Basic Elements of Narrative (review)

The most recent installment of Herman's research episodes, Basic Elements of Narrative, is a scholarly text, somewhat resembling a movie serial. It provides an engaging "story" of Herman's hope that his book proves relevant for narrative analysts, and itself is a refinement of ideas developed by scholars working in quite disparate traditions within the field and also neighboring fields. Herman makes his own case for how a prototypical narrative is characterized by explication of his four basic elements of narrative (situatedness, event sequencing, worldmaking/world disruption and what-it's-like) and cross-compares the ways these features manifest themselves in storytelling media, focusing on face-to-face storytelling, print texts, graphic novels and film.

Herman defines the "storyworld" pervading the text: "The world evoked by a narrative text or discourse; a global mental model of the situations and events being recounted. Reciprocally, narrative artifacts (texts, films, etc.) provide blueprints for the creation and modification of such mentally configured storyworlds" (193). Herman scrutinizes storyworlds in his main case studies to explore basic elements of narrative in various storytelling media and employs a "more or less" approach to substantiate his elements as conditions for narrativity. The bulk of the book presents an interesting and solid overview of interdisciplinary theory, recent developments in narrative inquiry, and background/context for his approach.

This book is both an outgrowth of and a contributor to cross-disciplinary research of narrative. For those not familiar with the topic, Herman suggests beginning with chapter 2 for some background and context. Herman introduces Labov's model of analysis of personal experience told in face-to-face interviews for an account of the narrative turn before changing course and taking up Todorov's coining of the term "narratology" as a science of narrative based on Saussure's structural linguistics. Herman explains how structuralists drew from Saussure and Russian formalist literary theorists, shifting scholarly focus from the study of a particular genre to all discourse narratively organized, thus initiating the narrative turn. This is why the volume is not titled Basic Elements of the Novel, although Herman uses narrative fiction as a key source of illustrative examples. The remaining sections outline postclassical approaches and provide a brief overview of stories in face-to-face communication.

In chapter 1, Herman suggests three profiles for narrative: as a mental representation, a type of text, and a resource of communicative interaction. At a minimum, stories concern temporal sequences with features of his other basic elements as conditions for narrativity, thus differentiating narrative from scientific modes of explanation. Herman's working definition of narrative is that stories are accounts of what happened to a particular people, that they concern what-it-was-like for them to experience what happened in particular circumstances with specific consequences. Herman draws on Alexandra Georgakopoulou's emic analysis of narrative and redescribes her "small stories" as modes of storytelling on the grounds that in these stories there is a shift of communicative circumstances (situatedness), as they are embedded in a "specific discourse context or occasion for telling" (6).

Chapter 3 focuses on situatedness. Ideas from sociolinguistics, social psychology, and narratology reveal how communicative environments shape how acts of narration are to be interpreted and, reciprocally, how contexts are shaped by storytelling practices. Herman draws on Erving Goffman's rethinking of the speaker-hearer in production formats and participation frameworks, and he posits strategies for responding to questions posed, within communicative situations, and formulating answers in a particular narrative occasion through his main case studies. Here, the reader is given a pause, as Herman describes how the graphic novel Watchmen recycles, recontextualizes, and animates prior conventions. However, the story is a means of reflecting contemporary Cold War anxieties and of critiquing the superhero concept, which conveys a darker realism in opposition to a superhero comic book world. The focus on Watchmen's framework, with a nine-panel-grid layout, recurring symbols and themes, and a template that favors secondary colors, is a revolutionary structure...