Quranic Stories and Narratology: Researchers’ Critical Methods and Approaches

The study of the narrative structure of texts has had a significant influence on literary criticism. This influence has even spread to the analysis of Quranic stories so that these stories have become an arena for the application of the methods of narrative criticism. By examining the articles that have studied the stories of the Quran through these theories, we encounter a large number of works that have employed various methods in their analysis. This study, in order to investigate how narratology is used in the critique of Quranic stories, analyzes the articles written in this field. We do not merely introduce these works, but, with an analytical method, examine different critical approaches in the papers published in scientific-research journals. We have covered the articles published from the last quarter of the twentieth century to the present in Iran, Iraq, and Algeria. We argue that the different approaches of researchers in the study of Quranic stories can be examined in several main areas. Some of these studies have analyzed Quranic stories in a mechanical way by inserting the text into a predetermined framework, so that the analytical part is but a reflection of the theory. A number of researches have made some changes in their method of critique so as to bring a coordination between the text and the theories. And only a few researches have prioritized the text in their attempts at bringing this harmony between the selected theory and the story, and thus, without merlely following the theories, have obtained reliable and novel results. Meanwhile, in a number of studies, we do not see anything but brief references to some methods of narrative criticism, so that the analytical part of these articles is only a personal interpretation of the text without relying on a clear theory in the research.