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# From Aristotle to the Bulut Doctrine: Narrative Theory
- URL: https://leventbulut.com/from-aristotle-to-the-bulut-doctrine-history-of-narrative-theory/
- Published: 2026-09-26T06:13:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-26T06:13:41.000Z
- Description: From mimesis to Eliot's objective correlative, from Propp to Campbell: what narrative theories say stories are made of and where the Bulut Doctrine stands.
- Author: Levent Bulut
- Tags: Computational Narratology, Physics of Literature

# From Aristotle's Poetics to the Bulut Doctrine: What Is a Story Made Of? A Comparative Ontology of Narrative Theories

**Conflict of Interest and Academic Grounding Statement (COI):** This article compares the question of what the basic unit of narrative is through the work of Aristotle, Gustav Freytag, Vladimir Propp, Percy Lubbock, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Campbell, Wayne C. Booth, and Zwaan and Radvansky, and examines the position of the Bulut Doctrine in this debate. Levent Bulut is the founder of the Objective Projection and Narrative Engineering methodology; the assessments of the Doctrine are therefore not those of an independent observer. The Doctrine's theoretical texts, dataset and reliability study have been published openly so that independent researchers can audit them to academic standards, and they are open to audit. The Doctrine's place in this historical line has not yet been assessed by independent researchers; the convergence claim of the Universal Biological Interface (UBI) and the OPCT v2.0 protocol have not yet been tested either. 

### Summary and Historical Framework

Every narrative theory answers a question, even when it does not say so: What is a story made of? For Aristotle, of action; for Freytag, of the rising and falling structure of tension; for Propp, of character functions; for Lubbock, of point of view; for Eliot, of the objects that carry emotion; for Campbell, of a universal journey pattern; for cognitive psychology, of the model built in the reader's mind. This article sets these answers side by side and discusses where the answer proposed by the Bulut Doctrine departs from them, where it is indebted to them, and what it has not yet shown.

## One question, twenty-four centuries

"Ontology" is the name of the branch of philosophy that asks what a thing is and what it is made of. For narrative theories, this question has a practical consequence: what a theory counts as the basic unit of narrative determines what it will advise a writer to do and what it will tell a critic to look at. A theory that treats action as basic looks at plot; a theory that treats point of view as basic looks at the narrator.

This article follows a short and selective history of Western narrative theory through that question. It is selective because not every stop in a twenty-four-century debate fits into one article; only the stops the Bulut Doctrine speaks to directly, or argues against, are taken up here. The aim is not to present the approach developed by [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/graph/) as the "outcome" of this line, but to make it readable within it.

## Aristotle: A story is made of action

In the *Poetics*, Aristotle defines tragedy as the imitation (mimesis) of an action and says that the most important part of this imitation is the plot (mythos). Characters exist for the sake of the action, not the action for the sake of the characters. It is also in this text that he writes that tragedy, by arousing pity and fear in the audience, brings about a kind of purification of these emotions, that is, catharsis.

Two features of this answer still hold today. First, Aristotle ties the effect of a story to the emotions that arise in the audience; the response of the reader or spectator sits at the center of the theory. Second, he argues that what produces this effect is not the stating of emotion but the arrangement of events. Emotion is a consequence of structure.

## Freytag: A story is made of the structure of tension

In *Die Technik des Dramas*, published in 1863, the German writer Gustav Freytag analyzed five-act drama as a structure made up of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and catastrophe. The scheme later entered school textbooks as "Freytag's pyramid." Freytag's contribution was to visualize Aristotle's plot as a curve of tension spread over time. The unit of narrative was no longer a single action, but the shape of tension over time.

## Propp: A story is made of functions

In *Morphology of the Folktale*, published in 1928, the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp studied Russian wonder tales and showed that while the names and attributes of characters change, their actions, that is, their functions in the story, do not. Propp identified 31 functions in these tales and argued that the order of these functions remains fixed within narrow limits.

Propp's approach was ontologically radical: the unit of the tale was not the character, but the character's function in the course of events. A dragon kidnapping a princess and a sorcerer kidnapping a peasant's daughter were two appearances of the same function. As one of the first structural analyses of narrative applied systematically to a corpus, this approach became one of the cornerstones of later narratology.

