User:Vefritz/sandbox

In narratology, the terms ‘story’ (or ‘story level’) and ‘discourse’ (or ‘discourse level’) refer to constituent levels of narratives as analytical “abstractions or constructs", which do not occur in reality. First applied to fiction (such as novels and short stories), they can arguably also be applied to all narratives across media, such as film, drama, pictorial narratives, or video games. ‘Story’ comprises the ‘building blocks’ of a storyworld (they can be identified by answering the question ‘what is the case in this world?’), while ‘discourse’ comprises all phenomena and devices used for the transmission of the story(world); discursive elements can be identified by answering the question ‘how is the storyworld transmitted?’. The terms ‘story’ and ‘discourse’ were introduced by Tzvetan Todorov  and subsequently popularised in English narratology by Seymour Chatman. Originally, narratology, in the field under discussion, was influenced by French theorist Gérard Genette, who, however, uses a ternary distinction: histoire (story), récit (the narrative text as such) and narration (the narrative act producing the story); récit and narration may be said to both refer to elements of the discourse level, and as a consequence the dichotomy ‘story vs. discourse’ has gained more importance than Genette’s terminology.