Introduction to Story and Discourse by Seymour Chatman - Chapter Summary

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Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. "Introduction." Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978. 15-21. Print.

Seymour Chatman


Different famous personalities have tried to analyze what makes a narrative. Emphasis is put on Aristotle's Poetics.  Fairy and folk tales had relatively simple plots and structures; modern narratives are more complex.

Dictionary definition of poetics: literary criticism treating of the nature and laws of poetry. =literary theory

Literary structuralistic theorists/poeticians deal not with evaluating  a poem but with defining, analyzing, categorizing it. Poetics, as Todorov states, should strive not to provide a mere description of the work, but to go outside of the constraints of the work in order to draw conclusions about it, and go beyond it. Literary theory is a study of the nature of literature.

Works of literature often are of mixed genres, and are never perfect representation of the genre. From these mixed-genres works we can draw conclusions to create a literary theory on a genre. Then we can "plot individual texts on the grid" of genres, and proceed to ask questions about the nature of plot, character, etc.

Poetics states that the necessary components of narrative are the following:


Where "discourse" indicates the manner in which the story is communicated.

For Aristotle, praxis (imitation of real-world actions) formed logos (ideas) which gave birth to mythos (plot). Russian theorists named two narrative components: fable (individual events to be included in the story) and plot, the way the fable was put together. French structuralists name raconte (the narrated) from which can be pulled racontants (story  elements-events, situations behaviours) and a recit (story).

"Narratives are structures independent of any medium"- many disciplines  agree that a structure is defined as such by having the properties of "wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation". Of course a narrative is whole, complete. It has transformations by the fact of storytelling and plot advancement, and self regulation in the sense that these transformations adhere to a set of laws which exist in that structure and do not deviate from the constraints of the structure (story). 

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