NARRATOLOGY

LONGMAN CRITICAL READERS

General Editor:
STAN SMITH, Professor of English, University of Dundee

Published titles:
K. M. NEWTON, George Eliot
MARY EAGLETON, Feminist Literary Criticism
GARY WALLER, Shakespeare's Comedies
JOHN DRAKAKIS, Shakespearean Tragedy
RICHARD WILSON AND RICHARD DUTTON, New Historicism and Renaissance
Drama
PETER WIDDOWSON, D. H. Lawrence
PETER BROOKER, Modernism/Postmodernism
RACHEL BOWLBY, Virginia Woolf
FRANCIS MULHERN, Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism
ANNABEL PATTERSON, John Milton
CYNTHIA CHASE, Romanticism
MICHAEL O'NEILL, Shelley
STEPHANIE TRIGG, Medieval English Poetry
ANTONY EASTHOPE, Contemporary Film Theory
TERRY EAGLETON, Ideology
MAUD ELLMANN, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
ANDREW BENNETT, Readers and Reading
MARK CURRIE, Metafiction
BREAN HAMMOND, Pope
GRAHAM HOLDERNESS, BRYAN LOUGHREY AND ANDREW MuRPHY,

Shakespeare: The Roman Plays

LYN PYKETT, Reading Fin de Siecle Fictions
STEVEN CONNOR, Charles Dickens
REBECCA STOTT, Tennyson
SUSANA ONEGA AND JOSE ANGEL GARciA LANDA, Narratology
NARRATOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION

Edited and Introduced by

SUSANA ONEGA
AND
JOSE ANGEL GARCIA LANDA
First published 1996 by Addison Wesley Longman Limited

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Contents

General Editors' Preface Vll

Notes on Editors IX
Acknowledgements X

Introduction 1
Preliminaries 1
The analysis of narrative structure 4
An historical overview 12
Conclusion 35
PART ONE: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: FABULA
1 ROLAND BARTHES Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narratives 45
2 CLAUDE BREMOND The Logic of Narrative Possibilities 61
3 A.-J. GREIMAS Reflections on Actantial Models 76
PART TWO: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: STORY
4 JONATHAN CULLER Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of
Narrative: Some American Discussions 93
5 MEIR STERNBERG What is Exposition? An Essay in Temporal
Delimitation 103
6 MIEKE BAL Focalization 115
7 PAUL RICCEUR The Time of Narrating (Erzahlzeit) and
Narrated Time (Erzahlte Zeit) 129
PART THREE: NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: TEXT
8 WAYNE C. BOOTH Types of Narration 145
9 WALKER GIBSON Authors, Speakers, Readers, and
Mock Readers 155
10 F. K. STANZEL A New Approach to the Definition of the
Narrative Situations 161
11 GERARD GENETTE Voice 172
12 GERALD PRINCE Introduction to the Study of the Narratee 190
13 LINDA HUTCHEON Modes and Forms of Narrative
Narcissism: Introduction of a Typology 203

v
PART FOUR: NARRATOLOGY AND FILM
14 CELESTINO DELEYTO Focalisation in Film Narrative 217
15 EDWARD BRANIGAN Story World and Screen 234
PART FIVE: POST-STRUCTURALIST NARRATOLOGY
16 PETER BROOKS Reading for the Plot 251
17 TERESA DE LAURETIS Desire in Narrative 262
18 HAYDEN WHITE The Value of Narrativity in the Representation
of Reality 272
19 J. HILLIS MILLER Line 28E
Notes on Authors 29E
References and Further Reading 30C
Index 31E

vi
General Editors' Preface

The outlines of contemporary critical theory are now often taught as

a standard feature of a degree in literary studies. The development of
particular theories has seen a thorough transformation of literary
criticism. For example, Marxist and Foucauldian theories have
revolutionised Shakespeare studies, and 'deconstruction' has led to a
complete reassessment of Romantic poetry. Feminist criticism has
left scarcely any period of literature unaffected by its searching
critiques. Teachers of literary studies can no longer fall back on a
standardised, received methodology.
Lecturers and teachers are now urgently looking for guidance in a
rapidly changing critical environment. They need help in
understanding the latest revisions in literary theory, and especially
in grasping the practical effects of the new theories in the form of
theoretically sensitised new readings. A number of volumes in the
series anthologise important essays on particular theories. However,
in order to grasp the full implications and possible uses of particular
theories it is essential to see them put to work. This series provides
substantial volumes of new readings, presented in an accessible form
and with a significant amount of editorial guidance.
Each volume includes a substantial introduction which explores
the theoretical issues and conflicts embodied in the essays selected
and locates areas of disagreement between positions. The pluralism
of theories has to be put on the agenda of literary studies. We can
no longer pretend that we all tacitly accept the same practices in
literary studies. Neither is a laissez-faire attitude any longer tenable.
Literature departments need to go beyond the mere toleration of
theoretical differences: it is not enough merely to agree to differ;
they need actually to 'stage' the differences openly. The volumes in
this series all attempt to dramatise the differences, not necessarily
with a view to resolving them but in order to foreground the choices
presented by different theories or to argue for a particular route
through the impasses the differences present.
The theory 'revolution' has had real effects. It has loosened the grip
of traditional empiricist and romantic assumptions about language
and literature. It is not always clear what is being proposed as the
new agenda for literary studies, and indeed the very notion of
'literature' is questioned by the post-structuralist strain in theory.
However, the uncertainties and obscurities of contemporary theories
appear much less worrying wh~n we see what the best critics have
vii
Narratology: An Introduction
been able to do with them in practice. This series aims to disseminate
the best of recent criticism and to show that it is possible to re-read
the canonical texts of literature in new and challenging ways.

RAMAN SELDEN AND STAN SMITH

The Publishers and fellow Series Editor regret to record that Raman
Selden died after a short illness in May 1991 at the age of fifty-three.
Ray Selden was a fine scholar and a lovely man. All those he has
worked with will remember him with much affection and respect.

viii
Notes on Editors

SUSANA ONEGA is Professor of English Literature at the University of

Zaragoza. She is also the president of the Spanish Association for
Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN), and represents Spain on the
board of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE).
She has published numerous articles on English and American
literature or literary theory and is the author of Anti/isis estructural,
metodo narrativo y 'sentido' de The Sound and the Fury, de William
Faulkner (Zaragoza, 1989), and another entitled Form and Meaning in
the Novels of John Fowles (Ann Arbor, 1989). She is also the editor of
Estudios Literarios Ingleses II: Renacimiento y Barraco (Madrid, 1986)
and of Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature
(Amsterdam, 1995). She also belongs to the editorial boards of
several journals.

JosE ANGEL GARciA LANDA (PhD. Zaragoza, M.A. Brown University)

is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Literary Theory in the
English and German Department at the University of Zaragoza. He
has published numerous articles on English literature and on literary
theory. He is the author of Samuel Beckett y la narraci6n reflexiva
(Zaragoza, 1992) and the editor of Miscelanea: A Journal of English and
American Studies.

The editors are members of a research team which has been doing
work on narratology since 1989. Several research projects carried
out by this team have been financed by the University of Zaragoza
(Vicerrectorado de Investigacion) and the Spanish Ministry of
Education (DGICYT).

ix
Acknow ledgements

Our interest in narratology goes back to two team research projects

financed by the University of Zaragoza in 1989 and 1990-1, and
further developed in two wider research projects financed by the
Spanish Ministry of Education (PS90--0117 and PS94--0057).
We are grateful to the authors and other copyright holders of the
articles reprinted here for permission to reproduce copyright
material, and to Stan Smith, who suggested the topic of this reader.
We would also like to thank Celestino Deleyto for specialized advice
on film studies, Beatriz Penas and Tim Cooper, who read the
introduction, and the Longman copy-editor, who has been most
helpful and efficient.
Susana Onega
Jose Angel Garcia Landa
1996

