Narratological Formulation of Story-Form Memory Construction: Applying Genette’s Narrative Discourse Theory

Abstract

An episodic memory is generally defined as a memory that enables the recollection or remembrance of past events or experiences. It is not assumed as a copy of the past events themselves and is instead assumed as corresponding to mentally encoded or constructed information. However, the mechanism that constructs episodic memory is not systematically formulated in previous studies on cognitive architectures and systems. In this study, the term “story” is used, rather than episodic memory, to refer to a mental representation of temporally and linguistically organized events and entities. The main difference between a story and an episodic memory is that a story involves the form of the mental representation, while the definition of an episodic memory is generally based on the function (i.e., it enables the remembering of past events). A story is considered as a uniform mental representation involving episodic memory, current situation, prospective memory, planned or imagined future, and fictional story. In order to ensure a systematic formulation of the story-form memory construction, this study introduces Genette’s narrative discourse theory, a representative work in narratology. Genette’s theory is characterized by its systematicity. He provided a hierarchical classification of terms to describe a narrative structure, with particular focus on how a narrative is structured on a text as opposed to what is told. In this study, Genette’s narratological terms are analogically translated into methods of a story-form memory construction in a cognitive system.