Showing papers on "Narrative structure published in 2006"

Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis

Abstract: Narrative research is frequently described as a rich and diverse enterprise, yet the kinds of narrative data that it bases itself on present a striking consensus: they are autobiographical in kind (i.e., about non-shared, personal experience, single past events). In this paper, I put forth a case for under-represented narrative data which I collectively call (following Bamberg 2004a, b; also Georgakopoulou & Bamberg, 2005) “small stories” (partly literally, partly metaphorically). My aim is to flesh small stories out, to urge for the sort of systematic research that will establish connections between their interactional features and their sites of engagement and finally to consider the implications of their inclusion in narrative research for identity analysis (as the main agenda of much of narrative research). I will thus propose small stories research as a “new” narrative turn that can provide a needed meeting point for narrative analysis and narrative inquiry.

Genre and game studies: toward a critical approach to video game genres

Abstract: This article examines the notion of genre in video games. The main argument is that the market-based categories of genre that have been developed in the context of video games obscure the new medium's crucial defining feature, by dividing them into categories (loosely) organized by their similarities to prior forms of mediation. The article explores the inherent tension between the conception of video games as a unified new media form, and the current fragmented genre-based approach that explicitly or implicitly concatenates video games with prior media forms. This tension reflects the current debate, within the fledgling discipline of Game Studies, between those who advocate narrative as the primary tool for understanding video games, "narratologists," and those that oppose this notion, "ludologists." In reference to this tension, the article argues that video game genres be examined in order to assess what kind of assumptions stem from the uncritical acceptance of genre as a descriptive category. Through a critical examination of the key game genres, this article will demonstrate how the clearly defined genre boundaries collapse to reveal structural similarities between the genres that exist within the current genre system, defined within the context of visual aesthetic or narrative structure. The inability of the current genre descriptions to locate and highlight these particular features suggests that to privilege the categories of the visual and narrative is a failure to understand the medium. The article concludes by suggesting that the tension between "ludology" and "narratology" can be more constructively engaged by conceptualizing video games as operating in the interplay between these two taxonomies of genre.

The other side of the story: Towards a narrative analysis of narratives-in-interaction.

Abstract: The starting point of this article is what will be identified as the ‘narrative canon’ comprising a specific type of narrative (past events personal experience elicited in research interviews) that...

Introduction: Graphic Narrative

Abstract: The explosion of creative practice in the field of graphic narra-tive—which we may define as narrative work in the medium of com-ics—is one with which the academy is just catching up. We are only beginning to learn to pay attention in a sophisticated way to graphic narrative. (And while this special issue largely focuses on long-form work—\"graphic narrative\" is the term we prefer to \"graphic novel,\" which can be a misnomer—we understand graphic narrative to encompass a range of types of narrative work in comics.) 1 Graphic narrative , through its most basic composition in frames and gutters—in which it is able to gesture at the pacing and rhythm of reading and looking through the various structures of each individual page—calls a reader's attention visually and spatially to the act, process, and duration of interpretation. Graphic narrative does the work of narration at least in part through drawing—making the question of style legible—so it is a form that also always refuses a problematic transparency , through an explicit awareness of its own surfaces. Because of this foregrounding of the work of the hand, graphic narrative is an autographic form in which the mark of handwriting is an important part of the rich extra-semantic information a reader receives. And graphic narrative offers an intricately layered narrative language—the language of comics—that comprises the verbal, the visual, and the way these two representational modes interact on a page. This special issue of Modern Fiction Studies—the first special issue in the broad field of modern and contemporary narrative devoted entirely to the form of graphic narrative—demonstrates the Introduction 768 viability of graphic narrative for serious academic inquiry, and also reveals what it does differently from the kinds of narratives with which we have more typically been engaged. It is no longer necessary to prove the worthiness and literary potential of the medium of comics (which has always contended with much denigration). Comic strips like Winsor McCay's and later long-form works like Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986; 1991) have, as with many other comics works before, in between, and since, demonstrated clearly how moving and impressive comics can be. In our current moment, in which an array of new literary and popular genres aim to further the conversation on the vital and multilayered work of narrative, graphic narrative has become part of an expanding literary field, absorbing and redirecting the ideological, formal, and …

The role and function of narrative in tourist interaction.

