Narratologist

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A scholar or expert who examines the structure, function, and theory of narrative and storytelling
2. One who analyzes the methods and principles behind how stories are told and constructed
3. A person specialized in exploring the techniques and elements of narrative forms in literature or media

Etymology: "Narratologist" is a plain formation: it combines "narratology," the study of narrative, with the suffix "-ist," which marks a person who practises or specialises in something. A narratologist is therefore someone who works in narratology, much as a biologist works in biology or a pianist plays the piano. The base word "narratology" is itself a modern coinage built from the Latin-derived "narrative" and the Greek-derived suffix "-logy," meaning the study or science of a subject. The pattern is the same one that produced terms like "sociology" and "criminology," and the suffix tells you the word names a field of systematic study rather than storytelling itself. Because the term is a compound of established parts, it carries no hidden history of its own: its meaning follows directly from the field it names, and it was formed by the ordinary process of adding "-ist" to an existing scholarly term.

Synonyms: storyteller, narrativeanalyst