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New Developments in the Study of Narrative:

An Interview with David Herman
Shang Biwu
Abstract: David Herman is a professor in the English Department at Ohio State University,
where he co-founded and served as the inaugural director of the Project Narrative initiative
(http://projectnarrative.osu.edu). The editor of the Frontiers of Narrative book series and of the
new journal Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, Herman also sits on the editorial boards
of two other book series as well as nine journals in the field, includingNarrative, the Journal of
Narrative Theory, and Modern Fiction Studies. The author of over 150 research articles, chapters,
review-essays, and reviews, he has also authored a number of monographs and edited and coedited several volumes, including Universal Grammar and Narrative
Form (1995), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999), Story Logic:
Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (2002), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive
Sciences (2003), Narration in Natural Language (2005), the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory(with Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 2005), The Cambridge Companion
to Narrative (2007), and Basic Elements of Narrative (2009).
In this wide-ranging interview concerning the current state of-and likely future directions forresearch on narrative and narrative theory, Herman contextualizes his use of the
term postclassical narratology and discusses the relationship among the many strands of
narrative inquiry that now build on yet also rethink the conceptual underpinnings of structuralist
approaches. He also provides an account of the idea of "storyworlds" and how a focus on such
narrative worlds cuts across the different subdomains of contemporary narrative theory. Finally,
Herman comments on some of the most newly emergent trends in the field, and gives a preview
of a volume onTeaching Narrative Theory that he has coedited with Brian McHale and James
Phelan.
Keywords: cognitive narratology; David Herman; interdisciplinary narrative theory; media and
narrative; multimodal discourse; postclassical narratology; Project Narrative; storytelling;
storyworlds; transmedial narratology
Shang Biwu (Shang for short hereafter): Let's start with the very term "postclassical
narratology." To my knowledge, about a decade ago, you coined this term in an essay "Scripts,
Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology" (1997). But it is your 1999
volume, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, that has made the term a hard
currency in contemporary narrative theory. My question is under what circumstances did you put
forth the term "postclassical narratology"? Or, to phrase the question another way, in what sense
does narratology become "postclassical"? I think it would be too simplistic to just set them into
two different historical periods, saying that classical narratology started from 1960s and that
postclassical narratology started from late 1980s or early 1990s.
David Herman (Herman for short hereafter): My choice of the term postclassical
narratology was inspired in part by some of the work presented at a symposium on "Mathematics
and Postclassical Theory" that I attended in 1993 at Duke University. Some years after attending

that symposium (and reading published versions of some of the papers, especially one by Arkady
Plotnitsky, a former teacher of mine in graduate school), I began to think of the contrast between
classical and postclassical physics as a possible analogue for the contrast between structuralist
narratology, as practiced by Barthes, Greimas, Genette, Todorov, and others, and approaches to
the study of narrative that draw on frameworks for inquiry that were either inaccessible to or
ignored by the structuralist theorists.
To develop the analogy slightly more fully: The classical physics of Newton is not
"invalidated" by the postclassical physics of Einstein, Bohr, and others. Rather, what the
postclassical frameworks clarify is the scope of applicability of the earlier, Newtonian models.
Newtonian physics is very good at describing and predicting the behavior of mid-sized objects
like chairs and bicycles. But it is not so good at describing and predicting the behavior of very
large or very small (or very fast) things, such as the evolution of a galaxy or what goes on inside
a particle accelerator. A theory with a wider scope of applicability is needed to account for such
phenomena--a theory of which the Newtonian model can then be seen as a special case. By
analogy, structuralist narratology is not invalidated by later developments in the study of
narrative; instead, those developments suggest that, though scholars of story can build on the
aspects of narrative discussed by the structuralists, the scope of narrative analysis--the range of
narrative phenomena that need to be investigated by theorists--is more expansive than the
structuralists envisioned.
