Annotating Narrative Levels: Review of Guideline No. 8

“Let me tell you a story.” The proposed guidelines suggest that this phrase serve as the heuristic that readers supply at the beginning of any possible embedded narrative to identify a shift in narrative frames or levels. (The difference between “frame” and “level,” although perhaps confusing in the history of narratology, does not seem like an important distinction at this stage of the project.) This simple phrase, the author suggests, can replace a field of narrative theory they feel would “simply confuse my student annotators.” However simple the phrase might seem, however, it, in fact, conceals a number of key narratological issues: focalization, temporal indices, diction / register, person, fictional paratexts, duration, and, no doubt, others. The question for the guidelines is whether one can leapfrog the particularity of these issues if students use the above phrase to annotate texts with XML tags and produce operational scripts that identify the nested narratives. As it currently stands, students seem capable of learning the basic idea of nested narratives and tagging changes in narrative frames, but there are no real results to confirm the project’s success, as the author reports they are not yet able to confirm any inter-annotation agreement.