Narrative

Paul Zumthor’s “La Brièveté comme forme” analyzes the relations between brevity and form and addresses such matters as narrative time and the definition of narrative as a genre. Zumthor summarizes classical rhetorical theories of brevity in narration, and he considers the roles played by variations in time, space, and cultural milieux in the objects to which the term “brevity” is applied. Drawing examples from geographically, generically, and culturally diverse traditions, from ancient to modern practices, he notes that the length of a text in terms of its linguistic materiality does not necessarily give the measure of its duration, and argues that discussions of brevity must take into account the real time of performance or reading and the immediate spatial and temporal contexts within which these works function in a given sociocultural situation. Zumthor concludes by listing a series of attributes found at the heart of all brief medieval narrative literature: the unity of the event narrated; the finality of the ending, in which the conclusion exhausts the narrative premises; a relatively explicit and univocal significance or meaning; and a cluster of shared stylistic features found in narratives of less than a few hundred lines.