Chinese name: Narratology nature: the reason why science became famous: the birth of formalism criticism: the definition, origin and development of France in the 20th century, foreign and domestic, related figures, pioneers, advocates, reinventing ideas, symbolizing the empire and the definition of Narratology in the 20th century were born in France. Narratology (French narratology) consists of Latin root narrato and Greek suffix logie. As the name implies, narratology should be the science of studying narrative works. However, this definition cannot stand further study. Because the definition of narrative works, the research object of narratology, is not an easy task. The new edition of Robert French Dictionary defines narratology as "the theory of narrative works, narrative, narrative structure and narrative." The seven-volume La Ruse French Dictionary interprets narratology as "people sometimes use it to refer to the scientific study of the structure of literary works". Obviously, the "literary works" here don't just include a narrative work. There are great differences between these two definitions, but one thing is the same, that is, they both attach importance to the study of text narrative structure. Simply put, narratology is the theory of narrating this article, focusing on the technical analysis of narrative text. Roland barthes believes that any material is suitable for narration, including paintings, movies, cartoons, social anecdotes and dialogues. Narrative carrier can be oral or written audio language, fixed or moving pictures and gestures, and an organic mixture of all these materials. In fact, the development of narratology does not completely follow this idea, and its research object is limited to myths and folk stories, especially novels, which are narrative works with written language as the carrier. Even if we enter the narrative field composed of non-verbal materials, it is based on the study of narrative works with language as the carrier. Even Bart's "Fashion System" is studying the number of words about fashion in newspapers and magazines. As far as myths, folk stories and novels are concerned, narratology pays attention to the first two in the early stage and mainly studies "stories"; After the development of narratology, it mainly studies the latter and cares about "narrative discourse". Therefore, the two cannot be mentioned in the same breath. In this way, from the actual development situation, narratology is the study of written narrative materials based on myths, folk stories and novels, and uses this as a reference to study other narrative fields. The word "narratology" was first put forward by todorov. In "Grammar of decameron" published in 1969, he wrote: "... this work belongs to a science that has not yet existed, and we will call it narratology for the time being, that is, the science about narrative works." In fact, before this, the research conception and theoretical outline of narratology have been quite complete. The emergence of narratology is the result of the joint action of structuralism and Russian formalism. Structuralism emphasizes that we should examine and grasp things from the relationship of internal factors that constitute the whole. In particular, Saussure's structuralist linguistics examines language from the perspective of time, that is, the internal structure of language, rather than from the perspective of diachronic and historical evolution. This research idea has had a great influence on the emergence of narratology. Origin and development of foreign countries Although the word "narratology" was formally put forward by T. Todorov in 1969, people's discussion on narrative has already begun. Plato's famous mimetic dichotomy/diegesis can be regarded as the beginning of these discussions. /kloc-After the novels in the 0/8th century officially entered the literary palace, the discussion on narration (especially novels) became more comprehensive: from the content of novels to the form of novels, to the functions of novels and the status of readers. Some narratology categories that people are keen to discuss today, such as narrative viewpoint, voice and distance, were also discussed a long time ago. For example, Thomas Liszt used "narrative viewpoint" to analyze novels in 1832, and another scholar in the same period, John Gibson Lockhart, also used this term to discuss how to keep the author at a proper distance from his own works. Later, after Henry James' comprehensive exposition and the in-depth development of E·M· Forster and M. Scholler, narrative perspective became one of the most important terms in novel criticism (naturally including narratology). However, as a discipline, narratology was formally established under the influence of Russian formalism under the background of structuralism in the 1960s. It "studies the narrative characteristics and individual differences of * * * in all narrative forms, aiming at describing the narrative-related rule system that controls narrative (and narrative process)". As far as ideological origin is concerned, narratology theory originated from Russian formalism in the 1920s and the narrative precedent of structuralism initiated by Vladimir propp. Russian formalists such as shklovsky and Eisenbaum found the difference between "story" and "plot", in which "story" refers to all events in the actual time series, and "plot" focuses on the actual situation of events in the works, which directly affects the division of narrative works' structural levels by narratology. They put forward the concepts of "story" and "plot" to refer to the material content and expression form of narrative works, and roughly outlined the two levels of story and discourse, which were the focus of later classical narratology research, in order