Herman

Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical NarratologyAuthor(s): David HermanSource: PMLA, Vol. 112, No. 5 (Oct., 1997), pp. 1046-1059Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463482 .

Accessed: 08/05/2013 16:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 124.124.234.170 on Wed, 8 May 2013 16:12:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mla

http://www.jstor.org/stable/463482?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


David Herman

Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology

DAVID HERMAN teaches literary theory, linguistics, and twentieth-century literature at North Carolina State Univer- sity. He is the author of Univer- sal Grammar and Narrative Form (Duke UP, 1995). This essay is part of a book-length project on postclassical models for narrative analysis.

SOME THIRTY YEARS AGO, narratologists like Claude Bre- mond and Roland Barthes, inspired by Vladimir Propp's ground-

breaking Morphology of the Folktale (1928), began to elaborate the idea of the narrative sequence and to catalog some of the sequences they viewed as common, if not universal, ingredients of narrative. This work addresses several questions. What makes certain sequences of events stories-that is, narratively organized sets of occurrences-and not descrip- tions, deductions, or, in Bremond's phrase, "lyrical effusions" ("Logic" 390)?1 Are some narrative sequences more amenable than others to processing as stories? Can certain kinds of stories meet the minimal criteria for narrative yet lack features required for the stories to be deemed valu- able, interesting, or "effective" (Labov 370) as narratives (see Bruce; Labov and Waletzky; Genette, Essay 25 and Revisited 18-19)?

Consider the following set of propositions:

1. A monkey screeched. Sunlight blazed down upon the sea. The rancher gazed proudly at his bison.

This string of sentences may strike me as a bad parody of surrealist description, but the sentences do not compose a narrative sequence. Nor will anyone confuse a syllogism like 2 with a story:

2. Susan is a narratologist. All narratologists are structuralists. There- fore Susan is a structuralist.

Further, certain conversational openings are used so often that they prompt an interlocutor to coconstruct a particular canonical sequence of utterances:

1046



David Herman 1047

3. Speaker A: How are you doing? Speaker B: Pretty good. How about you? Speaker A: Oh, pretty good.

Such two-party sequences are distinguished precisely by their overt unremarkableness, their patent avoidance of any information that might be deemed interesting and thus worthy of narrative communi- cation or telling. Typically such noninformative, even anti-informative, sequences occur in contexts in which neither party wants or offers stories.

On the basis of the following sequence, however, a Gothic tale or maybe an allegorical fable begins to take shape in my imagination:

4. A black-caped figure prowled among the houses. An owl screeched. Three children were borne away into the night.

Example 4 does not explicitly relate what the black- caped figure did while prowling around, but the sequence furnishes enough of a propositional scaffolding for me to reconstruct the figure's nefarious intent, cuing me to infer that the owl screeches just when the prowler abducts the three children. By contrast, though a set of cooking instructions might detail acts and occurrences that follow a particular temporal sequence, it cannot be said to tell a story:

5. "Remove pizza from box and inner wrapper. ... [P]lace on preheated cookie sheet. Bake for 16-18 minutes or until center cheese is melted and edges are golden brown."2

Given their illocutionary status as commands, the sentences in 5 outline a bare pattern for potential events, a skeleton plan for action, issuing step-by- step directives bearing on the realization of a goal (i.e., the golden-brown pizza). The sequence therefore tells not how something happened, in the manner of a story, but rather how to make something (good) happen, in the manner of a prescription or, more precisely, a recipe. The frozen-pizza instructions differ from the following sequence, whose constituent sentences declare instead of direct. Ex- ample 6 organizes a set of individually highly re- portable actions and events into a structured whole that I recognize to be (part of) a story:

6. "Mary's fingernails tore at his [Bigger Thom- as's] hands and he caught the pillow and covered her entire face with it, firmly. Mary's body surged upward and he pushed downward upon the pillow with all of his weight.... His eyes were filled with the white blur moving toward him in the shadows of the room" (Wright 97-98).

What sets examples 4 and 6 apart from 1, 2, 3, and 5? Why would most people construe 4 and 6 as narrative sequences and the others as a description, a syllogism, an exchange of greetings, and a recipe? Is some critical property-something definitive of stories-built into 4 and 6 but absent in 1, 2, 3, and 5?

In this essay, after reviewing some classical accounts of narrative sequences, I sketch developments in language theory and cognitive science that have occurred after the heyday of structuralist narrative poetics and that may throw further light on the problem of what defines narrative. Of special relevance is research in the field of artificial intelligence on knowledge structures that have been characterized as schemata, scripts, and frames. For Dennis Mercadal a script is a "description of how a sequence of events is expected to unfold. . . . A script is similar to a frame in that it [a script] repre- sents a set of expectations.... Frames differ from scripts in that frames are used to represent a point in time. Scripts represent a sequence of events that take place in a time sequence" (255). Schema, a "term used in psychology literature which refers to memory patterns that humans use to interpret current experiences," can be defined as "a synonym for framelike structures" (254).3 This research suggests that the mind draws on a large but not infinite number of "experiential repertoires," of both static (schematic or framelike) and dynamic (scriptlike) types. Stored in the memory, previous experiences form structured repertoires of expectations about current and emergent experiences. Static repertoires allow me to distinguish a chair from a table or a cat from a bread box; dynamic repertoires help me to know how events typically unfold during common occasions like birthday parties and to avoid mistak- ing birthday parties for barroom brawls or visits to the barber.

Thus cognitive scientists have studied how stereotypical knowledge reduces the complexity and



1048 Elements of a Postclassical Narratology

duration of processing tasks bound up with per- ceiving, inferring, and so on (Bobrow and Norman; Chamiak and McDermott 393-415; Grishman 140- 58; Mercadal 109, 255; Minsky, "Framework" and Society 244-72). In this research tradition, understanding can be described as "a process by which people match what they see and hear to pre-stored groupings of actions that they have already experi- enced" (Schank and Abelson 67). Scripts are the knowledge representations that store these finite groupings of causally and chronologically ordered actions-actions that are required for the accom- plishment of particular tasks (e.g., eating a meal at a restaurant, making an omelette). The performance of a long or complicated task usually necessitates more than one script; no one can do heart surgery or build a particle accelerator without recourse to a vast assortment of complexly interrelated scripts. Likewise, comprehension of a text or a discourse- a story-requires access to a plurality of scripts. In the absence of stereotypes stored as scripts, readers could not draw textual inferences of the most basic sort-for example, that a masked character described as running out of a bank probably just robbed it.