It's worth pointing out that, among researchers concerned with storytelling in face-to-face
interaction, there has been parallel shift--a similar rethinking of the scope of applicability of
models for narrative analysis. Precipitating this shift is the recognition that the model pioneered
by the linguist William Labov in studies such as "The Transformation of Experience in Narrative
Syntax" (1972) captures one important sub-type of natural-language narratives--namely, stories
elicited during interviews--but does not necessarily apply equally well to other storytelling
situations, such as informal conversations between peers, he-said-she-said gossip, or
conversations among family members at the dinner table. Narratives do different things, and
assume different forms, in different communicative environments. In conversations among peers,
participants may all be trying to capture the floor at once in order to tell their own version of a
story under dispute. Such competition for the floor will drastically alter the shape of the stories
participants (try to) tell; for example, given the communicative exigencies at work, storytellers
are likely to truncate or omit all but the most essential orienting information, and conversely to
bolster their efforts to signal the point of their narrative, or why they should be heard out rather
than interrupted with a competing story. Meanwhile, the narratives told in this context are likely
to bear on the social status or "face" of their tellers in ways that they might not in the context of
interviews. Hence new, richer models of the structures and functions of storytelling in interaction
need to be developed--with the Labovian account now acquiring the status of a model suited to a
special case within a larger array of storytelling situations.
There has been a similar expansion in the research focus of narratology more generally. This
expansion has been caused by two factors: (1) the recognition that narrative analysis
encompasses storytelling practices across media, and not just literary narratives; and (2) the
integration of concepts and methods that were not included in the analytic toolkit used by the
early narratologists when they founded the field. These concepts and methods derive from areas
such as post-Saussurean linguistics (discourse analysis, possible-worlds semantics, etc.),
ethnography, gender theory, philosophical ethics, cognitive science, film and media studies, and
so on. Gender theory, for example, raises questions about gender identities that bear directly on
models of narration and characterization in narrative. Likewise, cognitive narratologists begin
from the premise that ideas from cognitive science are relevant for the study of narrative as a

resource for sense-making as well as a target of interpretation.

Thus you are right to suggest, in your question, that the classical/postclassical distinction is
not exclusively a matter of chronology. The distinction reflects, rather, different understandings
of the proper scope and analytic methods of narrative inquiry. This is why I included the
following sentence in my "Introduction" to theNarratologies volume: "Postclassical narratology
(which should not be conflated with poststructuralist theories of narrative) contains classical
narratology as one of its 'moments' but is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and
research hypotheses; the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of
narrative itself" (pages 2-3).
Shang: I quite agree with you about the expansion in the research focus of narratology. From
my point of view, compared with its structuralist counterpart, postclassical narratology differs
mainly in its emphasis on media and approaches, both of which contribute to its plurality. In
terms of media, postclassical narratology goes beyond literary narrative, which leads to the
flourishing of studies on digital narrative, narrative in music, narrative in paintings, narrative in
law, etc.; while in terms of approaches, postclassical narratology goes beyond Saussurean
linguistics, which leads to the boom of cognitive narratology, rhetorical narratology, feminist
narratology, postcolonial narratology, etc. In other words, what we have now is not a
postclassical narratology but many postclassical narratologies. Compared with the volume of
work on the relationship between classical narratology and postclassical narratology, the
relationship within postclassical narratologies seems to be a blind spot. What's your view on the
plural nature of and the interrelations among postclassical narratologies?
Herman: You ask an excellent question here, and it suggests how rapidly the field is
developing. No longer is the main task that of integrating new concepts and methods into the
field of narrative inquiry as it was originally articulated by structuralist theorists; rather the most
pressing business is to consider how the range of strategies adopted by analysts with this broad
goal--the goal of re-envisioning the scope and aims of narrative research--relate to one another.
Or to put the same point another way, if postclassical narratology in a first phase involves
incorporating ideas that fall outside the domain of structuralist theory, in order to reassess the
possibilities as well as the limitations of classical models, new challenges emerge in a second
phase. What is now required is to bring into closer dialogue the full variety of postclassical
approaches-feminist, transmedial, cognitive, and other. In this connection, my suggestion is that
by juxtaposing the descriptions of narrative phenomena (narration, perspective, character, etc.)
made possible by these approaches, testing for overlap among the descriptions, and then
exploring the degree to which the descriptions' non-overlapping aspects might complement one
another, theorists can begin to map out the interrelations among postclassical
approaches.[1] More than this, they can engage in a more coordinated effort to accomplish what
remains the overarching goal of narrative inquiry: coming to a better understanding of what
stories are and how they work.