Abstract: Tourist experiences are often profound and help to shape the social world of actors. Memories of travels become part of lived experiences to share with others. Experiences of travels or holidays achieve iconic status in everyday lives, and are communicated through the stories of life into lived identities. Accounts of touristic experiences in naturalistic everyday interaction have a story-like quality to them which become mythologised, fabled and flamboyantly and richly narrated to friends and relatives back home. However it is often extremely difficult to collect naturally occurring data of these storied experiences. Interviews in contrast appear to have a more structured and less naturalistic quality. This paper argues that using less structured interview situations, and a very close, fine-detailed analysis of interview data that draws upon socio-linguistic approaches, it is possible to reveal the underlying narrative structure of accounts for and of touristic experience. The paper argues that the natur...

Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time: Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Abstract: Focusing on the unique architecture of comics, in which panels are both sequenced linearly and meaningfully juxtaposed on a two-dimensional page, this essay explores Chris Ware's use of two- and three-dimensional narrative strategies to complicate linear understandings of narrative structure. In Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware employs such multidimensional narrative strategies to effectively thematize the novel's engagement with issues of narrative time, circularity, and continuity, as well as to call into question the very notion of a "narrative line."

Representing Madness: How Are Subjective Experiences of Emotional Distress Presented in First-Person Accounts?

Abstract: Close to 600 first-person narratives of madness have been published in English alone, offering invaluable insight into emotional distress from a rarely studied perspective. The goals of this study were (a) to analyze how writers of such narratives present their subjective experience of emotional distress in terms of narrative structure and voice and (b) to examine how the author's purpose in writing the narrative affects its form. Previous studies of physical illness narratives have shown that they can be categorized into types based on structure and style.We asked: Are emotional distress narratives similar, or do they constitute a unique form? Ten such narratives were analyzed, with respect to the following four dimensions: writer's subjective experience, narrative structure, voice, and purpose. The results suggest a typology of narratives of emotional distress that is quite distinct from those constructed for physical illness.

Catholicism, sexual deviance, and victorian gothic culture.

Abstract: It has long been recognised that the Gothic genre sensationalised beliefs and practices associated with Catholicism. Often, the rhetorical tropes and narrative structures of the Gothic, with its lurid and supernatural plots, were used to argue that both Catholicism and sexual difference were fundamentally alien and threatening to British Protestant culture. Ultimately, however, the Gothic also provided an imaginative space in which unconventional writers from John Henry Newman to Oscar Wilde could articulate an alternative vision of British culture. Patrick O'Malley charts these developments from the origins of the Gothic novel in the mid-eighteenth century, through the mid-nineteenth-century sensation novel, toward the end of the Victorian Gothic in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. O'Malley foregrounds the continuing importance of Victorian Gothic as a genre through which British authors defined their culture and what was outside it.

Narrative thinking and the emergence of postpsychological therapies.

Abstract: The growing emergence of an appreciation of the significance of narrative, within philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities, has had a significant impact on theory and practice within the field of counseling and psychotherapy. The influence of narrative thinking has been felt in two main ways. First, concepts of narrative have been assimilated into established forms of practice. For example, within psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy, it is now accepted that attention to narrative structures within the discourse of therapy can be used to generate a fuller understanding of the operation of well-known phenomena such as transference. The primary intention of this area of work has been to utilise narrative concepts to permit a deeper understanding of existing ideas about therapeutic processes and procedures. Second, a quite separate set of developments has seen the construction of an approach to therapy which begins from an acknowledgement of the central role of narrative and storytelling in lives and relationships. This alternative approach, generally described as “narrative therapy”, can be characterised as the formation of a postpsychological approach to therapy, which focuses on issues surrounding the performance of narratives within relationships, community and culture, rather than on inner psychological processes within individuals. It is argued that postpsychological narrative therapies have the potential to address key contemporary personal and social dilemmas in ways that are not possible within individualist models of therapy.

Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors

Abstract: A study of post-classical Arabic historiography, focusing on two major Crusader-period chronicles written in Syria and Egypt. It investigates the authors’ room to manoeuvre – ‘agency’ – in composing their works by considering the interplay between social context, intellectual tradition and narrative structure. The book contributes to the vivid debate on Islamic historiography and aims at bridging the conceptual gap that separates this debate from the study of medieval European historical writing.

Difficult stories: Public discourse and narrative identity in Eastern Germany

Abstract: Whilst former political prisoners of the socialist state are considered to be important witnesses of the past socialist rule by governmental authorities, able to testify about the ‘regime’, the eastern German public seems rather uninviting to their telling their life-stories. At the interstices of a demand for talking and a refusal of being listened to, the creation of narratives which would serve to portray one's experiencesis difficult. Following scholarship, narratives are furthermoreintertwined with individual identity. The article explores how in this situation of tension a group of former prisoners work together at constructing metaphors and narrative structures for the telling of individual stories, which will both communicate experiences well to a public, and be flexible enough for habitable individual identities.

