Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes?
Narrative Modalities and Generic
Categorization
Style, Summer, 2000 by Monika Fludernik
In Coming to Terms (1990), Seymour Chatman initiated an enquiry into the delimitation of the
narrative text type as against the text types of argument and description. This revolutionary step was a
major landmark for literary scholars; linguists, by contrast, had been battling with the same problems
for two decades, trying to distinguish between, on the one hand, the larger text types that are
constitutive of our understanding of narrative versus expository or exhortative discourse (in oral or
written formats), and, on the other hand, the surface textual sequences of report, dialogue, argument,
descriptipn, and so on. In narrative studies, too, there arose some recognition that a narrative text does
not exclusively consist in narrative sentences but includes a large number of supposedly nonnarrative
items (the speech and thought representation of the characters, for instance) as well as metanarrative
features (e.g., the narrator's evaluation, reader address) and some strictly speaking nonnarrative
elements, s uch as description, that are, however, constitutive of how most narratives handle the setting.
All of these supposedly nonnarrative elements are basic ingredients of any narrative surface structure.
From the classic definition of narrative as a "mixed" genre (combining mimesis and diegesis) to
Helmut Bonheim's The Narrative Modes (1982), which analyses narrative texts as sequences of report,
speech, description, and comment, narratologists and literary scholars have been keenly aware of the
fact that novels or short stories or even historical works are not uniformly "narrative." Not every
sentence in a narrative text, that is, qualifies as "narrative" by the standards of narratological narrativity.
It was Chatman's unique achievement to focus on this impurity of the narrative surface structure with
renewed critical attention and to tackle the problem in a manner anticipated by text linguistics.
Related Results
Dear readers
In Search of Someday: Trauma and Repetition in Joy Kogawa's Fiction
Reading the discourse of multicultural Italy: promises and challenges of...
Chaste widows, cunning wives, and Amazonian warriors: imaging of women in...
Mockingbird Game: Pnin and Evgenii Onegin, The
I would like to return to the problem of narrative's variegated textual surface structure, picking up
where I left this issue of generic classification and text types in Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996).
In a very brief section of chapter 8 of that book (section 8.4, esp. 356-58), I had proposed a revision
and extension of Chatman's triad which I modelled on textlinguistic work found in Longacre's The
Grammar of Discourse. I would now like to expand this proposal even further, linking it more
comprehensively with the structure of natural narratology. In particular, I wish to discuss some of the
theoretical implications of a text-type approach to the definition of narrative. I will start by introducing
a few models from text linguistics, especially the model of Virtanen and Warvik with which I was not
familiar when writing Towards a 'Natural' Narratology.
1. Text Types
Linguists have realized for some time that textual surface structures display a wide spectrum of forms
that vary with the respective type of discourse. Since text linguistics, unlike literary scholarship, does
not focus primarily on literary or even on written texts, linguists have had to develop a great number of
concepts to account for variety in language use (register e.g.) or for the use of language in specific
situations (e.g. telephone conversations; natural narrative; doctor-patient discourse; instruction
manuals; cookbooks, etc.). The term "text type" in text linguistics refers to a number of quite distinct
phenomena on a variety of different levels. In "Text-Type as a Linguistic Unit," for instance, Esser
defines text type as "language variation according to use as opposed to variation according to user"
(142). [1] He distinguishes between extensional definitions (text types as genres); definitions based on
external criteria of production; on structurally defined schemata or superstructures (cf. van Dijk); and
definitions deriving from "abstracted corpus norms" established by means of statistical analysis (e.g., in
the work of Biber). None of these definitions concern the sentence or paragraph level, although the
term "text type" is frequently deployed with that reference, too. Whereas literary scholars naturally
focus on literary genres (synchronically and diachronically) and subdivide the major genres -- lyric,
epic (fiction), and drama -- into ever more specific types (the novel, the detective novel; metaphysical
poetry, the sonnet), text linguists have been concerned with finding equivalents to the generic
distinctions between the lyric/epic/drama in their mostly non-literary corpora, and have been
subdividing their "big" text types into ever more specific "types of texts" (Textsorten).
A good example of such a typology is provided by Kinneavy in A Theory of Discourse (1971).
Kinneavy distinguishes between four "aims of discourse" (61), modelled on Jakobson's communicative
functions ("Closing Statement"), i.e. the expressive, referential, literary and persuasive text types (as
we would say). The category "literary aims of discourse" focusses on the signal (Jakobson's "poetic
function") and includes the joke, the movie, the TV show besides drama, ballads, the lyric, the short
story, and the like. Kinneavy's expressive category splits into (a) individual and (b) social types,
including under (a) conversation, journals, and prayers, and under (b) manifestos, contracts, myths, as
well as religious credos. The referential aim of discourse encompasses exploratory texts (dialogues,
seminars); scientific texts ("proving a point by arguing from accepted premises" or "by generalizing
from particulars"--it therefore best fits what might be called argumentation); and informative texts
(news articles, t extbooks). The persuasive category includes religious sermons, editorials, and political
or legal oratory.
Kamis, 17 february 2011
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_2_34/ai_68279076/
