Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Directions and Unsolved Problems

As critical junctures of discourse, beginnings are reflexive moments, highly charged with creating expectations and setting the reader's attitude towards a novel. Thereby they preserve the socio-representational climate of a particular historical moment. Assuming that the beginning of a work contains important cues that illuminate the specific quality of the fictional space and its relation to the non-fictional surroundings, this essay reviews cognitive frame conceptions for their heuristic value for a frame theory of literature. I suggest looking at framings that occur at the beginning of a work as culture-specific signposts which shed light on the historical discourse situation of fiction. In a case study of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing I will test the historicity of initial framings as interfaces between text, author, reader, and cultural context. As concepts that account for structures of expectations and provide guiding lines for interpretations, metaphors of frame and framing appear in a number of disci- plines and fields of research. Frame conceptions are common in anthropology and sociology, psychology and psychotherapy, linguistics and the interdisciplinary research of cognitive science. This essay reviews important theoretical aspects of frame conceptions and discusses their relevance for the analysis of literary fiction. It expounds on the metaphorical notion of space and the sense of perspective that are two key features of frame conceptions. The notion of space, outlined by the constraints of a physical, social, or psycho- logical setting, and the sense of perspective, implied in the alignment of this space, characterize my use of the concept 'frame' and my attempt to synthesize social and cognitive uses of the term. Accordingly, frames are understood as cognitive tools by which we navigate through our symbolic universe. They organize familiar patterns of knowledge to establish correspondences or 'mappings' that guide comprehension, ranging from basic construction of meaning to the creation of complex (psychological) realities. A frame implies a certain perspective that shapes the focus of our attention. Thus, like the frame of a painting, conceptual frames influence what we perceive and how we perceive things.

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Novel Beginnings: Initial Framings as a Historical Category of American Fiction

Master of Social Science in Culture, Communication and Media studies. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville 2014.

background

Narrative comparison and popular appeal of South African television drama series : a textual analysis of Yizo Yizo and InterSexions.

The study of narrative, narratology, has for some decades now been a well-established subdiscipline within the large field of critical methodology. Even classical scholars generally resistant to theory have found it acceptable. In part this can be explained by its classical ancestry: it was Plato who emphasised the importance of distinguishing narrator-voice and character-voice, and Aristotle who identified some of the key elements constituting plot structured as story. Part of the success of narratology is also due to the distinction of its classical practitioners. Naturally, the main emphasis among the studies of classical texts has been upon the major narrative forms, epic and the novel; but broader examination of the whole generic range has extended the scope of this method, and the first volume of an encyclopaedic study of narrator and narration in classical literature has recently appeared.

‘Why should I mention Io?’ Aspects of choral narration in Greek tragedy

The role of stories and their influence on communication have been widely discussed, yet despite recent advances, one thing remains unclear: How do consumers evaluate and respond to a brand story? To answer these questions, this study conducts a 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects design to test hypotheses. The results indicate that all elements of story are significant respectively. In addition, the correlation between authenticity and cognition was significantly higher than that between conciseness and cognition; the correlation between connectedness and affect was significantly higher than that between reversal and affect; cognition was significantly more influential to brand attitude than affect to brand attitude.

Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Citations

Directions and Unsolved Problems

Novel Beginnings: Initial Framings as a Historical Category of American Fiction

Narrative comparison and popular appeal of South African television drama series : a textual analysis of Yizo Yizo and InterSexions.

‘Why should I mention Io?’ Aspects of choral narration in Greek tragedy

Exploring the elements of a story-form advertising ans its effectiveness

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