Sabljak Tomislav: Teorija priče: panorama ideja o umijeću pričanja 1842. - 2005.

Story theory: a panorama of ideas about the art of storytelling 1842 - 2005

Edited by: Tomislav Sabljak

I came up with the idea for a collection of theoretical works on the concept of story while working on several selections of stories from Croatian literature and researching Croatian narrative heritage in the project "Short Narrative Forms in Croatian Literature". A big incentive was the establishment of a prize competition for domestic short stories in the daily newspaper "Večernji list" in 1964, which I have been leading from the very beginning until today. I followed the story as a fundamental discourse with the guidepost of narratologist Claude Bremond: "One reads words, sees pictures, deciphers gestures, but through them follows the story; and it could be the same story everywhere". The husband comes to lunch and sits down at the upholstered table and says to his wife - "You know what happened to me today!". He tells an unusual story. The journalist tells his editor - "I have a terrible story!". Dissatisfied with the premiere of the film, you comment that the film lacks a story. A report in a newspaper, an ordinary piece of news can become a story, a temporal succession of events according to the "and then" principle, which in the end must have a break in this imaginary continuity of presentation. Starting from Aristotle's understanding of mythos, I was looking for stories that are a kind of organization of reality. However, my ambitions, while classifying the stories in some sort of order, were much greater than the mere mechanics of selection and inclusion of certain authors and their stories in the selections. I was interested in how Croatian writers and critics think about the concept of story. Under the influence of Anglo-American literature, I came to the conclusion that the story is a key structure, which follows us twenty-four hours a day, it is always on our heels and we not only communicate it to others every day, but also dream about it, it appears whenever we say something, it has its own logic of impressive telling. The theoretical interest in the story begins in romanticism, which already sees the twist as an essential feature of the story, and in our country Janko Jurković, a representative of our late romanticism, was among the first to write about the concept of story. Later, more and more of our critics and writers wrote about the problems of the story: Šenoa, Hranilović, Šrepel, Cihlar