What are some good primers on Narratology?

August 4, 2005 8:58 AM

I'd like to become familiar with the basics of the Narrative Theory/Narratology. Can anyone in the know recommend a primer, or other key reading(s) -- either seminal books or articles? Assume I next to nothing about the field (so seemingly obvious citiations are welcomed); also assume that I won't be put off by thick tomes or dense prose. Thanks!
posted by .kobayashi. to Writing & Language (19 answers total)

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

These are just the editions I have — the specific editions you find may vary. Barthes is more semiotics, but his work is integral to the field of narratology, esp. the concepts of "the work" vs. "the text," "writerly" vs. "readerly," etc.

Chatman is a seminal narratological theorist, so I would start there. Ryan has spearheaded an effort to apply narratology to non-literary (or "new") media. If you'd like more, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on narratology in video games, so I'd be happy to provide you with further sources — just e-mail me. These books, and the references therein, should be a good start.
posted by TPIRman at 11:07 AM on August 4, 2005

Why specifically do you want to learn about?
posted by kensanway at 12:23 PM on August 4, 2005

Response by poster: Kensanway: What do you mean? I'd like to become more familiar with the basics of the study of narrative. How it's done. What the terms of art are. What the basic assumptions of doing so are. It's not ends oriented -- I'm too much of a novice for it to possibly be so, which is why I'm looking for the basics. Does that help?
posted by .kobayashi. at 2:25 PM on August 4, 2005

Sorry, I just realized that my question was incoherently phrased. I guess I was wondering why you wanted to learn about narrative theory, so we could tailor the answer around that. Is the purpose academic? Curiosity? Do you want to write something and you're working backwards from that?
posted by kensanway at 2:29 PM on August 4, 2005

I once took and then dropped a course on the narrative of the novel. I couldn't find the syllabus online, but here are some of the big titles. Just a warning--I haven't read most of these.

The Purloined Poe
This is an easy way to get into Lacan and Derrida, both of twhom (with Barbara Johnson), write about the structure of the purloined letter

Rhetoric of the Novel, Wayne Booth

Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Rene Giraud

Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks

S/Z is a pretty big deal, but it's also all about one novel. I've typically been told to read it as though that doesn't matter. If that's too big for you, you might want to start on some smaller, popcorn Barthes, like Pleasures of the Text or Mythologies.
posted by kensanway at 2:37 PM on August 4, 2005

Taking a different tact from those above, and depending on your purpose:

-- Poetics by Aristotle
-- The Art of Fiction by John Gardner
-- The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim
-- Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama by David Mamet
-- Art Of Dramatic Writing : Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives by Lajos Egri
-- Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays by David Ball
posted by dobbs at 2:39 PM on August 4, 2005

Oops, forgot the -- on the last one. Should be

-- Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays by David Ball

Just to make sure you don't think it's all one book with the McKee.
posted by dobbs at 2:40 PM on August 4, 2005

Response by poster: Oh, I think I see what you're getting at: I'm coming at this as more of an academic than a hopeful practicioner. I don't intend to be writing stories of my own. I just want to become more familiar with how literary theorists describe and analyze narrative: particularly how they discuss narrative structure and narrative voice. It's not ends-oriented: I'm not planning any research -- serious or otherwise -- that uses this field. I'd just like to know more about how those in the humanities analyze how stories are told.

(Lots of good advice here so far, thanks.)
posted by .kobayashi. at 3:28 PM on August 4, 2005

Best answer: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism was the textbook for a class I took called Interpretive Practices. It had various selections from Derrida, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, and lots of others, many of which dealt with this topic. They all had handy introductions, too. It's rather pricey, though.
posted by ludwig_van at 3:40 PM on August 4, 2005

Best answer: Personally, I would stay away from the new media / über-theory part of the narrative theory canon. I'd start with the basics, books like:

- Aristotle, Poetics (mentioned above)

- Henry James, Prefaces

- Tzvetan Todorov, "The Two Principles of Narrative"

- Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse

- Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

- Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds.

These are all very basic, straightforward, readable (with the possible exception of Genette) books. You might also want to look at the "Narrative" section of Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Another good route would be to look at the many books and essays on narrative written by writers themselves--people like E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Proust (in Time Regained) and so on.

The main thing is that narrative theory / narratology is not only a postmodernist / poststructuralist thing--it's helpful to know the classical, modernist, and structuralist sides of it too, not just Derrida. If you can get your hands on a Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, all of these books will be excerpted in some form or another, with helpful headnotes.

Hope that helps!
posted by josh at 4:26 PM on August 4, 2005

There's the Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, ed. H. Porter Abbott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), as well.

I did a postgrad. course on narrative a few years ago, but the only theoretical text that really stayed with me was Robert Alter's Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
posted by Sonny Jim at 4:29 PM on August 4, 2005

It's a little hard to find, but about a decade ago a standard reader in narratology grad seminars was an edited volume by W.J.T. Mitchell called On Narrative. It contains essays by most of the then-leading figures in post-structural, hermeneutic, and semiotic narrative theory. Some are difficult, but many (especially Paul Ricoeur's paper) are worth the effort.
posted by realcountrymusic at 5:30 PM on August 4, 2005

Narrative Design, by Madison Smartt Bell
posted by luckypozzo at 8:21 PM on August 4, 2005

I second the recommendation for Gardner's The Art of Fiction.
posted by trip and a half at 10:09 PM on August 4, 2005

Gérard Genette is the fellow you want. Try any of his "Figures" books.
posted by Wolof at 1:02 AM on August 5, 2005

Eek -- I look here, and see how little of this stuff has been translated. "Figures of Narrative Discourse" appears to be what you are after.
posted by Wolof at 1:19 AM on August 5, 2005

kensanway writes "S/Z is a pretty big deal, but it's also all about one novel. I've typically been told to read it as though that doesn't matter."

S/Z is about one short story (at most novella), and is much more concerned with semiotics than it is with narratology. I would leave it for a second or third tier book for this kind of project. (It is great, the kind of command performance that's astounding, just not really what you're asking for here.)
posted by OmieWise at 5:37 AM on August 5, 2005

since no one has mentioned it. perhaps the single most influential work of structuralist narratology in the 20th century: Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale.
Without Propp, no Genette, no Barthes . . .
posted by realcountrymusic at 6:28 AM on August 5, 2005

Response by poster: Some great answers here. I'm looking forward to digging in to lots of these. Thanks, Metafilter!
posted by .kobayashi. at 6:22 PM on August 6, 2005