Rewriting “Goldilocks” in the Urban, Multicultural Elementary School

Abstract: At a multicultural elementary school in Toronto, Canada, students in grades 1 and 2 digitally rewrote the traditional children's story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” The traditional tale was transformed into individualized narratives, with new characters, setting, and plot twists, and the students moved from reading the original story on paper to writing a revised version on screens. This process enabled them to engage with narrative structure, not only as emergent readers external to the text but also as authors of their own text versions. The project aimed to teach narratives, to experiment with the creation of digital literacies, and to test a process by which traditional children's literature can be made more socially and culturally inclusive for contemporary readers. The article describes the sociopolitical context of the study and places it within an evolving theory of multiliteracies, focusing on the pedagogical process used to create a digital narratives in a primary classroom. Examples from the children's rewritten stories are provided.

The Narrative Imagination across Media

Abstract: This article challenges the strong presumption that narrative, capable as it is of expression in different media, is constituted by a medium-independent content. It draws upon Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics series in order to interrogate the role of the medium in narrative, and the foundational narrative concept of the event, and elaborates a concept of narrative as a cognitive faculty. This approach to narrative facilitates a rhetorical model of its medium-contingency, and occasions an exploration of the narrative quality of dreams, which emerge as proto-fictions, and as the paradigm for a rhetoric-driven model of fictionality.

New narrative pleasures?: A cognitive-phenomenological study of the experience of reading digital narrative fictions

Abstract: New narrative pleasures? : A cognitive-phenomenological study of the experience of reading digital narrative fictions

‘The explosive devices of memory’: trauma and the construction of identity in narrative:

Abstract: This article attempts to show how a cognitive approach to textual analysis can function alongside other critical methodologies. Helen Weinzweig's novel Basic Black with Pearlsis an examination of the effects of trauma on the psyche, and in particular on its construction and maintenance of a sense of identity. As Shirley, the novel's narrator, struggles to locate the various aspects of her own identity, so too is the reader forced to experience this struggle in the act of attempting to construct for Shirley an identity out of her fragmented and discontinuous narrative. I approach this interpretational problem from two perspectives. Making use primarily of the work by Caruth, I demonstrate how Weinzweig's text might be read according to a canonical trauma paradigm. On the other hand, I consider Weinzweig's text within a cognitive stylistic framework, making use of Turner and Fauconnier's theory of conceptual blending and its various incarnations, as well as Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory. With these me...

Paths through Dichterliebe

Abstract: The article advances a new case for a coherent tonal and narrative structure of Schumann9s Dichterliebe, op. 48. Based on a map of key relations by Gottfried Weber, the hermeneutic analysis follows Dichterliebe9s tonal path along a double trajectory of major keys and their relative minor keys, whose progression through tonal space is understood as occurrences in event space. A comparison between Dichterliebe and its original version, 20 Lieder und Gesange, shows how the tonal and narrative paths pertain to both. The hermeneutic analysis demonstrates a slippage between story and narrative as well as reality and illusion, whereby Schumann responds to Heine9s irony, creating a tonal and narrative structure that is both circular and cyclical, both whole and fragment.

Cyberage Narratives: Creative computing in after-school centres

Abstract: In this article two computer-produced multimedia stories created by children in their after-school centre are analysed, building on the assumption that children draw that which is important for them. The aim is to make visible the significance of narrative structure, reaccentuation, intertextuality, multivoicedness and various levels of interpretation. The author discusses how the stories spring from the children’s everyday social practice and mirror their contemporary media culture. In conclusion, the author advances the need for the appropriation of a socially shared symbolic system within the chosen genre through participation in social practices

Entertaining illusions: how Indonesian élites imagine reality TV affects the masses

Abstract: Among the new genres of Indonesian television broadcasting, real-life crime and supernatural reality TV are of particular interest, because they were exceptionally popular for a time and aroused grave concern among intellectuals and the political elite. A close examination of both kinds of programming, however, suggests that their narrative structure is largely conservative and about reaffirming the social order against threat. In which case, why are elites so worried about such programmes? An analysis of broadsheet commentary reveals some remarkable preconceptions among the elite about the masses in Indonesia. Finally, a consideration of how Indonesians understand and engage with theatre—and so potentially television—indicates previously unconsidered radical possibilities.