The publishers are grateful to the following for permission to

reproduce copyright material:
The Editor of Atlantis for an edited version of 'Focalisation in Film
Narrative' by Celestino Deleyto in Atlantis 13 (November, 1991)
pp. 159-77; Blackwell Publishers Ltd/Cornell University Press for an
edited version of 'Voice' by Gerard Genette: Narrative Discourse: An
Essay in Method. Translated from the French by Jane Lewin. Copyright
© 1980 by Cornell University Press; Cambridge University Press/
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht for an edited version of 'A New Approach
to the Definition of the Narrative Situations' by F. K. Stanzel in A
Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche, pp. 46-78 and
diagram p. xvi (Translation of Theory des Erzahlens Gottingen:
Vandenhoek, 1979); the author, Teresa de Lauretis for an edited
version of her 'Desire in Narrative' from Alice Doesn't: Feminism,
Semiotics, Cinema. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984);
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd/Farrar, Strauss & Giroux Inc. for an
edited version of 'An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narrative' by Roland Barthes in Image, Music, Text. Edited &
translated by Stephen Heath. (New York, Hill & Wang, 1977,
pp. 79-124). Translation of Roland Barthes' 'Introduction a l'analyse
structurale due recit' in Communications 8 (1966) pp. 1-27; the author,
Linda Hutcheon for an edited version of her 'Modes and Forms of
x
 Notes on Editors
Narrative Narcissism: Introduction of a Typology' in Narcissistic
Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. (New York, Methuen 1984,
pp. 17-35); International Thomson Publishing Services/the author,
Edward Branigan for an edited version of his 'Story World and Screen'
in Narrative Comprehension and Film. (London, Routledge, 1992,
pp. 33-86, notes 230-46); Johns Hopkins University Press for edited
versions of 'The Logic of Narrative Possibilities' by Claude Bremond,
translated by Elaine D. Cancalon in New Literary History 11 (1980) and
'Introduction to the Study of the Narratee' by Gerald Prince,
translated by Francis Mariner in Reader Response Criticism. From
Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Edited by Jane P. Tompkins. First
published in Poetique 14 (1973); Alfred A Knopf Inc. for an edited
version of 'Reading for the Plot' by Peter Brooks from Reading for the
Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Copyright © 1984 by Peter
Brooks; National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) for an edited
version of 'Authors, Speakers and Mock Readers' by Walker Gibson,
first published in College English 1 (February, 1950); Tel Aviv
University, Porter Institute for an edited version of 'Fabula and
Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative', by Jonathan Culler, first
published in Poetics Today 1:3 (Spring, 1980) pp. 27-37; University of
Chicago Press and the authors/editor Hayden White, W. J. T. Mitchell,
Wayne Booth & Paul RiCCEur for edited versions of 'The Value of
Narrativity in the Representation of Reality' by Hayden White in On
Narrative edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1980, pp. 1-23. First published in Critical Inquiry 7:1 (Autumn,
1980», 'Types of Narrative' by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction.
(Chicago, 1961, pp. 149-65), 'The Time of Narrating (Erzahlzeit) and
Narrated Time (Erzahlte Zeit)' by Paul RiCCEur in Time and Narrative 2.
Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1986, notes 182-6). Translation of Temps
et recit 11. La configuration dans Ie recit de fiction); University of Nebraska
Press for an edited version of 'Reflections on Actantial Models' by
A-J. Greimas in Structural Semantics: At Attempt at Method by A-J.
Greimas. Translated by Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer & Alan
Velie. Copyright © Librairie Larousse, 1966. Translation copyright ©
1983 by the University of Nebraska Press; University of Toronto
Press Inc. for an edited version of 'Focalization' by Mieke Bal in
Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Translated by
Christine van Boheemen. (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of
Toronto Press, 1985, pp. 100-18). Translation of Theorie van vertellen
en verhalen. (Muiderberg, Countinho, 1980); Yale University Press for
an edited version of 'Line' by J. Hillis Miller in Ariande's Thread: Story
Lines. Copyright © 1992 by Yale University Press.
xi
Narratology: An Introduction
We have been unable to trace the copyright holder of 'What is
Exposition? An Essay in Temporal Delimination' by Meir Sternberg,
and would appreciate any information which would enable us to
do so.

xii
Introduction

Preliminaries

Definition of narratology
Narratology is, etymologically, the science of narrative. The term was
popularized, however, by such structuralist critics as Gerard
Genette, Mieke Bal, Gerald Prince and others in the 1970s. 1 As a
result, the definition of narratology has usually been restricted to
structural, or more specifically structuralist, analysis of narrative.
The post-structuralist reaction of the 1980s and 1990s against the
scientific and taxonomic pretensions of structuralist narratology has
resulted in a comparative neglect of the early structuralist approaches.
One positive effect of this, however, has been to open up new lines
of development for narratology in gender studies, psychoanalysis,
reader-response criticism and ideological critique. Narratology now
appears to be reverting to its etymological sense, a multi-disciplinary
study of narrative which negotiates and incorporates the insights of
many other critical discourses that involve narrative forms of
representation. Consequently, while our selection of texts in this
reader gives ample representation to the original structuralist core of
the discipline, it also includes samples of approaches which are
narratological in the wider if not in the strict formalist sense of the
term.

Wider and narrower definitions

Is Aristotle's Poetics the first narratological treatise?2 Although
Aristotle's work focuses on one specific genre, tragedy, it offers
extraordinary narratological insights which are applicable to all
genres that use plots. For Aristotle, plot (mythos) is the central
element in a literary work, a narrative structure which is common to
dramatic and narrative genres proper. The conceptual ambivalence
of 'narrative' is present, then, from the very beginning of the
discipline. A wider Aristotelian definition of 'narrative' might be 'a
1
Narratology: An Introduction
work with a plot' (e.g. epic poetry, tragedy, comedy); a narrow one
would be 'a work with a narrator' (epic poetry, but not, in principle,
drama or film). Today, narratology studies the narrative aspects of
many literary and non-literary genres and discourses which need
not be defined as strictly narrative, such as lyrical poems, film, drama,
history, advertisements.

Narrative as mediated enunciation

The difference between narrative in the wider sense (as 'a work with
a plot') and narrative proper has a parallel in the distance between
the poles of dramatic narrative and mediated narrative ('showing'
and 'telling'). Linguistic narrative (history, the novel, short stories)
would be narrative in what we have called the narrow sense of the
term, that is, narrative mediated in this case by the discursive activity
of a narrator. Still, there may be other forms of mediacy: in film, the
camera is a mediating device, albeit non-verbal (the use of the word
'enunciation' in this case is therefore a new, analogical development).
Drama itself, of course, is a mediated presentation which uses a
variety of linguistic and non-linguistic strategies, some of which may
be more 'narrative' than others (e.g. the chorus in classical Greek
tragedy, the device of the messenger who reports offstage events or,
at the extreme, Brecht's 'epic' theatre).

The specificity of each narrative medium

Each medium and each genre allows for a specific presentation of the
fabula, different point-of-view strategies, various degrees of
narratorial intrusiveness and different handlings of time.
Consequently, each narrative medium requires a specific analytical
approach to narrative structures and levels (see, for instance, chapter
14).
The novelistic tradition is one of continuous redefinition of the
narrative voice, from fake memoirs and letters, to intrusive and
omniscient narrators, to modernist experiments with objective
presentation or a limited point of view. Some critics have argued
that innovative novel-writing is inherently reflexive: the discourse of
the novel is simultaneously a reflection on past and present ways
of telling a story. This reflexivity leads both to a defamiliarizing
foregrounding of technique and to experimental variations on the
specific areas of narrative structure exploited by a given novelist (e.g.
temporal structure, perspectival control). It should be stressed,
however, that defamiliarization is not necessarily a characteristic of
narrative (or the novel, or literature, for that matter): there are also
2
 Introduction
eminently ritualistic genres in which narrative pleasure derives from
strict adherence to generic conventions (e.g. jokes, neoclassical
tragedy, or noh drama in Japan).
One of the main differential traits of the novel is its ability to mix
reflection and narrative (thence, in part, its reflexivity). The classic
novel became the genre which revealed the inner life of characters,
showing not just their behaviour but the relationship between action
and character. By contrast, drama, in general, is much more directly
focused on action. It is easy to see that the foregrounding of action
in drama and of character in narrative leads to a whole array of
consequences for the treatment of such aspects as time or
psychological representation. Drama generally tends to focus on a
significant and clearly defined action, with a strong plot based on
cause and effect. The 'unity of time' of neoclassical drama, which of
course was not meant by neoclassicist critics to apply to written
narrative, was a recognition of this difference. It was also a
recognition, albeit an exaggerated one, of the specificity of dramatic
illusion.
The theatrical element of drama involves a further difference: the
written, verbal text of a play is only the basis for the actual
performance, which is a different and constantly changeable
interpretation of that text and in fact on every occasion a new text for
the audience. In film, unlike drama, the visual! aural presentation
becomes a fixed text, which nevertheless remains subject to the
viewer's perceptual activity. Drama and film, like narrative paintings,
comic books, and so on, have a visual element in common. Images
may be used to narrate just like words; it is here perhaps that
narratology shows most clearly that it is not just a subsection of
literary theory, but rather of a general semiotic theory.

Definition of narrative
A narrative is the semiotic representation of a series of events
meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way. Films, plays,
comic strips, novels, newsreels, diaries, chronicles and treatises of
geological history are all narratives in this wider sense. Narratives
can therefore be constructed using an ample variety of semiotic media:
written or spoken language, visual images, gestures and acting, as
well as a combination of these. Any semiotic construct, anything
made of signs, can be said to be a text. Therefore, we can speak of
many kinds of narrative texts: linguistic, theatrical, pictorial, filmic.
Any representation involves a point of view, a selection, a perspective
on the represented object, criteria of relevance, and, arguably, an
implicit theory of reality. Narrative structuring may become most
3
Narratology: An Introduction
elaborate in literary texts, but narrativization is one of the commonest
ways of applying an order and a perspective to experience.
The term 'narrative' is, then, potentially ambiguous. As we have
seen, it has at least two main senses: the broad one, which we
have just defined, and the narrow one, according to which narrative
is an exclusively linguistic phenomenon, a speech act, defined by
the presence of a narrator or teller and a verbal text. This definition
would restrict the area of analysis to oral or written narrative, and
in the case of literary studies, to such literary genres as the novel, the
short story, epic poetry, ballads, jokes. Here we shall be concerned
mainly with the narrower sense, with the study of verbal narrative,
and specifically with fictional! artistic narrative. The contributions we
have selected deal in the main with the narrative element in the
literary genres, although a few items deal with non-verbal narrative
media such as film.
Narratological analysis concentrates on those aspects of textual
production, structure and reception which are specific to narrative:
for instance, the study of plot, or the relationship between action and
character portraiture. Narrative may of course be approached in other
ways: historically, thematically, stylistically, archetypally,
deconstructively. In fact, most of the structures studied by
narratologists do not exist exclusively in narrative works, but in
narrative they are central and noticeably distinct. This is the case
with regard to point of view or enunciation, for example, which may
be found in a meditative sonnet as well as in a novel.

