Enunciative Narratology : a French Speciality

This essay is intended as an introduction to “French enunciative narratology” or the theory thus termed on the basis of a certain number of criteria presented in the introduction: the fact that it is produced by linguists; the fact that it aims to remedy the shortcomings of Genettian narratology in the domain of linguistics; the fact that it refers to the work of enunciative linguistics, applied to the corpus of fictional narratives. The first section of the essay concerns the historical and methodological relations, or lack of relations, between enunciative linguistics and narratology (in Genette’s sense). The second section examines the contributions made by enunciative narratology to narratology or narrative theory. This section looks, successively, at Laurent Danon-Boileau’s definition of an enunciative schema, Alain Rabatel’s linguistic (enunciative and textual) approach to point of view and the broad outlines of Rivara’s enunciative narratology. The third section focuses on the limits of enunciative narratology and argues that it relies on an erroneous or ambiguous concept of the narrator, which is inherited from narratology. This section concludes with several suggestions for moving beyond the limits of enunciative narratology by pushing linguistic-enunciative analysis even further and casting off the more debatable legacies of narratology once and for all.