to highlight the skills of studying narrative works. The most direct influence comes from the Morphology of Folk Stories in Plop, which is regarded as the beginning of narratology. Plop breaks the traditional method of classifying fairy tales according to characters and themes, and thinks that the basic unit of stories is not characters but the "functions" of characters in stories, thus separating 3 1 "functions" from numerous Russian folk stories. His views were accepted by Levi-Strauss and spread to France. This view is different from the traditional narrative theory's emphasis on the content and social significance of the work, but based on the structural culture theory of modern linguistics, which pays more attention to the work and its structural analysis: it pays attention to the * * * of the work rather than the specific artistic achievements; This paper mainly studies the relationship between author and narrator, narrator and characters, author and reader, as well as narrative discourse and narrative action. Levi-Strauss mainly studies the inner unchangeable factor structure in myth, trying to discover the basic structure of human thinking with language model. In the 1960s, a large number of works about the structural analysis of narrative works began to appear. Both Gremas and todorov began to translate and introduce Russian formalism. 1966, the eighth issue of Communication magazine published a special issue entitled "Semiotics Research-Narrative Works Structure Analysis", which announced the formal birth of narratology. It is in this special issue that roland barthes published the famous Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative Works, which put forward a programmatic theoretical conception for the future study of narratology. In this paper, Bart summarizes the achievements of predecessors and expounds his unique views. He suggested that narrative works should be divided into three descriptive levels: functional level, behavioral level and narrative level, and any language unit may combine with each level to produce meaning. It was also in 1966 that Gremas' structural semantics came out. He mainly studied the organization of meaning in discourse, and also compiled a semiotic box as the basic composition mode of meaning, and further studied the narrative structure and discourse structure. So far, the familiar narratology usually refers to the classic narratology, which is a "fruitful fruit" on the fertile soil of structuralism in the 1960s. Todorov, Genette, roland barthes, Graeme, Bremon and other narrators of the older generation broke new ground on the basis of in-depth analysis of the stories and discourses of narrative texts, making narratology spread around the world with France as the axis and becoming a dynamic "upstart" in the family of literary theories. It can be seen that before narratology was formally put forward as a discipline, its development was spectacular, from the study of primary narrative forms such as myths and folk stories to the study of narrative forms of modern literature, from the exploration of the deep structure of "stories" to the analysis of the narrative structure of "words". Todorov suggested that the study of narrative works should be carried out at the level of "story" and "discourse". In decameron's Grammar, he studies the literariness of literary works by analyzing the grammatical structure of literary works, and divides narrative into three levels: semantics, syntax and vocabulary, and divides narrative problems into three grammatical categories: time, style and style. Through the analysis of decameron, each story is simplified to a pure syntactic structure, and two basic units, namely "proposition" and "sequence", are obtained, trying to establish a narrative structure model. Genette absorbed the research results of todorov's narrative discourse. Narrative Discourse, published in 1972 and included in three sets of figures of speech, is his great contribution to the study of narratology. This paper takes Proust's novel Memories of Time Past as the research object, and summarizes the laws of literary narration. He analyzes narrative works from grammatical categories such as time, style and voice, which essentially express the relationship between story, narrative and narrative-he first defines story, narrative and narrative in the introduction. His analysis focuses on narrative discourse and pays attention to the relationship between narrative discourse level and narrative story level. 1983, he wrote "New Narrative Discourse", which answered the criticism of narrative discourse by scholars such as Van Reyes, Dorrit Gaoan and Mick Barr, and revised or further explained some of his arguments. When the theory of narratology spread from France to Europe and developed to Britain and America, some changes took place. Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, Martin's Contemporary Narratology and Watt's The Rise of Fiction are important achievements in the study of American and British narratology. British and American scholars start with rhetoric skills, and the research is more intuitive and empirical. For example, Booth's exposition of "implied author" and "voice" in The Rhetoric of Fiction is not from the perspective of narrative grammar, but from the perspective of rhetoric, which is also of great significance to the development of narrative academic theory. In the mid-1980s, the theory of narratology was gradually introduced into China, especially Jameson's speech in Peking University, which brought the prosperity of narratology in China. 