Narrative Basics Flashcards
TODROV NARRATIVE THOERY.
1) Equilibrium
2) Disruption
3) Recognition of disruption
4) Attempts to repair disruption
5) Return to equilibrium
Basic Narrative
Narratives help children to deal with opposites and extremes. For example - sometimes taking risks can be rewarded or hero may leave home to attain goals. Poverty/wealth, beautiful/ugly.
Folk tales: folk tales are prototypes of all narratives. They are the staring point and are often interpreted differently today.
WARNER: women represented poorly: passive victims. Goldilocks/red riding hood: punished for being curious
VLADAMIR PROPP - 1928
Main characters?
Typical characters:
1) Hero - seeking character
2) Villain - opposes/blocks hero
3) The Donor - brings magical item
4) The Dispatcher - sends the hero on quest
5) The False Hero - disrupts the heroes quest by making false claims
6) The Princess - acts as reward for the hero
7) Her Father - rewards the hero
PROPP
Struggle and recognition scene
Struggle scene: PROPP suggested there was a struggle scene between victim and hero & after disorder is settled.
Recognition scene: the part of the film where the hero is recognised as the hero. E.g false Hero gets unmasked or hero gets rewarded
Applying PROPP to advertising and TV
Advertising: Kozloff
- can see props theory is advertising. For example X makes tea (husband doesn’t like). O brings better, X then is praised by husband. Hero & donor.
TV: Kozloff and Fiske
- Star Trek, action adventure shows, quiz and makeover shows that follow west structures
Critique of PROPP
Bordwell - suggested that props theory is only really suited for basic narrative structures. What about on-going narratives like TV series where it’s constantly changing?
Bremond & Greimas - expanded the theory making it more flexible
Levi’s Strauss - influences PROPP
PROPP alternative - The Virgin Princess
The idea that the hero doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘saving’ someone or something. Could be the idea that the ‘hero’ is self-fulfilling. For example bend it like Beckham or billy-Elliot
Structuralism - what is it?
Intellectual statement which approaches contemporary culture of a system of signs. It exposes underlying structures by which we make sense of the world including stories.
Things cannot be seen as isolation - they must be seen in the context of larger structures that they are apart of.
Structuralist models break down narrative into company parts.
- HOW events are shaped and structured
- WHO tells the story?
Basic distinction drawn between
- Text (discourse) - HOW events are actually told, the verbal/visual representations of the story
- Story - the chronically sequence of events what the tale is about
The same story can be told and retold differently
Gerard Genette - 1972
Plot:
1) Narrative mode
2) Focalisation
3) Authoral Persona
4) Control of Time
5) Packing and Framing
6) Speech and thought representation
Claude Levi Strauss
Binary oppositions:
Narratives rely on conflicts good/evil
News: home vs abroad
Advertising: old vs new
The Oedipus Myth
Dealing with contradictory world news about origins of the man
Barthes 1957: ‘mythologies’ text applies structuralist analysis to combine arts in popular entertainment
Narrative and time
Genette/Rimmin-Kenan
ORDER - when an event is narrated e.g.
- may start at the end and use flashbacks
- may look ahead to events in the future
- may begin ‘in medias res’
E.g Humpty Dumpty
Told again: Eggcentric celeb found smashed outside ‘the wall’ nightclub
DURATION - how much narrative TIME is devoted to an event in the text?
- summary: brief report
- scene: time taken to narrate events roughly equivalent to toke taken up by those events
FREQUENCY - how OFTEN are we told about an event in the text?
- singulative - told once what happened once
- repetitive - told multiple times what happened once
- iterative - told once what happened multiple times
Heterodiegetic narrator
Homodiegetic narrator
Heterodiegetic narrator - doesn’t participate in events, may be omniscient e.g unnamed voice over
Homodiegetic narrator - part of action, fallible e.g Humptys own account of events
Point of View/ Focalisation
Basics
Focalisation is important to understand how meanings are filtered through a viewer/reader.
It’s important to focus on HOW events in a narrative are being represented and WHY this is being offered for WHAT effect?
Narration - who speaks?
Focalisation - who sees, feels etc
CHATMAN - preferred ‘filter/slant’
RIMMON KENAN - believe that events in a narrative always filtered through some perspective or ‘angle of vision’
Focalisation
3 facets of Focalisation RIMMON KEENAN
Internal and external focalisation
INTERNAL - inside the represented events. Usually character-focaliser. Limited to what the character can see/hear
EXTERNAL - external to the represented events. Usually narrator, birds eye view, ‘objective’
Linguistic markers for focalisation:
- range of verbal devices available. May have access to ‘actual’ perceptions & thoughts of the character. E.g. Eye witness accounts/interior monologue OR narrative offers reports of what was said/thought
3 facets of focalisation: RIMMON KENAN
1) Perceptual - what the focaliser sees, hears etc (saving private Ryan)
2) Psychological - what the focaliser thinks or feels (close up)
3) Ideology - what the focaliser believes/values his or her world views. E.g referring to values and the use of derivative terms like bitch
