narratology
narratology,the term applied since 1969 to the formal analysis of narratives. Although in principle applicable to ancient theories of storytelling such as Aristotle 's, the term is applied to the modern tradition, of which the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale ( 1928 ) is taken to be the founding work. Narratology rests upon certain basic distinctions between what is narrated (e.g. events, characters, and settings of a story) and how it is narrated (e.g. by what kind of narrator, in what order, at what time). Different narratological approaches pursue each of these questions. Investigations into the narrated materials commonly seek the elementary units that are common to all narratives: Propp's work on Russian folk tales proposed that there were no more than 31 such basic elements or ‘functions’, and that they always appeared in the same order. Likewise, the French narratologist A. J. Greimas proposed that...
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