Is There a French Postclassical Narratology?
Is There a French Postclassical Narratology?

Summary/Abstract: This brief historiographic study shows that French narratology does not divide into a ‘classical’ narratology and ‘postclassical narratologies’ in the way spoken of by David Herman or into the hyphenated ‘narratologies’ identified by Ansgar Nünning. The principal players (Barthes, Todorov, Genette) turned to other pursuits, and Ricoeur’s watershed Time and Narrative opposed ‘semiotic rationality’ to ‘narrative intelligence’ of a hermeneutic type while the disappearance of structuralist linguistics as a ‘pilot science’ was not succeeded in France by the ‘renaissance’ of narratology that occurred in other countries starting in the early 1990s. Theoretically oriented research on narrative continued, but not always under the label of narratology, some of it in non-literary fields. French discourse analysis appears to offer a conceptual and methodological framework for addressing the concerns of postclassical narratology.

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