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Part I. Interdisciplinary Approach to Storytelling ] 25 group. Barthess critigue of his contemporary literary theory was that it was extremely author-centered, linking the work to the biography of the author. In Barthes interpretation, writing is not a presentation, characterization, or notation, but rather a performative act, a kind of ,subjectless’ expression. 2.4 Genre Theory The most common way to classify narratives is by genre, which offers a kind of narrative template for analysis. Bruner (1996) argued that the actions of the characters in a story and the events that occur around them make sense in terms of the genre of the narrative structure that surrounds them. Plato, in the second book of the Republic, distinguishes between two kinds of narrative, the true and the fictitious, and then states that both are educational, and that education by sagas begins in early childhood. In the third book, he writes that narration is when the poet presents the speeches and the events between the speeches. When the poet reproduces someone else’s words, it is imitation (mimesis), and when the poet describes the action without imitation, it is a narration (diegesis). In addition to emphasizing the narrator he also draws attention to the temporality of narration. Although Plato's work also identifies specific genres (epic poem, tragedy and comedy), Aristotle is the thinker who put greater emphasis on developing the notion of genre. In Poetics, Aristotle describes how the poetic craft reaches its peak in tragedy and comedy. Aristotle expands the definition of mimesis to include all poetic activity. In the first part of this fragmentary work, he gives a precise description of the distinguishing features of tragedy and comedy, and in the second part specifies their purpose. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, is the representation of good characters, while comedy presents bad characters in terms of ridicule. He also describes the two genres from a formal point of view, referring to the meter of the poem and the temporality of the narrative. Aristotle makes a detailed comparison between epics and tragedies in terms of length, meter and thematic features. Already in this early work, a systematic approach to thinking about narrative can be found. Aristotle describes narrative as the putting together of events (pragma(ta)). He defines tragedy as consisting of six obligatory elements, which he further groups according to their role in imitation. The means of imitation are the plot and the characters, while the mode of imitation is language; the objects of imitation include argument, spectacle and song. Among the ,elements’ of narrative, Aristotle considered the most important to be the plot (mythos), which he considered to be the imitation of actions (and not of people). Aristotle believed that the appeal of the tragedy was its unexpected turns (peripeteia) and realizations (anagnorisis). Aristotle proposed five criteria for the plot: (1) it must be a ‘closed whole’ - it must
