“Narratology”, as a formal terminology, was proposed in French theorist Ciwei Ta Todorov’s Grammar of the Decameron published in 1969. Todorov thus called for a new type of generalizing theory that could be applied to all domains of narrative, and in fact for a hypothetical “science that does not exist yet; let’s call it narratology, or science of narrative.”(Todorove, 1967) In fact, the widely accepted and recognized narrative theories, like point of view, text structure, speech style were deeply discussed by Todorov, though he didn’t give a name to these theories.
Before that, narratology had already been analyzed by many famous scholars. Plato’s famous dichotomy, mimesis/diegesis, is regarded as the beginning of these discussion. In the 18th century, discussion on narratology tended to be more comprehensive, as the fiction was accepted as one of literary works, including fictional contents, style, function and the readers’ status. Now, the narrative concepts researchers are keen to discuss, such as, narrative point of view, voice, distance etc, have already been discussed before. For example, Thomas Lister in 1832 took advantage of narrative view-point to analyze novel. At the same time, John Gibson Lockhart use the terminology to discuss how to maintain appropriate distance between author and literary works. Then with the help of Henry James and in-depth analysis of of E. M. Foster and M. Schorer, narrative view-point became one of the important terminology in fictional criticism.
The establishment of narratology as a science in 20c60s lends to a strong association with structuralist quest for a formal system of useful description applicable to any narrative content under the influence of Russian Formalism. One of the most famous dichotomies introduced by the Formalists is a distinction between story and plot, or fabula and sjuzhet. Story, fabula is a chronological sequence of events, whereas plot, sjuzhet, is the artistic arrangement of events, such as, repetition, parallelism, gradation and retardation. Fabula and sjuzhet were used to subsititude story and ways of expressions in the narrative works, which generally outline “story” and “discourse” in classical narrative research, so as to highlight the techniques in narrative works. In particular, Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale anticipated many of the methods of narratological analysis in its breakdown of a corpus of Russian folk tales into a finite number of constituent parts: thirty-one different morphological functions and seven “spheres of action”. His points was transmitted into France which is very different from traditional narrative theories. Vladimir, on the basis of modern structuralism,
focus more on the text and structure, such as commonalities between texts, author, narrator, characters and the relationship between the three, as well as the narrative discourse etc.
In 20c60s, many works on narrative structure study appeared. A famous journal of Communication was published in Pairs in 1966. It was the very magazine and treated as “semiotic study- structural analysis of narrative works in the distinctive field which signified the basic theories and means of narratology to the readers by a series of essays by Barthes, Claude, Bremond Genette, Greimas, Todorov, and others which in turn often referenced the works of Vladimir Propp.
By now, the familiar narratology usually refers to classical narratology which is a rich fruit derived from the fertile soil of structuralism in 20c60s. The contribution of the old narratologists, like Todorov, Gerald, Roland Barthes, C. Bremond, etc to story and discourse on narrative text make narratology spread all over the world and became one of the distinctive literary theories.
In 20c70s, Gerald absorbed Todorov’s research results on narrative discourse and discussed the novel Remen Rance of Things Past in his essay Narrative Speech, which is one essay of his book Figures III published in 1972. By doing this, Gerard Genette established a system to analyze narrative works and make narratology come across a milestone. In the late 1970s, based on different research achievements, classical narratologist like Gerald and Chatman formulated the basic theory of narratology. In his masterpiece Story and Discourse published in 1978, Chatman demonstrated the differences between story and discourse through analyzing narrative techniques in novels. He pointed out that narrative analysis which emphasizes expression in the narrative works belongs to the narrative discourse. Furthermore, Gerald advocates the concepts of focalization. The term“focalization” refers to the perspective through which a narrative is presented. Gerald divided focalization into three types, that is: zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization which all paly an distinctive role on the fictional narrative analysis.
Since 1980s, a lot of western scholars who studied novels started to shift their attention to studies of culture, social, historical and political background, considering the influence of external forces. They thought a text as the literary criticism method to fight against politics or as a political symbol. They neglected the literary beauty and focus on the politics in literary works which brought great damage to literary creation. Narratology
developed very slowly in the relative radical environment. Fortunately, increasing numbers of western scholars began to realize the negative effect brought about by only criticizing literature works politically and culturally. After suffering attacks, narratologists began to absorb beneficial theory and analysis modes to enrich research category of narratology and overcome limitation of its own. Miller’s Reading Narrative, James Phelan’s Narrative as Rhetoric, Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theories and so on, all these narrative theories are wonderful masterpieces composed by authors on the basis of classical narrative theory and strengths of other critical theories. In Susan Sniader Ianser’s Fictions of Authority: Woman Writers and Narrative Voice, feminist criticism was added to narrative theory. Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory combines narrative time and space with narratology. The new narratology enrich narrative theory, promote the development of narratology in the new era and open up a new field and perspective. So classical narratology goes together with post-classical narratology ranter than replacing each other. The concepts and patterns of classical narratology are adopted by American scholars to analyze the post-classical narrative works. In the International Narratology Seminar, a major theme was proposed, that is how to apply traditional narratology into non-literary works, at Hamburg University in Germany. It’s an important way to expand the narrative field by using the same narrative theories. It’s beneficial to open a new world for narratology and enrich narrative research results.
