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symptomatic, atomizing approaches to understanding human subjectivity. She
builds on the arguments of the anti-psychiatric movement of the 60's to ar-
gue that human subjectivity should be represented in artificial agents using a
hermeneutic approach which includes narrative.
Literary studies
Literary studies are particularly concerned with analyzing the properties of
stories as narrative. These properties can then be used as a basis for story-
generation or understanding systems. For example, Vladimir Propp's analysis
of the structure of folk tales (Propp 1969) has served as an inspiration for many
AI researchers (e.g. Meehan 1977, Turner 1992, Weyhrauch 1997).
More generally, literary studies and literary theory embrace an enormous
spectrum of perspectives on story, narrative, and their function in our cul-
ture, from Aristotle's theory of poetics to New Criticism to speech act theory to
structuralism to Reader Response theory to postmodernism and beyond. Each
of these strands involves novel ways of thinking about narrative and its place in
human experience that can be tapped for work in NI - the surface has barely
been scratched.
In “Story grammars: Return of a theory,” Lang provides a brief history of
story grammars, a structuralist attempt to formally capture the structure of
folktales within a given culture.
In “Vital narratives,” Laurel analyses narratives along four different axes:
the kinds of relationships they support, their relevance to people's daily lives,
the strategies they help fulfill, and their epistemological value.
Drama
Drama is the performance of stories in front of an audience in real-time
(i.e. plays and movies). Dramatic stories have different properties from lit-
erary stories (i.e. novels); following Laurel (Laurel 1991), dramatic stories
have the properties of enactment, intensification, and unity of structure, vs.
literary stories which have the properties of description, extensification, and
episodic structure. Given the affinity between drama's focus on action and the
action-based, real-time, responsive behavior of interactive computer systems,
researchers have begun tapping the dramatic tradition, particularly within the
areas of interface design and interactive drama (Laurel 1991, Bates 1992, Hayes-
Roth, van Gent, and Huber, 1997, Mateas and Stern 2000, Mateas 2000).
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