NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Narratives

In non-technical terms, no matter what the context (whether scientific, philosophical, legal, etc) a narrative is a story, an interpretation of some aspect of the world that is historically and culturally grounded and shaped by human personality (per Walter Fisher). Derived from the Latin word gnarus and the Indo-European root gnu, "to know," it came into English via the French language and it is used in a number of specialised applications. Story has several different meanings as described below. ... Interpretation, or interpreting, is an activity that consists of establishing, either simultaneously or consecutively, oral or gestural communications between two or more speakers who are not speaking (or signing) the same language. ... Wikimedia Commons has media related to: History For other senses of this word, see history (disambiguation). ... The word culture, from the Latin colo, -ere, with its root meaning to cultivate, generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ... Credited with formalizing Kenneth Burkes Dramatism, Walter Fisher introduced the narrative paradigm to communication theory. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ... French (français, langue française) is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered in speakers only by Spanish and Portuguese. ...

1 Conceptual issues
2 Discussion
3 Main criticisms of the Narrative Paradigm
4 Literary theory
5 See also
6 Other specific applications
7 External links
8 Related reading

Conceptual issues

Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs and studies the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and nonverbal elements, creating a discourse with different modalities and forms. In On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson argues that literature does not exist as a separate entity. He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are basically the same except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work Vladimir Propp who analysed the plots used in traditional folktales and identified distinct functional components. This trend continues in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. It leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important epistemological questions: What is text? What is its role in the contextual culture? How is it manifested as art, cinema, theatre, or literature? How as poetry, short stories and novels of different genres? Semiotics, or semiology, is the study of signs, both individually and grouped in sign systems. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... In semiotics, a sign is generally defined as, ...something that stands for something else, to someone in some capacity. ... In semiotics, the concept of a code is of fundamental importance. ... Communication is the process of exchanging information, usually via a common protocol. ... In semiotics, modality refers to the particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i. ... Roman Osipovich Jakobson (October 11, 1896 - July 18, 1982) was a Russian thinker who became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art. ... In semiotics, the process of creating a message for transmission by the addresser to the addressee is called encoding. ... // Introduction The distinctive feature of Russian Formalism is the emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and the original conception of the evolution of literary history. ... Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (or Shklovskii) (January 24, 1893–December 6, 1984) was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer. ... Vladimir Propp (St Petersburg, April 29, 1895 â€“ Leningrad August 22, 1970) was a Russian structuralist scholar who analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. ... The Prague Linguistic Circle founded as Cercle Linguistiqe de Prague or in Czech PraÅ¾skÃ½ lingvistickÃ½ krouÅ¾ek became known around the world as the Prague School. ... Claude LÃ©vi-Strauss Claude LÃ©vi-Strauss (pronounced ) born November 28, 1908, is a French anthropologist who became one of the twentieth centurys greatest intellectuals by developing structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture. ... Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 â€“ March 25, 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher and semiotician. ... The word culture, from the Latin colo, -ere, with its root meaning to cultivate, generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ... A genre is a division of a particular form of art according to criteria particular to that form. ...

Outside the mainstream of Semiotics, Walter Fisher has also offered a comprehensive theory known as the Narrative Paradigm. The Narrative Paradigm is a theory proposed by Walter Fisher that all meaningful communication is a form of storytelling or to give a report of events (see narrative) and so human beings experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives, each with their own conflicts, characters, beginnings, middles...

Discussion

Human beings seem to prefer to shape information into the form of a "story". Rather than organising data as facts in logical relationships, most people retain their everyday information as anecdotal narratives with characters, plots, motivations, and actions. At its broadest level, Fisher argues that all communication is a form of storytelling. In his "Narrative Paradigm", he defines "narration" as symbolic actions, words, and/or deeds that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create or interpret them: a definition broad enough to support his claim that all meaningful communication is storytelling. Communication is the process of exchanging information, usually via a common protocol. ... â€œStorytelling is humanityâ€™s oldest form of literacy. ...

Fisher suggests that everyone has the same two abilities in judging either the rationality or the modality of the story: In philosophy, the word rationality has been used to describe numerous religious and philosophical theories, especially those concerned with truth, reason, and knowledge. ...

to test for narrative coherence and probability, i.e. to see whether the story is "good", it must hold together as a credible sequence of events, and make sense in real world terms: and
to confirm narrative fidelity, i.e. that it matches the values, beliefs, and experiences common to the audience. If it does, it will be a reasonably faithful portrayal of the real world and it will "resonate" with soundness.

In semiotics, the value of a sign depends on its position and relations in the system of signification and upon the particular codes being used. ... Look up belief in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... An audience is a group of people who participate in and experience or encounter a work of art, literature, theatre, music or academics in any medium. ...

Main criticisms of the Narrative Paradigm

The first and most obvious is that not all human discourse takes the form of a story. This page, for example, is not written with human characters and a plot. Although it might be possible to sustain the idea that Fisher, himself, is a character in the narrative of whether his theory will be accepted or not, this sequence of words does not match the normal reader's expectations for a narrative. However, Fisher then argues that the writer(s) of this page have their own narratives and, in offering this information to the reader, the writer(s) are inviting the readers to incorporate this information into their own lives. Secondly, Fisher does not define the relationship between narrative probability or fidelity, nor provide criteria for testing them. In general, he seems to be dismissing traditional philosophical standards of rationality with little to replace it with. Nevertheless, the Paradigm does represent an interesting parallel to the more traditional theories of Semiotics.

