Structure of narrative
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1. The document discusses various structural theories of narrative including those proposed by Greimas, Todorov, Genette, and Culler. 2. Greimas observed that narratives involve the transfer of an entity from one actant to another, with main actants including Subject-Object and Sender-Receiver. 3. Culler argued that literary interpretation is guided by an underlying structural system of implicit rules and codes that readers use to make meaning.
![Structure of narrative (5th meeting)<br />narrative examine in minute detail the inner âworkingsâ of literary texts in order to discover the fundamental structural units (such as units of narrative progression) or functions (such as character functions) that govern textsâ narrative operations.<br />Greimas observes that human beings make meaning by structuring the world in terms of two kinds of opposed pairs<br />Greimas, the forwarding of the plotâthe movement from conflict to resolution, struggle to reconciliation, separation to union, and so forthâinvolves the transfer of some entity (a quality or an object) from one actant to another.<br />Actants Plot types<br />SubjectâObject Stories of Quest/Desire (a subject, or hero, searches for an object: a person, thing, or state of being)<br />SenderâReceiver Stories of Communication (a senderâa person, god, or institutionâsends the subject in search of the object, which the receiver ultimately receives)<br />HelperâOpponent Subplots of Stories of Quest/Desire or Communication (a helper aids the subject in the quest; an opponent tries to hinder the subject)<br />Greimaâs narrative sequence structure<br />1. Contractual structures involve the making/breaking of agreements or the establishment/violation of prohibitions and the alienation or reconciliation that follows.<br />2. Performative structures involve the performance of tasks, trials, struggles, and the like.<br />3. Disjunctive structures involve travel, movement, arrivals, and departures.<br />Todorov draws an analogy between the structural units of narrativeâsuch as elements of characterization and plotâ and the structural units of language structure of the most basic sequence is (1) attribution, (2) action, (3) attribution: unvolved-seeks love- loved<br />Todrovâs three categories of adjectives: states (unstable attributes, such as happiness and unhappiness), qualities (more stable attributes, such as good and evil), and conditions (the most stable attributes, such as oneâs sex, religion, or social position).<br />Genette begins by differentiating among three levels of narrative that generally have been included under the umbrella of the term narrative: story, narrative, and narration.<br />Story consists of the succession of events being narrated.<br />Narrative refers to the actual words on the page, the discourse, the text itself, from which the reader constructs both story and narration.<br />Narration refers to the act of telling the story to some audience and thereby producing the narrative.<br />Means of three qualities, which he calls tense, mood, and voice.<br />Tense: order, duration, and frequency<br />Mood : distance and perspective.<br />Voice :the relationship of the narrator (the act of narration) to the story being told and to the narrative (the way the story is being told).<br />Identify the formula that structures a narrative or group of narratives, use that formula to address larger questions about literary meaning and its relationship to human life.<br />âHow does this formula reveal a pattern in narrative in general, and what does this pattern imply about human experience or the structures of human consciousness?â<br />The structure of literary interpretation<br />According to Jonathan Culler, the structural system that governs both the writing and interpretation of literary texts is the system of rules and codes, which we have consciously or unconsciously internalized, that tell us how to make meaning when we read literature<br />The point is not that any two competent readers would necessarily agree in their interpretations of a particular work but that both interpretations would be guided by the same structural system of interpretive rules and codes.<br />The structural system Culler<br />Major Components: <br />,[object Object]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/structureofnarrative-111014011310-phpapp01/85/Structure-of-narrative-1-320.jpg)
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Structure of narrative
- 2. naturalization : is the process by which we transform the text so that the strangeness of its literary form, which we donât see in everyday writingâfor example, rhyme; meter; divisions into stanzas, acts, or chapters; and interior monologuesâ makes sense in terms of the world we live in.
- 3. the rule of significance: is the assumption that the literary work expresses a significant attitude about some important problem, and so we pay attention to what it says in ways that we wouldnât do with other kinds of writing.
- 4. the rule of metaphorical coherence: is the requirement that the two components of a metaphor (the vehicle, or metaphorical term, and the tenor, or subject to which the metaphor is applied) have a consistent relationship within the context of the work.
- 5. the rule of thematic unity: is the chief reason why there is a rule of metaphorical coherence, for the rule of thematic unity is our expectation that the literary work has a unified, coherent theme, or main point.Homeworks in pairs:<br />Analyze the structural narrative in Oscar Wildeâs The Impotance of Being Earnest by using Greimasâ system of actants.<br />(Send to rinasaraswati@yahoo.com)<br />