There was a time when media scholars loved to state that everything in media were narratives. John Fiske demonstrated how we read the news in narrative terms, for example with Greimas classic actant model of protagonist and goal, antagonist and helpers.
Edward Branigan later argued that narrative in fact is a powerful schema through which we understand stories in our world. But at the same time, he reinforced the rules of Booth and Todorov that you cannot call just anything a narrative. You need causality, efficiency and closure.
But it seems to me that we need to discuss more some of the border forms. Chronicles and descriptions of eventful times. What about travelogues? Life stories? Biographies?
I do not want to replay the narrative-or-not debate that some computer game researchers seem to want to inflate into a silly game in itself (look in the archives of Gonzalo, Jesper or GrandTextAuto for references to that debate). But as we try to understand the mechanisms of several genres, several kinds of texts, noting the differences as well as the similarities is one way to go about.
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