Narratology
Kathleen Ahrens
Hong Kong Baptist University
How a story is structured
• Narrative Structure
– Characterization
– Plot
• Visual Structure
– Color
– Shape
– Position
Telling a story
• Think of a story that is important to you –
– Meeting your partner
– Giving birth
– Accomplishing a goal
You as the storyteller
• Pick one story
• Imagine yourself telling this story to:
– Your child
– Your best friend
– Your boss
Analyze your stories
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How did the story change?
Where did you begin?
Where did you end?
How many details did you add?
How much personal information did you
reveal?
What is Narratology?
• Refers to the structuralist study of narrative
• How recurrent elements, themes, and patterns
yield a set of universals that determine the makeup
of a story
• Goal: To move from a taxonomy of elements to an
understanding of how these elements are arranged
in actual narratives, fictional and non-fictional
Intellectual Tradition
• Linguistic work of Ferdinand de Sassure
(1857-1913, Swiss linguist)
• Distinguished between parole (specific
instances of spoken language) and langue
(the idealized abstract grammar)
Structuralism
• The study of systems or structures as
independent from meaning (field of
semiotics)
Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)
• Russian formalist
• Demonstrated how literary language
differed from ordinary language
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)
• French anthropologist
• He concluded that myths found in various
cultures can be interpreted in terms of their
repetitive structures
Vladimir Propp (1895-1970)
• Morphology and the Folktale (1928)
• Influenced Claude Levi-Strauss and
Roland Barthes
• Unnoticed in the West until it was
translated in the 1950’s
• Extended the Russian formalist approach to
the study of narrative structure
• Formalism – sentence structure was broken
down into the smallest analyzable elements
- morphemes
• Propp analyzed fairy tales and broke them
down into the smallest narrative units –
narratemes
• Created a typology of narrative structures
• Analyzed character and type of action
• 31 generic narratemes
How do children develop their
concept of story?
• Applebee (1978)’s study shows that a
child’s idea of a story parallels other
cognitive abilities and is related to general
growth in ability to take on others’
perspectives
• Applebee (1978) described 6 stages in
children’s event-arrangement from ‘heaps’
(mere lists of unrelated perceptions) to ‘true
narratives’ (complete events that reveal a
theme or evaluation of experience
How do children develop their
concept of story?
• Other researches shows that children in the
telling of their own stories gradually develop
certain literary conventions (i.e. ‘once upon a
time’)
• Developments that parallel children’s storytelling
abilities occur in their responses to narratives
• Storying is central to personal and ethical
development
How does culture affect the
interpretation and telling of stories?
• Important differences among cultural
groups are reflected in their explanatory
stories of the universe
• Similar events appear radically dissimilar
when viewed through the lenses of different
cultural traditions
How does culture affect the
interpretation and telling of stories?
• Chafe (1980) showed that different nationalities
have different storytelling performances after
watching a short film
• Americans focused on details and temporal
sequencing
• Greeks sought a larger story context and ascribed
social motives to character
• Not only different story lines but also
diverse linguistic strategies for stating
explanations
Relationship between language arts and
narratives
• Stories will be a major vehicle of students’
language development
• In encouraging their storymaking, along
with their personal responses to the stories
they read, teachers are fostering their
personal and cultural development
Relationship between language arts and
narratives
• Narratology is concerned with how the individual
mind seems to encode information about the
world through highly personalised schemata
• Storymaking provides a natural transition into
more formal writing tasks
• Narratology is fundamentally related to teaching
and learning at all grade levels and even beyond
the classroom
Narrateme sequence in fairy tales
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A family member leaves home (hero)
Hero is forbidden to do something
The hero does the forbidden thing
The villain gains information about the hero
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Victim unwittingly helps the hero
Villain causes harm to family member
Hero is tested
Hero acquires use of magical agent
Hero and villain fight
Villain is defeated
Hero returns home
Hero marries and ascends the throne
The Study of Narrative Structure
• Narratology: The study of story structure
• Fundamental idea: stories provide the initial
and continuing means for shaping our
experience
Main ideas
• Second idea: Stories are the repository of
our collective wisdom about the world
• Third idea: They are the mediating
structures for our encounters with reality
8 Broad Character Types
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The villain
The donor (prepares the hero)
The magical helper
The princess
Her father
The dispatcher (sends hero off)
The hero
False hero
Example
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Analyze the tale of Little Red Riding Hood
What is she forbidden to do?
