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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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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey is described.
Abstract: As data becomes established as part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important. This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in schools using real life, complex, urban data sets collected as part of a smart city project. The approach is founded on the premise that young learners have the ability to work with complex data sets if they are supported in the right way and if the tasks are grounded in a real life context. Narrative principles are used to frame the task, to assist interpretation and tell stories from data and to structure queries of datasets. An inquiry-based methodology organises the activities. This paper describes the initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey. Additional trials are scheduled with older learners which will evaluate learners on more challenging data handling tasks. The trials are informing the development of the Urban Data School, a web-based platform designed to support teaching data skills in schools in order to improve data literacy among school leavers.

19 citations


Cites background from "Story and Discourse: Narrative Stru..."

  • ...Narrative provides coherence through the people and setting (time and place) of the story and the use of theme [5][17]....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For instance, Naylor and Smith as mentioned in this paper argue that personal narratives belong to the tellers because they are the ones responsible for recognizing in their own experiences something that is ''story worthy'' ("Personal" 268-69).
Abstract: In Southern communities the compelling need "to talk, to tell"(1) can inspire numerous -- if not untold -- types of oral performances. As with almost any folk community, Southern stories can range from trickster tales to personal experience narratives to exogamous accounts.(2) From among these various oral genres available for performance, Gloria Naylor in Mama Day and Lee Smith in Oral History have strategically manipulated the personal narrative -- an oral story which recounts an individual's life experiences in the voice of first person -- in order to problematize story-listening in racially separate Southern communities.(3) In her model of Cocoa Day as story-listener, Naylor evokes Southern African American traditions of storytelling, compelling us to hear and believe the personal narratives of a "dead" man. Lee Smith also invites her readers into distinctive racial and cultural territory, manipulating us -- through the effacement of Jennifer Bingham as listener -- into hearing the singular narratives of White ethnic ghosts from Appalachia. Naylor and Smith ultimately reveal their distrust of "the American reader," whose historical reluctance to hear stories of difference compels the authors' use of narrative ploys. Storytellers, faced with the threat of having their personal narratives either dismissed or appropriated, recount their experiences in order to secure ownership of events that belong to them. Indeed, as folklorist Sandra Dolby Stahl has said, personal narratives "`belong' to the tellers because they are the ones responsible for recognizing in their own experiences something that is `story worthy'" ("Personal" 268-69). But while personal-experience narratives "belong" to individual tellers and substantiate what is "story worthy" in their lives, tellers are not lone agents in the storytelling enterprise: Oral performances of personal narratives command real, warm-blooded listeners to enthusiastically receive, value, and confirm the experiences of the teller. In this recurring cycle of telling and listening, the speaking subject tends to be venerated as one who asserts an identity. The position, however, of this "somebody else" -- this listener in Southern culture -- invites our closer attention. One African (San) storyteller has said of his story-listening habits, "I simply listen, watching for a story that I want to hear" (qtd. in Scheub 2). Clearly, listeners will vary in enthusiasm, occasionally choosing to "watch for" a more satisfying story than the one being told. Moreover, degrees of competence can differ among listeners, perhaps forcing a desperate storyteller to survive a telling event with a wooden, unreceptive listener. For a felicitous moment in storytelling, however, the listener must deliberately collaborate with the teller, jointly shaping the production of the story.4 In fact, the proficiency for telling personal narratives emerges from having habitually and actively listened to the experiences of others. The American South endures as a culture that empowers such practices of listening and telling. While the celebration of personal narratives is, of course, not the exclusive province of Southerners, storytelling and listening events nonetheless thrive in the South because of the self-conscious privileging of orality, community, and intimacy in the region: through storytelling, members of a Southern community vigorously reaffirm their connection to each other. This desire to connect has motivated Alice Walker to write that "what the Black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community" (1). Indeed, a Southern identity -- Black or White -- very much depends on gaining the competence to hear the personal-experience narratives of others in order to willfully cultivate intimacy in a community, as is clear in the works of Naylor and Smith. Stahl recognizes that "the knowledge one gains as a listener when personal narratives are told brings with it the sensation of intimacy" (Literary x). …

19 citations

Dissertation
01 Mar 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the complementary relationship between impoliteness (as a form of aggression), and humour (as an entertainment) in the fictional film As Good As It Gets, drawing from a number of scenes involving the main protagonist Melvin Udall.
Abstract: This study aims to investigate the proposed complementary relationship between impoliteness (as a form of aggression), and humour (as a form of entertainment). Taking the fictional film As Good As It Gets, I draw from a number of scenes involving the main protagonist Melvin Udall. Although this character is extremely offensive to others, the film is classified as a romantic comedy. As such, it offers a good basis on which to test out my ideas regarding the proposed relationship between impoliteness and humour, and more importantly, how and why we may feel the need to laugh at what is essentially socially proscribed and disturbing behaviour. My work, then, contributes to two main academic fields of interest: with regards the field of impoliteness I demonstrate why offensiveness can be entertaining by making specific links with humour theory, and within the field of stylistics I show how a multi-disciplined approach to character analysis can offer us richer observations and interpretations of behaviour, than would otherwise be available through analysis of models in isolation.

19 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a transmedial conceptualization of storyworlds as intersubjective communicative constructs is presented, and the question to what extent spectators of films, readers of comics, and players of video games may choose to apply variations of the principle of charity in cases where default assumptions about the relation between a narrative representation and the storyworld(s) it represents become problematic or even collapse entirely.
Abstract: Located within the more encompassing project of a genuinely transmedial narratology, this article's focus is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to further our understanding of strategies of narrative representation and processes of narrative comprehension across media by developing a transmedial conceptualization of storyworlds as intersubjective communicative constructs; on the other hand, it will zoom in on transmedial as well as medium-specific forms of representational correspondence ( sensu Currie), examining the question to what extent spectators of films, readers of comics, and players of video games may choose to apply variations of the principle of charity ( sensu Walton) in cases where default assumptions about the relation between a narrative representation and the storyworld(s) it represents become problematic or even collapse entirely.

19 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
23 Dec 2017
TL;DR: Barbarossa as discussed by the authors is a pervasive role-playing game based on user-generated content (UGC) where players can create, edit and release their own content to the game world, thus influencing the game's evolution as well as the experience of other players.
Abstract: User-generated content (UGC) is already incorporated in several computer game instances wherein the players may create, edit and release their own content to the game world, thus influencing the game's evolution as well as the experience of other players. Lately, pervasive games have emerged as an exciting new development in gaming extending the boundaries of play out in the real word. The effectiveness of pervasive games in creating immersive live-action game experiences principally depends on the correlation of the game content with actual physical elements. To address this issue, most pervasive game prototypes so far have been bound to specific locations, while game content has been manually edited by the developers; they have also been heavily dependent on the mediation of orchestration teams. Nevertheless, the capacity of pervasive games to be staged anywhere (i.e. their portability) is critical for their wider adoption and commercial success. Since the manual creation of game content is not feasible in portable games, UGC remains as the only practical option for content provision. Notably, the impact of UGC has not been studied so far in the pervasive games literature. This article introduces Barbarossa, a pervasive role-playing game based on UGC. Barbarossa serves as a testbed for investigating the effect of UGC under diverse technical, functional and game play characteristics. The user trials of Barbarossa confirmed that the effective use of UGC can enhance the quality of experience perceived by players and indirectly serve as a useful orchestration tool. We also document best practices with respect to the effective use of UGC in pervasive games, which could be useful to future developers.

18 citations