Let me refer to a current project of mine--an essay on "Multimodal Storytelling and Identity
Construction in Graphic Narratives"--to try to substantiate this general claim.[2] The project
focuses on word-image combinations in graphic narratives, and more specifically on how such
combinations cue interpreters to draw inferences about characters inhabiting the "storyworlds"
that such narratives evoke. At issue, in other words, is how texts that exploit more than one
semiotic channel trigger inferences about agents within narrated worlds. Significantly, when they
founded the field of narratology, structuralist theorists of narrative failed to come to terms with
two dimensions of narrative that constitute focal concerns of my study: on the one hand, the
referential or world-creating potential of stories; on the other hand, the issue of mediumspecificity, or the way storytelling practices, including those bearing on world creation, might be

shaped by the expressive capacities of a given semiotic environment. But how might different
strands of postclassical narratology be woven together to explore referential dimensions of
multimodal narratives, and more specifically issues raised by the representation of agents in the
narrative worlds of graphic texts?
The way to proceed in such contexts, I would argue, is to let the phenomenon of interest guide
the process of integrating or synthesizing approaches, rather than trying to combine the
approaches beforehand and then applying the resulting combination in a top-down fashion. As I
developed my own project, I found it necessary to begin combining the resources of cognitive
narratology and transmedial narratology. The question of how textual cues trigger inferences
about storyworlds, or what we can call narrative ways of worldmaking, constitutes a topic of
broad relevance for cognitive narratology, or the study of mind-relevant aspects of storytelling
practices, wherever-and by whatever means-those practices occur. Cognitive narratologists work
to enrich the original base of structuralist concepts with ideas about human intelligence,
examining various dimensions of narrative structure vis--vis modes of sense making; to this end,
stories can be studied both as a target for interpretation and as a means for organizing and
comprehending experience, a tool for thinking. In the approach to narrative worldmaking
outlined in my essay, the focus is on cognitive processes cued by discourse patterns-inferences,
prompted by visual as well as verbal information in graphic narratives, about the ontological
status, inhabitants, and spatiotemporal profile of a given storyworld. In general, storyworlds can
be viewed as mental models enabling interpreters to frame inferences about the situations,
characters, and occurrences either explicitly mentioned in or implied by a narrative text or
discourse; reciprocally, narratives provide blueprints for the creation and modification of such
mentally configured storyworlds. A key question for cognitive narratology is what constitutes
distinctively narrative practices of world construction, as opposed to those enabled by readouts
from scientific instruments, syllogistic arguments, and other modes of representation. My study
examines the centrality of inferences about storyworld agents for world-building practices in
narrative contexts.
Meanwhile, questions about medium-specificity fall under the scope of transmedial
narratology, or the study of narrative across media. Unlike classical, structuralist narratology,
transmedial narratology disputes the notion that the fabula or story level of a narrative (= what is
told) remains wholly invariant across shifts of medium (= an aspect of how that "what" is
presented). Yet it also assumes that stories do have gists that can be remediated more or less fully
and recognizably, depending in part on the semiotic properties of the source and target media.
Transmedial narratology is thus premised on the assumption that, although stories conveyed via
different media share common features insofar as they are all instances of the narrative text type,
storytelling practices are nonetheless inflected by the constraints and affordances associated with
a given semiotic environment. Sets of constraints and affordances interact in multimodal
storytelling, or forms of narration that recruit from more than one semiotic channel to evoke
storyworlds. So research in this area, too, can inform the study of visual-verbal representations of
agents in graphic narratives.
Other domains may be relevant as well. For example, feminist narratology will be relevant for
the study of graphic narratives that represent characters struggling with gender stereotypes. But
my larger point here is that research on specific narrative phenomena, such as characterization in
graphic narratives, is the best way of coming to understand how the various postclassical
approaches may interrelate and complement one another. Indeed, we may now be at a point
where, instead of speculating about these sorts of interrelations, it would be better to engage with
focused research questions and assemble the tools needed to answer them--tools that will
sometimes derive from quite different traditions of narrative inquiry.

Shang: It's been almost a decade since you proposed the term postclassical narratology.
Looking back, can you tell us what achievements postclassical narratology has reaped in the past
ten years? And what are the potential areas that are still left untouched and require further
exploration?
Herman: I think that one of the major achievements of postclassical narratology is that
practitioners working under its auspices have come to see their individual projects as contributing
to a large, diverse, yet still coherent body of research--an umbrella discipline that encompasses a
range of approaches to and goals for narrative study. If a poll of researchers in the field were
conducted, my sense is that feminist narratologists, scholars of digital narrativity, cognitive
narratologists, and analysts working on narratives across media would think of themselves as
engaged in a common enterprise: namely, developing, testing, and refining models of what
stories are and how they work, while also contributing to a joint effort to understand how
narratives are imbricated with other sociocultural practices and processes of meaning-making.
