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Concept
Narratology
Summary
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov (Grammaire du Décaméron, 1969). Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp (Morphology of the Folktale, 1928), and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).
Cognitive narratology is a more recent development that allows for a broader understanding of narrative. Rather than focus on the structure of the story, cognitive narratology asks "how humans make sense of stories" and "how humans use stories as sense-making instruments".
Narrative and Plot (narrative)
Structuralist narratologists like Rimmon-Kenan define narrative fiction as "the narration of a succession of fictional events".
Cognitive narratologists focus on how people experience something as narrative rather than on the structure of the text itself. The six-word story "For sale: baby shoes, never worn", is often given as an example that would not qualify as a narrative in the strictly structural approach, but that evokes a sense of narrative.
Marie-Laure Ryan distinguishes between "a narrative" as an object that can be clearly defined and the quality of narrativity, which means "being able to inspire a narrative response”. This allows her to understand video games as possessing narrativity without necessarily being conventional narratives. Astrid Ensslin builds upon this, explaining that "games have the potential to evoke multiple, individualized narrative scripts through world-building, causal event design, character development and other elements that players interact with the intention to solve problems and make progress".
The origins of narratology lend to it a strong association with the structuralist quest for a formal system of useful description applicable to any narrative content, by analogy with the grammars used as a basis for parsing sentences in some forms of linguistics.
Official source
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