From Narratology to Narrativity, and Back

Abstract

A surprise shook the world of Greimassian scholars in 2014: narratology was back in strength! Major international congresses were organised, bringing together American and European universities, to studythe “fabulous powers of narrative”. Storytelling entered a new era, ensuring the success of Christian Salmon’s book well beyond the confines of acadaemia. However, among the theoretical references of this research movement, largely based on Anglo-Saxon cognitivism developed in English-speaking countries, not the slightest allusion was made to “narrative and discursive semiotics”. And yet, it was under this title that JosephCourtés, then assistant to Algirdas Julien Greimas at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (École de hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS-Paris), published an introduction to semiotics in 1976. And ten years earlier, in 1966, Greimas had published the actantial schemain Structural Semantics, his founding work. The formalization of narrative grammar and its development in modal syntax would become one of the key accomplishments of this semiotics. This was when narrativity, transcending the boundaries of narratology, was supposed to make its entrance into the humanities and social sciences. And yet it was apparently forgotten. What happened? Or rather, where was the Greimassian theory? Our purpose here is to review this conceptual story and put it into perspective. We will do so by discussing, at the end of our journey, the descending filiation of this theory, through some of the semiotic paths that it has produced. Not in order to present the labyrinthine conceptualisations but to suggest their respective contributions to a renewed reflection on the narrative.