How to Explore a Field

When the first encyclopedia of a field of knowledge is published, it amounts to a coming of age. So it is with the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the appearance of which has staked a confident and substantial claim for its subject as an established intellectual frame of reference in the humanities, the social sciences, and beyond. It is not the first reference work in the field: indeed Gerald Prince's Dictionary of Narratology, which first appeared in 1987, is now in its second edition.¹ But whereas a dictionary is concerned primarily with the clarification of terms—very needful in this context, for narrative theory has endured more than its quota of neologisms—an encyclopedia takes as its object a certain consolidated domain of knowledge of which the tangle of terminology is only indicative. In the pioneering structuralist days of narratology it seemed plausible to build a science of narrative, and one interpretation of the appearance of such a landmark book is that the grand structuralist ambition has, in a sense, been realized. It is crucial, however, to inquire into what sense that is, and how it is qualified in the fabric of this encyclopedia.

Certainly the expansive ambitions of structuralist narratology have been, if anything, exceeded by the spread of narrative theory's influence in recent years. The encyclopedia's introduction invokes the "narrative turn" taken by an extraordinary range of disciplines reaching across the humanities and social sciences, including, for example, such far-flung subjects as medicine, law, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. One risk that arises from this apparent ubiquity is that the encyclopedia's own object can begin to appear unmanageably diffuse. That object is designated, I think wisely, as "narrative theory," rather than, say, "narrative studies," or (worse) "narrative"; but in point of fact a significant proportion of the material included really belongs under the second or third of these descriptions. Testament to this is the large number of entries that take the form "[discipline/field] and narrative," or "[generic/historical/ethnographic modifier] narrative." Under these heads the focus of discussion shades imperceptibly between theory of narrative, narrative approaches to another object of study, critical perspectives upon the narrative dimension of a given discourse, and narrative practice (as, for example, under "medicine and narrative"). I think such a diffusion of the encyclopedia's object is an inevitable and salutary consequence of the current state of narrative theory, though its centrifugal quality sits uncomfortably with the book's declared aim to be "a comprehensive reference resource—one that cuts across disciplinary specialisations to provide information about the core concepts, categories, distinctions and technical nomenclatures that have grown up around the study of narrative in all of its guises" (x). The main interest of much of the material in entries of this type tends in the opposite direction: that is to say, it merits inclusion for the light these various specializations can throw upon the core concepts of narrative theory. Take the entry on "modernist narrative": this is a substantial (four-page) discussion of modernist innovations in narrative form by Randall Stevenson, organized under the thematic and contextual heads, "consciousness and perception," "temporality," "sources and values," "art and language," and "literary and critical consequences." It is an impressively condensed piece of literary history, but not really the kind of information you would seek out in an encyclopedia of narrative theory: indeed the only recent work of narrative theory cited in the entry's bibliography is, inevitably enough, Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse.² The value of the entry in this context doesn't really emerge until you start to pursue the many cross-references embedded within it, from the obvious "thought and consciousness representation" and "temporal ordering" to the more oblique "intermediality" and "genealogy."

The reasons for the hazy boundaries of narrative theory as embodied in this encyclopedia are intimately related to the interdisciplinary scope to which it testifies, though the significance of that relation is incompletely and intermittently...