). Riggan (1981) devotes a book-length
study to unreliable narrators as picaros, madmen, naïfs or clowns,
pointing to the relation between a deviant or deranged mind and unreli-
ability in recounting one’s own experiences. Rimmon-Kenan ([1983]
2002: 101–102) identifies three main sources of unreliability: the narra-
tor’s limited knowledge; his personal involvement; and his problematic
900 Dan Shen

value-scheme. Fludernik (1999: 76–77) draws attention to the different

causes underlying the same type of unreliability; e.g. the factual type
may arise either from “deliberate lying” or from “the narrator’s insuffi-
cient access to the complete data,” or it may form “symptoms of a
pathological scenario.”
Olson (2003) differentiates between “fallible” and “untrustworthy”
narration, the former attributable to external circumstances and the lat-
ter caused by the narrator’s disposition. The two types of unreliability
may elicit quite different responses from readers, who are inclined to
justify the former according to the circumstances involved while being
more skeptical and critical towards the latter. Olson’s differentiation is
valuable, but the distinction would be more memorable if she used dif-
ferent terms such as “circumstantially unreliable” for the former type
and “dispositionally unreliable” for the latter. In fact, Booth, upon
whose theory Olson bases her distinction, uses “untrustworthy,” “falli-
ble” and “unreliable” interchangeably ([1961] 1983: 158). While Booth
makes a point of including the “circumstantial” kind, asserting that un-
reliability is “more often a matter of what James calls inconscience”
(159), Schwarz excludes the “circumstantial,” arguing that “Stevens is
more an imperceptive than unreliable narrator; he is historically deaf to
his implications rather than untruthful” (1997: 197). We need to bear in
mind, however, that (un)reliability essentially concerns whether the
narratorial discourse is able to report, interpret or evaluate events and
characters correctly or sufficiently. No matter how honest a narrator is,
so long as her/his discourse fails to meet these standards, the narration
will remain unreliable. Just as a person’s view may change in the
course of real life, the degree of a narrator’s (un)reliability may vary at
different stages of the narration (see Phelan 2005, 2007; McCormick
2009).

3.1.3 Estranging vs. Bonding Unreliability

While most narrative theorists concentrate on the ironic effects caused

by unreliability, Phelan (2007) draws a distinction between “estranging
unreliability” and “bonding unreliability” in order to account, in a more
comprehensive and balanced way, for the effects of the technique on
the audience’s intellectual, affective, and ethical relationship to the nar-
rator. The estranging type increases the distance between the narrator
and the authorial audience, while the bonding type, conversely, reduces
that distance. Since most previous work on unreliability focuses on the
estranging type, Phelan concentrates on bonding unreliability, of which
he identifies six subtypes: (1) “literally unreliable but metaphorically
 Unreliability 901

reliable”; (2) “playful comparison between implied author and narra-

tor”; (3) “naïve defamiliarization”; (4) “sincere but misguided self-
deprecation”; (5) “partial progress towards the norm”; (6) “bonding
through optimistic comparison”.

3.2 The Constructivist/Cognitivist Approach and

its Relation to the Rhetorical

3.2.1 Yacobi’s Integrating Mechanisms

The constructivist approach has been pioneered by Yacobi (1981, 2001,

2005), who directs attention to how readers resolve textual incongrui-
ties with five integrating mechanisms: (1) the genetic; (2) the generic;
(3) the existential; (4) the functional; (5) the perspectival. The “genetic”
mechanism attributes fictive oddities and inconsistencies to the author’s
production of the text, regarding them as the author’s mistakes, among
other things. The “generic” principle appeals to generic conventions of
plot organization such as the progressive complication and the happy
ending of comedy. The “existential” principle refers incongruities to the
fictive world, typically to canons of probability that deviate from those
of reality, as in fairy tales or in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” The “func-
tional” mechanism attributes textual incongruities to the work’s creative
ends that require such oddities. And the “perspectival” principle as-
cribes textual incongruities to the narrator’s unreliable observation and
evaluation as symptoms of narrator/author discord (see McCormick
2009 for a good application of these mechanisms).
Significantly, Yacobi’s mechanisms involve substantially different
strategies—alternative rather than complementary ways of integrating
discrepancies. Thus, mechanisms (1) and (5) are diametrically opposed
to each other while mechanisms (1) and (2) and (1) and (4) are incom-
patible with each other (only the perspectival or the generic goes with
the functional, the former being a specific case of the latter). These
competing or contradictory mechanisms, however, may function differ-
ently for readers with different world/literary knowledge or social iden-
tity or in different cultural/historical contexts.

3.2.2 Incompatible Yardsticks

To understand the relation between the two approaches concerned (i.e.

rhetorical vs. constructivist/cognitivist), it is important to distinguish
when and how they conflict and when and how they do not. In terms of
critical coverage, there is no conflict, but rather complementarity. The
902 Dan Shen

rhetorical approach tries to reveal how the implied reader (a critic who
tries to enter into that reading position) deals with one type of textual
incongruity—the gap between narrator and implied author—while Ya-
cobi’s constructivist approach tries to show how different actual read-
ers deal with textual incongruities in general. However, in terms of
yardstick, there is a conflict between the two approaches. For Yacobi,
who uses the reader’s own “organizing activity” as the guiding princi-
ple (1981: 119), all five mechanisms are equally valid (e.g. regarding
the narrator’s problematic claim as the author’s own mistake is as valid
as treating it as a signal of the narrator’s unreliability against authorial
norms). It should be noted that many cognitivist narratologists do not
share this position. Rather, they are concerned with generic readers who
are equipped with the same “narrative competence” (Prince [1987]
2003: 61–62) and who share stereotypic assumptions, frames, scripts,
schemata, or mental models in comprehending narrative in a “generic
context” of reception (see Shen 2005b: 155–164).
From Yacobi’s constructivist angle, narratorial unreliability—
concerning the perspectival mechanism—is just “a reading-hypothesis”
that, “like any conjecture, is open to adjustment, inversion, or even re-
placement by another hypothesis altogether […] What is deemed ‘relia-
ble’ in one context, including reading-context, as well as authorial and
generic framework, may turn out to be unreliable in another” (2005:
110). This forms a notable contrast with the rhetorical approach, which
treats the gap between narrator and implied author as being encoded in
the text prior to interpretation. If an actual reader can decode the gap in
the way intended—and signaled—by the implied author, she/he has
successfully entered the position of the implied reader, and the reading
is then an “authorial” reading versus a misreading.
Interestingly, when constructivist and cognitivist critics, including
Yacobi, proceed with analysis of narratorial unreliability, they them-
selves often take recourse to the methods of the rhetorical approach. In
Yacobi’s ground-breaking essay for the reader-oriented approach
(1981), for instance, we see an implicit shift to the rhetorical stance.
She starts by criticizing the rhetorical approach for placing unreliability
in the narrator and/or the author rather than in the reader’s organizing
activity (119–120). Then she draws on a scheme proposed by MacKay
(1972) for differentiating information and communication: the former is
defined from the viewpoint of the receiver and the latter “cannot be de-
fined without reference to the viewpoint of the transmitter” (122). As
for the literary work, Yacobi asserts that usually there is no doubt
“about the very existence of communicative intent on the author’s part”
and that the relations “between implied author and reader are by defini-
 Unreliability 903

tion functional and hence located within the framework of an act of

communication” (122–123).
Here Yacobi also considers the variability of context. However, the
context is only textual, for it concerns “the modalities of the unreliable
source(s) of narration vis-à-vis authorial communication” (123). Yacobi
distinguishes between two kinds of unreliable narrators: the unself-
conscious versus the self-conscious, the latter’s unreliability being
“harder to detect than the unsuspecting monologist’s” (124). This posi-
tion is unequivocally rhetorical: the implied reader “detects” unreliabil-
ity through the textual features encoded by the implied author prior to
interpretation. In such contexts, Yacobi is not placing unreliability
“within the reader’s organizing activity” but in the narrator and the au-
thor, and consequently the yardstick of unreliability is the implied au-
thor’s norms or “overall design” (125).
Yacobi’s more recent essay (2005) is entitled “Authorial Rhetoric,
Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings.” As shown by her
own analysis (e.g. 1981: 124–125), in order to grasp the “authorial
rhetoric,” a critic must try to enter the implied reader’s position so as to
arrive at the authorial reading. By contrast, in interpretive practice we
find “divergent readings” attributable to the differences among actual
readers and various contexts. It is very important to investigate diver-
gent actual readings—unreliability in different actual readers’ eyes—
either synchronically or diachronically (see Zerweck 2001; V. Nünning
2004; Yacobi 2005). But if we acknowledge, in Yacobi’s own words,
that a literary narrative is a “communicative act” that “cannot be de-
fined without reference to the viewpoint of the transmitter,” we must
avoid taking actual readers rather than the implied author as the basis
for narratorial unreliability.

3.2.3 Nünning’s Shifting Position

In the work of Ansgar Nünning, another representative of the construc-

tivist/cognitivist approach, we also see shifts to the rhetorical position.
In Nünning (1997b), a constructivist stance is adopted: “a structure is
not by its nature inherent in a literary text; rather the structurality is
construed by the perceiving human consciousness” (115), but it stands
out particularly in the following assertion: “The information on which
the projection of an unreliable narrator is based derives at least as much
from within the mind of the beholder as from textual data. To put it
quite bluntly: A pederast would not find anything wrong with Nabo-
kov’s Lolita; a male chauvinist fetishist who gets his kicks out of mak-
ing love to dummies is unlikely to detect any distance between his
904 Dan Shen

norms and those of the mad monologist in Ian McEwan’s ‘Dead As

They Come’.” (Nünning 1999: 61) Here the measure of unreliability
rests with the ethically problematic reader’s “norms” in conflict with
the implied author’s norms, a matter of the former subverting the latter.
By contrast, Nünning (1997a) focuses on “the textual and contextual
signals that suggest to the reader that a narrator’s reliability may be
suspect” (83). In such places, Nünning’s reader is in accord with “the
value and norm system of the whole text” (87) and is therefore identical
with the implied reader that the rhetorical approach focuses on.
Later, Nünning (2005) attempts to synthesize the constructiv-
ist/cognitivist and rhetorical approaches. He explicitly criticizes the
former approach for neglecting authorial or textual function (105), but
the rhetorical approach is also criticized for failing to give sufficient
attention to readers’ interpretive strategies or conceptual frameworks
(91–99). Nünning’s synthetic “cognitive-rhetorical” approach asks
questions such as: “What textual and contextual signals suggest to the
reader that the narrator’s reliability may be suspect? How does an im-
plied author (as redefined by Phelan) manage to furnish the narrator’s
discourse and the text with clues that allow the critic to recognize an
unreliable narrator when he or she sees one?” (101, emphasis added).
These questions, however, come only from the rhetorical side of Nün-
ning’s “synthesis.” The constructivist/cognitivist approach will ask very
different questions such as: When faced with the same textual features,
what different interpretations might readers come up with? What differ-
ent conceptual frameworks or cultural contexts underlie the divergent
readings?

