Seymour Chatman (August 30, 1928 – November 4, 2015) was an American

film A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...

and

literary critic A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature' ...

and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. He is one of the most significant figures of American

narratology Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. The term is an anglicisation of French ''narratologie'', coined by Tzvetan Todorov (''Grammaire du Décaméron'', 1969). Its theoretica ...

(theory of narrative), regarded as a prominent representative of its

structuralist Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns tha ...

branch.

Personal life

Seymour Chatman was married three times, to Evelyn (divorced in 1964), Sidsel (divorced circa 1970), and Barbara. He has three children, Emily Chatman Duffy, an artist, Jennifer Chatman, a professor, and Mariel Chatman Lassalle, a lawyer. He has four granddaughters, Ava, Sonya, Noemie, and Anais.

Published works

Chatman's work includes: * ''The Later Style of Henry James'' (1972) * ''Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in fiction and Film'' (1978) * ''Michelangelo Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World'' (1985) * ''Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film'' (1990) * ''Reading Narrative Fiction'' (1993) * ''Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films (2004) with Paul Duncan''

References

External links

* 1928 births American film critics American literary critics University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty 2015 deaths {{US-film-critic-stub