Seymour Chatman, Introduction

(In Story and Discourse)

On the off chance that it proves useful, I'm looking into some narratology from the '70s, given that narratology is concerned with patterns and repetition, and that narrative structures are so important to franchises. Chatman's book seems interesting enough. What I appreciate most about it is his insistence that "definitions are made, not discovered," as opposed to the empiricist view that structures are fixed objects which scholars must uncover. Definitions and classifications are powerful tools with which we can create meaning.

Coming from a structuralist perspective, Chatman suggests that categorization is useful not because it helps us to find pure examples of whatever category we're dealing with, but because it helps us to plot texts in relation to one another - sort of an early transgeneric approach. I suppose that I am adding another axis to his abstract network to include the discursive and pragmatic elements of franchises. Story (referring to content) and discourse (referring to expression) need to be expanded to account for reception (referring to interpretation and use) in order to discuss the continuum of meaning which is genre, or franchise, or whatever. This multi-directional process is the only way we can fully understand their complexity.