3.2.4 Cognitive Investigation with the Rhetorical Yardstick

Significantly, one can take a cognitive approach to unreliability without

dropping the rhetorical yardstick. A good case in point is Vera Nünning
(2004), who draws attention to different readers’ changing interpretive
frames across historical contexts. The essay begins with a quote from
Booth ([1961] 1983: 239): “The history of unreliable narrators from
Gargantua to Lolita is in fact full of traps for the unsuspecting reader.”
Adopting Booth’s rhetorical standard, Vera Nünning tries to reveal var-
ious traps of interpretation—how different historical contexts affect
readers’ conceptual schema and distort the original meaning, resulting
in “misreadings” (A. Nünning 2005: 99).
We can extend the point that only the rhetorical yardstick is valid by
considering conceptual frames. In investigating Nabokov’s Lolita,
Zerweck (2001: 165) points out that, “depending on whether real-world
 Unreliability 905

frames or literary frames are applied by the individual reader,” the nov-
el can be read in two opposing ways: either as “a highly unreliable nar-
rative” or “as a subtle metafictional game” being played with the liter-
ary convention of unreliability. In this situation, the rhetorical critic will
choose the more powerful interpretive hypothesis as the one intended
by the implied author. By contrast, the cognitivist critic can merely de-
scribe opposing readings. But it is the interpretive frames that the im-
plied Nabokov had in mind—frames that he expected the implied read-
er to recognize and share with him—that really count in terms of the
intended meaning of the novel.

3.3 Unreliability in Film and Autobiography

Unreliable narration “can be found in a wide range of narratives across

the genres, the media, and different disciplines” (A. Nünning 2005: 90).
Although both the rhetorical and the cognitivist/constructivist ap-
proaches to unreliability have focused on prose fiction, some narratolo-
gists have turned their attention to unreliable narration in film and auto-
biography, among other media or other genres. Chatman (1978: 235–
237, 1990: 124–138) extends the discussion of unreliability to film,
where more dramatic effect may emerge, since a voice-over depicting
story events may be belied by what the audience sees on the screen.
Interestingly, the cinematic camera can also be used to mislead the au-
dience temporally for certain effects (Chatman 1978: 236–237, 1990:
131–132; see also Currie 1995; Bordwell 1985; Kozloff 1988).
As regards the non-fictional genre of autobiography in the verbal
medium, there are, on the one hand, the same manifestations of unrelia-
ble narration as in fiction: misreporting, -interpreting, -evaluating or
underreporting, -interpreting, -evaluating. On the other hand, misreport-
ing and underreporting figure much more prominently here, since in
this “non-fictional” genre, whether the report is accurate or adequate
often forms the focus of attention. In terms of this “factual” kind of un-
reliability, while in fiction—whether verbal or visual—the indicators
are usually intratextual problems (textual inconsistencies or incongrui-
ties), in autobiography, the case is more complicated, since unreliability
can occur not only at the intratextual level but also at the extratextual
and intertextual levels. If the events depicted in an autobiography, how-
ever consistent the text itself is, do not tally with extratextual reality,
we will be faced with “extratextual unreliability”; and if two or more
autobiographies representing the same life experiences do not accord
with each other, this will result in “intertextual unreliability” (see Shen
& Xu 2007 for a detailed discussion).
906 Dan Shen

In terms of the relation between author and narrator, there exists an

essential difference between autobiography and fiction. In autobiog-
raphy, the (implied) author and narrator often collapse into one, since it
is usually “an art of direct telling from author to audience” (Phelan
2005: 67) where the author is the narrator. As distinct from fiction, un-
reliability, in the autobiographical norm of “direct telling,” is usually a
matter of the “cognizant” reader’s judgment at the expense of the “I” as
the second self of the narrator-author (Shen & Xu 2007: 47–49). More-
over, in autobiography, markers of “factual” unreliability exist that are
not found in fiction, e.g. features indicating that the autobiographer (au-
thor-narrator) is fictionalizing her/his experiences (see Cohn 1999).
As a non-fictional genre, autobiography shares essential characteris-
tics with other non-fictional narratives, such as those in news reporting
or daily conversation. What has been said about autobiographical unre-
liability therefore applies in varying degrees to narratorial unreliability
in other types of non-fictional narratives as well (see Currie 1995: 19;
cf. Fludernik 2001: 97–98; Bamberg → Identity and Narration).

4 Topics for Further Investigation

(a) Unreliable narration in non-verbal media and in verbal genres other

than prose fiction. (b) In prose fiction, unreliability in postmodern fic-
tion, second-person narration, simultaneous narration, etc. (c) Unrelia-
bility in poetry, e.g. in the “dramatic monologue.” (d) The relation be-
tween unreliable narration and gender, class or racial issues. (e) In
dealing with textual incongruities, whether there are other integration
mechanisms or conceptual frames apart from those already identified.
(f) How different critical theories lead to different conceptions of the
same textual incongruities. (g) When a text is translated into another
language, how the different cultural context with different social norms
bear on the interpretation of unreliability. (h) Whether there are other
causes underlying unreliable narration. (i) Whether there are other indi-
cators of unreliable narration. (j) How to carry out a rhetorical investi-
gation of unreliability more effectively, especially in terms of a text
produced in a different historical or cultural context.
 Unreliability 907

5 Bibliography

5.1 Works Cited

Bierce, Ambrose (1911] 1946). “Oil of Dog” (1911). The Collected Writings of Am-
brose Bierce. New York: Citadel Press, 800–803.
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Bordwell, David (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P.
Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
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Cohn, Dorrit (1999). The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
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Fludernik, Monika (1999). “Defining (In)Sanity: The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpa-
per and the Question of Unreliability.” W. Grunzweig & A. Solbach (eds.).
Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Boundaries:
Narratology in Context. Tübingen: Narr, 75–95.
– (2001). “Fiction vs. Non-Fiction: Narratological Differentiation.” J. Helbig (ed.).
Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger.
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C., 85–103.
Fowler, Roger (1977). Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen.
Hansen, Per Krogh (2007). “Reconsidering the Unreliable Narrator.” Semiotica 165,
227–246.
Kozloff, Sarah (1988). Invisible Storytellers. Berkeley: U of California P.
Lanser, Susan S. (1981). The Narrative Act. Princeton: Princeton UP.
MacKay, D. M. (1972). “Formal Analysis of Communicative Processes.” College Eng-
lish 11, 265–269.
McCormick, Paul (2009). “Claims of Stable Identity and (Un)reliability in Dissonant
Narration.” Poetics Today 30.1, 31–72.
Nünning, Ansgar (1997a). “‘But why will you say that I am mad?’ On the Theory,
History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” Arbeiten aus An-
glistik und Amerikanistik 22, 83–105.
– (1997b). “Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Implied Author: The Resurrec-
tion of an Anthropomorphized Passepartout or the Obituary of a Critical Phe-
nomenon?” Anglistik. Organ des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 8, 95–116.
– (1999). “Unreliable, Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreli-
able Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses.” W. Grünzweig & A. Solbach
(eds.). Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Bounda-
ries: Narratology in Context. Tübingen: Narr, 53–73.
– (2005). “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and
Rhetorical Approaches.” J. Phelan & P. J. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion to
Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 89–107.
908 Dan Shen

Nünning, Vera (2004). “Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values
and Norms: The Vicar of Wakefield as a Test Case of a Cultural-Historical Narra-
tology.” Style 38, 236–252.
Olson, Greta (2003). “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narra-
tors.” Narrative 11, 93–109.
Pettersson, Bo (2005). “The Many Faces of Unreliable Narration: A Cognitive Narrato-
logical Reorientation.” H. Veivo et al. (eds.). Cognition and Literary Interpreta-
tion in Practice. Helsinki: Helsinki UP, 59–88.
Phelan, James (2005). Living to Tell about It. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
– (2007). “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Loli-
ta.” Narrative 15, 222–238.
– & Mary Patricia Martin (1999). “The Lessons of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegesis,
Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day.” D. Herman (ed.). Narratolo-
gies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 88–109.
Prince, Gerald ([1987] 2003). A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
Riggan, William (1981). Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-
Person Narrator. Norman: U of Oklahoma P.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics.
London: Routledge.
Schwarz, Daniel R. (1997). “Performative Saying and the Ethics of Reading: Adam
Zachary Newton’s Narrative Ethics.” Narrative 5, 188–206.
Shen, Dan (2005a). “Mind-style.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 566–567.
– (2005b). “Why Contextual and Formal Narratologies Need Each Other.” Journal
of Narrative Theory 35, 141–71.
– (2011). “What is the Implied Author?” Style 45.1, 80–98.
– “Implied Author, Authorial Audience, and Context: Form and History in Neo-
Aristotelian Rhetorical Fiction.” Narrative 21.2, 140–158.
– & Dejin Xu (2007). “Intratextuality, Intertextuality, and Extratexuality: Unrelia-
bility in Autobiography versus Fiction.” Poetics Today 28.1, 43–88.
Wall, Kathleen (1994). “The Remains of the Day and its Challenges to Theories of
Unreliable Narration.” Journal of Narrative Technique 24, 18–42.
Yacobi, Tamar (1981). “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.” Poetics
Today 2.2, 113–126.
– (2001). “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator’s (Un-
)Reliability.” Narrative 9, 223–229.
– (2005). “Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings:
Tolstoy’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’.” J. Phelan & P. J. Rabinowitz (eds.). A Companion
to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 108–123.
Zerweck, Bruno (2001). “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural
Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style 35, 151–178.
 Unreliability 909

5.2 Further Reading

Allrath, Gaby (2005). (En)Gendering Unreliable Narration. Trier: WVT.

D’hoker, Elke & Gunther Martens eds. (2008). Narrative Unreliability in the Twenti-
eth-Century First-Person Novel. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Hansen, Per Krogh (2008). “First Person, Present Tense. Authorial Presence and Unre-
liable Narration in Simultaneous Narration.” E. D’hoker & G. Martens (eds.).
Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth- Century First-Person Novel. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 317–338.
Herman, Luc & Bart Vervaeck (2008). “Didn’t Know Any Better: Race and Unreliable
Narration in ‘Low-Lands’ by Thomas Pynchon.” E. D’hoker & G. Martens (eds.).
Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 231–246.
Phelan, James (1989). “Narrative Discourse, Literary Character, and Ideology.” J. Phe-
lan (ed.). Reading Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 132–146.
Richardson, Brian (1988). “Point of View in Drama: Diegetic Monologue, Unreliable
Narrators, and the Author’s Voice on Stage.” Comparative Drama 22, 193–214.
Richardson, Brian (2006). “Postmodern Unreliability.” B. Richardson. Unnatural Voic-
es: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio
State UP, 103–105.
 Index
Aaker, David A. 111
Aarne, Antti 628
Aarseth, Espen 603, 608–612, 614f.
Abbate, Carolyn 471. 482
Abbott, Edwin 806
Abbott, H. Porter 51, 53ff., 70, 75, 100,
149, 159, 279, 317, 415, 427,
447, 477, 514, 570, 584, 603,
608, 635, 637, 686, 707, 711,
715, 758, 836, 862, 869
Abelson, Robert P. 49, 86, 756ff., 769
Abouzeid, Mary 497
Abraham, Ulf 502
Aczel, Richard 700
Adam, Jean-Michel 637, 862
Adorno, Theodor W. 259
Aeschylus 119
Alber, Jan 1, 48, 50, 75, 152f., 166,
211, 318, 320, 322, 455, 514,
678, 851, 889–892
Alexander, Marc 52, 86, 173, 234, 241,
254, 278, 317, 412, 425, 516,
594, 648, 751, 760, 802, 831
Allbritton, David W. 38
Allen, Woody 332
Allport, Gordon W. 247
Almén, Byron 588
Almodóvar, Pedro 400
Alphen, Ernst van 623, 633
Alter, Robert 282f., 347
Althusser, Louis 258, 261
Altieri, Charles 541, 543
Alvesson, Mats 109
Amenábar, Alejandro 399f.
Amis, Martin 153. 888
Amodio, Mark C. 119
Amsterdam, Anthony G. 374
Anderson, Joseph D. 283
Anderson, R. Lanier 354
Andersson, Greger 437
Andresen, Helga 494, 496
Andrews, Molly 584
Andrianova, Marija D. 570
Andringa, Els 524
Ankersmit, Franklin R. 231
Antaki, Charles 249
Antin, David 820
Antonioni, Michelangelo 389
Apollonius of Rhodos 119f.
Aristophanes119, 132
Aristotle 5, 30, 35, 41, 67, 132–136,
161, 184f., 242, 277, 281f., 312,
320, 448ff., 454, 469, 534f., 537,
540f., 564, 571, 578f., 590, 594,
609, 626f., 683, 707–711, 715,
743, 839, 859, 868, 875, 879
Arnauld, Andreas von 474, 377
Arnold, Matthew 535
Astruc, Alexandre 395
Atkinson, John Maxwell 94, 98
Attridge, Derek 539
Audet, René 587, 595f., 598, 637
Auerbach, Erich 116
Augst, Gerhard 493, 495, 500
Augustine 17ff., 454, 571, 868, 879
Aumüller, Matthias 674, 875
Auslander, Philip 681f.
Aust, Hugo 162
Austen, Jane 533, 709, 814
Austin, John L. 53
Austin, Michael 53
Avanessian, Armen 873
Ayelet, Ben-Yishai 603
Azaryahu, Maoz 800, 807
Babel, Isaak 723, 789
Baacke, Dieter 458
912 Index

