Narratology: The Theory of Narrative - A Pictorial Guide

Narratology is the theory of narrative; you can also call it the theory of storytelling. The aim of this video is to present a pictorial guide, mainly for beginners. It is based on as many simple graphics and animations as I was able to access or create. There are many types of stories, and many types of narratologies, and therefore we must be selective. This overview is an attempt to combine mainly four approaches: 1) Classical Narratology, 2) Natural Narratology, 3) Focalization Theory (point-of-view theory), 4) Transmedial Narratology. By Manfred Jahn.
Script with notes and references: www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/Narrat...
Script also available here: www.academia.edu/98848432/Nar...
00:00 Intro
01:23 Elements of narrative texts
03:53 Homodiegetic and heterodiegetic texts
06:19 Perception and perspective
09:23 Mindsets
11:05 Focalization in texts
13:29 The composition of film
15:28 Focalization in film
16:42 A master template of focalization
18:39 Externality and internality
22:21 A scene from Vertigo (1958)
23:02 (Clip)
23:40 Storyboard analysis
26:08 That's all

[@ragoonsgg589]

Thank you. A much more designed, understandable, and concise explanation than Biel.

[@manfredjahn6200]

Thank you. If, in a film, a POV-shot represents what a character sees (Scottie looking at Madeline in the video) then that character is (used as) a reflector. The same thing happens in a narrative text when it displays the perceptions, feelings, and thoughts of a character as if registering such mental data directly from within the character's consciousness. It is a technique that lets a reader or viewer witness the action from the reflector's perspective and become a witness to the character's mindset and worldview. A very effective technique is to juxtapose the contrasting worldviews of two or more reflectors - a murderer's and a victim's, for instance. For a famous literary example consider Stephen, Mr Bloom, and Molly in Joyce's Ulysses. You may want to check ch. 3.2 in my narratology tutorial for many more examples (link in description). Season's greetings everyone!

[@forraizoltan]

Fantastic video, please consider further instalments. Perhaps a series about narratology if your time permits. :)

[@johncrwarner]

I first encountered narratology in the field of "Narrative Theology" where the use of narrative literary criticism was applied to Biblical texts. I found it rewarding as a tool for understanding these texts. I had not encountered / explored further the literary theory it was based on. So only today when I was browsing Peter Barry's "Beginning Theory" did I discover it was a school of criticism. I enjoyed this video and learnt / relearned several technical terms and their relationships. For me "storytelling" is a key to how human beings seem to process information weaving it into a story / tapestry sometimes necessitating unpicking a pattern to build a new one. Thank you for this brief pictorial guide.

[@coltthestarsheriff3544]

Merry Christmas dear professor, and a Happy New Year! 🎄🍾

[@manfredjahn6200]

Hi all, just to let you know, I am currently collecting materials for a video essay on Modes and Models of Communication, code-based as well as inference-based, with maybe some thoughts on the impact of the ChatGPT revolution. We'll see what quagmire that's going to put me in....

[@coltthestarsheriff3544]

In one of his books, Canadian semiotician and literary theorist Louis Hébert says that narratology is a form of poetics, that deals with written narrative text only. Maybe that was the case in the 70s, but today, narratology deals with all media, just like any form of semiotics.

[@manfredjahn6200]

Yes; narratology should make it a point, and recently has made quite an effort to do so, to address narratives, narrativity, and storytelling in all forms and media. Only then can we hope to see true universals and commonalities, if indeed there are any, and not just some sort of family resemblance, as Wittgenstein would probably argue?

[@coltthestarsheriff3544]

@@manfredjahn6200 with my anthropological background, i have no doubt in universal - particular synergy, including narratives and other types of discourse. Dell Hymes' ethnopoetics is searching for particularities and local patterns, although Hymes himself did apply structuralist method on some Indian myth.

[@hakunamatata2627]

sir, could you explain the concept of reflector character a little more with a few more examples please. This session is wonderful. Thank you very much for creating it. Happy Christmas.