That said, and to pick back up with issues broached in my response to question 2, much
remains to be done when it comes to exploring how the different subdomains of postclassical
narratology relate to one another--and how the concepts and methods used in one area relate to
those used in another. For example, corpus-narratological approaches examine how features are
distributed in large narrative corpora, in contrast with approaches that adopt a case-study
approach and base their claims on the analysis of an illustrative text or two. The challenge is not
only to bring such quantitative and qualitative methods together under the larger rubric of
postclassical narratology, but also to open lines of communication between practitioners of the
two approaches, such that their key findings can be, if not reconciled, then at least coordinated
and cross-compared.[3] This example in turn points to broader challenges in the field. One broad
challenge is to create more opportunities for exchange between humanistic and social-scientific
approaches to narrative--for instance, between literary narratology and ethnographic and
sociolinguistic approaches to storytelling in everyday interaction. Very different research
traditions have grown up around the study of literary narratives versus the analysis of everyday
storytelling, and scholars interested in bridging these traditions need to make sure that they are
not talking at cross-purposes when they use what seem to be the most basic terms
like narration, event, perspective, etc. And the difficulty of establishing common ground,
together with the need for it, becomes ever more acute as the narrative turn unfolds across more
and more fields of inquiry (see my responses to questions 5 and 6 below). What is needed is an
understanding of narrative capacious enough to accommodate different disciplinary interests and
emphases, but without becoming so broad that the term story starts to include everything--and
therefore nothing at all.
Shang: In answering my question about the interrelations among postclassical approaches to
narratology, you frequently mentioned the term "storyworlds," which is also the name of a new
journal of which you serve as editor. Why do you employ the term "storyworlds" instead of
"narrativeworlds," since the latter term seems to be much larger in scope? As editor of the
journal, can you briefly explain what you mean by "storyworlds"? When it comes to studying
such narrative worlds, what are some of the primary approaches, key objectives, and potential
results?
Herman: To respond to this question, I'll again need to elaborate more fully on parts of my
response to question 2.
My use of the term storyworlds harkens back to the account developed in my book Story
Logic (9-22); there I use the term to refer to the world evoked implicitly as well as explicitly by a
narrative, whether that narrative takes the form of a printed text, film, graphic novel, sign
language, everyday conversation, or even a tale that is projected but is never actualized as a

concrete artifact-for example, stories about ourselves that we contemplate telling to friends but
then do not, or film scripts that a screenwriter has plans to create in the future. As such,
storyworlds are mental models of the situations and events being recounted-of who did what to
and with whom, when, where, why, and in what manner. Reciprocally, narrative artifacts (texts,
films, etc.) provide blueprints for the creation and modification of such mentally configured
storyworlds. In print narratives, these blueprints are composed of the expressive resources of
(written) language, including not just words, phrases, and sentences, but also typographical
formats, the disposition of space on the printed page (including spaces used for section breaks,
indentations marking new paragraphs, etc.), and (potentially) diagrams, sketches, and
illustrations. In graphic novels, meanwhile, the non-verbal elements play a more prominent role:
the arrangement of characters in represented scenes, the shapes of speech balloons, and the
representations of the scenes in panels that form part of larger sequences of images and textual
elements, can convey information about the storyworld that would have to be transmitted by
purely verbal means in a novel or short story without a comparable image track. Likewise,
interlocutors in contexts of face-to-face storytelling, viewers of films, and participants in
computer-mediated modes of storytelling use a variety of cues to construct a time-line for events,
a broader temporal and spatial environment in which those events occur, an inventory of the
characters involved, and a working model of what it was like for these characters to experience
the more or less disruptive or non-canonical events that constitute a core feature of narrativity.[4]
Although in using the term storyworlds it may seem as though I am privileging narrative
worlds over the textual blueprints that encode or evoke them, in actual fact I intend the term to be
a shorthand way of referring to all the dimensions of the process just described, including the use
of textual designs to encapsulate information or trigger inferences about narrative worlds, as well
as cognitive-emotive aspects of the experience of inhabiting those worlds. Also, in developing
this conception of storyworlds in the 2002 study as well as in later work[5], my aim has been to
further the project of cognitive narratology, which (to reiterate) can be defined as the study of
mind-relevant dimensions of storytelling practices. Focusing on the idea of storyworlds has
allowed me to put my work into dialogue with--and build on--consonant traditions of research
pioneered by cognitive psychologists, discourse analysts, psycholinguists, philosophers of
language, and others concerned with how people create and make sense of texts or discourses.