Bachelard, Gaston 801 Beaujour, Michel 21, 862

Bacharach, Sandra 3 Beck, Ulrik 206
Backe, H.-J. 616f. Becker, Tabea 98f., 493–496, 499f.
Bae, Byung-Chull 832 Beckett, Samuel 317, 428, 650, 778
Bal, Mieke 199, 203, 208f., 265, 292, Beethoven, Ludwig van 481f.
304, 315, 317, 332, 397, 437, Bell, Alice 739, 889
471, 514f., 554ff., 570, 594, 624, Bell, Derrick 376
626, 633, 635, 637, 647, 699, Belov, V. 789
765, 852, 878 Belyj, Andrej 669, 722f., 767
Balcerzan, Edward 291 Bender, John 379, 869
Bally, Charles 815 Benedetti, Carla 2
Balter, Leon 271 Bénichou, Paul 6
Balzac, Honoré 328, 748, 805 Benjamin, Walter 258f.
Bamberg, Michael 16, 33, 51, 97, 100, Benveniste, Émile 292, 512, 647, 661
243, 248, 376, 413, 455, 492, Berensmeyer, Ingo 9
542, 575, 584, 681, 842f., 907 Berger, Karol 136
Banfield, Ann 187ff., 193f., 661, 684, Bergman, Ingmar 401
790, 813, 815, 819, 873f. Bergson, Henri 125
Barnes, Djuna 57 Berkum, Jos J. A. van 761
Baroni, Raphaël 74, 97, 160, 241, 276, Berlant, Lauren 214
317, 425, 491, 568, 596, 707, Bernaerts, Lars 154
710, 713, 734, 770, 837, 843 Bernhart, Walter 275, 283, 285
Barrows, Howard S. 412 Bernhart, Wolfgang 421
Barry, Jackson G. 623 Berns, Ute 243, 321, 635, 839
Barth, John 559 Bertaux, Daniel 246
Barthes, Roland 8, 32, 47f., 56, 66, Bessière, Jean 328
207, 220, 224, 262, 271, 364, Bhaya Nair, Rukmini 74
368, 412, 471, 511f., 537, 558f., Bickerton, Derek 815
608, 616, 631f., 711, 748f., 770f., Bierce, Ambrose 898
874, 877f., 881 Bieri, Peter 871
Bartlett, Frederick C. 49, 758 Biriotti, Nicola 8
Bateson, Gregory 618 Birk, Hanne 265
Battersby, James I. 543, 602 Birus, Hendrik 36
Baudelaire, Charles 685, 721 Bishara, Nina 350
Baudrillard, Jean 471 Bitzer, Lloyd F. 577
Bauer, Dale 210 Black, David A. 395
Bauman, Richard 681 Black, John B. 758
Baumann, Mario 330 Blackmur, Richard 312
Baumgartner, Hans Michael 229 Blanckenburg, Christian Friedrich von
Baxtin, Mixail 123ff., 210, 219–225, 627
260, 290, 303, 354, 358, 367ff., Bleich, David 746
410, 541, 565ff., 571, 647, 660, Bleumer, Hartmut 281
662, 745, 792f., 796, 812, 815, Blin, George 197
818, 821, 869, 871 Blomkamp, Neill 57
Bazin, André 390 Blommaert, Jan 98
Beardsley, Monroe C. 7, 291, 536 Boccaccio, Giovanni 161f., 547
 Index 913

Bode, Christoph 358f. Brinker, Menachem 281

Bohnenkamp, Anne 2 Brinton, Laurel 820
Boje, David M. 109 Brock, Timothy C. 153, 851
Bolter, Jay David 472, 610f., 800f. Brockmeier, Jens 53, 455, 497
Bongiorno, Andrew 135 Brody, Howard 415
Bonheim, Helmut 702 Broekman, Jan 374
Booker, Christopher 710 Broich, Ulrich 699
Booker, M. Keith 126 Bronwen, Thomas 585
Booth, Wayne C. 2, 7, 116, 207f., 263, Bronzwaer, Wilhelmus J. M. 293f.,
288, 291ff., 295, 301f., 306, 318f. 296
321, 346, 394, 423, 537, 539– Brooks, Cleanth 511, 536, 707, 710,
543, 566, 570, 626, 631, 651, 714
657, 684, 693, 696, 743ff., 747, Brooks, Peter 142, 372f., 459, 543,
749ff., 848f., 896ff. 900, 904 603, 633, 713, 873
Boothe, Brigitte 453 Brown, Cary A. 407
Bordwell, David 319, 384, 391, 394f., Brown, Gillian 68f., 94
401, 471, 481, 594, 609, 635, Browning, Robert 174, 357, 790
708, 712, 714, 761, 905 Broyard, Analtole 413
Borges, Jorge Luis 739 Brütsch, Matthias 386
Bortolussi, Marisa 52, 71, 74, 283, 648, Bruner, Jerome 20, 51, 160, 169f.,
751 245f., 376, 408, 451f., 459, 490,
Bosse, Heinrich 6 492, 542, 578, 594, 596, 602,
Boueke, Dietrich 493, 495 759, 837ff.
Bourdieu, Pierre 254 Bruyn, Günter de 15
Bourg, Tammy 524 Bublitz, Wolfram 69
Bower, Gordon 758 Buchholz, Sabine 797
Boyd, Brian 53, 710 Bühler, Karl 125, 288, 364, 790, 873
Boyle, T. C. 357 Bühler, Willi 820
Brahier, Gabriela 436 Bunin, Ivan 220
Brandist, Craig 125 Bunyan, John 18, 532
Branigan, David 761 Burke, Kenneth 248, 576f., 583, 745
Branigan, Edward R. 394, 396, 398, Burke, Michael 53
609, 635 Burke, Peter 18
Braun, N. 86 Burke, Seán 4, 8
Braun, Peter 21 Burkhardt, Armin 329
Brauner, Daniel J. 410 Burns, Allan 702
Brautigan, Richard 767 Buschmann, Matthias 359
Brecht, Bertolt 282, 428, 521, 686 Butler, Judith 379, 687
Bremond, Claude 86, 93, 99, 167, 207, Butler, Octavia 525
424, 471, 512, 549, 592, 625f., Butor, Michel 768, 778, 782
632, 635, 711, 734, 770, 877f. Butte, George 53
Breton, André 141 Buytendijk, Frederik J. J. 609
Breuer, Joseph 415 Caesar (Gaius Iulius Caesar) 660
Brewer, Mária Minich 208 Callimachus 119
Bringsjord, Selmer 86, 628, 829, 831 Caillois, Roger 616
Brinker, Klaus 99 Callaway, Charles 831
914 Index

Cammack, Jocelyn 283 Chomsky, Noam 631

Campbell, Joseph 36, 86, 769 Christensen, Lars Th. 109f.
Camus, Albert 315, 369 Christie, Agatha 654
Capps, Lisa 79, 97, 550, 682, 838, Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero) 769
841ff. Clair, R. P. 107
Carbough, Donal 455 Coetzee, J. M. 738
Card, Orson Scott 525 Cohen, Annabel J. 271, 274
Carnap, Rudolf 856 Cohen, Keith 385, 592, 596, 598
Caracciolo, Marco 151–154 Cohn, Dorrit 19, 22, 53f., 117, 151,
Carr, David 451, 454 181, 190f., 314, 317, 319, 331,
Carrard, Philippe 229, 236 333, 339, 357, 598, 600, 630,
Carroll, Joseph 710 697ff., 714, 736, 812f., 815, 898,
Carruthers, Mary J. 282 906
Carter, B. A. R. 692 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 232, 271,
Carter, Ronald 98 281, 357
Case, Alison A. 211 Collins, Wilkie 356
Cassirer, Ernst 125, 722 Colombani, Laetitia 400
Castelvetro, Lodovico 135 Condit, Celeste Michelle 578, 581f.,
Cavazza, M. 84, 86 584
Cavell, Stanley 541 Conermann, Stephan 436
Cellini, Benvenuto 20 Conrad, Joseph 260, 541, 552
Černov, Igor’ 510 Cook, Guy 757ff.
Cervantes, Miguel de 282 Coombe, Rosemary 373
Červenka, Miroslav 290, 306 Cordesse, Gérard 698
Čexov, Anton 303, 567, 674, 723 Corneille, Pierre 67, 280, 709
Chafe, Wallace 97, 99 Cornelissen, Joep 105, 108
Chalmers, David J. 154 Cornils, Anja 330, 458, 630, 637
Chambers, Ross 263 Cortázar, Julio 153, 331, 768
Charles, F. 86 Coste, Didier 555f., 647, 657f.
Charolles, Marc 78 Coulmas, Florian 815
Charon, Rita 414, 543 Coupland, Nikolas 94
Chartier, Roger 231 Courtés, Joseph 550, 565, 590
Chatman, Seymour 8, 37, 52, 56, 66, Couturier, Maurice 8
73, 135, 144, 169, 202f., 208, Cover, Robert M. 378f.
292ff., 296, 310f., 314–317, 319, Crane, R. S. 537, 707, 709, 713f.
321, 385, 388, 394f., 412, 428ff., Crawford, Chris 617
471, 513, 601, 609, 625f., 630, Crenshaw, Kimberlé 212
633f., 651, 654, 680, 684f., 693, Critchley, Simon 539
696, 712, 750, 766, 799, 850, Crittenden, Charles 33, 191
861ff., 869, 872, 874, 878, 897ff., Čudakov, Aleksandr 290
905 Culler, Jonathan 45, 56, 67, 75, 79,
Chateaubriand, Françoise-René 14, 186 138, 169, 262, 410, 508, 599,
Chaucer, Geoffrey140, 355, 767 625, 633, 746, 749, 770
Cheney, George 110 Culpeper, Jonathan 32, 73
Cheong, Yun-Gyung 87, 832 Culpepper, R. Alan 439
Chinca, Mark 95 Cummings, E. E. 77
 Index 915

