Aspects of a Narratology of Drama

Abstract

It was only recently, in its post-classical phase, that narratology began focusing on the play as a genre that also contains narrative components. Prior to this, it treated plays as a “supragenre” and as something that is different from a narrative text in terms of constitution because they were supposed to be fundamentally established precisely by the absence of transmitting the dramatic act in the representation of fictitious action. Manfred Jahn introduced the concept of narrative voice into plays, demonstrating that a strict dichotomy between play and narrative is not feasible. Brian Richardson proved that narratological categories are useful for analysing plays in a series of articles. This article offers an overview of some key achievements of the narratology of drama from the transgeneric perspective by Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer and by Monica Fludernik in addition to the two authors mentioned above. Coauthors Nünning and Sommer advocate a distinction between diegetic and mimetic narrativity, borrowing Jahn’s adaptation of Chatman’s genre classification. Fludernik proceeds from her natural narratology and proposes a narrative model of drama communication that combines the analysis of narrative in plays with performative approaches to studying discourse in narrative fiction. The paper also mentions two critics of transgeneric narratology that problematized the relevance of narrative transmission concepts and their applicability within a transgeneric context, and summarizes Peter Hühn’s and Roy Sommer’s opposition to two of their theoretical arguments. It concludes in a rather text-centric manner by introducing certain narratological concepts into an analysis of plays by Dušan Jovanović and examining the narratives and narrativity in them. In this regard, Jovanović’s oeuvre proves to be a perfect choice for analysis because it is rich and diverse in narratives and to date has not yet been studied from this perspective.