The analysis of narrative structure

Narratology in the strict sense of the word is usually associated with
structuralism. Thus, in selecting relevant contributions for this
reader we have assumed that structuralist approaches constitute the
core of the discipline. The work of Saussure and the Russian
formalists early in this century prepared the ground for structuralist
thought. The formalists argue that words in poetry do not function
only as signifiers: they are also signifieds. Literature is defined as a
functional system, as a set of devices whose value is determined by
other devices which are played off against them (those of other genres,
past styles, and so on). A work presupposes conventions, other
works, styles, genres, structures of meaning which go beyond the
work itself. Literature is for these early structuralists a kind of langue
of which each specific work is an instance of parole. French
structuralists carried these linguistic analogies further during the
1960s and 1970s.
4
 Introduction
Structuralists often hesitate, however, when it comes to deciding
the level at which the analogy should work: is it literature as a
whole that works as a language, or is it the individual work that does
so? Each work may be argued to constitute to some extent a langue
of its own, may be seen as a self-regulating structure, since it creates,
up to a point, the conditions for its own meaning and helps define
the language in which it is interpreted. When the structuralists opt
for this second alternative and seek to analyse the functioning of
individual works, they are closer to the New Critical analysis of works
as 'organic wholes'. If, on the other hand, they choose the first, that is,
the analysis of general literary mechanisms, the individual work
comes close to disappearing. It becomes a mere crossroads of
different codes, the codes being the real object of analysis. A kind
of turning-point away from this tendency is represented by Barthes
in S/Z (1970), which rejects the idea that a work can be reduced to
the codes that enable its existence. 3 S/Z is often considered as the
opening statement of the post-structuralist analysis of narrative,
which tends to emphasize the reader's active manipulation of
semiosis.
The initial question a narratologist would try to answer is: in what
sense can we analyse the structure of narrative? How can we begin?
The very definition of narrative we propose - 'the representation of
a series of events' - assumes that narratives are composite entities
in a number of senses, that a narrative can be analysed into the events
that compose it, and that these events can be studied according to their
position with respect to each other. In a series of events some are at
the beginning, some in the middle, some at the end. A narrative
therefore consists of a number of successive parts: it has a longitudinal
structure of time and actions. This 'horizontal' approach to narrative
description is analogous to syntactic analysis in linguistic studies. We
shall call it the syntagmatic axis in analysis.
A narrative, then, is in one sense a succession of elements. But it is
a compound in other senses, too, and can be analysed in more ways
than one. In our definition, it should be noted, a narrative is not 'a
series of events', but 'the representation of a series of events'. Here
the composite nature of narrative appears not as a number of
successive parts, in length or horizontally, but, as it were, vertically,
in depth: the narrative is not what it seems to be; it is a sign which
represents a state of affairs. This 'vertical' direction in analysis leads
us from the sign to its signification. The basic activity in this sense is
interpretation, and therefore we shall call this the hermeneutic
direction in narrative analysis. What we get in a narrative text are
not events as such, but signs, the representations of events. Here an
5
Narratology: An Introduction
infinite complexity may arise. In what way are the events represented?
In what way is the narrative similar to or different from the events
it represents? Narratological theories will largely consist in the
formulation of possible answers to these questions.
We see, then, that the very definition of narrative leads us to the
beginning of analysis, and in several directions at once. We shall
examine different theories which analyse narratives either
horizontally, or vertically, or both. As far as horizontal analysis is
concerned, we have spoken so far of beginning, middle and end.
Other concepts will complicate this simple account of parts. As far
as vertical analysis is concerned, we may speak of levels of analysis.
Our definition distinguishes at least two basic levels. If narrative is
a semiotic representation of a series of events, one level of analysis
will examine the events represented. Another level of analysis will
examine the structure of the representation. We shall find that
narratological theorists often differ when it comes to defining these
levels of analysis: some distinguish two, while others speak of three
or four. Mieke Bal tells us that there are three basic levels of analysis
of narrative: fabula, story and text; Tomashevski only speaks of two,
fabula and siuzhet. 4 In fact, this problem arises in all areas of literary
study. Theories which appear to be similar often turn out to originate
in entirely different critical projects. For the purpose of this
discussion, we assume a framework of three levels of 'vertical' or
hermeneutic analysis of the narrative text: text, story and fabula (see
e.g. Bal, Narratology). Thus, if we take a work such as Robinson Crusoe,
we will say that the text is the linguistic artifact that we can buy and
read, written de facto by Defoe and supposedly by Robinson. The
fabula is whatever happened to Robinson in his travels and on his
island. The story is the precise way in which that action is conveyed,
the way the fabula is arranged into a specific cognitive structure of
information.
Bal has defined these concepts as follows:

1. A TEXT is a finite and structured set of linguistic signs.

1.1. A narrative text is a text in which an agent relates a story . ..
2. A story is the signified of a narrative text. A story signifies in its
turn a fabula. 5

We may represent these levels of signification by means of the

following diagram: 6

6
 Introduction

Author

Narrative text

Story

Author

Reader

Figure 1

The fabula is, according to Bal, a bare scheme of narrative events

which does not take into account any specific traits that
individualize agents or actions into characters and concrete events. A
description of the fabula (or action) would also omit any temporal
or perspectival distortions: there are no flashbacks or variations in
point of view at this level of analysis. In other words, in Bal's
conception the fabula is actually an action-scheme: it is a synthetic
abstraction, not the concrete, full-blown action that we construct when
reading or watching a narrative. It may be confusing that other
theorists (Ingarden, Martinez Bonati, Ruthrof) use the other concept of
deep structure (concrete action and world, not abstractive fabula). We
shall retain both concepts, since both are analytically significant: the
full-blown or concretized action can be meaningfully opposed to a
more abstract and reduced fabula or action-scheme.
It is also possible to draw up schemes of the story and the text (the
'reduced' version of the text being best called a summary). By this
method we obtain the following critical tools:

Text Summary
Story Story-scheme (plot)
Action Action-scheme (fabula)