Currie, Gregory 193, 661, 905f. Detering, Heinrich 3, 8

Currie, Mark 449, 871, 873 Dewey, John 523
Curtius, Ernst Robert 116, 135 D’hoker, Elke 655
Cutter, Martha J. 348 Dickens, Charles14, 96, 203, 541
Cutting, Douglass 637 Diderot, Denis 281f.
Dadlez, E. M. 523 Diehl, Joshua 79
Dällenbach, Lucien 339, 552 Diengott, Nilli 151, 209, 293
Dalí, Salvador 141 Dijk, Teun A. van 67, 78, 98, 254, 257,
Damasio, Antonio R. 53 564, 628, 637, 769, 771, 840, 855
Dammann, Günter 858 Dilthey, Wilhelm 19, 454, 500
Dancygier, Barabara 52 Diogenes Laertius 134
Danielewski, Mark Z. 807 Diomedes 135
Dannenberg, Hilary 53, 211, 707f., DiSalle, Robert 796
710ff., 715, 726, 735, 770, 802, D’Israeli, Isaac 17
878 Dissanayake, Ellen 53
Dante Alighieri 135 Dixon, Peter 52, 71, 74, 283, 648, 751
Danto, Arthur C. 229, 450, 454, 460 Döblin, Alfred 357, 781
Dassin, Jules 389 Dokic, Jérôme 192
Dautenhahn, Kirsten 475 Doležel, Lubomír 52ff., 185f., 220,
David, Jacques-Louis 478f. 232, 263, 569f., 589, 600, 633,
Davis, Mark H. 523f. 652, 726, 730f., 737f., 740, 769,
Davis, Lennard J. 259 818, 874, 891
Deal, Terrence 110 Dos Passos, John 357, 768, 781
de Beaugrande, Robert 65, 68, 758, 855 Dostoevskij, Fjodor M. 123f., 220, 222,
Deetz, Stan 107 224, 296, 302, 304, 366f., 369,
Defoe, Daniel 767, 888 567, 660, 669f., 673f., 793
DeGracia, Donald J. 146 Drach, Inna 572
Dehn, Mechthild 492f., 495ff., 502 Dressler, Wolfgang U. 65, 68, 855
Dehn, Natalie 827f. Droysen, Johann Gustav 230, 237
Dehn, Wilhelm 492 Dryden, John 709
De Lauretis, Teresa 208 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste 281
Deleuze, Gilles 471 Dubrow, Heather 427
Deleyto, Celestino 384 Duchan, Judith F. 51, 54, 560
Delgado, Richard 376 Dünne, Jörg 21
DeLillo, Don 68 Dumarsais, César Chesneau 329f.
Delius, Nicolaus 428 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 208, 711
de Man, Paul 21f., 257, 538f. Duyfhuizen, Bernard 551
De Marinis, Marco 682 Dyer, Richard 42
Demosthenes 120 Eagleton, Terry 254, 257f., 260f.
Dena, Christy 484 Eakin, Paul John 20, 25, 53, 543
Dennett, Daniel 139, 146 Easterlin, Nancy 53
Denning, Stephen 107, 109 Easthope, Antony 292, 295
Depew, Mary 119 Eaton, Marcia M. 33
Deppermann, Arnulf 97, 100 Ebner, Martin 439
Derrida, Jacques 537ff. Eckermann, Johann Peter 162
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine 255
916 Index

Eco, Umberto 7, 292, 307, 631, 726, Faulkner, William 73, 356, 556, 649,
732f., 748, 758, 761, 768, 771 767, 782, 815
Edelman, Lee 213 Fauconnier, Gilles 359, 797
Eder, Jens 32, 39f., 48, 52f., 56, 357, Fehn, Ann 625
635, 637 Fehr, Bernhard 820
Edmiston, William F. 199, 201, 693, Feltovich, Paul J. 412
699 Ferguson, Heather J. 761
Ehlich, Konrad 94, 99 Ferguson, Niall 185
Ehrlich, Marie-France 78 Ferrucci, David A. 86, 628, 829, 831
Ehrlich, Susan 814, 821 Fetterley, Judith 746
Eibl, Karl 9 Feyersinger, Erwin 335, 338
Eisen, Ute E. 328, 439 Fforde, Jasper 739
Eisenberg, Nancy 522 Fieguth, Rolf 2, 291, 305
Eisenlauer, Volker 442 Fielding, Henry 202, 537, 683, 709,
Ėjxenbaum, Boris 95f., 392, 509, 570, 713, 767
791f. Fiese, Barbara 79
Ėjzenštejn, Sergej 390 Finnern, Sönke 439, 441
Elam, Keir 682 Finney, Brian 199
Elias, Emy J. 264 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 681
Elias, Norbert 244 Fischer-Rosenthal, Wolfram 246
Eliot, T. S. 276, 331, 356f. Fish, Stanley 746f.
Elsaesser, Thomas 388, 391 Fishelov, David 42
Elsbree, Langdon 161, 166 Fisher, Walther 107, 578–583
Elson, Daniel K. 86 Fitzgerald, Faith T. 408
Emerson, Caryl 219, 225 Fix, Martin 497
Emmison, Miachael 180 Flaubert, Gustave 87, 291, 778, 814,
Emmott, Catherine 37, 50, 52, 54, 70, 848
73, 75, 86, 173, 234, 241, 254, Fleischman, Suzanne 874
278, 317, 412, 425, 516, 560, Fleming, Ian 711
594, 648, 751, 760f., 769, 772, Fludernik, Monika 1, 25, 47f., 50, 52f.,
802, 831 75, 79, 88, 93, 97, 100, 115f.,
Eng, Jan van der 303, 674 119, 149–155, 166, 211, 235,
Engels, Friedrich 255 264f., 311, 317, 319ff., 331, 333,
Erikson, Erik H. 245 344ff., 348ff., 371, 374ff., 386,
Erlinger, Hans Dieter 497 420, 427, 429f., 443, 455, 489,
Erll, Astrid 21 490, 514, 524, 527, 548, 551f.,
Ermida, Isabel 760 587, 594, 596, 598f., 601, 623,
Ernst, Ulrich 874 625, 634f., 637, 648, 659, 678f.,
Escher, M. C. 336, 338, 550, 807 682, 685f., 693, 698f., 751, 758,
Eskelinen, Marlin 608, 611 796, 813, 815ff., 819f., 840f.,
Eskin, Michael 254, 264 843, 850f., 855, 863f., 871, 878,
Esterhammer, Angela 686 887f., 891, 900, 906
Euripides 119 Flynn, Elizabeth A. 751
Fahrenwald, Claudia 492, 494 Foley, Miles 94
Farwell, Marilyn 214 Fombrun, Charles 108
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 387, 398 Fontanier, Pierre 329f.
 Index 917

Foote, Kenneth E. 800, 807 García Landa, José Ángel 75, 509, 511,
Ford, Madox Ford 849 514, 555f., 637
Forster, Edward M. 31, 41f., 88, 507, Gardner, Carl 378
510f., 594, 628, 695, 709ff., 739, Gardner, Jared 52
796 Garrod, Simon C. 756
Foster, Susan Leigh 471 Gass, William H. 346
Fothergill, Robert A. 21 Gaut, Berys 319, 387
Foucault, Michel 3, 8, 22, 449, 565 Gearey, A. 459
Foulkes, David 139 Geißler, Rolf 500
Fowler, Roger 700, 760, 899 Gelley, Alexander 862
Fox, Carol 496 Gennep, Arnold van 161, 165f.
Fraassen, Bastiann C. van 869 Genette, Gérard 22, 48, 54, 66, 85f., 99,
Frank, Armin Paul 355 117, 131, 133, 135, 179, 181,
Frank, Arthur 413f. 191, 197–203, 207f., 225, 236,
Frank, Joseph 668, 767. 779, 801, 806 247, 262, 293f., 304, 310ff.
Franzmann, Bodo 743, 747 314ff., 326f., 329–332, 334,
Frawley, William 160, 168 336f., 339, 345, 348, 365, 368,
Freeman, Elizabeth 214 385f., 396, 410, 422, 428ff., 437,
Freeman, Mark P. 246 439, 471, 508, 512–515, 547f.,
Frege, Gottlob 185, 730 552ff., 556–559, 566, 570f., 600,
Freud, Sigmund 20, 32, 36, 40, 139, 609, 619, 625ff., 630–633, 635,
142, 247, 256, 413, 415, 453, 713 646, 683f., 693, 696–699, 702,
Frevert, Ute 34 712, 743, 749, 758, 761, 766,
Freytag, Gustav 86, 710 770, 783, 796, 816, 848–852,
Fricke, Harald 338f. 861ff., 869f., 872ff., 877f.
Friedemann, Käte 7, 166, 313, 627, Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 69f., 243,
647, 651, 848, 851, 875f. 248, 584, 681, 842f., 855
Friedman, Andrew L. 105 George, Stefan 721
Friedman, Lawrence M. 378 Gergen, Kenneth J. 244, 451f
Friedman, Melvin 815 Gernsbacher, Morton Ann 72
Friedman, Norman 312, 629, 695, 698, Gerrig, Richard J. 38, 52, 56, 73, 87,
850 155, 271f., 283, 522f., 751, 761,
Friedman, Susan Stanford 211ff., 524, 851
797 Gervás, Pablo 86ff., 826
Frye, Northrop 207, 230, 236, 373, 516, Gerwitz, Paul D. 459
571, 707, 710 Gholamain, Mitra 40
Füger, Wilhelm 199f. Gibson, Andrew 449, 834, 878
Füredy, Viveca 550 Gibson, Walker 306, 743f., 749
Fulda, Daniel 233ff. Gilbert, Allan H. 135
Fulton, Helen 391, 396, 398 Giora, Rachel 65
Furtwängler, Frank 615 Giovanelli, Alessandro 851
Fusillo, Massimo 119 Givón, Talmy 72
Gaakeer, Jeanne 378 Gladfelder, Hal 379
Gallagher, Shaun 154 Głowinski, Michał 305, 368f.
Gallie, Walter B. 227 Gobé, Marc 111
Godall, H. L. 584
918 Index

