Zuzana Fonioková
Postclassical narratology
classical narratology
• since 1950s, structuralism
– Barthes, Genette, Stanzel, Prince, Booth, Rimmon-Kenan
• text-centred
• binary oppositions, taxonomies, elements of narrative
• narrative grammar, universal system
• descriptive
• synchronic
postclassical naratology
• since 1980s-1990s
– esp. USA, Germany, UK, France, Denmark
• context, culture, reader-oriented, interdisciplinary,
diachronic
https://www.diegesis.uni-
wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/96/93
postclassical approaches
• Wayne C. Booth: The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
• James Phelan
– Narrative = somebody telling somebody else, on
some occasion, and for some purposes, that
something happened to someone or something
• Peter J. Rabinowitz
– actual audience, authorial audience, narrative
audience, ideal narrative audience
rhetorical narratology
• anti-mimetic narratives that challenge and move beyond
real-world understandings of identity, time, and space by
representing scenarios that would be impossible in the
AW
• physically impossible scenarios and events, i.e. impossible
by the known laws governing the physical world, as well
as logically impossible ones, i.e. impossible by accepted
principles of logic
• Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Brian
Richardson ad.
• http://projects.au.dk/narrativeresearchlab/unnatural/
unnatural narratology
• reader-oriented
– Herman – storyworlds
– Fludernik – experientiality
• cognitive processes used when interpreting texts
• nexus of mind and narrative
• how narratives work with cultural models
cognitive narratology
Monika Fludernik: Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996)
David Herman, Lisa Zunshine, Uri Margolin, Meir Sternberg,
Manfred Jahn
• how issues of gender bear on the production and
interpretation of stories
• voice, agency
• Robyn Warhol: feminism – “the conviction that
dominant culture and society are organized to the
disadvantage of everyone who does not fit a white,
masculine, middle- or upper-class, Euro-American,
not-yet-disabled, heterosexual norm”
Susan Lanser, Robyn Warhol, Suzanne Keen, Ruth Page
feminist narratology