Introduction to Story and Discourse by Seymour Chatman - Chapter Summary
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