Emplotment
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The assembly of a series of historical events into a narrative with a plot. countable, uncountable
"1978, Hayden White, "The Historical Text As Literary Artifact", re-printed in Geoffrey Roberts (editor), The History and Narrative Reader, Routledge (2001), →ISBN, page 223, Yet, I would argue, histories gain part of their explanatory effect by their success in making stories out of mere chronicles; and stories in turn are made out of chronicles by an operation which I have elsewhere called “emplotment.” And by emplotment I mean simply the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggested is the case with “fictions” in general."
Example
More examples"1978, Hayden White, "The Historical Text As Literary Artifact", re-printed in Geoffrey Roberts (editor), The History and Narrative Reader, Routledge (2001), →ISBN, page 223, Yet, I would argue, histories gain part of their explanatory effect by their success in making stories out of mere chronicles; and stories in turn are made out of chronicles by an operation which I have elsewhere called “emplotment.” And by emplotment I mean simply the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggested is the case with “fictions” in general."
Etymology
From em- + plot + -ment; coined by Paul Ricœur.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.