Narrative network
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A narrative network is a system that represents complex event sequences or characters’ interactions as depicted by a narrative text. Network science methodology offers an alternative way of analysing the patterns of relationships, composition and activities of events and actors studied in their own context. Network theory can contribute to the understanding of the structural properties of a text and the data contained in it. The meaning of the individual and the community in a narrative is conditional on their position in a system of social relationships reported by the author. Hence, a central problem when dealing with narratives is framing and organising the author’s perspective of individual and collective connections in order to understand better the role of both the witness (viz. the persona that emerges from the narrative) and its testimony as reflected by the text. However, the category of narrative network is in its formative, initial phase and as a consequence it is hard to view as a stable and defined notion in linguistics, and beyond sociology.
As pointed out by Peter Munz, “Narrative is the only literary device available which will reflect the past’s time structure.”
