Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses

4 Introduction
many different sciences (or serve quite diverse masters) that an adaptation
of its theoretical bases becomes necessary. In this way new light tends to be
shed on hitherto unquestioned axioms which had been developed in relation
to literary narrative, most often the novel, and which are therefore not ideally
suited to their new contexts of application.
The present volume abides by Herman’s dual focus on what one could call
a critical but frame-abiding and a more radical frame-transcending or frameshattering
handling of the classical paradigm. The first part of this book deals
with extensions of classical narratology that take the achievements of structuralism
as a starting point for close scrutiny and then suggest revisions of
the traditional paradigm. Here the emphasis is on adding new distinctions,
questioning unacknowledged presuppositions, and on radically revising the
standard concepts and typologies, redesigning the conceptual underpinnings
of structuralist approaches. The second part, on the other hand, focuses on
narrative analyses that move beyond the classical framework by extending
their focus to a variety of medial and thematic contexts, from the visual realm
to the generic (e.g., autobiography), the queer, and the non-literary (e.g.,
medical interviews). Some contributions also arrive at radical revisions of the
classical model because the intermedial or thematic applications they have in
hand require such trimming or redesigning.
The essays in this volume moreover address potential overlaps between
the various postclassical approaches. For instance, they link ethnic concerns
with those of gender, visual narration with reader response, the autobiographical
mode and psychoanalysis with issues of gender and sexual orientation,
formal concerns with sociological analysis, or the rhetorical approach
with the unnatural. More generally, this collection presents new perspectives
on the question of what narratives are and of how they function in their different
media. We also wish to suggest that, as the first decade of the third
millennium draws to a close, we are now perhaps beginning to see a second
phase of postclassical narratology. David Herman’s volume Narratologies
could be argued to represent the first adult phase in a Bildungsroman-like
story of narratology. In this reading, Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists
figure as narratology’s infancy and the structuralist models of the 1960s and
1970s as its adolescence. This
[ . . . ] adolescence of narratology was followed by a reorientation and diversification
of narrative theories, producing a series of subdisciplines that arose
in reaction to post-structuralism and the paradigm shift to cultural studies.
[ . . . ] Out of the diversity of approaches and their exogamous unions with
critical theory have now emerged several budding narratologies which beto-