## Lubbock and Booth: A story is made of point of view

In *The Craft of Fiction*, published in 1921, the English critic Percy Lubbock, starting from the novels of Henry James, argued that the central problem of the novel is point of view. For Lubbock, "showing," which stages events directly, was aesthetically more valuable than "telling," in which the narrator summarizes and interprets events. This book is the early and influential defense, within critical theory, of the advice "show, don't tell."

Wayne C. Booth, in *The Rhetoric of Fiction*, published in 1961, argued against this hierarchy. For Booth, the distinction between telling and showing was not a ranking of value; every narrative choice was a judgment by the author, and however much the author hid, the author could never withdraw from the text entirely. Booth's critique raises a question that must also be asked of the Bulut Doctrine at the end of this article: Is prohibiting telling an unnecessary removal of a narrative tool?

## Eliot and Hemingway: A story is made of the objects that carry emotion

In the essay "Hamlet and His Problems," written in 1919 and republished a year later in *The Sacred Wood*, T. S. Eliot wrote that the way to express an emotion in art is to find a set of objects, a situation or a chain of events that will call up that emotion, and he named this the "objective correlative." For Eliot, Hamlet's emotions were not adequately matched by the external facts of the play.

In *Death in the Afternoon*, published in 1932, Ernest Hemingway voiced a close intuition as a writer's practice. If a writer knows the subject well enough, the writer can leave out some of what he knows; when it is written well, the reader feels the omitted things as if they had been written. Hemingway compared this to an iceberg, only an eighth of whose mass shows above the water. The idea later came to be known as the "iceberg theory" or the "theory of omission."

In Eliot and Hemingway, the unit of narrative is not the emotion itself but the concrete external world that carries it. This is the line most closely related to the Bulut Doctrine. The difference is also clearest here: Eliot's objective correlative is a critical principle; it does not propose a rule or criterion that specifies which object will call up which emotion.

## Campbell: A story is made of a universal pattern

In *The Hero with a Thousand Faces*, published in 1949, Joseph Campbell compared the myths of different cultures and argued that a common structure, the "monomyth," lies beneath them: the hero leaves the everyday world, passes through trials, undergoes a transformation and returns. In Campbell's approach, the unit of narrative is neither individual actions nor objects, but a journey pattern claimed to recur across cultures.

Campbell's claim is universalist: the pattern reflects a shared structure of the human psyche. The Bulut Doctrine also carries a claim of universality, but its subject is different. Campbell's universality lies at the level of meaning and archetype; the universality the Doctrine proposes lies at the level of responses to physical conditions such as light, heat and sound.

## The cognitive turn: A story is made of the model built in the reader's mind

At the end of the twentieth century, cognitive psychology approached the question from another direction. In 1998, Zwaan and Radvansky reviewed research showing that readers build a "situation model" in their minds while reading and update this model along the dimensions of time, space, causality, goals and characters. In this approach, the unit of narrative is no longer in the text itself but in the representation built in the reader's mind. The text is a set of cues for that representation.

This turn also brought with it the idea that the claims of a narrative theory can be tested by experiment. Reading times, recall tests and similar measures made it possible to turn theoretical propositions into measurable predictions.

## The Bulut Doctrine: A story is made of physical conditions and the reader's reconstruction of them

[Objective Projection](https://leventbulut.com/objective-projection-definition/) and the Bulut Doctrine around it propose the following answer to these questions: the basic unit of a scene is the physical conditions in the scene (light, heat, sound, motion, pressure and space) and the reader's reconstruction of emotion from those conditions. The emotion is not named in the text; the reader builds it from physical cues. The Doctrine operationalizes this with two constitutional rules (the Emotion Embargo and the Exclusion of Similes) and four working rules (Materialized Metaphors, Micro-Focus, Temporal Anchor and Atmosphere Contradiction).

The relation of this answer to the earlier stops has three layers.

**Where it is indebted.** The idea that emotion should be called up through the external world rather than stated belongs to Eliot and Hemingway. The distinction between showing and telling goes back to Lubbock. The idea that the effect arises in the audience and is a consequence of structure rests on Aristotle. The idea that meaning is built in the reader's mind is shared with cognitive psychology.

