Plain-language explanation.
Narratology is the study of narrative — the structures, forms, and functions of stories across literature, film, oral tradition, and other media. It asks: how are stories built? What makes a narrative coherent? How does telling shape what is told?
Core concepts and standard treatment.
Classic narratology distinguishes story (fabula — the sequence of events) from discourse (syuzhet — how those events are told). Key concepts include narrator and focalization (Genette), narrative time (analepsis/flashback, prolepsis/flash-forward, duration, frequency), actantial models (Greimas), and the three-act structure. Propp's morphology of the folktale and Barthes's S/Z established structural approaches.
Deeper theory, debates and edge cases.
Advanced narratology covers cognitive narratology (how readers mentally simulate story worlds — Mar & Oatley), transmedial narratology (narrative in games, databases, journalism), unreliable narrators, metalepsis (crossing narrative levels), postclassical narratology (incorporating gender, ideology, and embodiment), and computational narrative generation (story grammars, narrative AI).
How it is applied in practice.
At the narratologist and digital storytelling practitioner level, scholars publish in Narrative, StoryWorlds, and Poetics Today; advise film studios and game developers on story structure; apply narrative analytics to brand storytelling and political communication; design interactive narrative systems; and contribute to AI narrative generation research at the intersection of computational linguistics and creative AI.