From this perspective, what distinguishes narrative sequences, like 4 and 6, from nonnarrative ones, like 1, 2, 3, and 5, is not simply the form as- sumed by each. Narrative also depends on how the form of a sequence is anchored in-or triggers a recipient to activate-knowledge about the world. It is not that stories are recognizable only insofar as they tell what their recipients already know; rather, stories stand in a certain relation to what their readers or auditors know, focusing attention on the un- usual and the remarkable against a backdrop made up of patterns of belief and expectation.4 Telling narratives is a certain way of reconciling emergent with prior knowledge; describing, arguing, greet- ing, and giving recipes are other ways.

My analysis therefore centers on the interrelations among linguistic form, world knowledge, and narrative structure. Two sets of factors fall under my purview. The first, associated with what I call narrativehood, bears on what makes readers and listeners deem stories stories. These factors are criterial for narrative; they determine which event sequences qualify as narratives. The second set bears on the

narrativity of narrative sequences, which is a function of the "formal and contextual features making a narrative more or less narrative" (G. Prince, Dic- tionary 64). Narrativehood can be conveniently paired with narrativity to suggest the contrast between, on the one hand, the minimal conditions for narrative sequences and, on the other, the factors that allow narrative sequences to be more or less readily processed as narratives. After discussing how narrativehood is a function of the way linguistic, textual, or more broadly semiotic features cue story recipients to activate certain kinds of world knowledge, I turn to the problem of narrativity. Se- quences that have a minimal narrativity, which distinguishes them from nonnarrative sequences (of zero narrativity, by definition), are less readily con- figured into chronologically and causally organized wholes-less readily interpreted as stories-than are sequences with higher degrees of narrativity. Narrativity is a function of the pattern of script- activating cues in a sequence. All other things being equal, the greater the number (and diversity) of the repertoires set into play during the processing of a narrative sequence, the more narrativity will the processor ascribe to that sequence. The final part of my study explores some applications of this theoretical model. The concept of scripts not only yields insights into the structures and functions of particular literary narratives; by examining different modalities of the script-story interface, theorists of narrative may be able to rethink the historical development of narrative techniques and to understand better the differences among narrative genres at any given time. A script-based approach to literary history in particular may suggest ways of re- framing the concept of intertextuality, as a tool for exploring not so much networks of links or fields of analogies as relations among dominant and recessive world models, in addition to the bearing of these models on the texts that presuppose and encode them.

The early narratologists anticipated subsequent research on knowledge structures. Thus my goal is not to dismiss classical narrative poetics as an out- moded framework for analysis but to argue for its continued usefulness within certain limits. Rethink- ing the problem of narrative sequences can promote the development of a postclassical narratology that



David Herman 1049

is not necessarily poststructuralist, an enriched theory that draws on concepts and methods to which the classical narratologists did not have access (cf. Herman, "Focalization" and "Textual You").5 Al- though postclassical narratology is being energized by a variety of theoretical models and perspectives- feminist, rhetorical, linguistic, and computational -my purpose in this essay is to assemble some elements of a specifically cognitive approach to narrative discourse (cf. Jahn). Such an approach can potentially recontextualize reader-response theories contrasting shared and idiosyncratic reading strategies, for it shifts the focus from interpretive conventions to general and basic processing mechanisms that give such conventions their force and determine their scope of applicability (on this point, contrast Wolfgang Iser and Richard J. Gerrig).

Sequences: Classical Accounts and Postclassical Perspectives

As Bremond remarks, for Propp the basic unit or "narrative atom" is the function; narrative functions are actions or events that "when grouped in sequences, generate the narrative" ("Logic" 387). In Propp's words, the function "is understood as an act of character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action" (21). The action thus constitutes the function, functions constitute the sequence, and sequences constitute the story or, in Propp's case, the Russian folktale. To invoke a descriptive lexicon that A. J. Greimas derived from Propp, a story or tale can be analyzed into a set of actants whose specific deeds, realized linearly in the syntagmatic chain of the discourse, encode a more abstract pattern of actantial roles-a pattern formed by paradigmatic relations linking particular acts performed over the course of the narrative (Greimas 147-48, 176-256; cf. Levi-Strauss 812-16). The logicosemantic properties of such actantial roles-hero, villain, sender, receiver, and so on-derive from their functional orientation within that emergent totality known as "plot." In the Prop- pian tradition, therefore, narrative sequences are representations of the acts and events realized lin- guistically or textually in narrative discourse. For example, in sequence 6 the story is not (or not simply) that Bigger Thomas smothers Mary Dalton out

of fear of detection by her blind mother (the awe- some white blur); such a paraphrase refers only el- liptically to a network of actantial relations. This network governs the play of functions structuring 6, which is in turn constituted as a narrative sequence precisely by its actantial structure.

However, this model does not indicate how to match linguistic or textual units with the function(s) they purportedly fulfill in any given sequence.6 Ide- ally, the procedure for correlating formal units with functions and roles would be explicit and yield uni- formly reproducible results, but the functional profile of Bigger Thomas's deeds in 6, for instance, is so multifarious as to generate competing, even con- tradictory, interpretations.7 In the sequence Bigger is simultaneously villain and hero, agent and pa- tient (as a heated classroom discussion of Wright's novel recently demonstrated to me). Propp, for his part, tried to find constraints that, rooted in the structure of the tale as genre, predetermine the order of the functions occurring in any tale. Such constraints would allow readers to correlate acts with functions in more than just an ad hoc way. Thus, though functions might be omitted or inverted in particular tales (Mandler and Johnson 129-35; Stein 494-96), "[m]orphologically, a tale (skazka) may be termed any development proceeding from villainy (A) or a lack (a), through intermediary functions to marriage (W*), or to other functions employed as a denouement. Terminal functions are at times a reward (F), a gain or in general the liqui- dation of misfortune (K), an escape from pursuit (Rs), etc." (Propp 92). But this solution came with a price; it severely limited the relevance of the model by anchoring it too firmly in a specific narrative genre (Bremond, Logique 11-47; cf. Dolezel 65-66). The appcoach also gave an overly deterministic coloration to narrative sequences, a problem that Bremond's work on virtuality or nonactualiza- tion in sequences tried to address. Part of the in- terest and complexity of narrative depends on the merely probabilistic, not deterministic, links between some actions and events (Dolezel 63-64; Culler, "Defining" 136; cf. Ryan 109-74). What makes a story worth telling is, at least in part, that things might not in fact have turned out that way. Bigger Thomas might not have smothered Mary Dalton, or Mary's mother might have stayed out of the room




in the first place; or, in example 4, the black-caped figure might have abducted the entire village.8

