Mod 15

• Narrative criticism


  Focuses on stories in biblical literature and attempts to read these stories with insights drawn from the secular field of modern literary criticism. The goal is to determine the effects that stories are expected to have on their audience.
• Implied Author


  • The perspective from which the work appears to have been written, a perspective that must be reconstructed by readers on the basis of what they find in the narrative.
• Implied Readers


  • The one who actualize the potential for meaning in a text, who responds to it in ways consistent with the expectations that we may ascribe to its implied author.
• Normative Process of Reading

  • The exploration of the expected effects of texts on their implied readers.
• Narrative Analysis


  1. Ordering Events

  2. Duration and Frequency of Events

  3. Causal Links

  4. Conflict

  5. Characters

  6. Characterization

  7. Empathy

  8. Point of View

  9. Settings

  10. Symbolism

  11. Irony

  12. Intertextuality

  13. Structural Patterns
• Ordering Events - the order in which a narrative relates events, readers are expected to consider each new episode in light of what has gone before.
• Duration and Frequency of Events - refers to the amount of space given to reporting individual episodes or by the number of times that a particular event is referenced in the narrative.
• Causal Links - typical links include explicit or implicit indications that one event causes another to happen or at least make the occurrence of the subsequent event possible or likely.
• Conflict - it drives the plot and involves the readers in adjudication of opposing tendencies.
• Characters - it may be flat and predictable or they may exhibit a wide variety of traits who are presented as enlightened in one instance and yet as lacking insight in another.
• Characterization - refers to the readers' perception on how the characters are and it may be shaped by comments from the narrator, by reports of the characters' own words, deed, or perceptions.
• Empathy - refers to the effects that a narrative has on the readers and their feelings with particular characters in the narrative.
• Point of View - it presents diverse perspective concerning what is transpiring in the story, and readers are expected to regard some of these as more reliable than others.
• Settings - the spatial, temporal, and social locations of events that are significant for how readers construe what is reported in a narrative.
• Symbolism - the figures of speech and other symbolic language that readers are expected to understand in a way that transcends the most literal application.
• Irony - it contains literary cues that run contrary to what might initially appear to be the obvious interpretation that readers are expected to interpret in the story.
• Intertextuality - the assumption that the readers are already familiar with other texts and so borrowing freely from motifs that these texts employ.
• Structural Patterns - it is the patterns of discourse through which the story is told.
• Limitations of the Criticism: It treats texts as mere stories rather than records of significant moments in history. "Implied reader" is too limiting and accuse narrative critics of ignoring the vast panoply of potential responses that real readers actually bring to texts.