[@ragoonsgg589]

Also, when you mention 'narrative worlds' would 'fabula' be interchangeable in this case within the context of fiction? Thank you

[@manfredjahn6200]

Hi, thanks. As far as I understand it, possibly simplifying things a bit, fabula is one of two terms originally used by the Russian Formalists, both referring to action events - fabula the actual sequence of events, and syuzhet their causal structure and linkage (now often simply referred to as 'plot'). A narrative world is wider than that: it is a model of a world, fictional or real, including people, places, events, situations, and the natural laws that drive them, as far as we and the other participants know (and that knowledge may crucially differ depending on different observers). See Marie-Laure Ryan's great exposition of 'Possible Worlds' for more on this.

[@manfredjahn6200]

Thank you, great you liked it. Yeah, got time, got a mic, but need to do something about the voice... So, which narratological subjects or types of narrative are we interested in?

[@theotherantigone]

Everything. I am from the Philippines and when I teach lit subjects I try to enlighten my students with narratology. I discovered Narratology from an ebook chapter in basic prose and got hooked because of Flush. J’ai le trouvé très difficile mais voilà, il y a Manfred Jahn! Merci beaucoup!!!

[@jtauber]

I'm trying to work out the best terminology for describing who is "focused on" in a story. For example, in the Hobbit, the story follows Bilbo for the most part. If Bilbo is separated from other characters, the story almost always follows Bilbo. There are a couple of exceptions. There is a moment in Chapter 6 where we get the perspective of the Eagles for a couple of paragraphs and near the end of Chapter 8 where we switch to what happened to Thorin after his capture? Is this just a change of reflector or POV? In the case of the switch to Thorin it's not necessarily his POV just merely the part of the fabula involved him when Bilbo wasn't present. What's a good way to talk about that shift?

[@manfredjahn6200]

Interesting question. One idea is to distinguish between the reflector (the perceiving character in the story) and the thing or event or person s/he is focusing on. Readers have a POV, too, and we naturally transpose to a reflector’s POV, in order to see things just like Bilbo does, given his current limited knowledge, experience, mindset. At the same time, but on another level, Bilbo himself, in his act of focalization, is an object of the reader’s attention and interest -- so I suppose one could say that if the text uses a reflector, it provides us with one focalizer but two foci of interest? And as you say, the Hobbit occasionally shifts to other reflectors or even to the narrator’s higher-level POV, and indeed it is a good idea to think about why this is done in each case, and how it contributes to the overall knowledge architecture of text. What usually makes things difficult is that the narrator can, chameleon or ventriloquist-like, present other people’s opinions, public knowledge, communal beliefs, etc, and it can be really difficult to prize those levels apart. BTW, one interesting thing about the Lord of the Rings is that Tolkien uses Sam, not Frodo, as his usual focalizer. This makes a lot of sense because, apart from being normal, natural and openminded, Sam is basically ignorant about many relevant aspects, just like the reader is, and this allows the reader to co-experience/mirror/ simulate his growing understanding of a complicated world. Gandalf, for his part, knows far too much, we wouldn’t understand the working of his mind even if we had direct access to it. Of course, things are different when he becomes a story-internal teller himself, which occasionally happens.

[@jtauber]

@@manfredjahn6200 yes, I have often mentioned Tolkien's focalization of the "most ignorant character" as a way of communicating information to the reader in a natural way. Sam or Pippin or Merry or Gimli. I just finished my MA on linguistic features in Tolkien and am planning a PhD that will bring in narratological elements. I hope you don't mind me emailing you with more questions as a detailed narratological annotation of the texts is part of my plan.

[@manfredjahn6200]

@@jtauber Analyzing Tolkien’s narrative strategies, that’s a promising project, both with a view of deepening our understanding of Tolkien, and of narrative theory. Hopefully hasn’t been done already?

[@coltthestarsheriff3544]

Dear professor, I hope you're doing fine, I think you would like some books from Cheryl Mattingly, psychological anthropologist from USA and her narrative anthropology and books such as Healing Dreams and Clinical Plots, or Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Health, the one she wrote together with Linda Garro. Her PHD is/was all about how we think with stories.

[@manfredjahn6200]

Thank you, grateful for any suggestions. Storytelling is definitely an essential tool for coping with illness and recuperation.

[@coltthestarsheriff3544]

@@manfredjahn6200 it sure is, i witnessed it first handedly. It could be of interest to anyone in field of cognitive and postclassical narratology.