But the chief difficulty with the Proppian model, possibly the source of its other limitations, is that Propp tried to locate the criteria for narrative in the form of the tale itself, in the ordered incrementation of the tale's functions and sequences. Francophone structuralists later came to recognize that while linguistic or textual form may trigger the interpretation of a sequence as a story, the form of sequences is not a sufficient condition for a story. Thus, even as Tzvetan Todorov articulates a formal definition of the narrative sequence-"A sequence implies the existence of two distinct situations each of which can be described with the help of a small number of propositions; between at least one proposition of each situation there must exist a relation of transformation"-he refers back to Viktor Shklovsky's pos- tulation of the "existence, in each of us, of a faculty of judgment (we might say, today, of a competence) permitting us to decide if a narrative sequence is complete or not" (232, 231). A sequence can be processed as a narrative not just because it has a certain form but also because its form cues readers, in structured, nonrandom ways, to interpret the sequence as a narrative. A similar dual commit- ment to form and context appears in Barthes's "In- troduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" (1966). On the one hand, the essay sometimes sounds like glossematics (Hjelmslev, Prolegomena), as when Barthes calls the narrative sequence "a logical succession of nuclei [narrative hinges, or the elements without which a story would cease to be a story] bound together by a relation of solidarity: the sequence opens when one of its terms has no soli- dary antecedent and closes when another of its terms has no consequent." (One of his examples is the picking up and putting down of a telephone receiver.) On the other hand, Barthes describes such sequences as "essential headings" of "the narrative language within us" (101, 102). People learn that language by storing a lot of different narratives in memory as schemata, in terms of which they can then read and process other stories (cf. 116-17). Se- quences thereby become the output of "naming op- erations" that allow readers to "grasp every logical succession of actions as a nominal whole" (102); they are the product of readers' prior and ongoing

negotiations with narrative discourse, not the atomic or molecular constituents of discourse that was narratively structured before anyone ever got to it. In- deed, in S/Z Barthes associates sequences with just one of the codes that can be brought to bear on narrative: the "proairetic" code, by means of which story recipients try "to give a . .. name to a series of actions, themselves deriving from a patrimonial hoard of human experiences" (204; cf. Bremond, "Logic" 389-90, 406). Whereas Propp sought to isolate the minimal constituents of Russian folktales, Barthes argues that experiential repertoires are what allow readers to recognize a rescue, a seduction, or any other sequence when they see it in the making.

Subsequent research has, however, provided richer, more nuanced ways of talking about Barthes's patrimonial hoard of experiences. Among these are the knowledge structures that have been termed scripts, or standardized event sequences.9 Building on Frederick Bartlett's analysis of memory as the organization of prior experience into patterns of expectations for current experience (201-14), cognitive scientists have explored how stereotypical situations and events are stored in the memory and used to guide interpretations of the world. For example, I know what to do when the waiter comes up to me in a restaurant because I have been in res- taurants before and remember the standard roles of waiter and customer (Schank and Abelson 42-46). Every trip to a restaurant would be an adventure that consumed too many cognitive resources if I never mastered the appropriate restaurant scripts. As Roger Schank and Robert Abelson put it, "Some episodes are reminiscent of others. As an econ- omy measure in the storage of episodes, when enough of them are alike they are remembered in terms of a standardized generalized episode which we will call a script" (19; cf. van Dijk 179-83), defined as follows:

A script is a structure that describes an appropriate sequence of events in a particular context. A script is made up of slots and requirements about what can fill those slots. The structure is an interconnected whole, and what is in one slot affects what can be in another. Scripts handle stylized everyday situations. They are not subject to much change, nor do they provide the apparatus for handling totally novel situations.'0 Thus,



David Herman 1051

a script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation.

(41; cf. Schank 7-12)

Significantly, the concept of scripts was designed to explain how people can build up complex (semantic) representations of stories on the basis of few textual or linguistic cues. Thus when I read

7. "John went to Bill's birthday party. Bill opened his presents. John ate the cake and left" (Schank and Abelson 39).

or even

8. "Mary was invited to Jack's party. She won- dered if he would like a kite" (Minsky, Society 261).

I can make an astonishing number of inferences about the situations and participants-fill in the blanks of the stories, so to speak-because the sequences unfold against the backdrop of the familiar birthday-party script. The "terminals" or "slots" associated with that script allow me to make certain default assumptions (e.g., that guests give presents at birthday parties) and so to reconstruct the stories from merely skeletal sequences. But the research on scripts suggests that it would be misguided to search for some purely formal property that makes 7 and 8 narrative. Instead, it is the relation between the (form of the) sequences and the party script that accounts for my intuition that 7 and 8 are stories or at least parts of stories.

The notion of scripts provides a finer-grained vocabulary for describing what earlier narratologists characterized as readers' tendency to organize event sequences into stories (Chatman 45-46; Scholes 100). Every act of telling arguably requires that a listener or reader use scripts to help set the narrative in motion, to cocreate the story. But how might this script-story interface be characterized in detail? Not just any sequence can cue a reader to activate a particular script. Consider this sequence:

9. John went to a get-together for Bill. After some food and festivities, John went home.

If I told you 9 out of the blue, I could not reasonably expect you to infer from the cues provided that it is a story about a birthday party-that John and Bill are children, that parents probably supervised the gathering, that the festivities were over in time for the partygoers' early bedtimes, and so forth. So the formal features of sequences constrain the kinds of scripts that can be indexed to any story, and con- versely they limit the sorts of stories that can be predicated on any script. However, attempting to specify the nature of the constraint in question raises the problem of narrativehood, of what makes a narrative a narrative. For the form of a sequence is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for specific components of world knowledge to be activated during the processing of that sequence (Wi- lensky 425; Emmott).

