Abstract
The problems begin with the definitions. Let us set aside the secret plan, though an author’s scheming about a story may have some resemblance to conspiratorial thinking. Plot is a sequence of narrated events. Or, plot is a set of events related by causation. Plot is a kind of story, such as the marriage plot, whose evocation may or may not actually govern the shape of the story— Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (2011) illustrates this possibility. Plot is the story in the way the narrator tells it (in the text’s discourse). Or, plot is what the reader understands as the real story, having deciphered the narrator’s telling and gotten at the underlying events. Discussions of plot can emphasize narrative’s complicated relations with time (chronology), order (and disorder), and generic conventions. (Each of these elements is treated in its own chapter, following this one.) Plot’s deep structures have been studied by structuralist theorists interested in the ‘grammar’ of narrative. Aspects of plot, including episodes, digressions, multiple plots, and closure, have in themselves attracted a great deal of critical attention. An influential school of thought in feminist criticism sees some women writers as working against plot or traditional plot devices. Along with a narrator (one who tells) and characters (those existents or figures who embody actions and thoughts), plot is a core feature of narrative fiction. Not everyone has been happy about this fact.
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Further reading
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 1980. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. University of Toronto Press, 1985. Bal uses ‘story’ and ‘fabula’ differently than this chapter (her ‘story’ means my ‘plot’), but her book provides a useful introduction to the structural elements of plot.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Knopf, 1984. Brooks resists the division implied by fabula and sjuzet, suggesting that a proper consideration of plot must consider both story’s component parts and their ordering in the narrative.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press, 1978. Kernels and Satellites.
Electronic Literature Organization. Electronic Literature Collection. 2006, 2011. A web-based collection assembled under a Creative Commons license, the Electronic Literature Collection makes available current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Harcourt, 1927. ‘Story’ and ‘Plot.’
Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Lyric Subversion of Narrative in Women’s Writing: Virginia Woolf and the Tyranny of Plot.’ Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Ed. James Phelan. Ohio State University Press, 1989. 162–85.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press, 1980.
Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. University of Delaware Press, 1997. Richardson argues that causal connections are a defining feature of narrative; he also treats chance, cause, and fate in postmodern and postcolonial texts.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. Methuen, 1983. See especially her chapters ‘Story: Events’ (6–28) and ‘Text: Time’ (43–58).
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard, Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Cornell University Press, 1977.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction to Poetics. Trans. Richard Howard. University of Minnesota Press, 1981.
Tomashevsky, Boris. ‘Thematics.’ Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 61–95. Useful for story and plot (fabula and sjuzet), bound and free motifs (cf. Chatman’s kernels and satellites).
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© 2015 Suzanne Keen
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Keen, S. (2015). Plot and Causation: Related Events. In: Narrative Form. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439598_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439598_5
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