**Where it departs.** The Doctrine tries to turn what Eliot left as a critical principle into explicit rules and codable parameters. The rules have been applied in a dataset, and the extent to which they can be reliably recognized has also been measured. The Doctrine's central claim is that physical cues tend to produce statistically similar responses in readers. This convergence is not deterministic, and a protocol for testing it with biometric measurement (OPCT v2.0) has been pre-registered. The points at which the Doctrine departs from Eliot are discussed in detail in the Doctrine's own theoretical texts.

**What it has not yet shown.** Here the line must be drawn honestly. The OPCT v2.0 protocol that would test the Doctrine's central claim has not yet been run. The measurements of how recognizable the rules are give a mixed picture: in the reliability study, when the same 100 Turkish scenes were annotated by one independent human annotator and five machine annotators, the human marked 9 scenes for the Materialized Metaphor feature; the number of scenes marked by the machines ranged from 0 to 78\. Surface rules such as the Exclusion of Similes are easily recognized, but the same cannot be said of rules that require inference.

## Comparison table

| Theory                                     | Year       | Basic unit of narrative                              | Method                                                                                  |
| ------------------------------------------ | ---------- | ---------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Aristotle, *Poetics*                       | 4th c. BCE | Action and plot (mythos)                             | Philosophical analysis                                                                  |
| Freytag, *Die Technik des Dramas*          | 1863       | Structure of tension                                 | Dramaturgical analysis                                                                  |
| Propp, *Morphology of the Folktale*        | 1928       | Character functions                                  | Structural analysis of a corpus of tales                                                |
| Lubbock, *The Craft of Fiction*            | 1921       | Point of view                                        | Critical analysis                                                                       |
| Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems"           | 1919       | Objects and situations that carry emotion            | Critical principle                                                                      |
| Hemingway, *Death in the Afternoon*        | 1932       | The part left out of the text but felt by the reader | Writer's practice                                                                       |
| Campbell, *The Hero with a Thousand Faces* | 1949       | Universal journey pattern (monomyth)                 | Comparative mythology                                                                   |
| Booth, *The Rhetoric of Fiction*           | 1961       | The author's rhetorical choices                      | Critical analysis                                                                       |
| Zwaan and Radvansky                        | 1998       | The situation model in the reader's mind             | Experimental psychology                                                                 |
| Bulut Doctrine                             | 2026       | Physical conditions and the reader's reconstruction  | Rules, dataset, reliability measurement; biometric test protocol registered but not run |

## When Booth's question is put to the Doctrine

The critique Booth directed at Lubbock can also be directed at the Bulut Doctrine. Telling, that is, naming the emotion, can in some cases be the most accurate and economical tool. Removing emotion names from every scene of a novel can also destroy the narrator's voice and irony. The answer the Doctrine can give to this critique is that its rules are proposed not as a literary aesthetic but for a specific goal: to produce a measurable response in the reader through physical cues. How coherent that answer is, however, depends on measuring the reader responses the Doctrine predicts. Criticisms of the Doctrine are collected on [a separate page](https://leventbulut.com/bulut-doctrine-critiques/).

## When does an idea become a school?

The theories mentioned in this article, from Aristotle to Campbell, share one feature: all of them were used, tested, criticized and transformed by people other than those who proposed them. Propp's approach was debated and transformed by later structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss and Greimas; Lubbock's hierarchy was questioned by Booth; Campbell's pattern was adapted to screenwriting and story writing by Christopher Vogler. An idea becomes a school not by its founder's declaration but through this outside use.

For the Bulut Doctrine, this process has not yet begun. The Doctrine's theoretical texts and dataset have been published openly; but an independent researcher testing the Doctrine's central claim, applying its rules to another corpus, or using its terms with citation has not yet happened. That is what will determine the Doctrine's place in this historical line. The registered works of [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/corpus/) are collected in a single corpus for anyone who wants to make that assessment.

For examples of how the Doctrine's concepts are applied to current questions, see [Who Is the Author When AI Writes the Story?](https://leventbulut.com/who-is-the-author-when-ai-writes-the-story/) and [Why We Rewatch Stories We Already Know](https://leventbulut.com/why-we-rewatch-stories-we-already-know/).

