"Networking narrative texts. Motivational and spatial structures as a narrative means towards relativizing time."
The project attempts to put into practice an observation which Ricoeur derived from Aristotle: by connecting beginning, middle and end narrative transforms the sequence of narrated events into a "configuration". To this end an anlysis of motivational cross-references within texts which serve to transform narrated time into a networked structure is complemented by a study of descriptions of landscapes, architecture as well as space. These descriptions -which, in being static - already serve to slow down the narrative flow.
Literary texts are highly complex because of their interfaces with tradition and external (non-literary) reality. In this regard the analysis of motives and space is also presented as a way of reducing complexity by "highlighting" certain areas within the text. Assuming that literary texts are by nature internally non-contradictory, and that the study of different motivational fields will lead to comparable results, we can thus define delimited areas of investigation. Interpretations aretherefore easier to validate and less idiosyncratic. Regarding longer narrative texts it would seem sensible to concentrate on their beginnings which, as a "cosmogony" of the narrated world, often summarize their elements and structures.
In the medium term it is also planned to give a theoretical definition of the above phenomenon which, for the time being, is still outstanding.
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Iwate University, Morioka / Japan
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NarrNet 022 |
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