Suppose that a group of parents have been discussing their children's birthday parties for a while, and then one of the parents says:

10. John went to Bill's. John ate so much he got sick. Then John had to go home.

Presumably the other parents would conclude that 10 is a story about a birthday party, even though no explicit textual cues license that inference. Thus a particular set of cues need not be present in a story for recipients of it to activate a given script. A discourse context-the total context of utterances ex- changed during an occasion of talk-can imbue sequences it contains with narrative functions that they might not possess in isolation or, for that matter, in other discourse contexts. But neither is the presence of particular textual cues a sufficient condition for a script to be activated. Although example 8 would set the birthday-party script into play in many contexts, it would not do so if presented in, for instance, an account of the retirement of a chief meteorologist named Jack whose colleague Mary runs a program for observation kites.

As the birthday-party examples suggest, the knowledge structures regulating the design and interpretation of narrative sequences have an ex- tremely general provenance; strings of sentences representing actions and events can be interpreted as stories only insofar as they are embedded in global semantic frameworks subtending all thought,




speech, and behavior. The question then is how far, and in what fashion, scripts constrain the textual, linguistic, or more broadly semiotic production of particular stories. At what point would 4, 6, or 7, for example, become too skeletal for reconstruction as narrative sequences? In each case, which cues are definitive of a story, and why? I can begin to address these questions by moving from the problem of the membership criteria for the category of narrative to degrees of narrativity-to the way that different versions of a story can strike readers or listeners as more or less narrative. The factors bearing on narrativity may in turn help illuminate the nature of narrativehood. There may be a threshold past which differences of degree effectively become differences of kind; beyond that point a sequence may begin to display so little narrativity that it can no longer be processed as a story at all.

The Problem of Narrativity: A Thought Experiment

Narratologists differentiate between "tellability" and what they term "narrativity." Situations and events can be more or less tellable, and the ways in which they are told can be more or less readily processed in narrative terms-can display different degrees of narrativity. Thus, whereas both predicates are scalar, tellability attaches to configurations of facts and narrativity to sequences representing configurations of facts. For example, the facts surrounding a bank robbery are likely to be deemed more tellable than those connected with the daylong movement of a shadow across the ground-although some postmodernist writers have suggested otherwise (e.g., Robbe-Grillet; see also the final section of this essay). But if there are two representations of the facts of the robbery, one (i.e., one version of the story of the robbery) may be deemed to have more narrativity than the other. Imagine an outside ob- server's fast-paced report compared to a drawn-out, disoriented account by a badly shaken victim.

But what is it, exactly, that makes one version of a story more narrative than another? What formal or contextual variables correlate with differing degrees of narrativity? Since I cannot engage here in a full-blown analysis of all the variables associated with degrees of narrativity (see Giora and Shen), a

brief thought experiment instead may suggest ways to mark off gradations on the scale of narrativity- the continuum stretching from sequences that are nearly impossible to process as narratives to those immediately identifiable as such.

Consider the sequences 11-15, read as much as possible according to the grammar of English:

11. A splubba walked in. A gingy beebed the yuck, and the splubba was orped.

A rudimentary action structure is apparent in this sequence: after the entrance of an actant (the splubba) who has not been previously introduced in the context of the discourse, another new actant (the gingy) does something called beebing to something called a yuck, and this leads to the splubba's being or becoming "orped."

12. A splubba fibblo. Sim a gingy beebie the yuck, i the splubba orpia.

In 12 only the indefinite and definite articles are de- cipherable. The result is a drastically impoverished action structure, or rather a set of discourse entities that cannot readily be organized into any configu- ration of actions and events. Nevertheless, the distri- bution of indefinite and definite noun phrases- patterned in the way that given and new information is typically parceled out in a discourse (Emmott 158-61; Firbas; E. Prince; Schiffrin 197-226)- prompts me to read a kind of narrative structure into 12, along the lines of "first this, then that," or per- haps even "this, then because of this, that," although I do not know the meaning of this and that. Still, I am warranted in saying that 12 has less narrativity than 11. It is not that 11 is more intelligible than 12; for it is not as if, in 11, I know what beebed and orped mean. Rather, in 12 the deletion of a particular class of morphosyntactic features (verb inflections) removes some of the formal components that cue me to read 11 as an ordered sequence of causally linked events. Arguably, the narrativity of 12 has decreased in proportion to the deletion of such cues.

Sequence 13, however, displays zero narrativity:

13. Oe splubba fibblo. Sim oe gingy beebie ca yuck, i ca splubba orpia.



David Herman 1053

This string does not meet the criteria for narrativehood. It lacks sufficient grammatical structure for me to infer actants and entities populating a narrated world, let alone read an action structure into one temporal stretch of that world. By contrast, 14 exhibits more narrativity than 11 or 12 (and ipso facto 13), and 15 displays more than 14 because 15 narrates a fully recoverable, if not fully believable, world:

14. A splubba walked in. A gingy pulled the lever, and the splubba was instantaneously inebriated.

15. A bad man walked in. A beneficent sorcerer pulled the lever, and the bad man was instantaneously inebriated.

In comparison with 11, 14 provides additional formal cues for the use of particular kinds of world knowledge-specifically, stereotyped sequences of events such as pulling a lever and becoming inebriated-during the processing of the sequence. These supplementary cues include a higher percentage of recognizable noun phrases, allowing me to identify more entities populating the narrated world. In addition, the entire morphology of the verbs, not just their inflections, is grammatical, so I can situate story referents in a more fully realized action structure. That structure is constituted by the interplay between the verbs contained in the string and the event sequences encoded into my memory as scripts. Processing 15, a completely grammatical sequence, requires more (and more diverse) experiential repertoires than does processing 14, in which fewer story elements are expressed grammatically and thereby made available for subsumption under scripts.

