Knowra Narratology Narratology Narratology is the systematic study of narrative structure, including how stories are organized, told, and understood. It examines relations among events, narration, discourse, and audience.
Fabula and syuzhet : Fabula is the chronological sequence of story events; syuzhet is their arrangement in a narrative. This distinction separates the events being narrated from the order and form of their presentation.
Anachrony : Anachrony is a departure from chronological order, commonly through flashbacks or anticipations. It provides a precise way to analyze reordered events in narrative discourse.
Vladimir Propp : Vladimir Propp was a Russian folklorist whose morphological analysis identified recurring functions in folktales. His study of Russian wonder tales offered an influential model for describing narrative structure.
Literary criticism : Literary criticism interprets and evaluates literary works through historical, formal, and theoretical approaches. Narratology supplies structural tools, while literary criticism also addresses value, history, and interpretation.
Film narratology : Film narratology studies how cinema presents events through images, sound, editing, and narrative perspective. It adapts narratological questions to audiovisual techniques rather than verbal narration alone.
Narrative discourse : Narrative discourse is the way a story is presented through language, images, or other signs. It names the level at which narratology studies how a story is told.
Analepsis : Analepsis is a narrative move that presents an event earlier than the current point in the story. This specific backward shift illustrates how a narrative can disclose its fabula out of order.
Russian formalism : Russian formalism was a literary movement that studied the devices and structures shaping literary works. Its distinction between story material and artistic arrangement helped prepare narratological analysis.
Reader-response criticism : Reader-response criticism studies how readers participate in producing a text’s meanings. It foregrounds audience activity where structural narratology often foregrounds narrative organization.
Historiography : Historiography is the study and writing of historical accounts and the methods that shape them. Narrative analysis reveals how historical accounts arrange events and construct explanatory plots.
Show all 28