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Abstract: This paper aims to present a brief diachronic and transmedial overview of the development of the features of narration and its atomic unit, the narreme. Across media, narratives change, and so do the techniques and processes involved, giving rise to several distinctions in terms of genre, narreme delivery, audience involvement and relationship between audience and author. This is achieved through an attempt at identifying certain common features of narratives across media and to properly define and isolate the concept of narreme, for lack of a formal definition. The first section of this paper exemplifies and outlines said features, while the second part aims to demonstrate how said features and concepts developed transmedially, as well as how the fairly recent virtual medium provided grounds for a paradigmatic shift.
Key words: narratology, transmedial, narreme, virtual
The way narratives change across media has been studied intensely in the past few decades. From the Russian Formalists who created the distinction between fabula and subject (also known as the story-plot couplet), to Vladimir Propp's (et al.) structuralist theory of thematic narratology and Genette's (et al.) theory of modal narratology (Ronen 817-842 ), which although focus on different aspects and present different perspectives, do converge and are not mutually exclusive, and some scholars agree that these should not be treated differently (Baroni2). In modern narratology, indeed they are not.
The narreme is the fundamental unit of narration. Conceptually, it is similar to other atomic units, such as the atom in physics, the point in geometry or the phoneme in phonology. Unlike other such units, however, it lacks a proper definition and is difficult to locate or describe in a narrative. For the sake of brevity, a definition shall not be presently formed, but certain aspects of the nature of narremes must be taken into account. Immutability is one of them, as it is present in other similar cases. For instance, there is a difference between the arrangement of phonemes in a particular order, such that if one phoneme is swapped for another, a new element is formed (i.e. io vs. oi).
Narreme delivery is the fundamental mechanism of narration. Depending on how it is realised, a relationship between the narrative, the narrator and the narratee is created. Active delivery...