Individuals in Narrative Worlds: An Ontological Perspective

Abstract

which serves as a point of departure for most theoretical endeavors in the study of culture-provides us with four major components of this content aspect: plot, setting, ideas, and character. Each of these intuitive notions is, however, ambiguous and polysemic. The first theoretical step, accordingly, involves the explication and exactification of such notions by means of an explicitly defined theoretical vocabulary, which yields a model object or theoretical entity. The next step involves a delineation of the basic features of the model object, to be followed by a series of hypotheses about its relations with other form and content aspects of the narrative text. This theoretical stage is to be followed, in turn, by a historical-typological, that is, descriptive, stage and later on by empirical or reader-oriented research. The theoretical activity should strive to satisfy certain requirements of methodological adequacy, the most important of which are the following: (a) Sound logico-philosophical background beyond linguistics, as we are dealing here with what is being represented (sense and reference) and not with verbal means of representation. (b) Non-reductionist orientation: the goal of theorizing here is to account for or explicate pretheoretical intuitions, not to excise or exorcise them.