Aristotle's Narrative Theory

Literature Review:

Aristotle was certainly the first to apply logical and systematic reasoning to the investigation of narratives in his Poetics in order to identify their different structures and components. Aristotle concentrated mainly on tragedy, and identified its six main components: Action, Character, Thought, Language, Pattern and Enactment (spectacle) – Muthos (plot) andMimesis (mimetic activity) being the two main concepts.

In 1991, Laurel (1991) presented a model of the Aristotelian theory, in which she identified two different types of relations between the components of the structure of tragedy. Aristotle’s six classified components were related to each other in one direction, from action to performing, by an authorial view of

Walsh surveys the history of attempts to explain what fiction isand how it operates, pointing out that, for all their rich variety, ‘‘modern accounts offictionality generally turn upon one or more of a small range of theoreticalploys.’’ In addition, as he proves through patient exploration of centralmodern accounts, especially those based in speech act theory and possible worldstheory, all these exercises reduce to various kinds of displacement ‘‘by detaching thefictive act from the domain of truth.’’ (Despite their differences, there are interestingmethodological similarities between Walsh’s and Jacobi’s essays.) As an alternative,Walsh offers a pragmatic account of fictionality in which relevance, rather than truthbecomes the key term, and he demonstrates its explanatory power by analyzing theopening of Kafka’s The

Participating in a broader structuralistrevolution that sought to use Saussurean linguistics as a ‘‘pilot-science’’ forstudying cultural phenomena of all sorts (Dosse 1997: 59–66)Founding narratologie as a subdomain of structuralist inquiry, researchers like Barthes, Claude Bremond, Ge´rard Genette, A. J. Greimas, and Todorov followed Saussure’s distinction between la langue (language viewed as system) and la parole (individual utterances produced and Interpreted on that basis).

Rene´ Wellek and Austin Warren’s chapter on narrative fiction in their 1949 book Theory of Literature published in mid twentieth-century North America but bearing the traces of earlier German, Czech, and Russian scholarship, to underscore how modern-day research on narrative was shaped by the incoherence and displacements associated withWorldWar II, among other disruptive events. Caught up in these events, Wellek and Warren’s chapter in Theory of Literature provides a point of entry into the network of historical tendencies that conspired to make narrative theory what it was and