The term 'plot' as used in everyday language often designates a story-

scheme or an action-scheme, or a structure in between, mixing traits
of both. Here we shall use it to refer to a scheme consisting of the
structures of action and perception which shape the story. However,
7
Narratology: An Introduction
'plot' is a tricky word because of its rich meaning, and several theories
take into account other phenomena implicit in the everyday use of
the word?
The concept of story needs further elucidation. A story is a fabula
which has been given a presentational shape: a specific point of
view and temporal scheme have been introduced. We could say that
a story is a fabula as it is presented in a text - not the fabula as such.
The text is not the story, either: 'story' is still a synthetic abstraction
we produce from the text, taking into account only its narrative
aspects, considering it only in so far as it represents an action. We
may recall that for Aristotle mythos was merely one of several
'aspects' of a literary work. A text is a linguistic construct, while a
story is a cognitive scheme of events. The same story can give rise to
a number of texts: for instance, when Kafka wrote The Castle in the
first person and then rewrote it in the third person, the story
remained essentially the same, but the text became a different one.
The same story could in principle be told by means of different
texts: a film, a comic book or a novel. But film adaptations of novels
usually tell very different stories, even if the basic elements of the
action are preserved. The story, then, can be looked on as a further
structuring of the action. It may be ideally defined as the result of
a series of modifications to which action is subjected. These
modifications can be relative to time or to informational selection and
distribution (Genette's 'mood', Narrative Discourse). Telling a story
from a single character's point of view is one of many possible
modalizations of the action.
A narrative text is also an instance of discourse, of linguistic
action. Discourse is the use of language for communicative purposes
in specific contextual and generic situations, called discourse situations.
These can be described at different levels of specificity: there is
written discourse in general, but also specific fictional written
discourse. Increasing specificity would take into account historical
or generic considerations. Of the infinite number of discourse
situations which could be defined in this way, we may draw
attention to a few: the writing of narrative discourse which is intended
to be read as literature, the 'naive' reading of the same, the critical
(academic) discourse on literature, writing factual narratives such as
reports, or more personal narratives such as diaries and memoirs.
A text cannot be reduced to its linguistic codification, especially if
by 'linguistic' we mean 'relative to the abstract system of language'.
From the standpoint of linguistic pragmatics there are many cultural
codes, apart from the Saussurean langue, structuring discourse
(including narrative discourse). For instance, the social interaction
rituals which allow speakers to position and identify themselves in
8
 Introduction
conversation remain active when social interaction is represented in a
text. An author uses a multiplicity of codes in shaping a narrative,
with various degrees of deliberateness or consciousness. Many of
these codes are to be recognized and used by a receiver in
interpreting the text, if the interpretation is to be shared and accepted
by other speakers. This retrieval of the author's meaning can happen
with various degrees of awareness. There are no doubt many codes
organizing the meaning of texts which have not yet been identified
by theoreticians, although readers will use them intuitively. Not all
the codes used by the author need to be identified or retrieved, even
in this intuitive way. A portion of the meaning of the text is usually
enough for the purposes of most readers and critics, who may,
moreover, interpret the text according to codes which were not used
by the author, and in this way construct new meanings. The
legitimacy and value of these or any other meanings are defined in
a specific discourse situation - they cannot be determined a
priori.
The intrinsic context of a work is a communicative context. It can
be conceived as a virtual communicative situation, in which a textual
author communicates with a textual reader. The concepts of 'textual
author' and 'textual reader' derive from Russian and German
formalism,8 and more immediately from Walker Gibson's 'mock
reader'9 and Wayne Booth's 'implied author' and 'mock reader'.l0
The textual author is a virtual image of the author's attitudes, as
presented by the text. The textual reader is a virtual receiver created
by the author in full view of the actual audience he or she presumes
for his or her work. The textual reader need not coincide with the
author's conception of the audience: this reader-figure may be a
rhetorical strategy, a role which the author wishes the audience to
assume (or even to reject). Likewise, the reader's textual author and
the author's textual author need not coincide any more than the
meaning of the work for author and reader. But if communication is
to occur these figures must have elements in common.
The levels of analysis just mentioned can be conceived as a series
of semiotic strata, in which each level is the result of the
application of a set of transformational rules to the previous level. A
reader will consider the (verbal) text as a given, and will use it to
construct the story. In its turn, the fabula is constructed on the basis
of the story, by 'undoing' the transformations which gave rise to the
latter.
The complexity of this enunciative structure can be exploited
aesthetically in literature. A variety of displacements are possible.
The subject required by the narrative act, the narrator, need not
coincide with the subject of the fictional statement, the textual
9
Narratology: An Introduction
author. The narrator may be an entirely fictional figure, as in most
first-person novels, or may coincide formally though not
ideologically with the textual author - an unreliable third-person
narrator (Booth, Rhetoric).
Many combinations are possible, and the differences between the
various textual subjects may be clear-cut or extremely shady. This
is to be expected, since the textual author, like the narrator, is not a
substance but a discursive role. Discursive selves, permanent or
provisional, proliferate in literature as much as in other modes of
discourse. When we speak in our professional capacity, for instance,
we use a set of discursive conventions to fashion an official persona,
a provisional self designed for use in a given sphere of action. Irony
is another way a speaker may modulate the presentation of self.
Through the use of irony, a textual author creates a provisional,
evanescent enunciator (subject) which does not coincide with the
author's overall discursive self. More sustained irony will produce
something like a hypothetical character, and by pushing this a bit
further we can create a fictional narrator consistently differentiated
from the author by means of ironic distance. Such narrators may use
first- or third-person narrative strategies; they may write a
(supposedly) factual narrative -letters, memoirs, a diary - or an
explicit fiction.
The narrator's utterance is addressed to a hearer (reader) located
at the same structural level: the narratee.n Just as the various
fictional narrators merge gradually into the textual author, the
various narratees shade into the textual reader. This means that in
some tales the differences between the narratee and the implied reader
are crucial and clear-cut, while in others they are only latent.
So far we have identified a variety of textual figures, roles or
subject-positions. They each perform an activity which has a direct
object (if it is transitive) and an addressee: 12

Subject Activity (Verb) Direct object Addressee (Indirect

object)
Author Writing Lit. work Reader
Textual Literary Literary text Textual reader
author enunciation
Narrator Narration Narrative Narratee
Focalizer Focalization Focalized Implied spectator
(story)
Agent Performance Action (Agent)
10
 Introduction
We can also represent the structure of fictional narrative
diagrammatically:
Author's context
AUTHOR

(Narrative work) Textual author

(Fictional Fictional narrator
narrative)
(Story) Focalizer

(Fabula) Character

Narrated world
Events
(happenings or
actions)

