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NARRATOLOGY
[NARRATEE]
Narratology is a branch of narrative theory. The term was first used by the structuralist French critic Tzvetan Todorov in his Grammaire du Décaméron (1969; The Grammar of The Decameron) to refer to a structuralist description of narrative parameters that constitute narrative discourse and are in systematic interaction with each other. Not necessarily structuralist, narratology is centrally concerned with the establishment, rearrangement, and mediation of plot and typically provides a systematic account of functionally related elements such as plot levels, narrative mediation, person, perspective, and temporal arrangement, frequently in the shape of a typology of narrative forms.
Although Todorov was the first to use the term, narratology can in fact be traced back to Käte Friedemann's seminal study Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik (1910; The Role of the Narrator in Epic). Work by Percy Lubbock and Norman Friedman on narrative perspective as well as the early work of Käte Hamburger and Eberhart Lämmert laid the groundwork for the classic texts that have played a central role in the development of the discipline: F.K. Stanzel's Die typischen Erzählsituationen im Roman (1955; Narrative Situations in the Novel), Wayne C. Booth's A Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), and above all Gérard Genette's Discours du récit (in Figures III, 1972; Narrative Discourse).
Classical Genettean narratology concentrates on the surface structure of narrative and on the mediation of the story within the narrative discourse. Thus, characters are said to function as nouns, their characteristics as adjectives, and their actions as verbs. Genette also uses mood, voice, and tense but applies them to surface features of the narrative. Building on Genette's work, critics have developed a number of different, but roughly compatible, accounts of the basic narrative constituents, narrative levels, and major discourse features of narration. Recent developments have been in the direction of a greater refinement of individual categories. For instance, Mieke Bal's De theorie van vertellen en verhalen (1978; Narratology: An Introduction to the Theory of Narrative) and Seymour Chatman's Coming to Terms (1990) introduce refinements to Genette's theory of focalization, that is, the handling of perspective. Susan Lanser's The Narrative Act (1981) proposes a complex web of subcategories, and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's Narrative Fiction (1983) extends the range of narratorial functions.