The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

Whatever the social or psychological
functions of narrative structure, it must be
accorded a major role in establishing the
aesthetic unity which creates pleasure
through the contemplation and enjoyment
of purely formal patterning in narrative
art. See also DÉNOUEMENT, FORMALISM,
MYTH, NARRATIVE, PLOT, STRUCTURALISM.
See G. F. Else, Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’:
The Argument (1957); L. M. O’Toole,
Style, Structure and Interpretation in the
Russian Short Story (1982); M. Petrovsky,
‘Morphology of the novella’, Russian
Poetics in Translation, 10 (1983).
MO’T
Narratology Concerns the study of
narrative and proposes the isolation of
characteristics common to all narratives
whether they be literary, filmic, musical
or painterly. It is a theory that seeks to
locate the qualities of narrative that
underlie all stories and that enables us to
recognize modal similarities and distinguish
between different registers of presentation
and content. It concerns itself
less with the detail of the narrative than
with the typological building blocks that
make the conveyance of that narrative
possible. A starting point for understanding
narratology is the recognition that
many acts of human communication, in a
variety of media, contain elements of constructive
form that coalesce and interact
in broadly similar ways to make a story
sensible to the observer/reader. And,
because these stories can be transposed
between modes of presentation (say in
the adaptation of a novel for the screen),
they must contain components that are
specific to narrative and are sustained
regardless of the form within which they
are consumed.
The programmatic analysis of narrative
developed, perhaps unsurprisingly,
out of Russian Formalist and Structuralist
Narratology 151
schools of linguistic theory. Their
attention to the intrinsic literary qualities
of a text, divorced from its originating
context of production, followed the
conviction that human action and communication
are governed by preset rules
that abide by self-regulating discursive
practices and can therefore be isolated
and examined as formal elements of operative
systems of meaning. Within any
story, a narratologist seeks the identifying
typological characteristics that correspond
to a canon of predetermined laws.
Though the events of any given narrative
can be presented in a number of ways (as
they occur; in direct or indirect recollection;
in a deliberate disorder for instance)
the narratologist locates what is being
narrated independent of the way in which
it is told and of the narrating consciousness.
By isolating the core narrated story
s/he can dispense with the discursive
baggage of presentation and the specific
vagaries of narratorial control and concentrate
purely on the events that underpin
the story. This is not primarily a
vehicle for interpretational explication,
indeed the categorical dismemberment of
the text to reveal, as it were, its moving
parts, functions less as a determinant of
meaning and more as an indicator of the
ways that texts are endowed with meaning
in general.
Two significant figures within the
field of narratology have been Vladimir
Propp and Gérard Genette. Propp’s
Morphology of the Folktale (1928)
explored the Russian fairy story for
typological consistencies and detected
over thirty recurrent motifs that invariably
appear in a particular order. He also
isolated specific character-types who
fulfil important roles within the narratives.
These are: the hero, the villain, the
princess, her father, the dispatcher, the
donor, the helper and the false hero.