Character

Implied spectator

Fictional narratee

Textual reader

~~~_~~~
Reader's context

Figure 2

From the surface level of the linguistic text the reader constructs
two kinds of interpretive scheme: the discursive schemata (the
fictional speech situation, the textual senders and receivers) and the
narrative deep structures (the narrative and the story). An
interpreter will usually end by constructing some kind of literary
statement or interpretation, which becomes for him or her the
meaning or significance of the story.
Figure 3 represents this process of construction in a schematic way.
The vertical and slanting double arrows indicate that the process of
interpretation is not linear; it does not proceed neatly from one level
of the textual structure to the next. Instead, there is a constant
feedback between interpretation of the action, of the narrative
structure and of the textual subjects. Differences in construction of
the implied authorial attitude therefore often result in different
constructions of the action. We have used one-way arrows in the first
11
Narratology: An Introduction
story and
storystory story
story story

narrative story
story
text statement

textual
textual textual author,
and work and textual
narratee reader
Figure 3

step of the process in Figure 3 to emphasize that the first substantial

contact of the text rests on verbal denotation; but it is clear that even
the denoted meaning of the text may be subject to revision once
construction of the other narrative levels is under way. Nothing in
the work is fully given from the start: everything is subject to
revision and interpretation.

An historical overview

History of narrative and history of narratology

It is not clear yet what a history of narrative as such might be like.
There are of course histories of the novel, of film, even of historical
study itself; but a more general history of narrative forms would have
to be an interdisciplinary achievement. Most work in narratology
consists of synchronic formal analysis, and the discipline still needs
to develop a comparative and historical perspective on narrative
genres and structures. The history of the discipline of narratology
itself is also largely unwritten. What follows sketches its
development through the early prescriptive poetics of specific genres,
through formal and structural analysis, to recent trends which stress
the relationship between representation and specific ideological or
cultural forms. A study in depth of the historical development of
narrative genres would result in a cultural narratology, the study
of narrative forms in their relationship to the culture which generates
them. Cultural studies, derived from neo-Hegelian, Marxist, feminist
or Foucauldian sources, open up a new speculative area for
narratology that lies beyond the classification of formal devices and
the purpose of this book.

12
 Introduction
Narrative theory before 1950

Classical and post-classical

In Plato's Republic we find the groundwork of genre theory and of
the analysis of literary enunciationY After expounding a theory
of art as mimesis, Plato's spokesman Socrates discusses the style of
poetic compositions: 'All mythology is a narration of events, either
past, present or to come .... And narration may be either simple
narration, or imitation, or a union of the two' (p. 27). That is, the
poet may speak in his own voice (simple narration) or may speak
through the voice of a character (imitation, mimesis). Tragedy and
comedy are wholly imitative, while in dithyramb, lyric poetry and
similar genres the poet is the sole speaker, 'and the combination of
both is found in epic, and in several other styles of poetry' (p. 28).
From a narratological viewpoint, this is the first theoretical approach
to the problem of narrative voice, preceding a pragmatic approach to
the text as utterance.
Aristotle's Poetics further develops the formal approach to
literature. Aristotle apparently takes for granted that 'serious'
literature (of which tragedy is the highest form) is narrative - in the
wider sense of 'telling a story'. He roughly preserves the Platonic
classification of genres on the basis of enunciation, distinguishing the
wholly imitative form of dramatic performance from the mixed
presentation of epic narrative. Within the genres based on incident
and event (narrative proper and drama), the mythos, 'plot', or
'structure of the incidents' is for him the basic infrastructure; it is
foremost among the aspects of tragedy (plot, characters, diction,
thought, spectacle, song):

The most important of these is the arrangement of the incidents,

for tragedy is not a representation of men but of a piece of action,
of life, of happiness and unhappiness, which come under the
head of action, and the end aimed at is the representation not of
qualities of character but of some action.... And furthermore, two
of the most important elements in the emotional effect of tragedy,
'reversals' and 'discoveries', are parts of the plot .... The plot is
then the first principle and as it were the soul of tragedy: character
comes second.
(Poetics VI, pp. 25-7)

The mythos, the plot of the tragedy, is defined as 'the arrangement of

the incidents', so, strictly speaking, 'it is the plot which represents
13
Narratology: An Introduction
the action' (Poetics VI, p. 25). We therefore have two possible ways of
looking at a tragedy, two possible levels of analysis of the story
which is being represented. On the one hand, it is an action (praxis),
just as our daily activities may be described as actions. On the one
hand, it is a plot (mythos), an artistic structure which the poet builds
out of the action. That is, on the one hand we find mere incidents,
on the other, the disposition of incidents. The poet is the maker not of
verses or of incidents but of this important intermediate structure,
the plot. We may note that Aristotle did not include action as a
separate constituent of tragedy; he probably felt that the presence
of plot in that list of parts accounted for both of them.
Critical traditions in any cultures usually begin with foundational
texts which, as Miner has noted, normally take one specific literary
geme, most frequently 'lyric' poetry, as the model or epitome of all
literature.14 In spite of the centrality of narrative to all cultures, we
find that only one major critical tradition (the Japanese one, deriving
from Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji) takes narrative as the central
literary geme. Significantly, Aristotle's Poetics is based on drama,
specifically tragedy. Many aspects of the analysis of narrative form
sketched in the Poetics remained largely undeveloped until the
twentieth century, when they were taken up by the formalist and
structuralist critical schools.
The classical discipline of rhetoric was not primarily concerned
with narrative. Nevertheless, it provided many insights into the
mechanism of style and composition which were gradually
incorporated into the analysis of narrative. The most influential
treatises on rhetoric follow a standard development of the discipline,
concentrating on:

1 The possible kinds of discourse, the gemes of rhetoric (genera).

2 The structure of discourse, the way it divides into sections, its
internal organization (ordo, materia or res). Aristotle had already
introduced the syntagmatic analysis of narrative at two
differentiated levels: that of the text (the sections of a tragedy,
for instance) and that of the story (mythos) - the complication,
turning-point and umavelling of the plot.
3 The steps we must follow in order to compose a discourse (opus).
Concepts such as inventio, dispositio and elocutio would eventually
be applied to narrative as well as to oratory. IS The study of
dispositio, for instance, afforded the distinction between ordo
naturalis, the natural and chronological presentation of events, and
ordo artificialis, the artistically intended distortion of the
chronological arrangement of events. A typical statement of this
14
 Introduction
distinction is found in Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova. 16 The
classical distinction between simple, complex and mixed narrative
is preserved in post-classical rhetoric, and the study of
narrative voice also benefited from systematic study of the
resources of elocutio. Notions such as the levels of stylistic treatment
(the rota Virgilii), and the differentiation of characters' voices
(sermocinatio), were to lay the foundations for the structural study
of literature.

The Renaissance and Enlightenment periods developed their own

literary systematics often through a re-reading and expansion of
classical treatises. The Aristotelian theories of Robortello, Scaliger and
Castelvetro constitute a gigantic step forward in terms of the detailed
discussion of formal issues.17 Countless other treatises discuss the
poetics of tragedy, epic poetry, romance, and so forth. Although we
may disparage the neoclassical obsession with generic laws and rules,
as well as the prescriptive nature of these treatises, we should not
overlook their increasing analytical power. For example, debates on
the famous 'three unities' of drama helped to refine such basic
concepts as the opposition between represented and representational
time, narrative ellipsis and compression, the use of physical space
to signify fictional space, or the relationship between dramatic illusion
and convention. G. E. Lessing's Laokoon, for instance, remains within
the neoclassical and prescriptive episteme, but its analytical subtlety
and its wealth of conceptual abstraction foreshadow later
developments in aesthetics and semiotics. Lessing defines literature
as an art intrinsically conditioned by the temporal sequentiality of
linguistic signs (while the plastic arts use spatial signs). This abstract
definition is the starting-point for practical analysis of such issues
as the immediacy effect, dramatization and the use of point of view.1 8
The theory of the novel was neglected during the emergence of the
genre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Novels or
'romances' are not to be found in the classifications of Boileau or in
the criticism of Dryden. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries such critical statements as do exist are usually far behind
the criticism of poetry in theoretical development. Nevertheless, the
appearance of the novel leads to a qualitative step forward in analysis.
From the point of view of theory, the new form invites a new
paradigm, asking new questions and demanding new answers.
Novelists are among the first to make significant statements about
their craft. Innovative works themselves were such statements: the
novel is an intrinsically parodic genre, and the best novels are very
often a parody of, or at least a commentary on and interpretation of,
15
Narratology: An Introduction
previous modes of fiction writing. Don Quixote is often defined as a
satire on romances, and this implied critique can be read everywhere
in fiction, more explicitly than in drama or poetry. Great novels have
always been to some extent metafictions, or anti-novels.
Henry Fielding, the great heir of Cervantes in the British scene,
integrates commentary and fictional writing, most obviously in Tom
Jones, where each book is headed by one introductory chapter of
commentary. Fielding calls himself 'the founder of a new province
of writing' with independent laws,19 the 'comic epic poem in prose'20
- a deliberately paradoxical formulation, stressing both that the
novel is born out of the convergence of diverse genres and that it is
essentially parodic in nature: a way of setting previous conventions
of writing against one another. More specifically, the novel is the
parodic genre which results from setting the conventions of epic
and romance against prosaic reality.
Additional valuable insights are provided by Samuel Richardson
and Laurence Sterne. 21 Drawing on the classical distinction between
pure, imitative and mixed narrative, Richardson distinguishes
between first-person narration (in which the writer tells of his own
adventures), epic narration (controlled by what we would call an
authorial narrator) and a technique which is more dramatic,
introducing dialogue and direct speech. Richardson especially values
this dramatic mode, clearly with his own epistolary technique in
mind. Sterne pushes narrative experiment to a limit: Tristram Shandy
can be read as an entertaining and often teasing commentary on the
way narrative expectations are created and frustrated.
German critics, such as Friedrich Schlegel and G. W. F. Hegel,
provided some of the earliest theoretical approaches to the novel.
In his Brief aber den Roman, Schlegel voices in an explicit way the
notion of the novel as a medley or convergence of all previous
literary genres. For Hegel, the novel is the modem version of the
epic: both bourgeois and subjective - a result of the tum of romantic
literature towards subjectivism and reflexivity. Hegel's theories were
developed in the twentieth century by the young Lukacs, one of the
main theorists of narrative realism, who sees the novel as the product
