What is focalization?

Focalization, a term introduced by Genette, refers to the perspective through which narrative information is filtered, distinguishing who sees or perceives (the focalizer) from who speaks (the narrator).

Is narratology only about novels?

No; although developed largely on literary prose, narratology aims to describe narrative as such and is applied to film, drama, comics, oral storytelling, and other media.

Narratology

Narratology is the systematic study of narrative, analyzing the structures, levels, and devices through which stories are told across texts and media.

Definition

The branch of literary theory that describes the universal structures of narrative and the formal means by which any story is constructed and conveyed.

Scope

This topic covers the structuralist theory of narrative: the distinction between the events of a story and their narrative presentation, the analysis of plot functions, the categories of order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice, and the notions of focalization and the narrator. It traces narratology from Propp's morphology of folktales through the French structuralists to contemporary 'classical' and 'postclassical' approaches.

Core questions

What formal elements are common to all narratives?
How is the chronology of events transformed into the order and pacing of a text?
Who perceives and who speaks in a narrative, and how can these differ?
Can a limited set of functions or roles generate the variety of stories we encounter?

Key theories

Morphology of narrative functions: Propp's analysis of Russian folktales into a fixed sequence of recurring 'functions' performed by a limited set of character roles, providing an early model of narrative grammar.
Discourse categories of narrative: Genette's systematic vocabulary for analyzing narrative discourse, distinguishing order, duration, and frequency (tense), mood (including focalization and distance), and voice (the narrating instance).
Story, text, and fabula: Bal's three-layered model distinguishing the fabula (events), the story (the fabula as arranged and focalized), and the text (the actual verbal narration), refining the structuralist analysis of narrative levels.

History

Narratology grew from Propp's 1928 Morphology of the Folktale and the structuralist program announced in Barthes's 1966 essay on the structural analysis of narrative. Genette's Narrative Discourse (1980 in English) gave the field its most influential analytic vocabulary, and Bal systematized it for teaching. From the 1990s, 'postclassical' narratology incorporated cognitive, rhetorical, and cross-media perspectives.

Debates

Classical versus postclassical narratology: Whether narratology should remain a formal, text-internal poetics or expand to include readers' cognition, rhetorical situation, and contextual factors such as gender and ideology.

Key figures

Vladimir Propp
Gerard Genette
Roland Barthes
Mieke Bal
Tzvetan Todorov

Seminal works

propp1928
genette1980
barthes1966

Frequently asked questions

What is focalization?: Focalization, a term introduced by Genette, refers to the perspective through which narrative information is filtered, distinguishing who sees or perceives (the focalizer) from who speaks (the narrator).
Is narratology only about novels?: No; although developed largely on literary prose, narratology aims to describe narrative as such and is applied to film, drama, comics, oral storytelling, and other media.