Narrative Analysis

Narrative Poetics

Since Aristotle's Poetics, a key aspect of narrative analysis has been coherence of plot, an often-linear sequence of beginning, middle, and end (BME). The relationship of simple BME linear plots to more complex multiple simultaneous plots in epics continues to be a source of controversy. Narrative analysis can pose several challenges.

Russian Formalism

In Russian Formalism, narrative becomes a screen for stories. The concern is with moving story stuff (fabula) about to obtain an engaging or coherent plot (sujeuret). There is a hegemony here. Narrative ends up defining what is proper to story, and then changes the form to represent what remains in different orders.

Structuralism

Vladimir Propp analyzed narrative plots of folktales to identify functional components. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes performed structural analysis of narrative. William Labov's structuralist approach conceived narrative as amenable to formal theoretical frameworks, to the remodeling of human experience into narrative forms. Tzvetan Todorov coined the term la narratologie in 1969 to designate what he and other French structuralists (e.g., Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette, and A.-J. Greimas) imagined as a science of narrative modeled after the “pilot-science” of Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics. As such, a narrative enters the biography of the speaker, placing events into sequence, and a memory of experience that loosely corresponds to originary events. Polkinghorne theorizes that people try to organize temporal events into meaningful experiences using narrative forms and patterns.

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