1986- 1992 was the most active year for narratology translation, and the most representative narrative theory works in the west were basically translated during this period. China's localized narrative research has also made remarkable achievements, such as Chen Pingyuan's The Transformation of Narrative Mode in China's Novels (1988), Luo Gang's Introduction to Narratology (1994) and Yang Yi's Narratology in China (1997). While drawing lessons from the western narrative theory, they also made use of China's unique literary resources and discourse forms to conduct narrative research on classical literature, including The Book of Songs, storytelling novels, A Dream of Red Mansions and modern and contemporary novels since The Book of Songs, enriching the narrative theory and making their own efforts for the China of the western narrative theory. The development of narratology has also brought great influence to the practice of contemporary novel creation. Novels in the new period, especially avant-garde novels, are undoubtedly a great narrative revolution. In their novels, the traditional concept of story authenticity has been broken, the author subverts the fictional story in narration, and even the narrator directly reveals the fictional process of the story. Ma Yuan is the initiator of this change from story to narrative, and narrative time has broken through the natural process of story time and gained freedom. Another major change in novel narrative since 1980s is narrative perspective. The traditional realistic omniscient perspective turns to the narrator's internal perspective, guiding the narrative by what I see, hear and feel, or judging and surpassing the omniscient perspective by crossing internal and external perspectives and multiple narrative perspectives. Narratology is a theory developed on the basis of structuralism to study narrative texts. The man who first put forward the concept of narratology and thought it was a science to be established is generally regarded as Cvitan todorov, a famous contemporary French structuralist symbolist and literary theorist. He first put forward in decameron Grammar published in 1969: "... this science belongs to a science that has not yet existed, and we will call it narratology for the time being, that is, the science about narrative works." Prior to this, Barthes's Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative Works published in 1966, Claude Bremon's two papers, and Gremas's book Structuralism Semantics published in the same year can all be regarded as the foundation works of contemporary narratology. After more than 30 years of development, narratology has formed its own system, which can effectively analyze many narrative texts or styles. Next, we sort out the theories of several structuralists and narrators, and get a glimpse of narratology theory. Vladimir propp, pioneer of related figures, Russian folklorist propp is not a structuralist, but he is a pioneer of structuralist narratology. His book Morphology of Folk Stories (1928) is a landmark work in the whole field of narratology. His thoughts and theories had a direct and far-reaching impact on later structuralist scholars such as Grimas, todorov and Bremon. Propp is a contemporary representative of Russian formalism. Russian formalist literary criticism is the product of the 1920s and one of the sources of structuralism. Its school is characterized by paying attention to the form of works, which is divided into two important centers: Moscow Language School (established in 19 15) and Petrograd Institute of Poetic Language (established in 19 16). The members of the former are mainly linguists, while the members of the latter are mainly literary historians. This school has opened up two main directions for structuralism. First, it originated from shklovsky's distinction between two aspects of narration, which is equivalent to the signifier and signified in language, and was later called "narrative component" and "narrated component" by Bremon. The other direction comes from propp's folk story morphology. In propp's works, based on Russian folk stories, he summed up some common "behavior groups" and "functions" of 3 1 item, and considered these functions as the basic components of this genre narrative. He also dissected the narrative structure according to linguistic theory: the narrative structure consists of two axes: the displacement axis (vertical aggregation or equivalence and alternation of multiple expressions of the same function) and the connection axis (horizontal combination or front-back connection between functions). Although propp discussed a special narrative style-fairy tales, the method he adopted to analyze the story units and their relationships has important reference value for analyzing other narrative styles. Its great breakthrough lies in his establishment of a very important basic factor in the story-function, which makes it possible to study the narrative style according to the functions of characters and their connections. Therefore, it opens up a new way for the analysis of narrative structure and narrative elements. At the same time, he simplified the actions in the story into a sequential combination, which transcended the superficial experience description and made the study of narrative style more scientific. His contribution is enormous. Although what he did was only the first step, it was the first step to create the world. Gremas occupies a very important position in French narrative semiotics. His main achievement lies in the semantics of narrative style. He tries to describe the narrative structure according to the accepted linguistic paradigm, which comes from Saussure's theory of "language" and "speech" on the one hand, and from Saussure's and Jacobson's concept of binary opposition as the basic indicator on the other. His two most important works are Structural Semantics (1966) and On Meaning (1970). Grimas's achievements are mainly reflected in four aspects: 1. Grimas's structural semantics developed and perfected propp's "function" theory, and broke through the category of folk stories, making a more universal theoretical exposition on a series of issues such as novel characters and narrative syntax. 