Narratology. A Transdisciplinary Approach

general courses

In recent years narratology has been one of the most rapidly developing fields in the humanities - studies of narrative transcend the traditional boundaries of disciplines.

The course will present classic narratological categories developed during studies of literary texts; we will read excerpts from works by Stanzel, Genette, Uspensky, H. White, and will try to apply their proposals to analyses of excerpts from literary and historical narratives. The first part of the course will focus on analysing narrative as a story, plot and narrative situation, how a story is narrated, what the narrator's perspective is, what the linguistic and textual methods of shaping perspective are. In its second part, the course will look at how narratology is applied outside its prototypical area of a literary story - how narratology copes with images, role-playing games, collecting. Finally, we will discuss the meaning of narrative in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive sciences.

1. Introduction. Preliminary outline of key categories and oppositions: fiction and reality, the structure of a literary work according to Ingarden, narratives beyond language. The opposition of discourse and history.

2. Marie-Laure Ryan, On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology, in: Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism, pp. 1-23.

3. Studies of the plot as a pattern of action

V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale; the programme of 1960s French narratology

H. White, Metahistory (introduction); problems of the convention of historical narrative; Droysen's types of historical narrative

D. Herman, Story Logic; ontological foundations of narrative - state, event, action? What ontology does narratology need? What ontological assumptions does narrative imply? Narrative models of reality

4. The narrative situation. How to describe a point of view in narrative.

Stanzel's proposals (review of his typology, Stanzel's circle)

Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition

Genette, Narrative Discourse, the concept of focalization

5. Second-person narrative - M. Fludernik, Second-Person Fiction as a Test Case [Polish translation by M. Marcela]; a new approach to the communication situation in narrative; examples from literature: Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller; van Trier, Europa; role-playing games.

6. Narrating images - M. Bal, Narratology; Bal on narratological analysis of collecting: Telling Objects. A Narrative Perspective on Collecting (German translation). Towards cultural narratology

7. Narratives in philosophy, ethics, and psychology

Wilhelm Schapp's phenomenology of narrative (Entangled in Stories)

A. MacIntyre, After Virtue.

J. Bruner, Life Is a Story, "Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny" 1990, No. 4.

H. Hermans, Self-Narratives.

8. Narratology and the cognitive sciences

David Herman, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences.

Monika Fludernik, Erzäheltheorie. Eine Einführung, 2006, 2008. Przekład angielski: Introduction to Narratology, 2009 (jeszcze nie mam przekładu).

Mieke Bal, Narratology. (w tym roku ma się ukazać nowe wydanie)

Tzvetan Todorov, Kategorie opowiadania literackiego, "Pamiętnik Literacki" 1966.