Narrative Flashcards
Conventions of narrative realism
Events are arranged chronologically
Complex, rounded characters that develop
A narrator
Ending draws various strands together, usually through coincidence
Events are included on the basis of their relevance to plot development.
‘Realist operators’ excessive and non-necessary use of detailed description to produce reality effect
Narrative content
A collection of representative events (including participants in events and circumstances of events).
Narrative form
The way in which narrative vents are represented through a particular narrative medium
Content order
Chronological order of events (the story itself)
Form order
The order in which the narrative presents events (discourse)
What kind of effects can a mismatch between content and form order create?
Enigmas, suspense.
What effect does describing minor events in detail have?
Slows the narrative
What effect does the condensed treatment of major events have?
Accelerates the narrative
Narrative coherence
Recognition that we are being told one unified story
Why is content less coherent than form?
Because it is form that organizes content into a single, coherent thing, with start and finish, through process if selection and ordering.
Focalizer
Character from whose perspective events are told.
What effect can switching narrative pov have?
Causes uncertainty about content because it alters
Typicality
A formal characterstic
Motif
Typical event in a narrative
What narrative arc does the narrative proper undergo?
Movement from some form of lack to resolution and a form of closure.
Orientation
Setting the scene
Entry strategies
Setting the leading idea of a narrative
Exit strategies
Ending a text once a lack has been resolved.
What does Structuralism propose composes a narrative?
Story (histoire) - content, event, characters, setting. What is communicated
Discourse (means by which such content communicated) How it’s communicated
What does Aristotle propose composes a narrative?
Praxis (Imitation of real world actions) forms logos (an argument), from which are selected/rearranged the units that form the plot (mythos).
What does Russian formalism propose composes a narrative?
Fabula (fable - basic story to be related, what’s happened).
Sjuzet (plot - story as actually told by linking events together, how reader becomes aware of what happened, the order of appearance).
Kernel
Major events in terms of a narrative’s logic of hierarchy - advances a plot by raising or satisfying questions.
Advances action by opening alternative
Satellite
Minor events that can be omitted without disturbing logic of plot, serve to flesh out kernel
Motifs
Typical events such as a murder or marriage
Narrative proper
Movement from lack to resolution
Orientation
Setting the scene
Focalization
The way the text represents relationship between who experiences and what’s experienced
Focalizer
Who experiences
Focalized
What’s experienced
External focalization
anonymous outside voice
Character focalization
Phenomena experienced by character
Free direct speech
Litte intrusion by narrator, no ‘he said’
Direct speech
Quotation marks and reporting clause.
Indirect speech
No quotation marks, second person pronouns, past tense, narrative voice more dominant
Free indirect speech
Part direct, part indirect with suppression of distinguishing details, making it difficult to distinguish between voice of narrator and character.
What are the two traditional concepts of realism?
Either direct imitation of reality or mimesis (reconstruction of facts of reality)
Give some examples of realist conventions
Focus on 'ordinary life' and the complexity of normal people. Non-self-reflexive language Reliable, omniscient narrator Roughly chronological Narrative closure
What did Lodge propose was the reason that texts were realist?
Their conventions resemble non-fiction
How is the reality effect achieved?
Use of excessive, non-necessary information
What are non-realist texts?
Texts that play with realist conventions in order to challenge the traditional notion of what realism is
Surface structure
Abstract formulation of organization of the observable sentence (what the sentence looks like)
Deep Structure
What the sentence means
Give examples of two models of deep structure
Levi-Strauss - structure that underlies every myth is a four-term homology, correlating one pair of opposed themes to another.
Greimas - Contradictories and contraries
Outline Greimas’ model of deep structure
Contradictoires, one proposition negates the other, cannot both be true and cannot both be false, mutually exclusive and exhaustive (e.g. white v non-white)
Contraries, cannot both be true, but might both be false, mutually exclusive but not exhaustive (e.g. white v black)
Event-labelling (proairetic)
Reader amasses certain data under generic titles for actions and this title embodies the sequence (form of paraphrase that enables tangibility of story).
Non-uniform labelling
Labels given to actions can change and be labelled in various ways.
Narrative propositions
Paraphrasing events/actions as a simple sentence, rather than a single word as in ‘event-labelling’.
Catalyst
Expand, amplify or delays kernel (progression of plot)
Give Prince’s three principles of organization
Temporal succession, causality and inversion (or closure based on symmetry or balance).
For Propp, what is the ‘constant element’ in a narrative?
‘Function’ (an act of character, defined from point of view of its significance for course of the action - function may remain constant even when identity of performer changes). Study of what’s done should precede questions of who or how it’s done
According to Bremond, every three functions combine to punctuate which three stages?
Possibility, process and outcome (each function opens two alternatives).
According to Bremond, all macro-sequences are either one of two processes, what are they?
Improvement or deterioration.
