Abstract
These guidelines comprise instructions for the usage of a series of markup tags that describe narrative characteristics of fiction. These tags are used to mark disruptions in narration, in the form of narrative level changes, temporal jumps, and instances of subjective narration. The tags are designed to be used in XML, as is the case in the examples in these guidelines, but they can be adapted for other platforms like CATMA. There are six tags: <level> (for a narrative level change, an occurrence of a story within a story), <analepsis> (a flashback), <prolepsis> (a flash forward in story time), <soc> (stream of consciousness), and <fid> (free indirect discourse). The guidelines first describe the narrative concepts represented by each of the tags, with reference to Genette and other narratologists. There follows some detail on how the tags should be used specifically in the encoding of texts, with examples taken from a corpus of modernist fiction. Essentially, the tags should be applied at the points in the text where the relevant instance of narrative disruption begins and ends. This allows them the encoded text to be analysed afterwards to count the frequency of the tags, and the number of words contained within a tag. In this way, the usage of the tags serves as a method for quantifying the extent of narrative disruption in works of fiction.
Highlights
These guidelines comprise instructions for the usage of a series of markup tags that describe narrative characteristics of fiction
The tags are designed to be used in XML, as is the case in the examples in these guidelines, but they can be adapted for other platforms like CATMA
He suggests that we should “define this difference in level by saying that any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed.”[1]. While his focus on position is useful, his description of which narrative is higher than another is slightly confusing, as is the terminology he suggests, so we turn from here to Manfred Jahn, who adapts an idea from Genette about degrees of narrative into a simple numbered system, where a first-degree narrative level is “a narrative that is not embedded in any other narrative; a second-degree narrative is a narrative that is embedded in a first-degree narrative”,2 and so on
Summary
Gérard Genette provides the theoretical background both for narrative levels and anachronies as they are used here. He suggests that we should “define this difference in level by saying that any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed.”[1] While his focus on position is useful, his description of which narrative is higher than another is slightly confusing, as is the terminology he suggests (extradiegetic, intradiegetic, and metadiegetic narratives), so we turn from here to Manfred Jahn, who adapts an idea from Genette about degrees of narrative into a simple numbered system, where a first-degree narrative level is “a narrative that is not embedded in any other narrative; a second-degree narrative is a narrative that is embedded in a first-degree narrative”,2 and so on This iterative system is used in these guidelines
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