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Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
31 May 1980-
About: The article was published on 1980-05-31 and is currently open access. It has received 1885 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Narrative structure & Narrative criticism.
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TL;DR: This study addressed a puzzling discrepancy in existing research about when children achieve and manifest a mentalistic conception of the person by analyzing 617 stories composed by 30 children participating in a storytelling and story-acting practice integrated into their preschool curriculum.
Abstract: This study addressed a puzzling discrepancy in existing research about when children achieve and manifest a mentalistic conception of the person. Narrative research suggests that children do not represent characters as mental agents until middle childhood, whereas social cognition research places this understanding at around 4 years. Using a theoretically informed typology, 617 stories were analyzed composed by 30 children participating in a storytelling and story-acting practice integrated into their preschool curriculum. Results indicated that children's representation of characters shifted from almost exclusively physical and external portrayals of “actors” at 3 to increasing inclusion of “agents” with rudimentary mental states at 4 and of “persons” with mental representational capacities by 5. The developmental trajectories of boys and girls differed somewhat.
82 citations
Cites background or methods from "Story and Discourse: Narrative Stru..."
...To differentiate more fully the category of actors, we adapted narratologists’ notion of the development of characters from ‘‘flat’’ to ‘‘round’’ (e.g., Chatman, 1978), although still in terms of externally observable characteristics (Levels 1 – 2)....
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...Third, we constructed a theoretically informed typology of personhood to analyze the stories collected, one that attempted to capture the development of young children’s mentalistic conception of the person in light of the issues addressed by social cognition and narrative research....
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...…2001; for similar observations, see Bruner, 1986 and Tomasello, 1999), we constructed a developmental typology that drew on a range of sources in psychology (reviewed earlier), narratology (e.g., Bal, 1985; Chatman, 1978; Culler, 1975; Rimmon-Kenan, 1983), and philosophy (especially Searle, 1983)....
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TL;DR: Pointing Deictic gestures have the obvious function of indicating objects around the narrator, but they also play a part in narrations where there is nothing objectively present to point at as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Pointing Deictic gestures, or points, have the obvious function of indicating objects around the narrator, but they also play a part in narrations where there is nothing objectively present to point at. Although the gesture space may look empty, to the speaker it is filled with discourse entities. Deictic gestures establish in space the participants of a narrative and the participant events. An example of the former is a speaker who said, "the artist and Alice are walking by," pointing first to his right and then straight in front of him, before making an iconic gesture for "walking by." An example of the latter comes from a speaker who asked his interlocutor, "Where did you come from before?" and accompanied that with pointing vaguely to one side (Figure 5). The specific kind of abstract pointing to be discussed below often occurs at the beginning of new narrative episodes and scenes, where it is the dominant gesture. In this context, pointing may mark the establishment of a new focus space (Grosz 1981). In narrations of cartoon stories, about three-quarters of all clauses are accompanied by gestures of one kind or another; of these, about forty percent are iconic, forty percent are beats, and the remaining ten percent are divided between deictic and metaphoric gestures. In narrating films, the proportions of metaphoric and deictic gestures increase at the expense of iconic gestures (statistics from McNeill and Levy 1982; McNeill [forthcoming]). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:04:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 386 Poetics Today 12:3 Figure 5. An abstract pointing gesture with "where did you come from before?" (speaker on the left). III. Function of Gestures in Narratology
81 citations
TL;DR: A physical narratology of popular movies is explored—narrational structure and how it impacts us—to promote a theory of popular movie form, which shows that movies can be divided into 4 acts—setup, complication, development, and climax—with two optional subunits of prolog and epilog, and a few turning points and plot points.
Abstract: Popular movies grab and hold our attention. One reason for this is that storytelling is culturally important to us, but another is that general narrative formulae have been honed over millennia and that a derived but specific filmic form has developed and has been perfected over the last century. The result is a highly effective format that allows rapid processing of complex narratives. Using a corpus analysis I explore a physical narratology of popular movies-narrational structure and how it impacts us-to promote a theory of popular movie form. I show that movies can be divided into 4 acts-setup, complication, development, and climax-with two optional subunits of prolog and epilog, and a few turning points and plot points. In 12 studies I show that normative aspects in patterns of shot durations, shot transitions, shot scale, shot motion, shot luminance, character introduction, and distributions of conversations, music, action shots, and scene transitions reduce to 5 correlated stylistic dimensions of movies and can litigate among theories of movie structure. In general, movie narratives have roughly the same structure as narratives in any other domain-plays, novels, manga, folktales, even oral histories-but with particular runtime constraints, cadences, and constructions that are unique to the medium.
79 citations
Cites background from "Story and Discourse: Narrative Stru..."
...In the literature on text, Chatman (1980) used the terms of discourse and story, but for me the term discourse is too tied to the notion of conversation (which I investigate in Study 8) to be unambiguous here....
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TL;DR: This model links the theoretical fields of narratology and translation studies and helps to identify the agent of ‘change’ and the level of communication in which the most significant modifications take place.
Abstract: When critics identify ‘manipulations’ in translations, these are often described and analysed in terms of the differing norms governing the source and the target languages, cultures and literatures. This article focuses on the agent of the translation, the translator, and her/his presence in the translated text. It presents a theoretical and analytical tool, a communicative model of translation, using the category of the implied translator, the creator of a new text for readers of the target text. This model links the theoretical fields of narratology and translation studies and helps to identify the agent of ‘change’ and the level of communication in which the most significant modifications take place. It is a model applicable to all translated narrated literature but, as examples illustrate, due to the asymmetrical communication in and around children’s literature, the implied translator as he/she becomes visible or audible as the narrator of the translation, is particularly tangible in translated children’s literature.
79 citations
Cites background from "Story and Discourse: Narrative Stru..."
...The overt narrator has become less common in children’s literature over the past few decades, but even without saying ‘I,’ s/he can be no less revealing of character and attitude.7 The narratee, too, can be a character in the novel – Christopher Robin in the frame of Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh is an obvious example, or the social worker for whom Hal writes the account of his story in Aidan Chambers’ Dance on my Grave (1982); more often s/he isn’t actually portrayed but evoked....
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...The narratee, too, can be a character in the novel – Christopher Robin in the frame of Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh is an obvious example, or the social worker for whom Hal writes the account of his story in Aidan Chambers’ Dance on my Grave (1982); more often s/he isn’t actually portrayed but evoked....
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01 Oct 2012
TL;DR: A crucial re-imagining of digital games in their material contexts across different scales and registers: the machine, the body and the situations of play is discussed in this article, which demonstrates a heightening of the stakes in game studies research by providing access to scale and connecting digital games research to wider interdisciplinary contexts.
Abstract: This article argues that among the burgeoning approaches to game studies there is a crucial re-imagining of digital games in their material contexts across different scales and registers: the machine, the body and the situations of play. This re-imagining can be seen in a number of approaches: platform and software studies, which examine the materiality of code and/or the technological infrastructure through which it is enacted; critical studies of digital labour; and detailed ethnographic studies that examine the cultures of online worlds and situate gaming in relation to everyday practices. The article traces these three strands, focusing on how they demonstrate a heightening of the stakes in game studies research by providing access to scale and connecting digital games research to wider interdisciplinary contexts.
77 citations