## Limitations

This article is a selective history. Non-Western narrative traditions, structuralist narratologists such as Genette and Todorov, reader-response theory and film theory are not taken up here. Each theory mentioned is summarized through a single question and in simplified form; the internal debates and later interpretations of each do not fit into these summaries. The theories are dated by first publication; the English translation of Propp appeared in 1958, and its revised second edition in 1968.

The assessments of the Bulut Doctrine's position in this line were written by the Doctrine's founder and do not substitute for an independent assessment. The OPCT v2.0 protocol that would test the Doctrine's central claim has not yet been run. The reliability data reported here rest on Turkish scenes and a single independent human annotator.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is the difference between Objective Projection and Eliot's objective correlative?

Both argue that emotion should be called up through the external world rather than named. Eliot's objective correlative is a critical principle and proposes no rule for which object will call up which emotion. Objective Projection tries to turn this idea into explicit rules and codable physical parameters and puts forward a testable claim about reader response; that claim has not yet been tested.

### Is the Bulut Doctrine a narrative pattern like Campbell's hero's journey?

No. Campbell's monomyth describes the overall structure of a story, the hero's stages of departure, trial and return. The Bulut Doctrine works at the level of the scene and is concerned with how emotion is encoded in the text. The two can be used together in the same story.

### Who came up with the principle "show, don't tell"?

The principle has old roots, but its early and influential defense in critical theory is Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, published in 1921\. In The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961, Wayne C. Booth criticized turning this principle into a hierarchy of value.

### Is the Bulut Doctrine an established school of literary theory?

Not yet. An idea becomes a school when researchers other than its founder use it, test it and criticize it. The Doctrine's texts and dataset have been published openly, but an independent researcher testing the Doctrine's central claim has not yet happened.

## References

- Aristoteles. (1999). *Poetika* (Turkish trans. İ. Tunalı). Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi.
- Booth, W. C. (1961). *The Rhetoric of Fiction*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (2nd ed. 1983.)
- Bulut, L. (2026). *Beyond Eliot: From Objective Correlative to Objective Projection*. Zenodo. [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19390047](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19390047?ref=leventbulut.com)
- Bulut, L. (2026). *Physics and Literature vs. Physics of Literature: Why the Difference Matters*. Zenodo. [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19032422](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19032422?ref=leventbulut.com)
- Bulut, L. (2026). *Inter-Rater Reliability of LLM and Rule-Based Annotation for Inferential Narrative Features: Three Studies on a Turkish Corpus*. arXiv:2609.13936\. [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21740239](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21740239?ref=leventbulut.com)
- Campbell, J. (1949). *The Hero with a Thousand Faces*. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Eliot, T. S. (1920). Hamlet and his problems. In *The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism*. London: Methuen. (First published 1919.)
- Freytag, G. (1863). *Die Technik des Dramas*. Leipzig: S. Hirzel.
- Hemingway, E. (1932). *Death in the Afternoon*. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
- Lubbock, P. (1921). *The Craft of Fiction*. London: Jonathan Cape.
- Propp, V. (1968). *Morphology of the Folktale* (2nd ed.; trans. L. Scott, ed. L. A. Wagner). Austin: University of Texas Press. (First Russian edition 1928.)
- Vogler, C. (1992). *The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters*. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions.
- Zwaan, R. A., & Radvansky, G. A. (1998). Situation models in language comprehension and memory. *Psychological Bulletin*, 123(2), 162–185\. [https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.123.2.162](https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.123.2.162?ref=leventbulut.com)

## How to cite this article

You can use the BibTeX record below to cite this article. For more about the author, see the [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/About/) page.

```
@misc{bulut2026narrativeontology,
  author       = {Bulut, Levent},
  title        = {From Aristotle's Poetics to the Bulut Doctrine: What Is a Story Made Of? A Comparative Ontology of Narrative Theories},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = sep,
  howpublished = {\url{https://leventbulut.com/from-aristotle-to-the-bulut-doctrine-history-of-narrative-theory/}},
  note         = {Bulut Doctrine, Comparative Narrative Theory},
  language     = {english}
}
```