On Narrative Studies and Narrative Genres

Abstract

In the past two or three decades, students of narrative have very much consolidated and developed our knowledge by isolating, (re)characterizing, and (re)classifying a large number of features distinctive of or pertinent to (verbal) narrative (see Adam 1985; Genette 1980, 1988; Mitchell 1981; Prince 1987; Scholes and Kellogg 1966). In the area of narrative discourse (that of the narrating rather than the narrated, the representing and not the represented), for instance, Genette and others (e.g., Bal 1985; Chatman 1978; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Todorov 1981) have described the temporal orders that a narrative text can follow, the anachronies (flashbacks and flash-forwards) that it can exhibit, the achronic (undatable) structures that it can accommodate. Furthermore, they have characterized narrative speed and its canonical tempos (ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch, and pause). They have investigated narrative frequency (the relationship between the number of times an event happens and the number of times it is recounted), examined narrative distance (the extent of narratorial mediation) and narrative point of view (the perceptual or conceptual position according to which the narrated events are depicted), studied the types of discourse that a text can adopt to report the utterances and thoughts of characters, and analyzed the major kinds of narration (posterior, anterior, simultaneous, intercalated) as well as their modes of combination (two different acts of narration can be linked through a simple