On the Semiotic Parameters of Narrative : A Critique of Story and Discourse
Résumé
Classical narratology postulated for narrative a story level and a discourse level, drawing on and synthesizing various existent or newly-devised dichotomies: fibula/sjuet, story/plot, raconté/racontant, histoire/discours. While this schema proved indisputably to be a major step forward both in the delimitation of the formal features of narrative and in the practice of narrative analysis, it is nevertheless flawed by a tendency to superimpose concepts that are not based on wholly convergent criteria. It is this situation, in part, that contributed to the crisis of narratology, particularly once research sought to reach beyond the confines of textual immanence and to incorporate narrative communication, on the one hand, and the semantic dimension of narrative, on the other.
Various attempts have been undertaken over the years to resolve these issues, both by narratologists and by researchers who have sought to integrate narratological concepts into concerns of another nature, one of the most notable examples being Paul Ricur's hermeneutic theory, where these concepts occupy a mediate position within the three "mimeses." The argument of this paper, however, is to show how, within the structuralist story/discourse dichotomy, there lies a latent ternary categorization, largely overlooked by the poststructuralists, but representing a powerful undercurrent in narratological models that should be taken more openly into account: narrative contents, narrative signifiers and their configurations, the dynamics of narrative deployment or, in semiotic terms, semantics, syntactics, pragmatics. From this perspective, it then becomes necessary to look at narrativity as a form of semiosis, the textual equivalent of which is intertextuality. Intertextuality thus plays a crucial role in narrative, and indeed is absent from no form of expression, so that it may be more or less highlighted from one work, author, movement or period to another, just as it may be manifested locally or globally. And finally, an intertextual approach forms a useful if not indispensable means of determining the relations between the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features of narrative.
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