Godard, Jean-Luc 389 Groeben, Norbert 743, 746

Godelier, Maurice 256 Grossmann, Honathan 379
Gölz, Christine 290 Grunewald, Ralph 373
Görlach, Manfred 856 Grusin, Richard 472, 611, 800
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 14, 18ff., Gubrium, Jaber F. 248, 584
161f., 450, 731, 738, 859ff. Gülich, Elisabeth 99
Goetsch, Paul 95 Günther, Hans 793
Goffman, Erving 49, 248, 526, 560 Gunning, Tom 141, 388, 609
Gogol, Nikolaj 566, 723, 789, 791 Gusdorf, Georges 20
Goguen, Joseph 84 Gutenberg, Andrea 711
Goldberg, Michael 458 Gymnich, Marion 265
Goldman, Laurence 180 Haard, Eric de 818
Goldman, Susan R. 73, 78 Habermas, Jürgen 257
Goldmann, Lucien 258 Häsner, Bernd 332
Goldstein, Philip 751 Hagener, Malte 391
Gombrich, Ernst H. 272f., 281, 283 Hahn, Alois 16
Goodrich, Peter 375 Hahn, Barabara 8
Goodson, Ivor F. 246 Hale, Dorothy L. 539, 543
Gosse, Edmund 16 Halle, Morris 142
Gottschall, Jonathan 710 Hallett, Wolfgang 484
Goutsos, Dionysis 69f. Halliday, Michael A. K. 67ff.
Goyal, Amit 87 Halliwell, Stephen 132, 134, 161, 448,
Gozzoli, Benezzo 479 450, 848, 851, 859
Grabes, Herbert 668, 767, 771 Halpern, Jodi 408
Grabócz, Márta 471, 482, 588, 635 Hamburger, Käte 151, 187ff., 193f.,
Grall, Catherine 648, 656 598, 600, 630f., 661, 871, 873f.
Gramsci, Antonio 255, 257f. Hamon, Philippe 262, 348, 862
Grausam, Daniel 350 Hansen, Per Krogh 674, 721, 898f.
Graves, Robert 767 Hansen-Löve, Aage 674, 721f., 790f.
Green, Melanie C. 153, 851 Hardy, Thomas 276
Greenhalgh, Trisha 413, 459 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 539
Gregory, Marshall 263 Harrell, D. A. 84
Greimas, Algirdas Julien 35, 48, 66, 93, Harrison, Mary-Catherine 526
207, 262, 368, 439, 481, 512, Hartling, Florian 4
550, 554, 565, 590ff., 626, 631f., Harth, Dietrich 227
769, 877f. Hartmann, Bernd 612
Grethlein, Jonas 99, 236 Hartmann, Ernest 139, 141
Grice, H. Paul 69, 74, 840 Hartner, Marcus 359
Griem, Julika 358, 395 Harweg, Roland 779
Griffin, Terri M. 496 Hasan, Ruqaiya 67ff.
Griffith, David Wark 388 Haslam, Michael 134
Grimm, Gunter 301, 307 Hatch, Mary Jo 108, 111f.
Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Haubold, Johannes 119
Christoffel von 767 Hauerwas, Stanley 458
Grishakova, Marina 52 Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard 34
Grodal, Torben 357, 387, 390, 396, 710 Hauschild, Christiane 170
 Index 919

Hauschild, Eberhard 442 Hjort, Mette 523

Hausendorf, Heiko 493, 498 Hobson, J. Allen 139, 143
Hauser, Gerald A. 575, 577 Hochman, Baruch 33, 42
Hawkins, Anne 79, 413 Hodge, Bob 98
Hawthorn, Jeremy 543 Hoek, Leo H. 292, 294
Haynes, Christine 3, 6, 8f. Hoesterey, Ingeborg 636
Head, Sir Henry 758 Hoey, Michael 69
Heath, Stephen 392 Hof, Renate 21, 23
Heelas, Paul 244 Hoffman, Martin 525f.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 453 Hoffmann, Thomas 497
Heidegger, Martin 454 Hofheinz, Marco 441
Heininger, Brnhard 439 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 721
Heinze, Richard 5, 889, 891 Hofstadter, Douglas 331, 336f., 807
Helbig, Jörg 396, 400 Hogan, Patrick Holm 52f., 452, 525f.,
Heliodorus 118 707, 710, 713
Hemingway, Ernest 315, 651, 684 Hogarth, William 479
Hempfer, Klaus W. 292, 860f. Holdenried, Michaela 21
Hengel, Loouis van den 24 Holk, André van 674
Henkel, Nikolaus 855 Holland, Norman 746
Hennig, Anke 873 Holloway, John 772
Herder, Johann Gottfried 17 Holmes, Jeremy 79
Herodotus 118, 120 Holstein, James A. 248, 584
Heritage, John 94, 98 Holthusen, Johannes 723
Herman, David 8, 32, 47–55, 57ff., 73, Holub, Robert C. 747
86, 93, 99ff., 126, 151f., 160, Home, Henry (Lord Kames) 281
166, 168, 191, 204, 210, 234, Homans, Margaret 208
243, 245f., 264, 359, 412, 448f., Homer 94, 118ff., 130, 134, 136, 140,
497, 560, 571, 588f., 594, 596, 221, 347, 469f., 566, 683, 781,
599f., 602, 623, 625, 632, 634, 859
648, 682, 714, 740, 751, 758f., Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 535,
761, 766, 769, 796, 801, 803, 709f., 743, 769
817, 821, 837, 841, 858, 869ff., Horkheimer, Max 259
880 Horstkotte, Silke 485
Herman, Luc 202 Hovland, Carl J. 771
Hertz, Randy 374 Howard, Ron 400
Hesiod 119 Howatson, Margaret C. 140
Hesse, Carla 6 Hühn, Peter 70, 85, 118, 173, 275, 284,
Hettling, Manfred 160, 164f. 295, 284, 295, 319f., 423–427,
Heyse, Paul 162 436, 452, 471, 475, 478, 491,
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura 760 567, 588f., 594, 597, 601, 608,
Hintikka, Jaakko 726 630, 635, 637, 682, 710, 759,
Hirsch, Eric D. 7 769, 796, 837f., 869
Hirsch, Marianne 471 Huet, Pierre-Daniel 627
Hirschkop, Ken 125 Huizinga, Jan 608
Hirt, Ernst 874, 876 Hume, David 15, 182, 189
Hitchcock, Alfred 394, 396 Humphrey, Robert 815
920 Index

Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery 411f., Jaszi, Peter 6, 8

415 Jauß, Karl Robert 40, 48, 67, 746, 869
Hurwitz, Brian 413, 459 Jean Paul 17
Husserl, Edmund 453f. Jedličková, Alice 365
Hutchby, Ian 94, 98 Jefferson, Gail 97
Hutcheon, Linda 345–348, 471, 679 Jeffries, Lesley 760
Hutcheon, Michael 471 Jelinek, Estelle E. 23
Hutchinson, Peter 355 Jenkins, Henry 484, 614, 617, 738, 809
Hutto, Daniel 53 Jensen, Peter Alberg 724
Hydén, Lars-Christer 53, 459 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 400
Hymes, Dell 492 Jhala, Arnav 832
Ibsch, Elrud 862 Johnson, B. S. 768
Ihwe, Jens 626 Johnson, Dan 527
Ingarden, Roman 49, 71, 368, 390, Johnson, Mark 154, 769, 802
744f., 747, 757f., 771 Johnson, Nancy 66, 758
Ingold, Felix Philipp 8 Johnson, Samuel 17
Invernizzi, Marcia A. 497 Johnson-Laird, Philip 758
Ireland, Ken 770 Johnstone, Barbara 94, 99
Iser, Wolfgang 48, 75, 152, 190, 292, Jones, Gregory 458
304, 306f., 354, 439, 597, 686f., Jong, Irene J. F. de 99, 116, 119f., 134,
743, 746ff., 757, 771 330
Irvine, Leslie 54 Jonson, Ben 709
Iversen, Stefan 889, 891f. Jonze, Spike 399
Jackson, Bernard S. 372f. Josipovici, Gabriel 778, 782
Jackson, Tony E. 51 Josselson, Ruthellen 246
Jäger, Georg 3 Jost, François 397f.
Jaeger, Stephan 230, 235, 451 Jost, Roland 497
Jäggi, Andreas 551, 558 Jouve, Vincent 262
Jahn, Manfred 48, 50, 52, 118, 201, Joyce, James 36, 174, 316, 356, 693,
319ff., 428ff., 633, 635, 686, 693, 780, 797, 815, 819
702, 751, 797 Joyce, Michael 768
Jakobson, Roman 142, 590, 647, 652, Jung, Carl G. 36, 142f.
667f., 671, 674, 720, 722 Juraga, Dubrovka 126
Jakubinskij, Lev P. 125 Juul, Jesper 608, 613
James, Henry 282, 291, 304, 316, 541, Kablitz, Andreas 198
629, 651, 683, 693ff., 700, 703, Kächele, Horst 453
709, 814, 849, 900 Kähler, Martin 438
James, William 244 Kafalenos, Emma 426, 707, 751, 766,
Jameson, Frederic 258, 260ff., 524 770f.
Janik, Christina 637 Kafka, Franz 77, 805, 901
Janko, Richard 135 Kalepky, Theodor 815
Jannidis, Fotis 2f., 6, 8f., 32, 34, 37, 53, Kansteiner, Wulf 230
56f., 66, 86, 93, 188, 215, 220, Kamp, Werner 4
241, 272, 313, 354, 588, 637, Kant, Immanuel 455, 758, 868
659, 735, 869 Kanzog, Klaus 551, 558
Jasińska, Maria 368 Karatsu, Mariko 839f., 843
 Index 921

Karlgren, Jussi 637 Klimek, Sonja 330ff., 334–338

Kayman, Martin A. 374 Kloepfer, Rolf 747
Kayser, Wolfgang 368 Knights, Lionel C. 33
Kearns, Michael 686 Koch, Peter 499
Keating, Patrick 52 Koch, Thomas 32
Keaton, Buster 400 Kock, Christian 163
Keen, Suzanne 32, 52, 115, 211, 349, Kocka, Jürgen 450
521, 524–527, 542, 593, 600, Köhler, Wolfgang 758
683, 736 Köppe, Tilmann 130, 661
Keller, Gottfried 14 Koffka, Kurt 758
Keller, Rudi 38 Kohli, Martin 17
Kellogg, Robert 116 Korman, Boris 223, 290, 309
Kemper, Dirk 572 Kormann, Eva 23
Kennedy, Alan 110 Korthals Altes, Liesbeth 262f., 456
Kennedy, Edward 576 Koselleck, Reinhard 190, 233
Kennedy, John F. 577 Kovalev, Oleg A. 570
Kenner, Hugh 819 Koževnikova, Natal’ja A. 222, 721,
Kerbrat-Orcchione, Catherine 595, 713, 724, 790, 819
771 Kozloff, Sarah 399, 471, 483, 905
Kermode, Frank 595, 713, 771 Kraan, Menno 422f.
Kern, Friedrike 493, 498, 500 Kracht, Christian 790
Keupp, Heiner 457 Kracke, Wand H. 140
Kerby, Anthony Paul 455 Krah, Hans 172ff.
Keßler, Eckhard 228 Kramer, Lawrence 588, 635
Kibal’nik, Sergej A. 570 Kraume, Lars 400
Kiefer, Jens 118, 173, 275, 424ff., 635, Kraus, Werner 457
759 Kreiswirth, Martin 448, 634
Kilroe, Patricia 138f., 141 Kress, Günther 98, 472f.
Kindt, Tom 7, 9, 75, 291, 293, 448, Kripke, Saul 185, 726, 737, 740, 880
623, 630f., 636 Kristeva, Julia 8, 224
King, Geoff 609 Kroll, Wilhelm 134
Kingsbury, Jack Dean 439 Kronsbein, Joachim 21
Kinney, Clare R. 421 Krüger, Klaus 283
Kintsch, Walter 78 Krummheuer, Götz 458
Kirkwood, William B. 581 Krzywinska, Tanya 609
Kitchen, Philip J. 110 Kuhn, Markus 319, 358f., 384, 386f.,
Kittay, Jeffrey 862 391, 393, 395, 398f., 401f., 476,
Kjeldsen, Jens E. 577 502, 608, 685, 760, 803, 869, 878
Klarer, Mario 855 Künzel, Christine 373
Klauk, Tobias 130 Kuiken, Don 155
Klaus, Peter 861 Kukkonen, Karin 334f., 338, 715
Klein, Sheldon 826, 830 Kumagi, Arno 413
Kleinschmidt, Erich 5 Kunz, Josef 162
Klemperer, George 407 Kurosawa, Akira 358, 389f.
Klepper, Heinz 20 Laas, Eva 396
Klepper, Martin 355 LaBerge, Stephen 146
922 Index

