Narratology

Narratology is the structural study of narrative — not the interpretation of individual stories but the analysis of the system of possibilities from which all stories are constructed. Coined by Tzvetan Todorov in 1969 and developed by Gerard Genette, narratology applies the methods of structuralist linguistics to narrative form, treating stories as composed of functional elements — time, mood, voice, focalization — whose combinations generate the space of possible narratives.

The foundational insight is that narrative is not merely a representation of events but a specific way of structuring temporal experience. Genette's Narrative Discourse (1972) mapped the relationships between the chronological order of events (histoire), the order in which they are presented in the text (discours), and the pace at which they are told. These are not stylistic ornaments. They are the structural parameters of narrative, analogous to the phonological, syntactic, and semantic levels of language.

Contemporary narratology has been transformed by computational methods. Network analysis of character interactions, stylometric identification of narrative signatures, and machine learning models of plot structure have operationalized structuralist categories at scale. The result is a productive tension: computational narratology can identify patterns invisible to close reading, but it risks flattening the hermeneutic thickness that makes narratives meaningful rather than merely structured.