Poststructuralism

This chapter argues that the willingness of the poststructuralist narratologists (particularly Chatman, Lanser, Brooks, and de Lauretis) to look beyond the confines of twentieth-century linguistics and semiotics for their critical concepts and models re-energizes narratology’s relationship with ancient poetics. At the same time, the poststructuralist drive to push beyond the established boundaries of narratology and into a much wider domain of narrative ‘texts’—looking outside the narrow field of literary narrative into media such as film, music, and visual culture—rediscovers Aristotle’s Poetics and the anticipation of cross-medial narrative theory found there.