Labov, William 51, 93f., 97, 99f., 150, Lesser, Ruth 70

160, 162f., 442, 471, 490f., 493, Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 449, 470,
596, 599, 681, 803, 837, 839ff. 476, 769, 800, 869
Lacan, Jacques 40, 142, 258 Lester, James C. 831
LaCapra, Dominick 814 Levin, V. 724
Lachmann, Rolf 462 Levinas, Emmanuel 263, 539, 541
Laclau, Ernesto 257 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 256, 628, 631,
Laclos, Pierre-Françoise Choderlos de 877
356 Levinson, Stephen C. 96
Lämmert, Eberhard 67, 449, 626, 630, Lewis, David 38, 185f., 663, 826–730,
770, 872, 876 737, 740
Lahn, Silke 878 Lialina, Olia 768
Lakoff, George 154, 802 Lieblich, Amia 246
Lamarque, Peter 33 Liebeneiner, Wolfgang 401
Lamping, Dieter 36 Limoges, Jean-Marc 335
Landow, George P. 4, 610 Linde, Charlotte 51, 79, 803
Lang, Fritz 397 Lindemann, Uwe 354, 359
Lang, Sabine 333, 337 Linell, Per 126
Langer, Susanne 453 Linhares-Dias, Rui 850ff.
Langellier, Kristin M. 248 Link, Hannelore 292
Lanser, Susan S. 8, 208–214, 264f., Lintvelt, Jaap 292, 294, 302f., 700
294, 548, 633, 656, 687, 694, Lionett, Françoise 23
696, 701f., 716, 897 Lippert, Julia 235
Lardner, Ring 790 Lips, Marguerite 815
Larrain, Jorge 255 Liptay, Fabienne 396
Lattmann, Claas 136 Lobsien, Eckhard 283
Lauer, Gerhard 41 Lock, Andrew 244
Laurel, Brenda 609f. Lock, Charles 126
Lausberg, Heinrich 329 Lodge, David 683, 863
Laver, Sue 523 Lönneker, Birte 635, 832
Lawrence, D. H. 721 Löschnigg, Martin 21, 25
Le Bossu, René 709 Longacre, Robert E. 98
Lebowitz, Michael 828, 830f. Lonoff, Sue 356
Leech, Geoffrey N. 95, 813f. Lorck, Etienne 815
Leeuwen, Theo van 472f. Lord, Albert 94
Lehmann, Hans-Thies 428 Lorenzer, Alfred 453
Lehmann, Volkmar 637 Losey, Joseph W. 389
Lehnert, W. G. 86 Lothe, Jakob 319, 390, 392, 395, 543
Leibfried, Erwin 697 Lotman, Jurij M. 32, 34f., 160, 169–
Leitch, Thomas M. 597f. 174, 424f., 490, 567f., 571, 595,
Lejeune, Philippe 22, 25, 247 667, 671, 712, 760, 802, 805
Le Poidevin, Robin 777 Loxley, James 678
Lerch, Eugen 815 Lubbock, Percy 197f., 224, 312, 629f.,
Lermontov, Michail 221, 223 651, 683, 694ff., 848–851
Lesemann, Paul M. 496 Lucaites, Joun Louis 578, 581f., 584
Leskov, Nikolaj 789, 791f. Luchins, Abraham S. 771f.
 Index 923

Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele 97, 100 Marozza, Maria Ilena 139, 143

Ludwig, Otto 651 Marx, Karl 255
Lüderssen, Klaus 459 Mateas, Michael 86, 88, 635, 769
Lüth, Oliver 497 Mattingly, Cheryl 415
Luhmann, Niklas 232, 457 Mauz, Andreas 436, 441
Lukács, Georg 125, 258, 627, 869 Mazzocco, Philip 526
Lynch, David 77 Mazzoni, Jacopo 135
Lyotard, Jean-François 348, 450, 553, McAdams, Dan P. 67, 79, 246
711 McAuley, Gay 681
Lysias 120 McCabe, Alyssa 497f., 501, 760
Macherey, Pierre 261 McCarley, Robert 139, 143
Machor, James 751 McClary, Susan 588
MacIntyre, Alasdair 107, 451, 454, McCloud, Scott 471, 800
456, 542, 578f. McClure, Kevin 583
MacLean, Marie 685 McCormick, Paul 900
Mäkelä, Maria 817, 891f. McInerney, Jay 888
Mailloux, Steven J. 747 McIntosh-Varjabédian, Fiona 231f.
Mairs, Nancy 413 McLean, Hugh 788
Maître, Doreen 738 McHale, Brian 40, 125, 222, 312, 327,
Maiwald, Klaus 502 331, 336f., 421, 426, 555, 558,
Malina, Debra 327, 333, 338 597, 601, 678, 726, 739, 768,
Mamet, Daid 68 813f., 816f., 851
Mandler, Jean Matter 49, 66, 758 McLuhan, Marshall 470
Manguel, Alberto 743 McTiernan, John 400
Mani, Inderjeet 86, 88, 832, 881 Medved, Maria I. 53
Mankiewicz, Joseph 399 Medvedev, Pavel 125
Mann, Thomas 663, 673, 730 Meehan, James R. 825
Mannheim, Karl 253 Megill, Alan 233
Manovich, Lev 611 Meijer, Jan 671, 674
Mar, Raymond A. 526 Meinhard, Isolde 552
Marckschies, Christoph 440 Meister, Jan Christoph 84f., 89, 151,
Marcus, Amit 655 160, 167f., 180, 448, 537, 575,
Margolin, Uri 2, 32f., 36ff., 56, 73, 635, 637, 832, 873, 878, 880f.
151f., 193, 202, 220, 242, 313, Mellmann, Katja 41, 53, 283
345, 354, 384, 420, 449, 532, Mendes, Sam 396
623, 637, 649f., 657, 668, 726, Mendilow, A. A. 869
735f., 749, 771, 777, 783, 851 Menhard, Felicitas 357ff.
Marinelli, Lydia 141 Merker, Erna 551
Markowitsch, Hans 21 Merklinker, Daniela 499
Marmontel, Jean-François 281f. Metz, Christian 136, 385, 392, 471,
Martens, Gunther 655 602, 631, 635, 872
Martin, Joanne 107, 111 Meuter, Norbert 448, 455ff., 460, 462,
Martin, Mary Patricia 654, 896f. 508, 517, 634
Martínez, Matías 181, 449, 508, 513, Meyer, Michael 98
850, 873, 878 Meyer-Blanck, Michael 443
Martínez-Bonati, Félix 661
924 Index

Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus 329, 332, Müller, Klaus-Detlef 25

337 Müller-Funk, Wolfgang 448
Meyrowitz, Joshua 468 Müller-Zettelmann, Eva 275, 320, 422,
Mezei, Kathy 210f. 424, 427
Miall, David S. 53, 155, 283, 522, 524, Muir, Edwin 511
526, 760 Mukařovský, Jan 290f., 306f.
Michie, Donald 439 Mullan, John 356
Micznik, Vera 588 Mumby, Dennis 106f.
Miéville, China 891 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 400
Mikkonen, Kai 802 Murray, Henry A. 247
Mill, John Stuart 14 Murray, Janet H. 608, 610f., 613
Miller, D. A. 213, 379 Nabokov, Vladimir 19, 534, 566, 768,
Miller, J. Hillis 254, 538, 771 903ff.
Miller, Nancy K. 208, 707, 710 Nagel, Thomas 892
Miller, Nicola 8 Nardocchio, Elaine F. 751
Mills, Sara 760 Nash, Christopher 448
Milroy, Lesley 70 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 482
Mink, Louis O. 233, 450 Nauta, Ruurd 330
Minnis, Alastair J. 5 Neitzel, Britta 608f., 612f., 615, 618f.,
Minsky, Marvin 50, 756, 758 637, 715, 770
Misch, Georg 19, 125 Nell, Victor 283, 524
Mishler, Elliot G. 246, 248, 409 Nelles, William 54, 199, 203, 328f.,
Mitchell, William J. Thomas 448 333, 555, 559, 598, 658, 702
Mittell, Jason 484, 635 Nelson, Katherine492, 494
Mixajlovskij, Nikolaj 125 Neubert, Hansjörg 458
Möllendorff, Peter von 328 Neuhaus, Volker 359
Mommsen, Theodor 228f. Neumann, Bernd 20, 25
Mondada, Lorenza 99 Neumann, Birgit 16, 265, 272, 553,
Monneret, Philipp 740 653, 679
Montfort, Nick 86, 831f. Neuweg, Georg Hans 501
Montgomery, Robert 395 Newcomb, Anthony 588
Moran, Leslie J. 371 Newman, James 615
Moretti, Franco 86, 808 Newton, Adam Zachary 263, 540ff.
Morier, Henri 329 Newton, Issac 868
Moritz, Karl Philipp 14 Nichols, Mike 389
Morris, S. Daniel 407 Nicol, Martin 442
Morrison, Kristin 694 Niederhoff, Burkhard 40, 100, 125,
Morrison, Linda 457 188, 197, 203, 278f., 313, 353,
Morsing, Mette 112 359f., 385, 409, 514, 565, 629,
Morson, Gary Saul 219, 225, 589, 596 637, 653, 684, 693, 802
Moser, Christian 21 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 889, 891f.
Mosher, Harold F. 862 Nietzsche, Friedrich 18, 354, 723
Müller, Günther 630, 770, 872, 874, Nieuwland, Mante 761
876 Niggl, Günter 20
Müller, Hans-Harald 7, 9, 75, 291, 293, Nitz, Julia 235
448, 623, 630f., 636 Noë, Alva 48
 Index 925

Nöth, Winfried 350 Page, Ruth E. 211, 264, 585, 687, 711,
Nolan, Christopher 400 801
Norlyk, Birgitta 575 Palmer, Alan 32, 49, 53, 151f., 215,
Norman, Donald A. 757 726, 736, 760, 812, 814, 816f.,
Norrick, Neal R. 838, 842f 820f.
Norris, Luke 379 Pamuk, Orhan 356, 649
Nünlist, René 116, 135f. Pandian, M. S. S. 23
Nünning, Ansgar 126, 199, 210, 232, Panofsky, Erwin 390
272, 284, 293, 319f., 345, 348ff., Parr, Rolf 3
354f., 359, 420, 427, 429f., 449, Parry, Adam 94
524, 551, 553, 557, 624f., 634f., Pascal, Roy 20, 814, 818
637, 648, 653, 658, 679, 685, Pasternak, Boris 624
700f., 850, 869, 897, 903ff. Patron, Sylvie 661
Nünning, Vera 319, 354f., 359, 624f., Patte, Aline 439
634, 637 Patte, Daniel 439
Nussbaum, Felicity 17, 23 Pavel, Thomas G. 54, 115, 185f., 589,
Nussbaum, Martha C. 254, 456, 524ff., 628, 632f., 637, 726, 729, 769,
539–543 805
Oatley, Keith 40, 53, 153, 522 Pearce, Celia 614
Obama, Barack 576 Pecher, Diane 154
Obbink, Dirk 119 Pedri, Nancy 485
Ochs, Elinor 51, 79, 97, 550, 682, 838, Peer, Willie van 52, 630
841ff. Peinando, Federico 86
Ødegaard, Elin Eriksen 498 Peirce, Charles Sanders 38
O’Donnell, Patrick 346 Perelman, Chaïm 567f., 571, 576
Oelmüller, Willi 281 Perels, Christoph 162
Oesterreicher, Wulf 499 Pérez y Pérez, Rafael 828, 831
Ohlhus, Sören 493, 500f. Perks, Robert 100
Okopień-Sławińska, Alexandra 2, 291, Perreten, Peter 24
305, 368 Perry, Menakhem 48, 52, 770ff., 821
Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie 567, 571, 576 Peseschkian, Nassrat 442
Olins, Wally 111 Peters, Julie Stone 374
Olney, James 21f. Peters, Thomas 110, 374
Olsen, Stein Haugom 892 Petersen, Jürgen H. 650, 760
Olson, Greta 374, 900 Peterson, Carole 498, 760
O’Neill, Patrick 199 Peterson, Eric E. 248
Ong, Walter J. 94, 243, 468, 619 Petrarch, Francesco (Petrarca) 20
Ono, Tsuyoshi 98 Petrey, Sandy 686
Ortega y Gasset, José 354 Petrovskij, Michail 674, 861, 875
Orwell, George 532 Petrulionis, Sandra Harbert 235
Oulanoff, Hongor 724 Petrovskij, Michail 674, 861, 875
Pabst, Walter 161 Petsch, Robert 630, 876
Padučeva, Elena 304 Pettersson, Bo 716, 898
Paech, Joachim 388 Pfister, Manfred 320, 354, 357, 359,
Page, Norman 817 680, 683, 685f., 700f.
Pflugmacher, Torsten 862
926 Index