Literary theory

For general purposes in Semiotics and Literary Theory, a 'narrative' is a story or part of a story. A story is any form of text, regardless of medium, describing a sequence of events caused and experienced by characters, some of whom may be fictional. It may be spoken, written or imagined, and it will have one or more points of view representing some or all of the participants or observers. In stories told verbally, there is a person telling the story, a narrator whom the audience can see and hear, and who adds layers of meaning to the text nonverbally. The narrator also has the opportunity to monitor the audience's response to the story and to modify the manner of the telling to clarify content or enhance listener interest. This is distinguishable from the written form in which the author must gauge the readers likely reactions when they are decoding the text and make a final choice of words in the hope of achieving the desired response. Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. ... Story has several different meanings as described below. ... A fictional character is any person who appears in a work of fiction. ... In literature and storytelling, a point of view is the related experience of the narrator â€” not that of the author. ... The Narrator is the entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. ... In semiotics, the process of interpreting a message sent by the addresser to the addressee is called decoding. ...

Whatever the form, the content may concern real-world people and events. This is termed personal experience narrative. When the content is fictional, different conventions apply. The text is projecting a narrative voice, but the narrator is ontologically distant, i.e. belongs to an invented or imaginary world, and not the real world. The narrator may be one of the characters in the story. Roland Barthes describes such characters as 'paper beings' and fiction comprises their narratives of personal experience as created by the author. When their thoughts are included, this is termed internal focalisation, i.e. when each character's mind focuses on a particular event, the text reflects his or her reactions. The Three Graces, here in a painting by Sandro Botticelli, were the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility in Greek mythology. ... Ontology (from the [Greek on, ontos being, existence + logia <logos word, study]) is the philosophical science of reality. ... An imaginary world is a setting, place or event or scenario at variance with objective reality, ranging from the voluntary suspension of disbelief of fictional universes and the socially constructed consensus reality of the Social Imaginary, to alternate realities resulting from disinformation, misinformation or imaginative speculation, and the subjective universe... Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 â€“ March 25, 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher and semiotician. ...

In written forms, the reader hears the narrator's voice both through the choice of content and style (the author can encode voices for different emotions and situations, and the voices can either be overt or covert), and through clues that reveal the narrator's beliefs, values, and ideological stance, as well as the author's attitude towards people, events, and things. It is customary to distinguish a first-person from a third-person narrative (Gérard Genette (1980-1972) uses the terms homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative respectively). A homodiegetic narrator describes his or her personal and subjective experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know anything more about what goes on in the minds of any of the other characters than is revealed through their actions, whereas a heterodiegetic narrator describes the experiences of the characters who do appear in the story and, if the story's events are seen through the eyes of a third-person internal focaliser, this is termed a figural narrative. In some stories, the author may be overtly omniscient, and both employ multiple points of view and comment directly on events as they occur. In semiotics, the process of creating a message for transmission by the addresser to the addressee is called encoding. ... An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ... The cover of the paperback edition of Seuils. ... 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday (the link is to a full 1972 calendar). ...

Tzvetan Todorov (1969) coined the term narratology for the structuralist analysis of any given narrative into its constituent parts to determine their function(s) and relationships. For these purposes, the story is what is narrated as usually a chronological sequence of themes, motives and plot lines. Hence, the plot represents the logical and causal structure of a story, explaining why the events occur. The term discourse is used to describe the stylistic choices that determine how the narrative text or performance finally appears to the audience. One of the stylistic decisions may be to present events in a non-chronological order, say using flashbacks to reveal motivations at a dramatic moment. Tzvetan Todorov (bg: Ð¦Ð²ÐµÑ‚Ð°Ð½ Ð¢Ð¾Ð´Ð¾Ñ€Ð¾Ð²) (born 1939 in Sofia) is a Bulgarian philosopher. ... Narratology is the theory and study of narrative and narrative structure and ([1]) the way they affect our perception. ... See also structural analysis and structural functionalism. ...

Other specific applications

Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.
Narrative film is film which uses filmed reality to tell a story, often as a feature film.
Narrative history is a genre of factual historical writing that uses chronology as its framework (as opposed to a thematic treatment of a historical subject).
Narrative environment is a contested term that has been used for techniques of architectural or exhibition design in which 'stories are told in space' and also for the virtual environments in which computer games are played and which are invented by the computer game authors.

It has been suggested that Narrative poem be merged into this article or section. ... The narrative film uses chronological reality to tell a fictional story. ... This article is about motion pictures. ... A reel of film, which predates digital cinematography. ... Chronology is the science of locating events in time. ... A narrative environment is a space, whether physical or virtual, in which stories can unfold. ... The virtual is a concept applied in many fields with somewhat differing connotations, and also denotations. ...

External links

StoryCode - is a free book recommendation service based on the analysis of narrative structures.
Narrnet - The Narratology Network
Manfred Jahn. Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative

Contents

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