Theoretical Framework

Zusammenfassung

Narratology, succinctly circumscribed as the ‘science of narration,’ originated under the leadership of Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette and others in the 1966 special issue of the journal Communications programmatically entitled ‘L’Analyse structurale du récit’ [Structural Analysis of Narrative].⁴ Three years later, the term ‘narratology’ appeared for the first time in Todorov’s (1969: 10) ‘Grammaire du Décameron’: “Cet ouvrage relève d’une science qui n’existe pas encore, disons la NARRATOLOGIE, la science du récit.” [This study builds on a science that does not yet exist, let us say, NARRATOLOGY, the science of narration.] By drawing on Aristotle’s ‘Poetics,’ Russian Formalism and influential ‘morphological/formalist’ works of the prestructuralist era (1920–1960ies) by Franz Karl Stanzel, Günther Müller, Eberhard Lämmert and across the Atlantic by Norman Friedman as well as Wayne C. Booth, French structuralism gave birth to narratology as “a methodologically coherent, structure-oriented variant of narrative theory.” (Meister 2009: 337)