Structural organization of memory narrative

The paper focuses on memory narrative, which is an object of mnemonic narratology, a new subarea of narratology that studies narratives as text structures verbalizing individual memory and its processes. Memory narrative is defined as a narration based on individual mnemonic experience and, as such, it is a specific type of personal experience narrative. Being a recurrent text structure that verbalizes mnemonic content, memory narrative is an organized discourse form logically and sequentially representing personal experience (while still allowing for breaches in temporality), including context necessary for the adequate interpretation and analytical processing of the narrated events and conveying the narrator’s subjective view and evaluation of the events. The paper aims at examining the structural organization of memory narrative as regards its external and internal forms. For this purpose, a corpus of memory narratives totaling 443 items was collected from various sources, including fiction, documentary prose, online blogs, newspaper and journal articles. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the empirical evidence allowed developing a two-fold typology of memory narratives accounting for their external and internal properties. The author’s findings concern communicatively conditioned macrostructural varieties of memory narratives and their internal structural specifics interpreted as modifications of the classical Labovian model of personal experience narratives.

Keywords

Authors

References