The sequences should thus be ranked 12, 11, 14, and 15 in order of increasing narrativity. In 11 and 12 there are markers, more or less prominent, of narrative (e.g., logicotemporal operators, indexes of given and new information); I know that I am in the presence of a story without knowing what that story means, what it is or might be all about. In 15 these markers furnish the formal scaffolding for a sequence whose content does lend itself to reconstruction along narrative lines. This increased narrativity stems in turn from the nature and scope of the scripts (and frames) activated during the inter-

pretation of the sequence, from being a bad man to walking in to performing sorcery. Thus there is a direct proportion between a sequence's degree of narrativity and the range and complexity of the world knowledge set into play during the interpretation of (the form of) the given sequence. (See, however, n15.) This thought experiment has suggested that a sequence rooted in a plurality of scripts will be more easily processed as a story, will be deemed more narrative, than one only fitfully anchored in the knowledge frames (Minsky, Society 263) bound up with grammatical competence. It has also indicated that a sequence's degree of narrativity is a function not of script use alone but also of a shifting constellation of formal and contextual factors. At stake are a wide range of variables operating at various levels of narrative structure, including morphosyntactic features of the language in which a story is told or written, the grammatical encoding of information about story referents as given or new, the extent to which the form of the sequence facilitates script-aided recognition of a coherent action structure, and the pertinence of intrasequential details to broader, intersequential patterns built up on the basis of generic expectations. The thought experiment brings into focus, too, a specific research strategy for postclassical narratology. Using Hjelmslevian parlance, Gerald Prince argues that what defines narrative is the form of its content side, not the form of its expression side.12 But, as the experiment suggests, the processing of a sequence as a story can be aided or impeded by features pertaining to its mode of expression. A fuller investigation of narrativity, then, should use the resources of language theory and cognitive science to study how the (form of the) expression side of stories interacts with (the form of) their content side. In other words, to understand why some sequences are more narrative than others, narratologists need new ways of modeling the interrelations between story and discourse,fabula and sjuzet.

Finally, the foregoing experiment reveals that narrative competence can be redescribed as a nested structure of processing strategies operating at different levels-or during different phases-of story comprehension. Spoken or written sequences take on the profile of stories because of the way their form triggers knowledge about (1) the grammar of the




language in which they are related, (2) standardized event sequences, among other sorts of experiential repertoires, and (3) other, prior sequences (and groups of sequences) mediating encounters with any particular string. Ranking these processing strategies, determining their order of importance or the stages at which readers and listeners resort to them in interpreting a narrative, requires a separate research project.13 In the last section of this essay, I want to examine some interconnections between strategies of types 2 and 3, mentioned above-between script-based strategies and strategies rooted in knowledge about intersequential relations. 14 Al- though schematic, my discussion will, I hope, dem- onstrate that the script concept can be productive not just for narrative theory but also for the practice of literary interpretation.

Indeed, in setting out the problem of narrative sequences, I have already appealed to knowledge based on intersequential, or generic, patterning. Ar- guably, generic factors help account for my inclina- tion to process sequence 4 as a (Gothic) story and not as a description like 1. Gothic tales I know pre- dispose me to read a coherent action structure into 4; by contrast, in 1 my search for analogous textual or generic models results in my tending not to organize intrasequential events into a narrative. More- over, a cognitive approach to literary narratives suggests that genres-and, for that matter, changes in narrative technique over time-can themselves be redescribed as modes of script use. Narratives can anchor themselves to stored world knowledge in vastly different ways, whether they activate it for their processing or encode it as themes. Hence focusing on the script-story interface may yield new perspectives on the study of literary history and cast new light on the generic categories to which narratives are typically assigned.

Scripts and Literary Interpretation

Although researchers as diverse as R. A. Buck (7 1- 82), Jonathan Culler (Poetics 130-60), Wolfgang Iser (53-85, 103-34), and Wallace Martin (67-68) have worked to implement versions of the script concept in literary-theoretical contexts, more attention needs to be given to the reciprocal relation between scripts and literary texts-to the way scripts

shape the design and interpretation of texts and texts in turn affect the production and dissemination of scripts (cf. Segre 26). To this end, I propose two hypotheses, one diachronic and the other synchronic in emphasis, which could be used to generate research strategies for a postclassical narratology:

The nature and scope of the world knowledge required to process literary texts change over time, as do the ways in which the script-story interface is encoded or thematized in texts. Such changes correspond to shifts in the relations among recessive, dominant, and emergent narrative techniques.

Contemporaneous texts can relate differently to prevailing scripts. Texts can pertain more or less critically and reflexively to the scripts circulat- ing when the texts were written. For narrative, these variations correspond to generic classifica- tions used to categorize stories.

Literary history produces an ever-expanding cor- pus of texts, whose varying designs reveal changing conceptions of how many (and what sorts of) scripts should be activated during textual processing. The formal impetus, the constitutive gesture, of literary fiction has been the rejection or at least the backgrounding of scripts in which prior texts were anchored and the complementary foreground- ing of new scripts matched to changing ideas about narrative. Thus Don Quixote (1605) opens with a semicomic indictment of the delusive power of out- moded scripts, those of chivalric romance; interpretation of the subsequent series of action sequences requires scripts grounded in an awareness of human potential and limitations rather than in the more re- stricted world knowledge undergirding idealized quests, knightly courtesy, and so on. Cervantes's novelistic narrative distinguishes itself from romance by demanding richer and more numerous experiential repertoires from readers who would coconstruct his fictional world.

