Towards a `natural' narratology

Let me start with an apologia for the title of this book. Three sources of inspiration have fed into the term `natural&s; narratology. For the moment I propose to keep the inverted commas on `natural&s; as an indication that I am very much aware of naïve and evaluative readings of that term and intend to eschew any prescriptive or moralistic interpretations. My espousal of this controversial label, as the prologue was meant to demonstrate, occurs at some level of sophistication. My own uses of the `natural&s; do not, however, merely reflect poststructuralist tenets. On the contrary, I attempt to cut through the threads of the deconstructionist and sociological debate and to institute a reconceptualization of the term within a more specifically cognitive perspective. My use of the concept of the `natural&s; relates to a framework of human embodiedness. It is from this angle that some cognitive parameters can be regarded as `natural&s; in the sense of `naturally occurring&s; or `constitutive of prototypical human experience&s;. The term `natural&s; is not applied to texts or textual techniques but exclusively to the cognitive frames by means of which texts are interpreted. Nor will the `natural&s; in these pages be opposed to the unnatural. Fictional experiments that manifestly exceed the boundaries of naturally occurring story(telling) situations are, instead, said to employ nonnatural schemata.