Reconsidering Greimas’ narrative theory: Differences that make a difference

Contemporary semiotics has largely adopted Greimas’ ideas of the “narrative program” and the “canonical narrative schema”, which emphasise the temporal dimension of narrative texts (conceived as correlations of a “before” and an “after”, an initial situation and a final one). By contrast, rather less attention has been paid to the Lithuanian scholar’s conception of the narrative as a tension between a “resolved (or posited) content” — i.e. the final “positive” state of things asserted by the text — and an “inverted content” — i.e. the initial thematic situation whose transformation into a contrary or contradictory situation marks the completion of a narrative sequence (Greimas 1966). Rather than focusing on mere temporal successions and cause-effect relations, such a perspective interestingly insists on the logical and expository structures underlying narratives. Building on these premises we will deal with specific cases of narratives focusing on the process of creation and manifestation of “otherness”, in order to show how the subjective-individual level (the “perspective logic”, Ferraro 2012) relates to the collective-external dimension (the “Sender level”), and to analyse the implications of such dynamics on narrative structures and functioning mechanisms.