What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (And Vice Versa)
Author(s): Seymour Chatman
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), pp. 121-140
代写美国论文Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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What Novels Can Do That Films Can't
(and Vice Versa)
Seymour Chatman
The study of narrative has become so popular that the French have
honored it with a term-la narratologie. Given the escalating and sophisticated
literature on the subject, its English counterpart, "narratology,"
may not be as risible as it sounds. Modern narratology combines two
powerful intellectual trends: the Anglo-American inheritance of Henry
James, Percy Lubbock, E. M. Forster, and Wayne Booth; and the mingling
of Russian formalist (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman
Jakobson, and Vladimir Propp) with French structuralist approaches
(Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, and Tzvetan
Todorov). It's not accidental that narratology has developed during a
period in which linguistics and cinema theory have also flourished. Linguistics,
of course, is one basis for the field now called semiotics-the
study of all meaning systems, not only natural language. Another basis is
the work of the philosopher Charles S. Peirce and his continuator,
Charles W. Morris. These trees have borne elegant fruit: we read fascinating
semiotic analyses of facial communication, body language, fashion,
the circus,
architecture, and gastronomy. The most vigorous, if controversial,
branch of cinema studies, the work of Christian Metz, is also
semiotically based.
One of the most important observations to come out of narratology
is that narrative itself is a deep structure quite independent of its
medium. In other words, narrative is basically a kind of text organization,
and that organization, that schema, needs to be actualized: in written
words, as in stories and novels; in spoken words combined with the
movements of actors imitating characters against sets which imitate
? 1980 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/80/
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