The organizing theme or structure of a narrative, the sense of a narrative or story. Following Paul Ricoeur, the plot is understood as the “synthesis of the heterogeneous” in several ways. First, the operation of the plot organizes what would otherwise be purely an enumeration of incidents into an intelligible whole, having at least a basic beginning-middle-end structure. Second, the plot integrates different components such as different protagonists, their activities and their feelings, and knowledge and intentions into the dynamic identity of a particular story located in space and time. Third, the plot distils a meaningful temporal unity from an otherwise chronological sequence of unrelated episodes.
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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Popp-Baier, U. (2013). Plot. In: Runehov, A.L.C., Oviedo, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_200163
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_200163
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