ABSTRACT
THROUGH ONE OF LIFE’S ACCIDENTS, I started out in the literary profession, specifically, as a narratologist, with French as my foreign language and structuralism as my training. Superficially, it may seem today that the kind of structuralist-inspired narratology I practiced so enthusiastically then has gone out of style. We have moved on to other things: feminism, postcolonialism, the study of images. The point of narratology, it seems, is no longer clear. However, the point of narratology, defined as reflecting on the generically specific, narrative determinants of the production of meaning in semiotic interaction, is not to construct a perfectly reliable model to “fit” all texts. Such an aim not only makes unwarranted claims about the generalizability of structure and the relevance of general structures for the meaning and effect of texts; it also presupposes the object of narratology to be “pure” narrative. Instead, narrative must be considered a discursive mode that affects all semiotic objects to varying degrees. Once the relationship of entailment between narrativity and narrative objects is abandoned, there is no longer any reason to favor narratology as the approach to texts traditionally classified as narrative.