Such changes in scripts and stories are reciprocal: the need for narrative innovation stems from the dominance of certain kinds of world knowledge that, although initially of limited influence, have been reinforced, consolidated, and generalized by



David Herman 1055

prior narrative techniques. Thus, by the time of Di- derot's Jacques lefataliste et son maUtre (Jacques the Fatalist; 1773), not the romance but rather the novel itself is the repository and source of outworn scripts. A product of the Enlightenment's rethinking of the claims of truth and fiction, knowledge and myth, Diderot's text features a narrator who in- sists that he is not writing a novel (51, 214) and who implies that to have verisimilitude, a fiction must not conform to novelistically patterned sequences of actions, such as pitched battles between heroes and villains (22, 30, 49). Diderot's antinovel resists such stereotyped action sequences, and promotes script multiplication and enrichment, by constantly fore- grounding the contingency, even indeterminacy, of the narrated events, sometimes hesitating between alternative accounts of happenings in the story world (251-54). Narrativizing the philosophical concerns of the French encyclopedists, in particular Enlight- enment debates concerning determinism and free will, Jacques the Fatalist contains sequences designed to activate several competing processing strategies simultaneously and thus to provoke reflection on deterministic models of human behavior.'5

Later literary developments suggest that there are other ways of reconfiguring the relations between world models and narrative techniques and other reasons for doing so. For example, Sartre's La nausee (Nausea; 1938) transforms the antinovel into a metanovel. Thematizing the search for ordered event sequences as a symptom of bad faith-distinguish- ing the radical fluidity of existence from the stories through which human beings inauthentically seek to congeal it (Nausea 37, 39-40)-Sartre's narrative is about the impossibility and undesirability of narrative. Given that the idea of the passage of time is "an invention of man" 'une invention des hommes' for Roquentin and that "[e]very existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance" '[t]out existant nait sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre' (132, 133; 168, 169), telling stories about human lives is an inherently and perniciously (self-)delu- sional project. The less authentic my attitude toward existence, the more scripts in which I am enmeshed and hence the more stories that I unfortunately begin to understand (Nausea 56-57, 95-96). Yet the text's thematic profile is at odds with the process-

ing strategies needed to cocreate the action structures around which its themes are clustered. Thus the experience of Sartre's narrative form is funda- mentally dialectical, forcing readers to adopt a stance that is at once authentic and inauthentic: they can reconstruct Roquentin's rejection of previous world models, his striving for a condition of abso- lute scriptlessness, only by anchoring his gestures in a variety of experiential repertoires.

To be sure, fuller implementation of the script concept in the study of literary history would require an expanded comparison of shifts in narrative form with changing world models, as well as a more com- prehensive survey of ways in which the interplay between scripts and stories can itself figure as a theme. The diachronic investigation of script use across time needs to be supplemented, however, with a synchronic investigation of script use across different genres at the same time, in accordance with my second research hypothesis. The recall of previously interpreted sequences, which are recognizable as narratives by virtue of the world knowledge they activate, enables the processing of other sequences as members of larger narrative classes (the diary novel, autobiography, travel narrative, etc.). Thus differences in genre can be correlated with differences in the processing strategies at once necessitated and promoted by particular kinds of sequences. Such strategies, which eventuate in generic codes, can be more or less multidimensional; in particular, different types of sequences relate more or less critically and reflexively to the world models on which their interpretation simultaneously depends.'6

A few representative sequences may provide a blueprint for further research on the orientation of narrative genres toward prevailing scripts. Se- quences 16, 17, and 18 are excerpted from works written within fifteen years of one another. The first sequence belongs to the genre of children's fiction, the second to that of autobiography, and the third to that of experimental literary narrative. In progress- ing through this series, one must use increasingly multidimensional or reflexive processing strategies. The processing of narratives is more complex when they inhibit what might be termed the naive appli- cation of scripts and promote instead reflection on the limits of applicability of the scripts being in- voked. The three stories recount event sequences-




getting one's head stuck in ajar, confronting armed soldiers, going down on allfours and acting like a dog-that could be transposed into other narrative genres. Correlatively, generic differences stem not from narrative content as such but from the complexity and duration of the interpretive routes that readers take in formulating narrative content (e.g., through story paraphrases like the ones just offered).

Sequence 16 is taken from the point in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) when Winnie-the- Pooh is tempted by his craving for honey into his and Piglet's Heffalump Trap, where he gets his head stuck in the jar intended as bait for the nonexistent but much feared Heffalumps:

16. "And all the time Winnie-the-Pooh had been trying to get the honey-jar off his head. The more he shook it, the more tightly it stuck. 'Bother!' he said, inside the jar, and 'Oh, help!' and, mostly 'Ow!' And he tried bumping it against things, but as he couldn't see what he was bumping it against, it didn't help him; and he tried to climb out of the Trap, but as he could see nothing but jar, and not much of that, he couldn't find his way. So at last he lifted up his head, jar and all, and made a loud, roaring noise of Sadness and Despair" (67).

This sequence suggests one of the crucial features of children's fiction: the genre is designed to estab- lish and inculcate particular world models (e.g., those associated with delaying gratification or resisting the gratuitous fabrication of monsters). This genre's primary function is not to problematize a world readers only think they know but rather to help them acquire more strategies for getting to know it. Far from presuming the script expertise supporting more-elaborate narrative experiments, children's fiction consolidates and reinforces the scripts on which narrative competence itself depends. Such fiction teaches reading by teaching scripts.

Sequence 17 comes from Maud Gonne MacBride's autobiography, A Servant of the Queen (1938), and recounts events surrounding the Irish civil war:

17. "Outside General Mulcahy's house in Porto- bello, the Women's Prisoners' Defence League had organised a great protest meeting against the

murder of prisoners of war for which Mulcahy was held responsible. The Free State soldiers were drawn up inside the railings; some shots had been fired over our heads; a woman's hat had been pierced by a bullet. I heard an order given and the front line of soldiers knelt down with ri- fles ready,-some of the young soldiers were white and trembling. I got up on the parapet of the railing and smiled contempt at the officer. He had curious rather beautiful pale grey eyes and a thin brown face. We gazed at each other a full minute. The order to fire was not given" (15).

Admittedly, part of what distinguishes 17 from 16 is MacBride's greater descriptive richness; 17 features a more densely populated story world with an in- dependently verifiable history and geography, the parameters of which are established by spatio- temporal indexes such as in Portobello and Free State soldiers. As a result, reconstructing the action sequence in 17 necessitates considerably more script expertise, familiarity with a greater variety of world models, than does processing 16 as a story. More than this, however, because MacBride's text belongs to the genre of autobiography, interpretation of 17 requires, to a greater degree than does reading Winnie-the-Pooh, reliance on and reevalua- tion of a particular class of world models: scripts and frames bearing on the formation and mainte- nance of selfhood (cf. Linde 127-91).17 MacBride's text not only activates experiential repertoires but also compels reflection on their explanatory scope- on the kinds of stories about the self that they do or do not help readers comprehend (Herman, "Auto- biography"). At once invoking and suspending models for heroic action created by or centered on men, interpretation of the sequence enriches the repertoire of behaviors that can be used to typify fe- male actants (e.g., facing down a group of armed soldiers); the text thereby exploits existing scripts to generate additional models for understanding who women are and what they can do.

