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Emerging Vectors of Narratology: Toward Consolidation or Diversification?
It can be observed that postclassical narratology, in its initial phase, expanded the scope of inquiry of its predecessor to become multiple, interdisciplinary, transgeneric, transmedial. More recently, it appears that narratology has entered a phase of consolidation, but with a continued trend toward diversification.
What does this consolidation consist of, and in what ways can narratology be said to diversify?
Are narratologies, in the plural, evolving toward narratology, in the singular – possibly to become a discipline in the full sense of the term? Does diversification imply more double-entry narratologies, or does it, perhaps simultaneously, involve a look at the various scientific cultures underlying research programs in narrative theory, past and present, but also non-Western? As theoreticians address issues of cognition and context in narrative, in what ways should the role of poetics in narratology be rethought?

Ubiquitous, stories have encouraged narratologists to expand their purview beyond the literary corpus and take the “narrative turn,” embracing fields as diverse as psychology, sociology, ethnology, history, the law, corporate management, digital technology, and more. But whatever the universals common to all narratives, literary scholars, psychotherapists, sociologists, ethnologists, historians, jurists, advertising executives and AI experts view narrative in significantly different ways and as serving purposes that may be wholly at odds from one field to another. What, then, is the influence on narrative of genre – not necessarily in the sense of traditional literary scholarship, but possibly in that of “speech genres” (Bakhtin), those “relatively fixed forms” that bridge the gap between units of language or other signifying systems and discourse in its prolific manifestations? Then, too, is the question of narrative in non-verbal forms – the plastic arts and music – but also narrative in its pluri-medial forms.
Yet other questions arise. If, as Barthes stressed nearly half a century ago, narrative is a universal anthropological phenomenon, to what extent is it constitutive of culture? Can similar lines of inquiry be pursued with regard to homo narrans, the storytelling animal?

Such are but a few of the questions open for debate at the 3rd Conference of the ENN, hosted by the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris on March 29 and 30, 2013.