Diagramming narrative
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Marie-Laure Ryan
Her research interests include narratology and digital texts. Her publications include
Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991);Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Narrative and Electronic Media (2001);Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytellling (ed., 2004); andAvatars of Story (2006).
Abstract
The use of diagrams as a tool of narrative analysis is a fundamentally semiotic project whose origins can be traced back to the emphasis placed by the structuralist movement on the synchronic systems that underlie signification. Defining diagrams as a spatial presentation of information which conveys meanings that could not be expressed in the linear form of a text, a list, or a formal coding system, this paper focuses on attempts to represent individual narrative plots, as opposed to diagrams that model a universal narrative structure or discourse phenomena. Through the analysis of diagrams relating to three aspects of plot — time, space, and mind — this paper argues that graphic representations are not merely a tool for representing narratological knowledge, but an important way to produce this knowledge. At their very best, they can be the seed of a new theory.
About the author
Her research interests include narratology and digital texts. Her publications include Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991); Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Narrative and Electronic Media (2001); Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytellling (ed., 2004); and Avatars of Story (2006).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- Diagramming narrative
- The new literary semiotics
- The contributions of Peirce's philosophical disciplines to literary studies
- Literary practice on the immediate horizon of the elaboration of semiotics: Peirce's meetings with a few great authors
- The making of the literary symbol: Taking note of Langer
- A semiotic definition of literary discourse
- Semiosis, art, and literature
- Story (first order predicate) logic
- Narrative self-reference in a literary comic: M.-A. Mathieu's L'Origine
- Recontextualizing character: Role-theoretic frameworks for narrative analysis
- Universal minds
- Reconsidering the unreliable narrator
- The cognitive import of the narrative schema
- The story turned upside down: Meaning effects linked to variations on narrative structure
- The role of Vorstellung in literary semantics
- Action between plot and discourse
- Perception already stylizes: On phenomenological semiotics
- Literary semiotics and cognitive semantics
- The representation of consciousness in language and fiction: A cognitive theory of enunciation
- Laughing brains: On the cognitive mechanisms and reproductive functions of mirth
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface
- Diagramming narrative
- The new literary semiotics
- The contributions of Peirce's philosophical disciplines to literary studies
- Literary practice on the immediate horizon of the elaboration of semiotics: Peirce's meetings with a few great authors
- The making of the literary symbol: Taking note of Langer
- A semiotic definition of literary discourse
- Semiosis, art, and literature
- Story (first order predicate) logic
- Narrative self-reference in a literary comic: M.-A. Mathieu's L'Origine
- Recontextualizing character: Role-theoretic frameworks for narrative analysis
- Universal minds
- Reconsidering the unreliable narrator
- The cognitive import of the narrative schema
- The story turned upside down: Meaning effects linked to variations on narrative structure
- The role of Vorstellung in literary semantics
- Action between plot and discourse
- Perception already stylizes: On phenomenological semiotics
- Literary semiotics and cognitive semantics
- The representation of consciousness in language and fiction: A cognitive theory of enunciation
- Laughing brains: On the cognitive mechanisms and reproductive functions of mirth
