ABSTRACT
Modernity seems to be in love with the category, with the quarantine, with that jesuitical, and even Aristotelian, need to classify, and to codify, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, with the desire to construct a “molar” structure for representing the nature and the operations of closed systems as varied as economics, politics, psychology, and even a dramatic text. Deployments of narrative theory in the field of Renaissance studies are thus both appropriate and striking, particularly in the last fifteen years as the work of continental European narratologists joins that of the more accessible texts by scholars writing in English and French. Properly and etymologically speaking, “narratology” or “narrative theory,” must necessarily suggest a theoretical analytic for tracing and describing particular narratives and narrative strategies quite generally. The reciprocity becomes an important corrective to any tendency that narrative theory might have to assimilate the theatrical into the novelistic.