of bourgeois demythologization of aristocratic ideals. 22

The aesthetics of realism

The early theory of the novel was formulated for the most part under
the realist aesthetics of the nineteenth century. While in this
century the theory of the lyric is expressive, the theory of the novel
remains largely mimetic. That is, the lyric is defined as an expression
of the poet's feelings, and its representative element is subordinated
16
 Introduction
to this expressive function (hence the 'pathetic fallacy', the projection
of subjective passions on to the landscape). Victorian theorists of
fiction often drew an opposition between the genres of the romance
and the novel. Romance was light entertainment, making free use of
fantasy and stirring adventure. The novel, on the other hand, was
on the way to becoming 'serious' narrative, through its aesthetics of
verisimilitude. This theory often originated with the novelists
themselves, such as Balzac in France. In England we find an eloquent
defence of realism in the essays of George Eliot and George Henry
Lewes, who attack popular fiction and contend that realism is a
novelist's moral responsibility.23
Among the basic terms of analysis in the realist aesthetic are plot,
character, setting, theme, moral aim and verisimilitude. For realist critics,
a novel should have a good construction, starting with a coherent
plot. The distinguishing trait of the novet however, is not the plot
but its mimetic aim in the depiction and characters and setting. Many
realist critics see deliberate plotting as a somewhat extraneous element
which may distort the spontaneous revelation of character. In the
Victorian age, the term 'novel of character' is often used as a
hallmark of narrative quality: the novel of character is privileged over
the simple-minded 'novel of action' or romance. Sometimes it is the
regional specificity of the characters and setting that is emphasized,
as in the late nineteenth-century school of 'local colour'. The realist
novel, in any case, should be a psycho-social study, one that reveals
new truths about human feelings and relationships. Such a novel
has a theme and is linked to a well-defined moral intention, an
authorial stance towards that theme, which is easily identified, whether
it is conveyed by direct or by indirect means. It is this moral intention
that makes realism something more than an attempt at copying
nature.
Bulwer Lytton's essay 'On Art in Fiction' is a typical nineteenth-
century approach to the narrative specificity of the novel.24 Lytton
gives great weight to the author's intended effect and deliberate
manipulation of the materials. It is essential to have a plan in a
novel: an artistic shape, although this shape does not coincide with
that of drama. For instance, the novelist uses description, not used
by the playwright, which as Lytton notes is integrated with plot and
character. He also argues that since the plot of a novel is less tight
and less guided by cause and effect than that of a play, the new genre
should be understood to have its own autonomous poetics. The
novelist has interests other than those of the playwright: in character
study and range of intimate emotions.
One of the most influential nineteenth-century approaches to
narrative construction is found in Edgar Allan Poe's theory of the short
17
Narratology: An Introduction
story. Poe identifies the unity of a work not so much in the structure
of the work itself as in its effect on the reader: the unity of the
reading experience is essential for the unity of the work. He sees
the novel as a genre devoid of a true unity of impression, while the
short story is for him the most artistic prose genre, because the unity
of effect on the reader can be calculated and preserved. 25 Poe
advocates a hyper-conscious theory of writing: everything is
controlled by authorial intention. The end of the work must be
complete in the writer's mind before actual composition begins: there
is to be no improvization or change of plan during the writing.
Thus, Poe situates himself in opposition to novelists like Dickens or
Trollope, who often worked without a pre-established plan and
improvised their plots in the making. Poe's conception of narrative
is centred on its closure: 'It is only with the denouement constantly in
view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or
causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points,
tend to the development of the intention.'26
We have seen that early theorists like Lytton placed some emphasis
on defining the conventions of the novel as such, and on
distinguishing the narrativity of fiction from that of drama. However,
many novelists have praised narrative techniques which approach
the effects of drama. Certain comments on narrative technique by
Richardson, Stendhal or Dickens are interesting forerunners of
Henry James's theories of fictional form because of the value they set
on the dramatic elements of the novel: writers should not tell the
whole of the story in their own person, but should show it - make
their characters tell it by means of dialogue and action. Stendhal
proudly notes that all other novelists tell the story, while only he
shows it to the reader.
Studies of narrative technique developed piecemeal, in Switzerland
with Edmond Scherer and in Germany with Friedrich SpielhagenP
Spielhagen adumbrated a fully-fledged theory of 'dramatic' narrative
technique especially suited to psychological realism.
With Henry James, likewise, we witness the evolution of realism
towards subjectivism and perspectivism, in part because of James's
psychological bent. According to James, the novel (unlike drama) can
reveal to us the inner life of characters, and this is the essence of
the genre, which otherwise must follow, in his opinion, a dramatic
ideal of concentration. 28 But the novel is a free form, he says. It has
no grammar which can be defined, no rules that can be taught,
because it is 'a personal, a direct impression of life' (p. 664). Execution
and intensity of impression are the grounds of its value, and they
cannot be defined. They stem directly from the personal way each
novelist sees life. In James's essays and prefaces to his own novels
18
 Introduction
we find some of the clearest and most influential statements of the
period on point of view and narrative voice, as well as on action and
character.
James makes a distinction between voice and point of view in his
novelistic practice as well as in his rhetorical statements. This
distinction arises from his concern with the novel's ability to depict
experience and psychological life. First-person narrative is not
adequate for his purposes, because he is not looking for a conscious
revelation of character, or for a novel based on recollection of past
experience, which is what first-person narratives are most suited to
reveal. His novels are usually written in the third person, which is
less 'intrusive', more 'dramatic'. The story should in any case unfold
in a transparent way without the writer stepping in to make his
own comments. Rather than being simply 'told', we are 'shown' action
and character as they develop through significant scenes. And there
is an ideal way of 'showing' in third-person narration which is at
once dramatic and psychologically immediate. This is what James
calls narration through 'centers of consciousness' (Preface to The
Portrait of a Lady), 'vessels of sensibility' or 'reflectors' (Preface to
The Wings of the Dove), which many narratologists now call
focalizers. The scenes usually act on a perceiving character, a
reflector or focalizer, whose psychological reaction, the development
of his or her understanding of the action, contributes to the organic
unity of the plot. This is the role of Strether in The Ambassadors, or of
Maisie in What Maisie Knew. James does not consider it necessary,
as do some of his followers, to avoid changes of perspective during
the narrative, but he does seek to cut the story into perspectival
blocks that are internally coherent. For instance, in The Wings of the
Dove, the story of Milly Theale is seen mainly through the eyes of
two characters, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, as well as through
Milly's own eyes. Every change of point of view, James says, has its
aesthetic justification, its dramatic coherence, but it is essential for a
novel to establish a 'register', a set of perspectival rules to which it
consistently adheres.
Just as Aristotle argued that an action or praxis had to be treated
artistically before it became the plot or mythos, James distinguishes
between the 'subject' and the 'wrought material' or novel, thus
prefiguring the Russian formalists' opposition between fabula and
siuzhet. The 'register' defines the relationship between the material
and the finished novel. Form and psychology converge: the dramatic
form allows the reader a new insight into the characters' perception
and interiority. James conceives of the rules governing point of view
as organic and internal, springing from the very nature of the
psychological material of the novel.
19
Narratology: An Introduction
The influence of James's ideas is readily apparent in most important
twentieth-century writers on fictional technique and point of view:
Percy Lubbock (The Craft of Fiction, 1921), Cleanth Brooks and Robert
Penn Warren (Understanding Fiction, 1943), Jean Pouillon (Temps et
roman, 1947), F. K. Stanzel (Typische Erziihlsituationen, 1954), Norman
Friedman ('Point of View in Fiction', 1955); Wayne C. Booth (The
Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961), Gerard Genette (Figures III, 1972), Mieke Bal
(Narratologie, 1977).29
Since the early phase of modernism (James, Conrad), theoretical
reflection on narrative has consistently been opposed to
experimental, avant-garde or at least 'highbrow' narratives. The
various genres of popular fiction continue to rely heavily on the
classical narrative devices of plotting and stereotyped characters. Still,
critics have often valued the pleasures provided by narratives of
action (as opposed to narratives of character, of point of view or
of linguistic experimentation). R. L. Stevenson's defence of the
romance, an answer to James's defence of psychological fiction, is a
case in point.30

Early modernism
As we have seen, Henry James helped theorize the transition from
Victorian realism to modernism. Critics like Joseph Warren Beach
and Percy Lubbock were to systematize and popularize these ideas. 31
Beach coined the phrase 'exit author' to describe the new dramatic
autonomy of the novel, whose action was to unfold directly under the
eyes of the reader, without the mediating value judgements of
the narrator. Percy Lubbock's book The Craft of Fiction was something
of an unofficial textbook of the modernist aesthetics of indirection.
Lubbock draws an opposition between two methods, 'showing' and
'telling': 'The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of
his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell
itself.'32 The aim of the novelist is to create a whole and full
impression, to produce a controlled effect on the reader through the
careful arrangement of form and subject matter. The aim is still to tell
a story which is morally or metaphysically relevant, but the point
now is that the reader must perceive and feel the story together with
the character - as an experiential process, not as a finished product
seen from the outside. Related to this aesthetic position is Dos Passos'
and Hemingway's concept of impersonal fiction, as well as
Lawrence's injunction to 'trust the tale' instead of the teller or Joyce's
image of the author standing apart from his creation, 'paring his
fingernails'.
According to Lubbock, what makes the story be shown rather than
20
 Introduction
told is a matter of composition, of the adequate treatment of the
story material through the use of subjective point of view and scenic
presentation. The novelist must use a coherent style: a consistent
narrative mode. If the subject matter requires transitions between
different modes they must be made smoothly: the seams must be
invisible. Nothing must remind us of the novelist's presence.
Everything that is told in a story must be motivated; that is, it must
be there on account of some character's experience. Of course, in
calling for a limited point of view Lubbock is also assuming a subject
matter that is psychological in nature: some kind of personal drama,
instead of the vast social frescoes of the Victorians. His model is
Henry James's The Ambassadors. Lubbock calls for conscious
craftsmanship, an attention to composition, and the development of
an adequate critical vocabulary to describe it. Similar ideas, the stress
on character, point of view and composition rather than on plot, are
also found in Ortega y Gasset's theory of the novel, and in various
other modernist critics. 33
Other valuable aesthetic approaches to the genre in the English-
speaking world are E. M. Forster's ever-popular Aspects of the Novel
and Edwin Muir's The Structure of the Novel. 34 Forster studies the basic
narrative elements of realist fiction, under such headings as 'story',
'plot', 'people', 'pattern and rhythm'. His emphasis, following what