[@coltthestarsheriff3544]

You said that classical narratology started in 1972 with Genette. Does that definitely mean that Greimas, Barthes ( okay, Barthes evolved much from his strict structural period, so we can exclude him) and Bremond are to be considered semioticians of narrative only, but not narratogists? I am asking because it seems there is no consensus, many people do consider Greimas to be narratologist, or at least "story - narratologist". As someone who is trained in Greimasian "Structural semantics", i can tell how different narratology is.

[@manfredjahn6200]

Hi StarSheriff, thanks for the comment, and good points. Yes, I would count Genette as the main (though not single) proponent of classical narratology (as opposed to any of the more modern 'post-classical' narratologies). But the beginning of the discipline I would set in 1966, the year in which the French journal Communications published a special issue (no. 8) entitled "The structural analysis of narrative", which in itself is still a good working definition of narratology. The term narratology itself was coined three years later by Todorov, who along with Barthes, Greimas, Bremond, Eco, Metz, and Genette was one of the original contributors to that special issue -- the usual suspects are all there, in 1966! (And I do think that Greimas's notion of isotopies was a stroke of genius.)

[@coltthestarsheriff3544]

I have noticed about isotopies, you use it a lot in you tutorial texts on the subject, which is great, considering that most textbooks on literary theory are only dealing with his actantial model. Now, Greimas is hard, very hard, it took me years to grasp even basic things, thanks to Lévi - Strauss and Lotman, because we use him for folklore studies, urban legends like Roommate Death and such, but we have also learned a thing or two about discourse - narratology thanks to Porter Abbott. I am aware about Todorov naming the discipline, who was also, like Genette, interested in discourse dimension of narratives, when the main goal was finding some universal grammar of all narratives. That's why I'm asking you, because classical semiotics is sooo into semantics of fabula, polar oppositions that give meaning to surface structures of a text, narration isn't that big of a deal. And on the other hand, i can't help but wonder how narratology is also some version of semiotics ( Monika Fludernik says it's similar to it, but I don't buy it) that also goes deep under the surface to determine an operating system and codes. I understand, Genette was all about the discourse, but many narratologists today are analyzing both story, discourse, and story's semantics in some way. Mieke Bal tried to bring together Genette and Greimas, right? And you can't really interpret characters and their action without semantics of their movement through the storyworld, both horizontally and vertically. Plus like any other type of semiotics, narratology is transmedial, that's what makes it different from poetics . So to me, difference between classical semiotics and narratology is similar to the relationship of classical ballet and jazz dance: they have some mutual conventions and techniques, but the guest for meaning is much more relaxed in narratology :))

[@manfredjahn6200]

@@coltthestarsheriff3544 The Quest for meaning I take you mean … nice title for a book yet to be written. At one point Genette says that he finds the division between form and meaning regrettable. Semantics isn't really my comfort zone but I would agree it's more important than anything else and nothing else can replace it. I suppose one could go the mental models route which readers construct in order to understand characters, situations, and story lines. James Phelan, in his more recent publications, adresses something he calls 'narrative progression', which maybe is a step in the right direction?

[@coltthestarsheriff3544]

​@@manfredjahn6200oh sir, the title already taken. The one who wrote that book is Canadian semiotican and linguistic anthropologist Marcel Danesi. We used his and Daniel Chandler's textbooks for our semiotics class. I understand Genette's concern, he was semiotician in my book anyway, although his version is/was less scary than Greimas'. I don't know that much about postclassical narratology, or "narrative progression". All i know is that Monika Fludernik has shown us how narratives and our cognitive models change over time. Like so called Oralists did before her in their own way, like Jack Goody, Walter Ong, or maybe even Albert Lord. I know how important mental models are, the entire field in anthropology was built around cognition and its cultural foundation, Roy D'Andrade was a key figure. But they were put aside thanks to the influence of Clifford Geertz and his interpretative anthropology. I know about you, about Mark Turner, cognitive poetics of Peter Stockwell. It's so not what I was used to.

[@manfredjahn6200]

Well, good to be on the same page on this, or maybe different pages of the same book. :)