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.

中文翻译：

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叙事维度模型与各种叙事体裁的探索

在过去的几十年里，叙事研究的分析范围已经从只关注个人经历的“原型”叙事扩展到各种各样的叙事类型。不管这可能多么有趣，这些类型也存在一些问题，因为有时不仅不同类型之间存在相当大的重叠，而且这些类型内部也存在差异。此外，现实生活中的故事通常由各种类型的混合组成，这使得将类型标签应用于这些叙事存在问题。因此，我没有进行这样的体裁分类，而是提出一个抽象的“叙事维度模型”来梳理各种叙事的相关特征和差异。该模型由两个三维集群组成，即，一个围绕叙述者，包含所有权、作者和讲述者的维度；一个围绕被叙述的事件，包含频率、时间和评价维度。我通过对各种叙事体裁的理论探索来说明这一点，并通过勾勒出通过该模型对叙事进行概念化和审查的优势来总结。