Relevant concepts taken from these other domains of inquiry include deictic center, mental
model, situation model, discourse model, contextual frame, text world, and possible world. These
terms, too, along with the research traditions that have grown up around them, are meant to
explain the nature of the link between textual patterns and the situation or world that they are
used to represent.
There is another reason for my focus on storyworlds, which dovetails with my interest in
developing postclassical approaches to narrative inquiry and which also gets at the last part of
your question above: namely, about approaches, objectives, and results associated with the study
of storyworlds. Significantly, classical, structuralist narratologists failed to come to terms with
the referential or world-creating properties of narrative, partly because of the exclusion of the
referent in favor of signifier and signified in the Saussurean language theory that informed the
structuralists' models. By contrast, worldmaking practices are of central importance to many
scholars working in the umbrella field of postclassical narratology, from feminist narratologists
exploring how representations of male and female characters pertain to dominant cultural
stereotypes about gender roles, to rhetorical theorists examining what kinds of assumptions,
beliefs, and attitudes have to be adopted by readers if they are to participate in the multiple
audience positions required to engage fully with fictional worlds, to analysts (and designers) of
digital narratives interested in how interactive systems can remediate the experience of being
immersed in the virtual worlds created through everyday narrative practices. Hence a focus on

storyworlds is in my view an emphasis that cuts across the multiple strands of research on
narrative that together form the domain of postclassical narratology.
Let me conclude my response to the present question by providing more information about the
scope and aims of the new journal that you mentioned. The journal will be launched by the
University of Nebraska Press in June 2009 and is titled Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative
Studies (http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/herman145/storyworlds.html); its aim will be to
publish state-of-the-art research in the field of interdisciplinary narrative theory. Unlike existing
journals that target particular disciplines in which only certain kinds of narratives are the primary
object of study, Storyworlds will feature research on storytelling practices across a variety of
media; it will also showcase cutting-edge methods of analysis and intepretation brought to bear
on narratives of all sorts. Relevant storytelling scenarios include face-to-face interaction, literary
writing, film and television, virtual environments, historiography, opera, journalism, graphic
novels, plays, and photography. At the same time, contributors to the journal can approach
narrative from perspectives developed in multiple fields of inquiry, ranging from discourse
analysis, literary theory, jurisprudence, and philosophy, to cognitive and social psychology,
Artificial Intelligence, medicine, and the study of organizations. In short, Storyworlds aspires to
be THE place for publishing interdisciplinary research on narrative across media.
If you follow the link listed above, you'll be able to find a Table of Contents for the first issue
of the journal. The diversity of the articles to be included in the inaugural issue as well as
subsequent issues--articles often marked by quite distinctive methods of analysis and a focus on
very different kinds of stories--is intended to reflect the diversity of narrative itself, or rather of
narrative ways of worldmaking. Indeed, one of the key aims of the journal is to underscore how
no one area of study can come to terms with the multidimensional complexity of narrative worldbuilding. Storyworlds thus aims to foster more dialogue among people who, from all academic
fields and indeed all walks of life, create, engage with, and analyze narrative in its many guises.
Further dialogue of this kind is a prerequisite for taking the measure of stories not just as a means
of artistic expression or a resource for communication but also a fundamental human endowment.
Shang: You are editor of the journal Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies and
the Frontiers of Narrativebook series, and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory. How has this editorial work shaped your view of contemporary narrative theory? In other
words, from your perspective, what are the major trends and features of contemporary narrative
theory, and postclassical narratology in particular?
Herman: Let me begin my response to this question by providing a few more details about
the editorial work you've mentioned. Although I have just undertaken the editorship of the
journal Storyworlds (as described in my response to the previous question), I have served since
2001 as editor of the Frontiers of Narrative book series, which, like the new journal, is published
by the University of Nebraska Press (see http://people.cohums.ohiostate.edu/herman145/frontiers.html). 9 titles have been published in the book series to date, with
about the same number of book manuscripts currently under contract, under revision, or entering
the production phase at this time. There has been a spike in the number of proposals and full
manuscripts that I have received over the past 6-9 months, and I attribute this increased activity
to several factors: the "narrative turn" that has underscored the relevance of narrative for multiple
fields of inquiry across the arts and sciences; a renewed focus, in fields such as literature,
language, film and television, and digital media, on frameworks for studying the formal as well
as contextual dimensions of stories and storytelling; and the international visibility of the Project
Narrative initiative (http://projectnarrative.osu.edu) based at my home institution, Ohio State
University.