Phelan, James 25, 39, 123, 203, 263, Prince, Gerald 2, 39, 67, 75, 87, 123,
444, 448, 542, 575, 585, 599f., 126, 160, 167f., 202f., 206f., 265,
602, 654, 707f., 713f., 751, 772, 274, 301f., 304, 307, 310, 332,
896ff., 900, 906 345, 348, 354, 364, 366, 368,
Philips, Mark Salber 237 448, 513, 532, 549, 570, 588f.,
Pias, Claus 613, 616f. 593, 596, 600, 602, 623ff., 628,
Piatti, Barbara 808 632, 634, 653, 687, 743, 749f.,
Picard, John 551 769, 790, 837f., 840, 902
Pier, John 75f., 136, 271, 305, 326, Proclus (Proclos) 134
328, 331–334, 336, 338, 357, Propp, Vladimir 35, 66f., 86, 93, 99,
400, 412, 427, 511, 550, 552, 207, 424, 426, 439, 481, 491,
558, 594, 619, 636f., 658, 711f., 496, 508, 510, 512, 628, 707,
739, 770, 772, 785, 807 710f., 769, 877
Pietzcker, Carl 2 Protagoras 132
Pil’njak, Boris A. 720 Proust, Joëlle 192
Pindar 118ff. Proust, Marcel 14, 19, 208, 632, 654,
Piwowarczyk, Mary Ann 750 805, 878f.
Pizzi, D. 84, 87 Psathas, George 94
Plachta, Bodo 3 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 390
Plantinga, Alvin 726 Punday, Daniel 245, 551
Plato 4, 15, 117f., 129, 131–136, 184, Puškin, Aleksandr 365, 673f., 723
188, 281f., 312, 355, 453, 469, Putnam, Hilary 183
534f., 556, 589, 609, 626, 628, Putzmann, Linda 106
647, 682f., 694, 743, 814, 816, Quasthoff, Uta 97ff., 493, 498, 500
848, 859f. Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quitilianus)
Platonov, Andrej 789 330, 578f., 581
Plenzdorf, Ulrich 738 Rabau, Sophie 329
Plotnitsky, Arkady 453, 461 Rabatel, Alain 699f.
Plummer, Kenneth 246 Rabelais, François 540
Plutarch 118, 134, 767 Rabinowitz, Peter J. 263, 448, 482,
Pochat, Götz 449 594, 714, 750f., 848, 850
Poe, Edgar Allan 67 Radway, Janice 746
Poirier, Suzanne 410 Raglan, Lord 769
Polanski, Roman 389, 401 Rajewsky, Irina O. 350, 429f.
Polanyi, Livia 838, 840 Ranke, Leopold von 233, 236f., 767
Polkinghorne, Donald E. 245f., 448, Ranta, Michael 52
451 Ratcliffe, Matthew 156
Polletta, Francesca 584 Rathmann, Thomas 161, 164f.
Porter, Roger J. 247 Ravenscroft, Ian 193
Posner, Roland 380 Reber, Arthur S. 501
Potocki, Jan 356 Reformatskij, Aleksandr R. 875
Pouillon, Jean 197f., 629, 869, 873f. Regard, Frédéric 24
Pramling, Niklas 498 Reich, Wilhelm 256
Pratt, Mary Louise 74, 163, 368, 680, Reichl, Karl 95
686, 840 Reinhart, Tanya 78
Price, Richard 230 Remizov, Aleksej 789, 792
 Index 927

Rengakos, Antonios 99 Rose, Christian 439, 441

Renner, Karl Nikolaus 172 Rosenblatt, Louise M. 744
Rescher, Nicholas 726f. Rosenthal, Gabriele 246
Resnais, Alain 389f. Ross, Gary 400
Revaz, Françoise 601 Roth, Paul A. 460
Rhoads, David 439 Rouse, Richard 613
Richart de Fournival 281f. Roussin, Philippe 329, 570
Richards, Ivor Armstrong 744 Rowland, Robert 577f., 581, 583
Richardson, Alan 51 Rudrum, David 686
Richardson, Brian 210, 264, 294, 320, Rüsen, Jörn 450
427, 429, 524, 594, 635, 649f., Rüth, Axel 164
708, 711, 714, 751, 770, 871, Rumelhart, David E. 86, 628, 757f.,
889, 891f. 769
Richardson, Samuel 356, 683 Rushdie, Salman 347
Richardson, Scott 119 Russell, Bertrand 185
Richter, David H. 543 Ruston, Scott 808
Ricœur, Paul 16, 154, 164, 227, 242, Ruthrof, Horst 771
245, 448, 450f.,454f., 482, 509, Ryan, Marie-Laure 4, 30, 38, 52, 54,
517f., 568f., 571, 578, 590ff., 73, 120, 140, 152, 163, 166ff.,
707f., 714f., 873, 877ff. 185f., 188, 193, 243, 271, 275–
Riedl, Mark 829f. 278, 283, 294, 319, 331, 334,
Riessman, Catherine Kohler 248 359, 430, 449, 475, 484, 502,
Riffaterre, Michael 743, 746 527, 536, 550, 555, 557f., 570,
Riggan, William 899 588f., 593f., 596, 600f., 603, 608,
Rigney, Ann 230, 840 610, 612ff., 617ff., 623, 626, 633,
Rilke, Rainer Maria 721 635, 637, 657, 661, 679, 710f.,
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 41, 135, 716, 726, 729, 733ff., 737ff.,
199, 292f., 296, 315, 327, 513f., 837f., 840f., 869, 889
554, 654, 700, 846, 850, 852, Rymar’, Nikolaj 290, 306
878, 898f. Sacks, Harvey 96f., 837f., 843
Roberts, Glenn 79 Sacks, Oliver 602
Robinson, Jenefer 156 Sager, Sven F. 99
Robinson, Sally 264 Saint-Gelais, Richard 332, 737
Roddenberry, Gene 525 Salinger, J. D. 96, 790
Roermund, G. C. van 459 Salmon, Christian 457, 584
Rösler, Hannes 378 Salway, Andrew 52, 86
Roesler, Wolfgang 17 Sanford, Anthony J. 52, 756, 761
Rohr, Susanne 21, 23 Saporta, Mark768f.
Rohwer-Happe, Gislind 423, 790 Sappho 120
Rohy, Valerie 214 Saramago, José 356
Romberg, Bertil 116 Sarat, Austin 374
Ron, Moshe 817 Sarbin, Theordore R. 246, 451f.
Ronen, Ruth 54, 185f., 726, 740, 797, Sartre, Jean Paul 19, 744f.
861, 870, 880, 888 Sartwell, Crispin 247
Roof, Judith 213 Saussure, Ferdinand de 58, 471, 512,
Rosch, Eleanor 48, 71 565, 877
928 Index

Scanlan, Timothy M. 709 Schneider, Ralph 804

Schafer, Roy 453 Schneider-Flume, Gunda 441
Schäfer, L. 86 Schnitzler, Arthur 648
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 112, 188, 232, Schön, Erich 40
241, 271, 275, 312, 334, 338, Schönert, Jörg 22, 173, 220, 242, 320,
495, 508, 584, 591, 728, 740, 798 420, 423f., 426f., 449, 635, 637,
Schaff, Barbara 4 646, 743, 878
Schaffer, Kay 376 Scholes, Robert 41, 116, 346, 389,
Schank, Roger C. 35f., 49, 86, 756ff., 597f., 700, 877
769 Scholz, Bernhard F. 6
Schapp, Wilhelm 453, 458 Scholz, Stefan 442
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 94, 97f. Schonfield, Ernest 356
Scheffel, Michael 86, 181, 348, 449, Schroeder, Ralph 739
508, 513f., 712, 850, 873f., 878 Schröter, Jens 440
Schein, Edgar H. 110 Schüler, Lis 502
Schenk-Haupt, Stefan 429f. Schütze, Fritz 246
Scherer, Jacques 809 Schultz, Maiken 108
Scherer, Wilhelm 37 Schultze, Quentin J. 443
Schernus, Wilhelm XII, 630, 637 Schulz, Don E. 110ff.
Scherpe, Klaus 862 Schulze, Theodor 458
Scheuerl, Hans 609 Schwarz, Daniel R. 900
Schiffrin, Deborah 97f. Schweickart, Patricinio P. 751
Schlaffer, Hannelore 161 Schweinitz, Jörg 388, 392
Schlickers, Sabine 329, 332f., 337, 395, Schwemmer, Oswald 451, 454, 460
397f., 635 Scorsese, Martin 389
Schlüter, Sabine 858 Scott, Walter 96, 709
Schmid, Wolf 1f., 71, 96, 166, 169, Scudéry, Geroges de 709
173f., 188, 220, 222f., 225, 236f., Searle, John 183, 186, 189ff., 662, 680,
263, 292, 294, 301–304, 307, 686
316–319, 339, 354, 360, 364– Seaton, Douglas 471, 482, 635
367, 420, 507–510, 515, 517, Seemann, Klaus Dieter 422f.
531f., 552f., 565, 567, 571, 589, Selbmann, Rolf 6
593, 595, 602, 608, 629, 631, Sellors, Paul C. 387
636f., 661, 664, 669, 673f., 679, Semino, Elena 424, 758ff.
685, 699f., 702, 712, 720f., 723f., Sempé, Jean-Jacques 480f.
747, 751, 787, 790, 794, 812, Sengers, Phoebe 635
818, 873, 875, 896 Seybold, David Christoph 17
Schmidt, Johann N. 319, 357f., 476, Shaffer, Peter 428
502, 608, 685, 760, 803 Shakespeare, William 67, 280, 282, 357
Schmidt, Siegfried J. 8, 626 Shelley, Mary 357
Schmitz, Barabara 437 Shen, Dan 145, 198, 247, 288, 294,
Schnabel, Julian 395 304, 359, 396, 423, 789, 871,
Schneider, Jost 743 896, 902, 905f.
Schneider, Manfred 23 Shepherd, David 125, 210, 249, 260,
Schneider, Ralf 32, 34, 38, 56f., 73, 355, 556, 821
524 Short, Michael H. 95
 Index 929

