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Methodology of Narrative Study: What the first thirty years of Narrative Inquiry have revealed
Edited by Allyssa McCabe and Dorien Van De Mieroop
[Narrative Inquiry 31:1] 2021
► pp. 4–27

The Narrative Dimensions Model and an exploration of various narrative genres

ORCID logo | KU Leuven

In the last few decades, the analytical scope of narrative studies has widened from a sole focus on “prototypical” narratives of personal experience to a wide variety of narrative genres. However interesting this may be, there are also some problems with these genres as there is not only sometimes considerable overlap between different genres, but there are also differences within these genres. Furthermore, real-life stories often consist of a mix of various genres, which makes applying genre-labels to these narratives problematic. Hence, instead of making such genre classifications, I propose an abstract “Narrative Dimensions Model” to tease out the relevant characteristics of and differences between various types of narratives. This model consists of two three-dimensional clusters, viz., one revolving around the narrator and containing the dimensions of ownership, authorship and tellership, and one revolving around the narrated events, containing the dimensions of frequency, time and evaluation. I illustrate this by a theoretical exploration of various narrative genres and I conclude by sketching the advantages of conceptualizing and scrutinizing narratives by means of this model.

Keywords: Narrative Dimensions Model, narrative genres, ownership, authorship, tellership, frequency, time, evaluation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Starting point
  • Operationalization: The Narrative Dimensions Model
  • Narrative dimensions in relation to non-canonical narratives
  • Narrator
    • Dimension of ownership
    • Dimension of authorship
    • Dimension of tellership
  • Narrated events
    • Dimension of frequency
    • Dimension of time
    • Dimension of evaluation
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 28 July 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.19069.van
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