As for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the volume (coedited by Manfred

Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan, and me) contains about 450 entries arranged in a standard A-Z format
and written by more than 200 experts from all over the world. 450,000 words in total, the volume
also contains a comprehensive, 78-page index designed to afford readers with multiple pathways
through the subject matter. Our basic thinking in organizing and editing the volume was as
follows: The very predominance of narrative as a focus of interest across multiple disciplines
makes it imperative for scholars, teachers, and students to have access to a comprehensive
reference resource-one that cuts across disciplinary specializations 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. TheEncyclopedia aims to be just this kind of
universal reference tool, providing a comprehensive resource for students and researchers in the
many disciplines drawing on concepts of storytelling and using methods of narrative analysis.
Thus, while providing ample coverage of structuralist models and of the frameworks developed
for the study of literary narratives, beyond this the Encyclopedia seeks to give a broad overview
of paradigms for analyzing stories across a variety of media and genres--from film, television,
opera, and digital environments, to gossip, sports broadcasts, comics and graphic novels, and
obituaries, to mention only a few.
Thanks to my editorial work on the journal, book series, and encyclopedia, I have come to
place special emphasis on the importance and relevance of work on narrative across media, as
well as studies of narrative that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Since my aim as an editor is to
identify and disseminate research on narrative practices across a variety of media and settings,
my editorial work harmonizes with my commitment to using narrative to try to create more open
dialogue among various fields of humanistic research as well as between scholarship in the
humanities and that being done in the social and even the natural sciences. Hence, as I see it, my
editorial work is integrally related to my work as a teacher and scholar, while also providing me
with means for achieving one of my overarching career goals: namely, to highlight the centrality
of stories and storytelling to human experience, and to use that centrality, in turn, to help open up
lines of communication between students and faculty specialists from all areas of inquiry.
My editorial work has also brought me into contact with both younger and more established
scholars seeking to advance the field either by (1) rethinking foundational concepts and methods
of narrative study, or else by (2) developing new, emergent areas of research in the field. In the
first category one might include the ongoing (re)investigation of issues such as unreliable
narration, the role of metaphors in narrative discourse, techniques for consciousness
representation, and so on. In the second category, i.e., the development of emergent areas of
narrative research, one might include work on digital narrativity (narratives conveyed through
blogs, web novels, interactive fictions, etc.); studies of multimodal storytelling, or the use of
more than one semiotic channel to evoke a storyworld (e.g., through word-image combinations in
comics and graphic novels, or through the coordinated use of utterances and gestures in face-toface narration); and also a range of new "hybrid" subfields such as cognitive narratology,
computational narratology (definable as the effort to build intelligent systems capable of
generating and understanding stories), and corpus narratology (definable as the use of tools from
corpus linguistics to develop methods for studying large, multi-million word narrative corpora).
Another emergent area is the study of "unnatural" narratives, that is, modes of fictional narration
that challenge real-world understandings of identity, space and time, causality, etc. In my view,
both the rethinking of enduring issues in narrative study and the creation of new frameworks and
new topics for narrative research are crucial elements of the broader endeavor of postclassical
narratology.
Shang: More than a decade ago, Mieke Bal claimed that narratology "is flourishing, but less
within the study of narrative texts than in other disciplines."[6]In a similar vein, Walter de
Gruyter brought forth, in 2005, a volumeNarratology beyond Literary Criticism. From your point

of view, could narratology really go beyond literary criticism? If yes, what are the relevant
consequences, both for literary criticism and for other branches of study?