Showalter, Elaine208 Stableford, Brian 891

Shryock, Richard 558 Staiger, Emil 860f.
Shumaker, Wayne 20 Stang, Richard 694
Shyamalan, M. Night 399 Stanzel, Franz K. 50, 67, 71, 99, 166,
Sidney, Sir Philip 535 181, 310–318, 421, 428ff., 449,
Sikes, Pat 246 589, 629f., 647, 694, 696ff., 702,
Silverman, David 409 819, 848
Simanowski, Roberto 4 Starobinski, Jean 20
Simmel, Georg 227 Starritt, Alexander 9, 503
Simonides of Ceos 470 States, Bert O. 139, 144ff.
Simon-Shoshan, Moshe 587, 603 Steedman, Carolyn 16
Simpson, Paul 760 Steen, Francis F. 51
Sinclair, John M. 69 Stein, Gertrude 15, 19, 497
Singer, Bryan 358, 399 Stein, Nancy 66, 412
Siodmak, Robert 389 Steinberg, Günther 815
Šklovskij, Viktor B. 85, 339, 346, Steinke, Anthrin 395
509f., 512, 516, 536, 559, 629, Steiner, Wendy 471, 479, 800
631, 671, 674, 712, 720, 724, Stempel, Wolf-Dieter 167f.
788, 870, 874f., 887 Stern, Andrew 86, 88, 769
Skobelev, Vladislav 290, 306 Sternberg, Meir 48f., 51f., 54, 152, 166,
Sławiński, Janusz 291 169, 180, 265, 375, 498, 436f.,
Sloterdijk, Peter 17, 23 458f., 482, 511, 522, 524, 587,
Smith, Brett 842 590, 593f., 597, 601ff., 637, 684,
Smith, Sidonie 16f., 24, 376 707, 712f., 812, 816, 821, 841,
Smolett, Tobias 356 843, 870, 874, 879
Smuda, Manfred 283 Sterne, Laurence 346, 509, 685, 767
Sokurov, Alexander 394f. Stiegler, Bernd 21
Solženicyn, Aleksandr 222 Stierle, Karlheinz 508, 514f., 673, 747
Sommer, Roy 118, 210ff., 265, 319f. Stillinger, Jack 424, 426
420, 427, 429f., 471, 588, 608, Stockwell, Peter 50, 760
635, 682, 686, 850, 860 Stoppard, Tom 320, 686
Sophocles 118f. Strasburger, Herman 117
Souriau, Etienne 312, 869 Straub, Jürgen 448, 450
Souvage, Jacques 570 Strawson, Galen 242, 248, 455, 542f.,
Sowa, Hubert 502 602
Sparkes, Andrew C. 842 Streib, Heinz 443
Spearing, Anthony C. 140 Stroud, Scott R. 581, 583
Sperber, Dan 38, 74f. Strube, Werner 7, 283, 856
Spicer, André 109 Struve, Gleb 724
Spielhagen, Friedrich 312, 627, 651, Stubbs, Michael 69
858 Stude, Juliane 501
Spinner, Kaspar 497 Stühring, Jan 661
Spitzer, Leo 819 Sturgess, Philip J. M. 587, 592, 596,
Spoerhase, Carlos 3 598, 637
Spolsky, Ellen 51 Suleiman, Susan R. 747
Squire, K. 617 Surkamp, Carola 359, 700
930 Index

Šukšin, V. 789 Tollefsen, Deborah 3

Susman, Margarete 7 Tolstoj, Lev 220f., 296, 303f., 567,
Suter, Andreas 160, 164f. 669f., 674, 805
Sutton-Smith, Brian 611 Tomaševskij, Boris 85, 507, 509–513,
Swales, Martin 162 515, 594, 629, 712, 869
Swedenberg, H. T. 709 Tomassini, Giovanni Battista 556, 558
Swift, Jonathan 888 Tomasulo, Frank P. 395
Tait, Allison 379 Tommola, Hannu 815
Tamarčenko, Natan D. 223, 225, 568 Tompkins, Jane 48
Tammi, Pekka 75, 815 Toolan, Michael J. 70, 247, 293, 304,
Tan, Ed S. 525 588, 637, 757, 771f., 814, 817,
Tannen, Deborah 97ff. 830, 850
Tarantino, Quentin 399 Toro, Alfonso de 779, 870, 874, 878
Tarasti, Eero 471, 481 Torode, Brian 409
Taylor, Charles 17, 241, 456 Townsend, Alex 358
Taylor, Marjorie 521, 523 Trabasso, Thomas R. 412
Tedlock, Dennis 95 Triandis, Harry Ch. 244
Terkel, Studs 94, 246 Tröhler, Margrit 36
Theocritus 117, 119 Trollope, Anthony 96
Thomä, Helmut 453 Trubeckoj, Nikolaj 861
Thomas, Bronwen 817 Truffaut, François 399
Thomas, Brook 379 Turner, Marc 359
Thompson, Evan 48 Turner, Mark 507f., 475, 797, 802
Thompson, Kristin 471 Turner, Scott R. 828, 830f.
Thompson, Sandra A. 98 Turner, Victor W. 681
Thompson, Stith 628 Twain, Mark 534, 540, 542, 790
Thomsen, Christian W. 611 Tynjanov, Jurij 289, 509, 590, 723, 792
Thomson, Alistair 100 Ullmann, Stephen 815
Thomson-Jones, Katherine 649 Uspenskij, Boris A. 207, 221f., 260,
Thon, Jan-Noël 52, 485, 613, 615, 619 314, 360, 570f., 629, 700, 702,
Thoreau, Henry David 24 803, 818, 873
Thorndyke, Perry W. 66 Vaina, Lucia 732
Thucydides 118, 356 Varela, Francisco J. 48, 154
Tieck, Ludwig 162, 356 Varga, A. Kibédi 477
Tihanov, Galin 125 Vatz, Richard E. 577
Titunik, Irwin 788 Vendler, Zeno 168, 857
Titzmann, Michael 170, 172f., 624 Vette, Joachim 438
Tjupa, Valerij 124, 219, 225, 354, 781, Veyne, Paul 180, 450, 569, 571
793, 818 Vincent, J. Keith 214
Tobler, Adolf 815 Vinogradov, Viktor 96, 289ff., 674,
Todemann, Friedrich 815 792
Todorov, Tzvetan 48, 67, 167f., 197f., Vismann, Cornelia374
207, 394, 426, 507, 511–515, Vitoux, Pierre 699f., 703
517, 549, 559, 613, 615, 618, Vitz, Evelyn Birge
624f., 631f., 635, 680, 686, 707, Voigts-Virchow, Eckhart 395
710f., 734, 749, 769, 869, 877f. Volek, Emil 509, 511, 514
 Index 931

Volkening, Heide 16, 21 Werner, Lukas 86, 869, 871

Vološinov, Valentin N. 125, 220, 223, Werth, Paul 51, 54, 73, 761, 796
256, 260, 813, 815, 817ff. Wertheimer, Max 758
Vossler, Karl 125 West, Martin L. 119
Voznesenskij, Andrej 671 West, Robin 373
Vultur, Ioana 275, 312 Westphal, Bertrand 808
Vygotskij, Lev 509 Weststeijn, Willem G. 424
Wages, Richard 614 Wexler, Alice 415
Wagner, Frank 327, 332, 337 White, Hayden 228, 230f., 236, 450f.,
Wagner, Klaus L. 490, 501 508f., 515ff., 569, 571, 578,
Walker, Cheryl 8 591f., 594f., 598, 600, 634, 707,
Wall, Kathleen 899 714f.
Walsh, Richard 74, 144, 318f., 322, White, James B. 375
522, 556, 584, 592, 600, 602, 661 Whitehead, Alfred North 462
Walter, Klaus 612, 615 Widdicombe, Sue 249
Walton, Kendall 38, 184, 189f., 270f., Wieler, Petra 489, 493f., 499
273, 283, 654, 658, 660, 729 Wiesenfarth, Joseph 848f., 851
Wardetzky, Kristin 493, 496, 498f. Wilde, Oscar 709
Warhol, Robyn R. 209ff., 213ff., 264, Wilder, Billy 427
524, 713f. Wilder, Thornton 320
Warner, Michael 214 Wilensky, Robert 88, 758
Warren, Austin 33 Willems, Gottfried 848
Warren, Robert Penn 511, 536, 707, Williams, Jeffrey 551, 557ff.
710f., 714 Williams , Patricia 376
Waterman, Robert 110 Williams, Patrick 123
Watson, Julia 16f., 24 Williams, Raymond 256f
Watt, Ian 869 Williams, Tennessee 428
Wattanasuwan, Kritsadarat 112 Wilson, Deridre 38, 74f.
Watts, Richard J. 74 Wimsatt, William K. 7, 291, 536
Waugh, Patricia 346f. Winko, Simone 3, 8f., 41
Weber, Dietrich 873 Winterson, Jeanette 214
Weick, Karl 111 Wispé, Lauren 525
Weidle, Roland 348f., 420, 430 Wittig, Monique 779, 782
Weimann, Robert 696 Wittig, Susan 99
Weinhold, Swantje 493f., 496, 499 Wodak, Ruth 98
Weinrich, Harald 440, 874 Wolf, Christa 15
Weinsheimer, Joel 30 Wolf, Dagmar 452
Weintraub, Karl J. 18 Wolf, Mark J. P. 612
Weisberg, Richard H. 375 Wolf, Norbert Christian 9
Weixler, Antonius 86, 869 Wolf, Werner 52, 152, 182, 275–278,
Wellbery, David E. 869 281ff., 285, 319f., 327, 334,
Wellek, René 33, 536, 711 336ff., 345, 347–350, 357, 380,
Wellmann, Henry M. 492 422, 472, 477ff., 482, 548, 551f.,
Welles, Orson 389f. 556, 560, 588, 635f., 678, 682,
Welzer, Harald 21 685f., 851, 891
Wenzel, Knut 458 Wolf, Yvonne 396
932 Index

Wolff, Erwin 307 Yule, George 68f., 94

Wolff Lundholt, Marianne 575 Zahavi, Dan 154
Wolfson, Nessa 100 Zamjatin, Evgenij 723f.
Woloch, Alex 215 Zbinden, Karine 125
Woodmansee, Martha 6, 8 Ždanova, Anna V. 566
Woods, Robert H. 443 Zerweck, Bruno 903f
Wooffitt, Robin 94, 98 Zielinski, Thaddeus 779
Woolf, Virginia 19, 356, 600, 695, 721, Zillman, Dolf 522, 524
815, 879 Zima, Peter 257
Wordsworth, William 15, 24 Zipfel, Frank 186, 191, 292
Worth, Sol 475 Žirmunskij, Viktor 723
Wunderlich, Werner 8 Žižek, Slavoj 256
Yacobi, Tamar 288, 655, 898, 901ff. Zola, Émile 781, 814
Yanal, Robert J. 522f. Zoran, Gabriel 797, 799
Yaron, Iris 69 Zoščenko, Michail 789, 792f.
Yellowlees, Douglas J. 771 Zubin, David A. 803
Young, Christopher 95, 99 Zunshine, Lisa 34, 53, 816, 820
Young, Katherine Galloway 99, 550 Zwaan, Rolf A. 154, 278, 283
Young, Michael 829f., 832 Žyličeva, Galina A.571
Xenophon131 Zymner, Rüdiger 860
Xu, Jejin 905f.