is perhaps the mainstream British tradition, falls on the depiction of
'people'; that is, of character. His classification of characters into 'flat'
(based on one trait and therefore predictable) and 'round' (complex
and lifelike) became universally accepted (incidentally, this
conception was far from new - the essentials can be found in
neoclassical critics, such as Dryden). Edwin Muir's work, less popular
with later readers, tries to establish different types of novel on the
basis of their experiential treatment of time, action and point of view:
the character novel, the dramatic novel based on conflict, or the
chronicle, the wide-ranging multiplot novel of social panorama.

High modernism and New Criticism

Henry James's ideas (as well as those of Lubbock, Forster and Muir)
were representative of the transition between the classical realist
novel, with its emphasis on story, setting and character, and the
modernist novel with its stress on writing and composition. In
the 1920s and 1930s there was a widespread critical revolution
against the aesthetics of Jate Romanticism. In literature this
revolution is called modernism and is identified with a self-conscious
avant-garde; in critical theory it was identified as New Criticism or
as formalism. The modernist/formalist revolution had deep
21
Narratology: An Introduction
consequences for the writing and criticism of all literary gemes. The
New Critics moved further away from mimetic considerations. They
dismissed the Romantics and favoured lyric poetry that was
complex, ironic and intellectualized. They criticized literature in terms
of its structural complexity, not in terms of its immediate fidelity to
life. That is, the aesthetic judgements of the New Critics tend to be
intrinsic rather than extrinsic. A work is above all a pattern of words,
a self-sufficient entity which constructs and manipulates emotions
and thoughts that have only an analogical relationship to reality. It
is a self-enclosed structure, meaning that any element has to be judged
within the pattern, taking its function into account, rather than being
identified in an immediate way with its equivalents in the historical
world. Originally the New Critics did not pay much attention to fiction,
although later we find readings of fiction in terms of tone, pattern,
irony and balance.35 With the 'close reading' developed by William
Empson and F. R. Leavis, the novel suddenly became a 'dramatic
poem' - its language became significant in terms of tension and
image, like the language of poetry.36 Virginia Woolf claimed that
modem fiction would assume the quality of a poem, and opposed
fiction modelled on fact or report (like that of the naturalists). For
her, as for other modernists, fiction must work through poetic
suggestiveness rather than through narrativity.37
Plot and character as critical terms seemed to fade into the
background, all emphasis falling on language and imagery, and on
the overall pattern woven by all these elements. This intrinsic tum in
critical thought eventually favoured the development of a reflexive
theory of fiction, although it took some time for this to be explicitly
formulated in the Anglo-Saxon world. For the time being, mimetic
concerns still occupied the foreground, but mimesis had become
internalized (Erich Kahler spoke in this respect of an 'inward tum'
of the novel}.38 Critics from the 1930s to the 1950s paid particular
attention to the modes of representation of inner life developed by
the modernist novel, by Joyce, Woolf or Faulkner. Terms such as 'free
indirect style', 'interior monologue', 'camera eye' narrative or
'stream of consciousness' occupy the centre of the critical stage. 39 We
shall not dwell long on this phase; our main concern here is with the
next stage of theoretical development: the theory of the novel as it
stood in the 1960s and 1970s. It was with the second wave of
formalism, in other words with structuralism, that narratology
underwent a wholesale expansion. But first we need to consider
additional formalist approaches which prepare the ground for this
development.

22
 Introduction
Formalisms
Continental criticism witnessed an increase in formalist analysis of
fiction, with the advanced work of German and Polish critics and
the work of the Russian formalists in the 1920s. It is true that aesthetic
studies simultaneously appeared in the English-speaking world,40
but in general theoretical speculation was more common in
continental Europe. The tradition of theoretical reflection descending
from Schlegel to Spielhagen and Walzel includes such interesting
practitioners as Kate Friedemann. Her book Die Rolle des Erziihlers
in der Epik is a fully-fledged narratological treatise written many years
before the appearance of mainstream narratology.41 She analyses the
technique of early modernist' dramatic' narration as formulated by
Spielhagen (whom we could usefully compare to James in the
Anglo-Saxon sphere) and contends that other types of narrative voice
which allow for the narrator's intrusions or commentary are equally
'artistic' and useful for the novelist.
While German aesthetics is one of the main influences on the
Russian formalist school, the systematic and functional approach to
form developed by Shklovski, Propp or Tomashevski is considered
by many as the inaugural statement of narratology proper. 42 The
formalists react against both impressionist and historicist approaches
to literature, and supplement their aesthetic background by
rethinkirlg Aristotelian insights, which they enrich with concepts
borrowed from the new developments in theoretical linguistics
(Baudouin de Courtenay, Saussure, Jakobson). Key ·narratological
concepts inherited from the Russian formalists are the opposition
jabula/siuzhet (the source of the opposition fabula/ story / text
mentioned above), or the concept of pseudo-oral narrative voice,
skaz. Such concepts are not to be applied in a mechanical way: the
aim of the formalists is to account for the organic effect of the work
and the interaction of all its elements. For instance, in their discussion
of 'realistic motivation' they argue that a technique such as
epistolary narrative has a specific informative function vis-a.-vis the
reader, while it is simultaneously 'justified' or motivated by the story,
therefore acting as a sign of realism. The work of Vladimir Propp on
the Russian folktale, influential in both anthropology and literary
theory, introduced such key analytical tools as the concept of
'narrative functions' and their organization into 'sequences'. Propp's
work is a grammar of narrative which identifies the basic' deep'
structure underlying any number of 'surface' manifestations.
The most important contribution of the formalists, then, is one of
general method: they aim at devising a general science of literature
(narrative) capable of describing the systematics of literary forms and
23
Narratology: An Introduction
also of literary evolution. Form and function are intrinsically related:
literary forms, for instance, may become worn and give rise to new
forms (parody) while their previous social function is taken up by
originally minor forms that evolve and come to the fore.
The systematic study of literary forms is characteristic of twentieth-
century criticism. The systematics may derive from linguistics and
aesthetics, but also from philosophy as well as from comparative
studies of anthropology, religion and myth.
Although there are a variety of philosophical approaches relevant
for the study of narrative, we may single out phenomenology as the
most akin to narratology stricto sensu. Phenomenology is a systematic
study of experience. It approaches reality as a formal system of
relationships, so leading naturally to the problem of additional
subsystems such as literary works and fictional objects, and
converging with semiotics in the study of sign systems and
representations. Roman Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art, which
applies Husserl's phenomenology to the description of literary works,
is a foundational text in this line,43 usefully complementing structuralisl
descriptions of narrative form. In his later work Ingarden antedates
many aspects of the reader-response approaches of the 1960s and
1970s.44 Critics such as Wolfgang Iser have further developed the
phenomenological study of reception and reading in closer
convergence with the structuralists. 45 There is, in addition, a rather
well-defined phenomenological approach to narrative which is
associated with existentialist philosophy, represented by the work of
Jean-Paul Sartre or Jean Pouillon.
Like literary phenomenology, 'myth-and-ritual' studies of narrative
have a formal (narratological) dimension. Many literary critics have
drawn inspiration from Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, Carl
Jung's studies on collective psychology or Joseph Campbell's The
Hero with a Thousand Faces. 46 Frazer's book is an attempt at finding a
common narrative structure beneath a wide range of myths and
rituals. Campbell's book identifies the basic stages of archetypal
narratives similar to those studied by Propp. A comparison of these
books reveals striking similarities not only in the object of study but
also in the abstractive nature of their approaches, although each is
grounded in a totally different discipline and intellectual tradition.
Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is yet another major treatise
on archetypal plot structures. 47 Indeed, Frye constructs a complex
interpretation of all literature in which the different genres and model
are organized as phases in a narrative structure associated with the
cycle of life. The creativity, learning and subtlety evinced in this wod
have been rewarded by its immense influence. Like many other
24
 Introduction
works not strictly narratological, Frye's Anatomy is essential reading
for any student of narrative.
Myth criticism is often combined with early psychoanalytic
approaches. Sigmund Freud himself devoted some attention to the
psychoanalytical interpretation of narrative literature as well as to
the narrative dimension of psychoanalysis. 48 Early analyses based
on Freud's work lay more emphasis on the former, that is, on
mechanisms of identification in reading, the writer's fantasies of
sexuality and power, or the 'pathological' origin of plot structures
and patterns of images or motifs. By contrast, present-day
psychoanalytic criticism often privileges the second perspective, that
is, the fantastic element in the analyst's (or the critic's) interpretive
activities, the formal and institutional constraints of the diagnosis,
and so on.

Contemporary narratology

Comparative narratology
Interdisciplinary studies of narrative afford a promising area for
future development. A 'comparative narratology' - in the sense of
'comparative literature' - addresses such matters as the structural
differences of given narrative genres or sub-genres, the
phenomenological difference between narrative and other literary and
artistic phenomena, and the comparative poetics of different cultures
and traditions. Interdisciplinary narratological studies also try to
strengthen the ties between narratology and other critical
endeavours, such as the theory of interpretation or reception,
women's and gender studies, deconstruction. The interdisciplinary
direction offers the most interesting avenues for development,
although it often leads beyond narratology proper. 49
From a strictly narratological perspective, we may classify theories
of narrative according to their main object of study within the
narratologically defined structure of the text. A theory is always a
limited model which isolates or gives preference to certain features
of the object of study. Most theories of narrative, therefore, privilege
either narrative as process or narrative as product, the level either
of the fabula, of the story, or of textual representation.

Theories of authorship
Authorship and literary production have been a traditional area of
literary research. In the nineteenth century, historical scholarship
developed alongside the bourgeois conception of the writer as a
25
Narratology: An Introduction
detached observer of society. The historicist orientation, together with
an individualist conception of writing, are still largely dominant
today. Roughly speaking, we can distinguish two tendencies. One
is towards impressionistic criticism, often biographical in tone and
interested in the personality of the authors, their lives and at best
the quality of their imagination and style, the comparison of different
works and the study of influence. This kind of criticism had its
academic heyday in the work of Walter Raleigh or David Cecil,so and
is perhaps the tone most often associated nowadays with journalistic
reviews and interviews. The other is more concerned with literary
history: the demarcation of literary periods and their defining
characteristics, the study of schools and movements, the interplay
between literature and other cultural phenomena (from Saintsbury,
Ker and Lanson to contemporary theorists of postmodernism.}51