Herman: Although I would tend to disagree with Bal's comment at this stage in the
development of narrative studies--after all, postclassical narratology has generated a host of new
approaches to the study of narrative texts--both my work on the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory and the launch of Storyworlds have brought home to me the very broad scope
of the "narrative turn" that continues to unfold across many disciplines. Martin Kreiswirth, Matti
Hyvrinen, and others have suggested that this narrative turn is of the same magnitude as the
linguistic turn that took place in earlier twentieth-century philosophy and culture. Whatever the
ultimate cause of the turn-is it the sense that all knowledge claims are grounded in particular
situations best characterized in narrative terms, or the need to use stories to negotiate the multiple
(sub)cultures, traditions, and ways of seeing being brought into ever-closer proximity by the
forces of globalization?-the many fields involved in the turn toward narrative have not only
adapted ideas from narratology but also contributed new ideas and methods to the study of
stories. To mention just one example: building on the work of Jerome Bruner, the philosopher
Daniel Hutto has been developing a narrative approach to the study of folk psychology, or the
heuristic strategies that people use to make sense of their own and other minds. Reciprocally
scholars of narrative have started to draw on Hutto's scholarship, and the work to which Hutto
was responding in developing his "Narrative Practice Hypothesis," to create new frameworks for
research on the minds of fictional characters--as well as the processes by which readers draw
inferences about those minds.[7] This kind of cross-fertilization among fields suggests that
narratology has already begun to contribute to model-building initiatives in domains outside of
literary criticism, even as the study of literary and other narratives has been enriched by models
under construction in other disciplines.
Shang: Though postclassical narratology is still in its heyday, there are some narratologists
who have already started predicting its future development--or at least made tentative proposals
along those lines. For instance, Jan Christoph Meister and others have recently argued that "the
best future for narratology lies in retaining a critical awareness of the fact that it was originally
intended to search for and study universals,"[8] while in Ansgar Nnning's opinion, "The future
development of both narratology and the usage of the term 'narratology' is uncertain, but it will
be interesting to watch."[9] Can you also predict what narratology will be like after its
postclassical phase?
Herman: It is difficult to make predictions about the future development of a field undergoing
such rapid expansion and transformation, but several trends can be anticipated. One trend has to
do with the globalization of narrative theory. In this connection, I think that we can expect a
fuller consideration of whether the narratological principles and methods developed to date-principles and methods extrapolating from a growing but still relatively limited corpus of
narrative texts--are sensitive enough to capture differences in storytelling practices as they play
out across different cultural and linguistic traditions. Narrative scholars from all over the world
will need to engage in a collaborative, cross-cultural as well as cross-disciplinary effort to refine
the narratological toolkit, as necessary, in light of attested storytelling traditions. This work is a
necessary complement to the research on narrative across media that is likewise emerging as a
focal concern in the field.
In fact, another emerging trend is a corollary of just this transmedial focus in contemporary
narratological research: namely, the attempt to isolate what is distinctive about literary narratives
in particular. Identifying what is distinctive about literary narrative is the goal of some of the
work on "unnatural narratives" mentioned in my response to question 5. Is literature the domain
of narrative in which producers and interpreters of stories are given special license to engage with

scenarios that challenge real-world understandings of identity, space and time, causality, etc.--as
when a human is transformed into an insect, or the narrator of a story proves, when we get to the
end, to have been an alien from another world?
A third trend is likely to be the continued effort to develop a workable transdisciplinary
conception of story, one that is flexible enough to accommodate fields from across the arts and
sciences but that also affords a reasonably well-constrained account of what a narrative is (and is
not). The challenge in this connection is to draw on the rich diversity of disciplinary approaches
and insights to build models for narrative study that are nonetheless internally coherent and
mutually intelligible to all the parties who contribute to the endeavor.
Shang: Given the growing interest in narratological concepts and methods across many fields,
teaching narrative theory is becoming a hot issue in contemporary narrative studies. In
cooperation with James Phelan and Brian McHale, you have edited a volume Teaching Narrative
Theory, which will be published in the near future by the Modern Language Association in
its Options for Teaching book series. Can you briefly tell us what this volume is about? From
your perspective, what is the best way to teach narrative theory?
Herman: Although recent years have seen the publication of many critical guides to key
issues in narrative theory, currently there is no volume available that targets the question of how
ideas from-or approaches to-narrative theory might be brought into play in the classroom. Thus,
although the contributors to our volume onTeaching Narrative Theory draw on early, pioneering
work as well as state-of-the-art research in narrative studies, they mainly focus on how key
concepts from the field can inform pedagogical practice, in a variety of disciplinary settings and
at different levels of instruction. We have organized the volume into four sections: Situations (the
various kinds of classroom situations in which narrative theory is taught); Elements (the basic
elements of narrative); Genres and Media; and Interfaces (the fields of study with which narrative
theory intersects and from which teachers of narrative theory can adapt productive concepts and
methods, while also contributing to those neighoring fields themselves). Throughout the volume
contributors keep in the forefront of their essays challenges that they have experienced while
teaching core concepts of narrative theory and also the strategies they've developed to address
those challenges.