Sequence 18, taken from the ending of Djuna Barnes's experimental novel Nightwood (1937), requires processing strategies that are even more multidimensional:



David Herman 1057

18. "The dog, quivering in every muscle, sprang back, his tongue a stiff curving terror in his mouth; moved backward, back, as she came on, whimpering too, coming forward, her [Robin's] head turned completely sideways, grinning and whimpering. Backed into the farthest corner, the dog reared as if to avoid something that troubled him to such agony that he seemed to rise from the floor; then he stopped, clawing sideways at the wall, his forepaws lifted and sliding. Then head down, dragging her forelocks in the dust, she struck against his side. He let loose one howl of misery and bit at her, dashing about her, bark- ing, and as he sprang on either side of her he al- ways kept his head toward her, dashing his rump now this side, now that, of the wall" (170).

It could be argued that 18 exploits prevailing scripts more critically and reflexively than 17 and that generic differences between 18 and 17 can be measured by the scope and frequency of the script suspensions cued by the texts' narrative form. At stake in Night- wood is a gamut of world models, including those bearing on questions of personal identity. The passage conveys a strikingly particularized action structure, which dissolves both human and animal behavior into microsequences of atomistic gestures. The sequence thus provokes reflection on, among other aspects of script construction and usage, the canons of tellability (at what level of detail should event sequences be stored or told? what counts as an action or an event?), models for understanding women's and for that matter human identity (to what extent can scripts indexed to nature and culture be transposed? how have such transpositions con- tributed to cultural as well as cognitive stereotypes about identity?), and the very concept of purposive action (why would someone mimic and thereby ter- rorize a dog? on the basis of what world models can readers make sense of such event sequences?).

While constituting only prolegomena for a future narratology, this essay suggests that a rethinking of classical approaches to the problem of narrative sequences will entail a more careful investigation of the interface between script and story. Postclassical narratology contains structuralist theory as one of its "moments" but enriches the older approach with research tools taken from other areas of inquiry. The

result is not simply new ways of getting at old problems in narrative analysis but a rearticulation of those problems, including the root problem of how to define stories. Here I have argued that incorpo- rating cognitive tools into narratology can throw new light on some of the most basic issues facing analysts of narrative. Given that scripts and stories are in some sense mutually constitutive, how readers and listeners process a narrative-and indeed whether they are able to process it at all-depends on the nature and scope of the world knowledge to which it is indexed. Postclassical narratology should therefore study how interpreters of stories are able to activate relevant kinds of knowledge with or without explicit textual cues to guide them. At the same time, it should investigate how narratives, through their forms as well as their themes, work to privilege some world models over others. After all, if the right kind of children's story caught on, people might finally stop worrying about Heffalumps. And in time, splubbas might circumvent the dreaded pulling of the yuck.

Notes

My thanks go to Manfred Jahn, Emma Kafalenos, Susan Moss, Gerald Prince, and Marie-Laure Ryan for their invaluable feed- back on various drafts of this essay. I am especially grateful to Harold F. Mosher, Jr., and Thomas Pavel for their productive questions and criticisms.

'In this essay the terms narrative and story are coreferential. 2Heating instructions for Red Baron Premium 4-Cheese Fro-

zen Pizza. 3See Bartlett; Crevier; Jacobs and Rau; Schank. 4Rachel Giora and Yeshayahu Shen (450-51), Propp (25-65),

Thomas Pavel (14, 17-24), and Marie-Laure Ryan (124-47) have made a stronger claim, arguing that processing sequences of actions as narratives requires readers to make inferences about characters' goals and motivations. For empirical evidence that conflicts with this claim, see Gerrig 36, 53-63.

5On the distinction between classical and postclassical theories, see Plotnitsky; Smith and Plotnitsky.

6Despite Emma Kafalenos's claim that a "named set of functions provides a uniform vocabulary for labelling interpretations of events" (131) and allows at least some of the ingredients of narrative competence to be captured, her modification of the Proppian framework does not directly address the problem of




how to match particular (classes of) linguistic or textual units with functions. See Hendricks 40-51.

7Propp discussed this problem when noting that a single function can have a double morphological meaning (66-70). Con- trast Ryan 211-22.

8Hence Gerald Prince's definition: "narrative is the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other" (Form 4; my emphasis). Cf. Ryan on what she calls the principle of semantic diversity in narrative universes (156-66).

9Although the final section of this essay invokes the somewhat broader concept of "world knowledge," which encompasses both scriptlike (dynamic) and framelike (static) knowledge structures, my primary focus throughout is on standardized sequences of events.

'0For Schank and Abelson novel situations require more- general planning mechanisms built into intelligence. See also Grishman 146-47.

'Giora and Shen define an action structure in narrative analysis as "a high-order organization which hierarchically connects not only adjacent events . . . but also events which are remote from one another on the temporal axis of a given discourse. Thus, a story ... is more than pairwise relationships among events, but rather, a string of events combined into a psychologi- cal whole" (450).

12"Aspects" 50-51; cf. Hjelmslev, "Stratification." Prince's point is that both narratives and nonnarratives can be expressed in various media (film, dance, language, etc.). Furthermore, given that "a narrative, a non-narrative poem, or an essay may deal with the same subjects and develop the same themes" (51), what Hjelmslev would call the substance of the content side does not define narrative either.

l 3See the important work of May Charles, who has studied how readers draw on world knowledge and text models to construct fictional worlds.

14There are two sorts of intersequential relations: between sequences in a single narrative (see Iser) and between sequences in different narratives in a single genre. In this essay I focus on the second to explore how generic patterning helps readers recognize event sequences as narrative.

