histoire

histoire [ees‐twah], the French word for story or history, used in modern narratology to denote the story, that is, the narrated events as distinct from the form of narration in which they are presented: thus the histoire is the sequence of narrated events as reconstructed by readers in a chronological order that may differ from the order in which the plot arranges them (see also fabula). In another sense, linguists have used the term to designate an apparently ‘objective’ way of relating events without deixis, that is, without reference to the speaker or writer, to the auditor or reader, or to their situation, as in most kinds of historical writing and third‐person narrative; in this sense, histoire is contrasted with discours.

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