To respond to the final part of your question (concerning what might be the best way to teach
narrative theory), let me provide a brief synopsis of part of our introduction to the volume, where
we suggest that three broad pedagogical goals are especially salient for teachers of narrative
theory. The three goals can be called translation, justification, and integration.
Translation refers to the process by which students at whatever level acquire, first, a basic
understanding of the concepts behind terms of art such as zero focalization, figural narrative
situation, deictic shift, actant, extradiegetic-homodiegetic narration, metalepsis, and emplotment;
and second, the ability to use these and other technical terms and concepts in their own
interpretive practice. In other words, a fundamental responsibility for teachers of narrative theory
is not just to present the nomenclatures that have been developed to describe fluctuations in the
perspectival organization of a narrative text, for example, but also to enable students to
internalize those nomenclatures and make them part of their basic skill-set as interpreters,
analysts, writers.
This second aspect of translation, which involves putting new terms and concepts into
practice, already points ahead to the second broad pedagogical goal, namely, justification. Here,
as in other areas of scholarship and teaching, translation and justification are intertwined aspects
of pedagogical practice. Successfully carrying out the process of translation requires that
instructors demonstrate to students not just the existence but furthermore the value-the

productiveness for interpretation and analysis-of ideas from narrative theory. Finally, at the
graduate level in particular, the challenge goes beyond translating key terms and concepts and
demonstrating their interpretive yield. Instructors also face the task of enabling more advanced
students to integrate ideas from narrative theory into their growing repertoire of interpretive
approaches, their strategies for professional development, and their ongoing apprenticeship as
teachers in their own right. Especially in graduate-level courses, the onus is on instructors to
show students how ideas from narrative theory can be made part of their everyday practice as
professional-scholars-in-training.
Shang: Thank you for answering these questions, Professor Herman.
Herman: Thank you so much, Shang, for your thought-provoking questions and for proposing
the idea of this interview in the first place. I am very grateful to you for your interest, and it has
been a privilege to work with you on this project.

NOTES
[1] In this response, I'll focus on ways in which the non-overlapping aspects of postclassical
frameworks may complement one another. I am grateful to Shang Biwu, however, for pointing
out that a fuller response would require discussion of conflicting as well as complementary
divergences among the approaches.
[2] "Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives," forthcoming in
Anna de Fina and Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Telling Stories: Building Bridges among Language,
Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society and Culture (Georgetown: Georgetown University
Press).
[3] For discussion of some of the issues involved, see David Herman, "Quantitative Methods
in Narratology: A Corpus-based Study of Motion Events in Stories," in Jan Christoph Meister
(ed.), in cooperation with Tom Kindt, Wilhelm Schernus, and Malte Stein, Narratology Beyond
Literary Criticism (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2005), pp. 125-49; and Andrew Salway and David
Herman, "Digitized Corpora as Theory-Building Resource: New Methods for Narrative Inquiry,"
forthcoming in Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas (eds.), New Narratives: Theory and Practice.
[4] In my forthcoming book Basic Elements of
Narrative (http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=9781405141536&site=1#top) I
develop more fully the claim that disruptive or transgressive events--events that violate the
canonical order of a world--constitute a core feature of narrativity, i.e., the property or set of
properties that makes a given representation or artifact more or less amenable to being
understood as a narrative.
[5] See for example the book mentioned in my previous note as well as the following study,
which like the book on Basic Elements, will be in print by the time this interview is published:
David Herman, "Narrative Ways of Worldmaking," in Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer
(eds.), Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Narrative Research (Berlin: de Gruyter).
[6] Mieke Bal, On Meaning-Making: Essays in Semiotics (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press,
1994), p. 26.
[7] See Daniel D. Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of

Understanding Reasons (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). For a review-essay on Hutto's book
and its implications for cognitive narratology, see David Herman, "Narrative and the Minds of
Others," forthcoming inStyle.
[8] Jan Christoph Meister, Tom Kindt and Wilhelm Schernus, "Introduction," in Jan Christoph
Meister (ed.) Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 2005, p. xv.
[9] Ansgar Nnning, "Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments,
Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term," in Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald
Mller (eds.) What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a
Theory (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), p. 264.
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