Narrative Acts as the Building Blocks of Stories
Keywords:
narrative acts, fabula, formal models, neo-classical narratologyAbstract
Narratological studies dealing with the story itself, the fabula, have become increasingly scarce in recent years. By revisiting classic narratological models, we identify the concept of narrative act, an "action upon an action", as a fundamental element of narrative transformation. We then draw up a systematic inventory of them, in the form of a broad typology organized into a set of interlocking models, each of which enriches the description of the fabula actions. In this modeling work, we emphasize the narrative nature of acts, in the sense that they are not simply speech acts or types of actions by an agent in social interaction. Notably, these narrative acts have their own narrative characteristics: dilation on the one hand, and the mise en abyme of the discourse on the other hand. More than 600 narrative acts have been found and grouped under twenty models. In order to provide a tangible access to this large set, a web-based interactive visualization has been implemented, offering a simple way to browse through the hundreds of narrative acts.
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