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Adding versus Arguing: Narratology and Taxonomy

the terminology of the critical intervention. The type of criticism I focus on here is narratology. If theory is the everrebellious offspring of structuralism, then narratology could be seen as the latter’s dutiful child, the inheritor of structuralism’s methods and legacies. That portrayal exaggerates and simplifies, of course, but it does seem to me that narratologists have a way of arguing with each other that is rather different from the arguments of those working in other branches of theory. And it further strikes me that this difference has to do with narratology’s image of itself as a type of science. To understand why, I want to suggest that we examine the history of narratology as a history of science. Lubomír Doležel has argued, “If we posit poetics as a science of literature . . . then we will naturally seek a place for its history within the framework of the history of science” (2). In this essay, I place narrative theory within the framework of “normal science” and link it more particularly with the paradigm of natural history, one that Michel Foucault identifies with the classical episteme, or the assumptions about knowledge that prevailed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I examine the attitudes and convictions that underlie narrative theorists’ debates and shape their sense of the work they do. The larger question, though, is whether it is possible to disentangle literary criticism, as practiced outside narratology, from a rhetoric or temporality of crisis. This is not at all to deny that a real employment crisis exists in the academy. Rather, it is to consider whether a persistent invocation of epistemic crisis has been helpful, or the opposite, with regard to this situation. According to The Living Handbook of Narratology, narratology is a “discipline dedicated to the study of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation” (Meister, par. 1). It sees itself as “a system of scientific practices” (par. 3). Such an understanding was present from the start of modern structuralist narratology. Tzvetan YOON SUN LEE has published “Narrative