Looking at Narrative as a Complex System: the Proteus Principle

I am here proposing a strategy of consolidation for narrative studies. Disciplines and paradigms have their own specificities, and approaching narrative phenomena they implicitly shape them. To make explicit such processes of selection and contextualization is an act of intellectual honesty that can be done in three simple steps: (i) adopting a systemic perspective, (ii) distinguishing between logical levels, (iii) employing the Proteus Principle in the formation of theories. Narrative is seen and used in many different ways that can be conceived as systems, i.e. considering that the properties of narrative cannot be studied in isolation but are interconnected in a network of relations where all the components are influencing each other