"Doing" Narratology: Drawing on Literary Theory for Structural Analysis of Narratives

• In Event: Exploring Methodological Issues in Narrative Research

Abstract

This methodology paper explores adopting narratological approaches from literary theory to help understand the structure of narratives. Narratology is the study of how stories are built and developed conceptually. This is in contrast to other narrative methods that analyze themes or linguistic structures in narrative data. While stories can be structured and interpreted in various ways, we look specifically at how emotionally charged occurrences give rise to conceptual “chunks” of student stories and can be used to understand larger emergent patterns in those stories. We use this method to analyze data collected during a larger study on emotions felt by engineering students; for this paper, one interview transcript analyzed using this narratological method will be presented.

Authors

• Joshua M Cruz, Arizona State University - Tempe

• Nadia Kellam, Arizona State University