2. Based on linguistic theory, Gremas gave a clearer definition of the research object of semiotics. As the research object, literary works are stories told in a specific natural language, so they are a meaningful whole. In other words, narrative is a whole composed of signifier and signified. He believes that the main task of narrative semiotics is to study the structure of narrative content (that is, what it refers to). Narrative content is divided into semantic and grammatical parts. Grammar constitutes the combination of narrative content, and semantics gives specific meaning to each unit in the combination. In addition, Gremas also emphasized the importance of hierarchy in structural analysis. One of Gremas' remarkable achievements is "Action Element Model". He divided the characters into six functions according to their performance, namely, three complementary components: subject/object, messenger/trustee, assistant/adversary. This model is helpful to classify the characters and narrative structure of the novel. 4. Grimas invented the "symbolic square" about the deep conceptual model: the four directions represent four different stages of structural development, and the socialist relationship between them can be explained according to the relationship of opposition, contradiction and inclusion in formal logic. Gremas' theory can be regarded as the development and perfection of propp's original concept, and his main purpose is to reveal the significance of the deep structure of narrative body through the establishment of plot structure model. Different from propp, he regards stories as semantic structures similar to sentences, and pays attention to the relationship between functions rather than individual functions. French-born CVitan Cvitan todorov and Cvitan todorov are not only influenced by propp and Levi-Strauss, but also by Russian formalism, and have made outstanding achievements in narratology, poetics and rhetoric. His unique achievements in literary concepts, literary narratives, literary genres and other structuralist critical theories have made him a world-influential structuralist literary theorist. Todorov used to be a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research and director of the Center for Art and Speech Studies. He studied literary theory under roland barthes and spared no effort to introduce Russian formalism literary theory. Todorov's major works are Literary Theory (1965), decameron Grammar (1969), Poetics (1968) and Prose Poetry (197 1). Discourse genre (1978), Mikhail Bakhtin-principle of dialogue (198 1 year), critical criticism (1984) and so on. Todorov's theory has played a great role in the formation of narratology. Since propp and Graemas, he has expanded the research scope of narratology, and turned it from the study of myths and folk stories to the study of the main forms of narrative novels. At the same time, he analyzes stories with grammatical patterns, and puts the essence of language in literature in a more prominent position. Roland barthes 19 15 was born in Cherbourg, France, and grew up in Bion and Paris. 1939 graduated from the Department of Classical Literature of Sorbonne University. After World War II, he taught at Bucharest University and Alexandria University. Since 1960, he has been teaching at the Institute of Advanced Studies and Experiments in Paris. 1976, he was awarded the honor of Professor of Literary Semiotics at the French Academy. His main works are Zero Degree of Works (1953), On Lessing (1963), Collected Works of Criticism (1964), Semiotic Principles (1964) and Methodology System (. The criticism of roland barthes's works is full of rebellion. His belief is to refute all orthodox beliefs about identity. Perhaps because of this, he was deeply dissatisfied with literary criticism full of orthodox ideas, and mercilessly attacked and dismantled those orthodox ideas and popular views. Generally speaking, his rebellion against orthodox literary criticism is manifested in four aspects: first, Barthes explicitly opposes literary criticism without history, believing that the premise of these literary criticisms is that the texts studied have unchangeable moral value and normative value, which has nothing to do with the social nature of the original writing, publishing and reading of the texts. 2. Bart is deeply dissatisfied with the tendency of psychological naivety and psychological determinism which is full of professional literary criticism. 3. Barthes hates the tendency of "A-Symbolia" shown by professional critics. 4. Barthes believes that traditional literary criticism never publicly explains what their ideology is, or even denies that the criticism they are engaged in has ideological characteristics, which is very hypocritical and a "mystification process" that completely disguises historical and cultural phenomena as natural phenomena, with extremely sinister intentions. 1970, Barthes published "S/Z", which broke down the short story "Sarrasin" by Balzac, a French realist writer, into 56 1 words, namely "reading unit". Among them, some are just a few words, some are sentences of different lengths, and each unit is an analysis topic. Then, he creatively proposed five codes: explanation code, behavior code, semantic code, symbol code and indicator code, which made Balzac's works almost cruelly decomposed and then analyzed. Barthes' criticism of traditional literary ideas has had a far-reaching impact, which is also his outstanding contribution to French literature and even world literature.