15Diderot's text points to an aspect of narrativity not consid- ered in the thought experiment conducted in the previous section. Just as there is a lower limit of narrativity, past which sequences activate so few world models that they cannot be processed as stories, there is an upper limit of narrativity, past which so many scripts are set into play that processors experience cognitive overload and find themselves unable to structure oversaturated sequences into coherent, narratively organized wholes. Sketching this upper limit of narrativity requires a separate study (Herman, Universal Grammar 124-38), but what seems to set twentieth- century fictional experiments apart from earlier experiments is the frequency of script oversaturation in narrative contexts.

16Narrative can be viewed as a way of accommodating emergent to existing knowledge. Narrative genres represent distinct strategies-more or less critical and reflexive-for achieving that accommodation.

17The point can be put the other way around: it is because 17 relates in certain ways to a certain class of scripts that readers give it the generic label of autobiography.

Works Cited

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New York: New Directions, 1961. Barthes, Roland. "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Nar-

ratives." Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977. 79-124.

. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill, 1974. Bartlett, Frederick. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and

Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1932. Bobrow, Daniel G., and Donald A. Norman. "Some Principles

of Memory Schemata." Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science. Ed. Bobrow and Allan Col- lins. New York: Academic, 1975. 131-49.

Bremond, Claude. "The Logic of Narrative Possibilities." New Literary History 11 (1980): 387-411.

. Logique du recit. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Bruce, Bertram. "What Makes a Good Story?" Language Arts

55 (1978): 460-66. Buck, R. A. "Reading Forster's Style: Face Actions and Social

Scripts in Maurice." Style 30 (1996): 69-94. Charles, May. "A Postmodern Challenge to Reference-World

Construction: Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew." Style 29 (1995): 235-61.

Charniak, Eugene, and Drew McDermott. Introduction to Artifi- cial Intelligence. Reading: Addison, 1985.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.

Crevier, Daniel. Al: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. New York: Basic, 1993.

Culler, Jonathan. "Defining Narrative Units." Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics. Ed. Roger Fow- ler. Oxford: Blackwell; 1975. 121-45.

. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

Diderot, Denis. Jacques the Fatalist. Trans. Michael Henry. Lon- don: Penguin, 1986.

Dolezel, Lubomfr. "From Motifemes to Motifs." Poetics 4 (1972): 55-90.

Emmott, Catherine. "Frames of Reference: Contextual Monitor- ing and the Interpretation of Narrative Discourse." Ad- vances in Written Text Analysis. Ed. Malcolm Coulthard. London: Routledge, 1994. 157-66.

Firbas, Jan. "On Defining the Theme in Functional Sentence Analysis." Travaux linguistiques de Prague 1 (1964): 267-80.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.

. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psy- chologicalActivities of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.



David Herman 1059

Giora, Rachel, and Yeshayahu Shen. "Degrees of Narrativity and Strategies of Semantic Reduction." Poetics 22 (1994): 447-58.

Greimas, Algirdas Julien. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.

Grishman, Ralph. Computational Linguistics. Cambridge: Cam- bridge UP, 1986.

Hendricks, William 0. "On the Notion 'beyond the Sentence."' Linguistics 37 (1967): 12-5 1.

Herman, David. "Autobiography, Allegory, and the Construction of Self." British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995): 351-60.

"Hypothetical Focalization." Narrative 2 (1994): 230-53. "Textual You and Double Deixis in Edna O'Brien's

A Pagan Place." Style 28 (1994): 378-410. . Universal Grammar and Narrative Form. Durham:

Duke UP, 1995. Hjelmslev, Louis. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Trans.

Francis J. Whitfield. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969. . "La stratification du language." Word 10 (1954): 163-88.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Re- sponse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Jacobs, Paul S., and Lisa F. Rau. "Innovations in Text Interpre- tation." Artificial Intelligence 63 (1993): 143-9 1.

Jahn, Manfred. "Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third- Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology." Po- etics Today (forthcoming).

Kafalenos, Emma. "Lingering along the Narrative Path: Ex- tended Functions in Kafka and Henry James." Narrative 3 (1995): 117-38.

Labov, William. "The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax." Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1972. 354-96.

Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience." Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Ed. June Helm. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1967. 12-44.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. "The Structural Study of Myth." Critical Theory since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Gainesville: U Presses of Florida, 1986. 809-22.

Linde, Charlotte. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

MacBride, Maud Gonne. A Servant of the Queen. Suffolk: Boy- dell, 1983.

Mandler, Jean M., and Nancy S. Johnson. "Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall." Cognitive Psy- chology 9 (1977): 111-51.

Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.

Mercadal, Dennis. A Dictionary ofArtificial Intelligence. New York: Van Nostrand, 1990.

Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. New York: Dutton, 1926.

Minsky, Marvin. "A Framework for Representing Knowledge." The Psychology of Computer Vision. Ed. Patrick Winston. New York: McGraw, 1975. 211-77.

. The Society of Mind. New York: Touchstone: 1988. Pavel, Thomas G. The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Re-

naissance Drama. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. Plotnitsky, Arkady. "Complementarity, Idealization, and the

Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality." South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (1995): 527-70.

Prince, Ellen F. "Toward a Taxonomy of Given-New Informa- tion." Radical Pragmatics. Ed. Peter Cole. New York: Ac- ademic, 1981. 223-56.

Prince, Gerald. "Aspects of a Grammar of Narrative." Poetics Today 1 (1980): 49-63.

. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. Berlin: Mouton, 1982.

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd ed. Trans. Laurence Scott. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Lajalousie. Paris: Minuit, 1957. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and

Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York:

New Directions, 1964. . La nausee. Paris: Gallimard, 1938.

Schank, Roger C. Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Ar- tificial Memory. New York: Scribner's, 1990.

Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1977.

Schiffrin, Deborah. Approaches to Discourse. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994.

Scholes, Robert. Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974.

Segre, Cesare. "From Motif to Function and Back Again." The- matics: New Approaches. Ed. Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. 21-32.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, and Arkady Plotnitsky. "Introduc- tion: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecid- able." South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (1995): 371-88.

Stein, Nancy L. "The Definition of a Story." Journal of Prag- matics 6 (1982): 487-507.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

van Dijk, Teun A. "Episodes as Units of Discourse Analysis." Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk. Ed. Deborah Tannen. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1981. 177-95.

Wilensky, Robert. "Story Grammars Revisited." Journal of Pragmatics 6 (1982): 423-32.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1993.



Documents

Herman