ABSTRACT
Theory-building depends partly on determining what counts as a prototypical object of a particular theoretical discourse. The more nearly prototypical the object, the better the theory ought to account for it, and the snugger the 'fit' between theory and object. The tradition of literary narratology, both classical and post-classical, answers 'the novel', while the tradition of narrative theory in ethnography, sociolinguistics, and folklore studies the tradition that runs from Labov through Ochs and Capps and down to Mildorf, its main representative in this volume answers something like 'everyday oral storytelling' or 'conversational storytelling'. The power of Monika Fludernik's natural narrative hypothesis, and the basis for its success, is to be found in the way it reconciles the two traditions in a single model. Conversational storytelling is indeed prototypical for natural narrative, but literary narrative preeminently the novel achieves prototypicality insofar as it observes the cognitive parameters of natural conversational narrative and striving to simulate naturalness.
