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Description and Event in Narrative
Author(s) -
Klaus Peter
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1982.tb00801.x
Subject(s) - narrative , narratology , narrative network , predicate (mathematical logic) , narrative criticism , narrative inquiry , subject (documents) , epistemology , narrative psychology , event (particle physics) , meaning (existential) , focalization , computer science , linguistics , philosophy , world wide web , physics , quantum mechanics , programming language
Up to now theorists of the narrative have paid very little attention to description in narrative texts. They have made a practice of distinguishing within a text between narrative and descriptive passages, considering only the first as being of importance to the analysis of narrative. Owing to this, description has become one of the least elaborate topics within 'narratology'. This neglect is not one of the most felicitous effects of narratological analysis. For it can not be denied, I think, that the meaning of a text is transmitted to a great extent by description and that any part of a text, in order to convey meaning, must contain at least some description. In this paper I will outline what place the concept of description may hold within narratology. I will do this on the base of a definition of narrative description in which I will distinguish between four elements : narrator, focalisator, subject and predicate. To emphasize the importance of description for the analysis of narrative, I will try particularly to relate the concepts of event and description with each other. As the basic pattern of an event, I will consider the substitution of a subject‐predicate combination for an opposite subject‐predicate combination. I will conclude that description is a concept that one cannot afford to neglect during the analysis of narrative.