How does she help the wolf?
How is she deceived by the wolf?
What happens?
How is the problem resolved?
Criticism
• Removes verbal consideration (language)
from the analysis
• Removes considerations of tone, mood,
character
• Can no longer distinguish one fairy tale
from another
Response
• Not meant to look at meaning or
distinguish between fairy tales
• Goal was simply to look at the elemental
building blocks that formed the basis of
narrative structure
Structuralist Approach
• Claude Levi-Strauss
• Born 1908, French anthropologist
• Structuralism is concerned with the
meaning of different social practices
• Meaning is something to be uncovered, it
is not transparent and self-evident
Paradoxes of Myth
• Myths – fantastic, unpredictable, arbitrary
• Myths in different cultures are similar
• How can myths be so similar when they
seem so arbitrary?
Proposal
• Universal laws govern mythical thoughts
• Each myth is just a particular instance of a
universal law of human thought
Example
• In Native-American stories, the ‘trickster’
acts as a mediator
• Raven or coyote
• Contradictory personality
• Raven and coyote eat carrion (dead meat)
• Half-way between life and death (i.e. they
don’t kill animals and they don’t eat plants)
• They reconcile opposed concepts of life
and death
• Own character reflects this contradiction –
they have a ‘tricky’ personality
• Through myths people develop often
sophisticated and communally shared
symbolic orders of meaning
• There are no ‘primitive’ societies
Questions
• What is the meaning of the ‘wolf’ in Little
Red Riding Hood?
• What is the meaning of the ‘hunter’?
• What is the meaning of Little Red Riding
Hood? What does she stand for?
Roland Barthes
• Barthes (1915-1980) – French literary critic
and philosopher
• Worked with structuralism
• Analyzed narrative along linguistic lines
• Three hierarchical levels
• Function - an elementary piece of a work;
a single descriptive word that can describe
a character
• Action – the character itself
• Narrative – composed of various actions
• 1960’s Derrida identified the flaw of
structuralism as relying on a standard of
measurement that is universal
• However, no symbols of constant and universal
significance exist – therefore, to evaluate
anything is meaningless
• Barthes re-evaluated structuralism
• Went to Japan
• Concluded that signed in Japan exist only
because of the significance given to them
by the people who read them
• Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author
(1968)
• The author as an authority
• Considered to be a forced projection of the
text
• Barthes point: great number of meanings
in language
• Also, no one can know the state of an
author’s mind
• Therefore, any notion of the author as the
ultimate authority is wrong
Where does meaning come from?
• If meaning doesn’t come from the author,
where does it come from?
• Suggestion: It comes from the reader
• S/Z (1970) – Barthes analyses a short story
by Balzac
• Determined 5 major codes for determining
significance
• Hermeneutic code denotes the series of
questions or enigmas that move the plot
forward; it sets up delays and obstacles
that maintain suspense.
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The proairetic code indicates the actions
and behaviors that constitute the plot
The symbolic code identifies details in the
story that are interpreted on a figurative
level
The cultural code references types of
knowledge that offer scientific or moral
authority
The text refers to common bodies of
knowledge (i.e. the meat in a ‘hot dog’
comes from pigs)
The semic code designates a special kind of
signifier that marks the development of a
theme through the language of the text
Note: This is done via metonymy (i.e.
mansion + BMW = the concept of wealth)
Example
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Little Red Riding Hood
Hermeneutic – questions that drive plot
Proairetic – actions
Symbolic – symbols
Cultural - background
Semic – lexical items that develop a theme
How a story is structured
• Narrative Structure
– Characterization
• Levi-Strauss, Propp
– Plot
• Propp, Barthes
How a story is structured
• Visual Structure
– Color
– Shape
– Position
• Main point: The reader creates the
interpretation
• The ideal text has the greatest variety of
independent interpretations
Future work on structure
Aristotle's Online
Questions?