French, German and often American critics are more prone than the
British to grounding literary scholarship on contemporary theories of
history, whether positivist (Taine), evolutionist (Brunetiere), classicist
(T. S. Eliot), Hegelian (the early Lukacs), Marxist (the later Lukacs,
Weimann), Weberian (Watt) or structuralist (White}.52 The
specifically narratological aspect of these theories often lies in the
links they establish between the narrative process and the 'master
narrative' of history they use as their basic framework.
Psychoanalysis is another major source for theories of authorship.
We should keep in mind here that Freudian theories, too, provide a
master narrative of the development of the self. The critic's aim is
usually to relate stylistic or thematic patterns in the work to the
structure of an author's personality, evaluating the interplay between
conscious and unconscious influences. The influence of
psychoanalysis on studies of narrative is too pervasive to attempt
even a limited overview. There is, besides, the closely related issue
of psychoanalytic treatment considered as a narrative process whose
patterns and symbolism can be approached much like those of a
literary text.

Theories of enunciation
Theories which foreground the study of enunciation and its protocols
are related to twentieth-century formalist criticism (stylistics,
Russian formalism, New Criticism, the Chicago school, structuralism
and literary pragmatics). They try to identify different strands or levels
in the voice of the text: it is no longer, or not only, the voice of the
author which is analysed, but also a number of fictional masks of
personae which mediate between the authorial voice and the
characters. Such theories differentiate the historical author from
26
 Introduction
the narrator and the implied author; Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of
Fiction is a seminal text in this respect. Linguistic theories studying
the articulation of subjectivity in language (Benveniste, Austin,
Bakhtin) are often applied to the' analysis of narrative enunciation.53
Narrative pragmatics may also focus on the enunciative pecularities
of fictional and non-fictional narrative. The specific rhetorical
devices of each of the textual voices help define the style of the text.
From the point of view of literary pragmatics, fictional narrative is
a second-degree discourse activity (or complex speech act), whose
understanding presupposes the understanding of more primitive or
literal discourse situations from which it derives. In the early
classifications of speech acts there was no place for fictional narrative.
This is not surprising, since these classifications were not really
concerned with actual speech acts, but with idealized or normative
speech-act types. That is why Austin or Searle could afford to posit
a sentence-grammar as the basis of their studies of speech activity.
The study of real discourse, however, must perforce be based on a
textual grammar, and is bound to yield somewhat less clear-cut
results. Writing a novel is obviously a kind of speech act, but its
specificity has to be captured by a theory of discourse which would
take into account the real circumstances and contexts in which
novels are written. Writing a novel, or writing fiction, is not a
'statement', though it is a derived act of a kind which has statements
as its remote ancestor in a structuralist/genetic conception of speech
activity. For practical purposes of analysis, writing a novel is that
kind of speech act called 'writing a novel': linguistics at this point
shades off into the literary theory of genres. Between the linguistic
speech act called 'statement' and the literary speech act called 'novel-
writing' several conceptual steps could be distinguished, among them
a study of the fictional statement as derived from the literal statement
and a study of the narrative as an extended statement derived from
the simple sentence. 54

Theories of action or fabula

The theory of action is a philosophical discipline, with work ranging
from traditional ethical treatises (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics) to
modem approaches in the fields of formal logic (Von Wright),
hermeneutics (Ricceur) or cognitive psychology (Goffman).55 Such
theories focus on the study of events, action sequences and schemes,
functions, actants, characters, settings and the internal laws of
narrated worlds. In the realm of literary narratology we find some
influential developments in the Russian formalist school. Vladimir
Propp develops a model for the functional classification of events and
27
Narratology: An Introduction
the description of action sequences at fabula level. He draws a clear
distinction between, on the one hand, the text itself, which is the
manifest level and, on the other, the abstract level of function
sequences and spheres of action of the characters (similar to Greimas'
'actants').56 Drawing on Veselovski's definition of plot or narrative
(siuzhet) as a succession of basic unanalysable units, the 'motifs' (a
subject plus a standardized action), Tomashevski distinguishes two
means of classification. 57 First, he differentiates linked motifs from
free motifs. Linked motifs are indispensable for the identity of the
fabula; free motifs are not important and can be altered without any
significant change in the fabula. Secondly, he opposes static to
dynamic motifs. Descriptions, for instance, or unimportant actions,
are static, while significant actions are dynamic. Barthes and other
structuralists further refined these concepts. While the essay by
Barthes included in our selection of texts is interesting in many
other respects, it has been especially influential as a model for the
analysis of narrative actions. Several formalized models, drawn by
analogy with linguistics or formal logic, were devised by structuralist
critics such as Bremond, Greimas, Todorov and Prince. We include
selections from the work of Bremond and Greimas. Many additional
formalist theories approach the analysis of action structures, their
generation, variations, and possible classifications. 58 Among recent
developments of action theories, the most fruitful contributions are
those which bridge the gap between literary narratology and cognitive
psychology (e.g. in GoHman, Bordwell, Branigan).59 The study of action
patterns in terms of schemata, scripts or frames allows for the
formulations of a common model for all narrative actions (both
'inside' the fabula and 'outside', at the levels of story construction
and the process of reading). It also permits links to be established
between narratology and artificial intelligence. 60

Theories of story and narration

Many theorists deal with, and many place their main emphasis on,
the intermediary structures of story construction and narration. Such
theories constitute the traditional narrow core of narratology. They
devise modes of analysis of the time structure of the story (order of
events, temporal distortions such as flashbacks or flashforwards,
duration and selection of scenes, narrative rhythm, etc). The study
of point of view (focalization, dramatic irony, suspense, omniscience)
and of presentational mode (showing/telling) also fall within the
scope of theories of story structure, as does the analysis of characters'
discourse (free indirect style, dialogue presentation) and narrative
voice. The most influential approaches to story construction and
28
 Introduction
narrative voice were developed by formalist critics (Russian
formalists, students of stylistics, New Critics, structuralists). Although
they are too numerous for a fair selection, we may refer the reader
to key concepts coined or developed by Henry James (reflectors,
restricted point of view), Lubbock (scenic or panoramic presentation,
showing/telling), Bally (free indirect style), Booth (reliable and
unreliable narrators, moral or intellectual distance), Genette
(focalization, narrative levels, anachronies, homodiegetic and
heterodiegetic narrators, the narratee), Bal (the focalizer, levels of
focalization), Bakhtin (dialogism, poliphony, heteroglossia), Dujardin,
Humphrey or Cohn (stream of consciousness), Fowler (mind-style).61
As these studies make up the main body of our selection, we refer
the reader to the texts in question, where many of the central
narratological concepts are analysed in detail. We have included
extracts from works by Culler, Sternberg, Bal and Ricceur which
analyse the relationship between the represented sequence of events
and the representational structures of the story from the point of
view of causality, temporality and perspectival presentation. The two
extracts in our brief section on film, by Branigan and Deleyto, also
focus on such representational structures. The selections grouped
under 'Text', on the other hand, focus on the linguistic surface of
narrative and the communicative activity of the narrative subjects
(author, reader, narrator, characters). In this section we include key
contributions from Booth, Gibson, Stanzel, Genette, Prince and
Hutcheon.

Theories of reception
Narrative is, among other things, a communicative speech act, a
message transacted between a sender and a receiver. Post-
structuralist critical schools have developed the analysis of the
reader's role in literary communication, stressing the active and
creative nature of reading and, generally speaking, of understanding.
Early narratological theories usually took the reader's role for
granted, but successive elaborations have approached the reader's
role from different perspectives, and reader-figures have
proliferated. Walker Gibson speaks of the 'mock reader', a reader-
image which is inscribed in the text by means of presupposition
and ideological assumptions. 62 Nowadays the term 'implied reader'
is more commonly used. The text may also feature a fictionalized
version of the reader, a 'narratee'.63 Narratees may range from fictional
characters to less obtrusive fictional addressees to the 'mock' or
implied reader.
A different line of inquiry consists in analysing the text from the
29
Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative: Some
American Discussions*
Booth, W. , 1961. Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press).
Brooks, Peter , 1977. ‘Freud's Masterplot: Questions of Narrative,’ Yale French
Studies 55/6: 280–300.
Brooks, Peter , 1979 ‘Fictions of the Wolfman,’ Diacritics 9.1: 72–83.
Burke, Kenneth , 1969. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: California University
Press).
Chase, Cynthia , 1978. ‘The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading
Daniel Deronda.’ PMLA 93: 215–227.
Chase, Cynthia , 1979 ‘Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud's Reading of Oedipus,’
Diacritics 9.1: 54–71.
Chatman, S. , 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
De Man, Paul , 1974. ‘Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric,’ Symposium: 33–45.
De Man, Paul , 1975 ‘Action and Identity in Nietzsche,’ Yale French Studies 52:
16–30.
De Man, Paul , 1977 ‘The Purloined Ribbon,’ Glyph 1: 28–49.
Freud, Sigmund , 1950. Totem and Taboo (New York: Norton).
Genette, Gérard , 1972. ‘Discours du récit,’ Figures III (Paris: Seuil).
Labov, William , 1967. ‘Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience,’
Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Froc. of the Annual Spring Meeting of the
American Ethnological Society (Seattle: Washington University Press), pp. 12–44.
Labov, William , 1972 Language in the Inner City ( University Park: University of
Pennsylvania Press).
Lubbock, P. , 1957, Craft of Fiction (New York: Viking).
Miller, J. Hillis , 1974. ‘Narrative and History,’ ELH 41: 455–473.

Focalisation in Film Narrative*

Astruc, Alexandre (1948), ‘Naissance dune nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo’,
Écran français No. 144 (30 Mar. 1948).
Bal, Mieke (1985, 1980), Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans.
Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
Bordwell, David (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press).
Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin (1990, 1979), Film Art. An Introduction
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
Branigan, Eward R. (1984), Point of View in the Cinema. A Theory of Narrationi
and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton).
Cohn, Dorrit (1978), Transparent Minds (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Genette, Gérard (1972), Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil).
Genette, Gérard (1982), Nouveau discours du récit (Paris: Editions du Seuil).
Jost, François (1983), ‘Narration(s): en deça et au delà’, Communications 38.
Kawin, Bruce F. (1978), Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard and First-Person Film
(Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Kozloff, Sarah (1988), Invisible Storytellers. Voice-over Narration in American
Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Mitry, Jean (1965), Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, vol. II (Paris: Éditions
Universitaires).
Monaco, James (1981), How to Read a Film (New York: Oxford University Press).