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Article Dans Une Revue Nalans. The Journal of Narrative and Language Studies Année : 2014

Why Narratology?

John Pier
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Résumé

Why narratology? What has narratology brought to the study of narrative, of literature, of discourse generally? What is the status of narratology among other disciplines? What difference does narratology make? These are some of the speculative questions I will attempt to answer in this paper. I say "attempt to answer," because various answers are possible and because few if any of them can fail to be challenged. The questions are further complicated in that the issues involved can be addressed from various alternative perspectives. And indeed, there are those who will simply shrug and retort: "Why bother with narratology? Why take the trouble?" Now, it is not by coincidence that the title of my talk, "Why Narratology?", resonates with the question "What is narratology?" What is Narratology is in fact the title of a collection of essays, subtitled Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, that was published in 2003 under the editorship of Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, the first volume of the book series "Narratologia" at Walter de Gruyter Press. Nor is it by coincidence that the question "What is narratology?"-itself open to widely divergent answers-leads us to considerations bearing on the history of narratology. The term, originally proposed by Tzvetan Todorov in his Grammaire du Décaméron in 1969, designates a "science of narrative"-not a science in the sense of the exact or natural sciences, as people have often assumed, but in the sense of poetics, a discipline with antecedents going back as far as Plato and Aristotle. Narratology properly speaking can be traced to these authors, although its most immediate sources are found in Russian formalism and in the structuralist movement. According to the editors of the volume What is Narratology?, the history of the discipline, unwritten in 2003-still to be written today and for which we have no widely-agreed methodology or standards for selecting and ordering criteria-can nonetheless be divided without serious controversy into three phases:
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hal-03946877 , version 1 (19-01-2023)

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John Pier. Why Narratology?. Nalans. The Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 2014, 2 (2). ⟨hal-03946877⟩
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