Thucydides' War Narrative: A Structural Study

Abstract: List of Tables Preface Introduction PART ONE 1. An Overview of the Archidamian Narrative Structure (ii.1--v.24) 2. Introductory Sentences (ii.1--v.24) Subjects in Introductory Sentences Verbs in Introductory Sentences Settings in Introductory Sentences Time in Introductory Sentences 3. Internal Structure of the Unit of Action (ii.1--v.24) Developed Picture Units List Units Extended Narrative Units Complex Units 4. Patterns Formed by Units of Action in the Archidamian Narrative (ii.1--v.24) Significant Juxtaposition Larger Connections PART TWO 5. The Years of the Peace (v.25--vi.7): The Unit of Action Changing Introductory Sentences of Units of Action Unit Arrangement Connections among Units The Narrative of the Years of the Peace 6. Years Seventeen through Twenty-one: The Unit of Action Transformed 7. Some Conclusions: Thucydides' Narrative Structures (ii.1--viii.109) Appendix A. Narrative Units and Narrative Sections (ii.1--viii) Appendix B. Introductory Sentences of Units of Action (ii.1--v.24) Appendix C. Time Formulae in Introductory Sentences (ii.1--viii.109) Notes Bibliography Index Tables

La narración infantil. Un estudio en niños de Educación Básica.

Abstract: This study aims at comparing variations in narrative structure and the use of evaluative language, as evidenced in the written narrative discourse of a group...

Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in "Twist Movies"?

Abstract: part from the acting of young Haley Joel Osment, which won universal praise, The Sixth Sense met with mixed reviews. Stephen Holden of the New York Times called it “gaggingly mawkish supernatural kitsch,” while Desson Howe of the Washington Post found the direction “superb” and the writing “wonderfully mystical,” with “a twist that will put your head in a swirl.” The surprise ending, of course, was the film’s major talking point and was discussed endlessly on internet chat forums. Some found it a contrived gimmick. Some remained unaffected, claiming they saw the twist coming a mile away. Others found the finale a brilliantly executed piece of cinematic storytelling. Much of the controversy centered on the question of whether or not the film actually “made sense,” whether or not it was logically consistent. Having seen the film, people intuitively try (to some extent at least) to test and compare the new piece of information—that Malcolm was dead the whole time—with what preceded it. Was he not wearing different outfits at different times in the movie? If so, how did he manage to change clothes? How could he have dinner with his wife in a restaurant on their wedding anniversary if he was already dead? Why could we not see his gunshot wound (which we do see in the montage sequence at the end)? After all, the fatal injuries of all the other ghosts that we see in the movie are visible to us. This essay is divided into two parts. The first part examines one of the key questions that a historical poetics of cinema seeks to answer according to David Bordwell: what are the principles according to which films (in this case, a single film) are constructed, and how do they achieve particular effects? (“Historical Poetics of Cinema” 371). In practice this means that I want to examine the Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense:

A Dynamic Decomposition/Recomposition Framework for Documents based on Narrative Structure Model

Abstract: This paper proposes a framework to access information based on a narrative structure of documents. This framework consists of two processes. The one is to decompose existing documents into smaller units. The other process is combining unit components into a new story taking on a new meaning based on a context. In this paper, a narrative structure for documents is modeled as follows. A story corresponding to a document is regarded as a sequence of scenes. A scene is a chunk of sentences. A sentence is mapped into a set of terms in the sentence. Decomposition process gives two mechanisms to decompose a story into scenes. Composition process shows four patterns to connect scenes. Both techniques to decompose/compose a story are based on the notions of term dependency and term attractiveness. This paper also showes visualization tools to express the narrative structure for documents. Word Colony overviews content of a story as a directed graph representing the relation among term dependency. Topic Sequence is also directed graph to show the sequence of scenes along a story plot. The basis of these visualization techniques is the notions of term dependency and term attractiveness. They show the variety of understandings of the same documents.

Elements of Narrative Analysis

Abstract: This article is intended to be an introduction to narrative analysis. It introduces key terms in narrative theory (e.g. story and plot), discusses various types of narratives relevant for social studies and features three selected analytical approaches to narratives: a poetic classification, a tripartite way of reading and a deconstructive analysis. The conclusion presents some reflections on narratives as ways to make sense of time. References have been selected as to guide the reader to further studies of narratives and narrative perspectives.

László Moholy-Nagy and Painting Photography Film: A guide to narrative montage

Abstract: This paper studies the 1925 book, Malerei Photographie Film [Painting Photography Film], written and designed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In this publication, using an innovative mix of written text, photography and graphic design, Moholy-Nagy discusses his ideas about photographic technologies and communication. The author reads this text as a guide to ‘narrative montage’. The relationship between image and text and definitions of (photo) narrative structure are reconsidered.

On the Epistemology of Narrative Theory: Narratology and Other Theories of Fictional Narrative

Abstract: This article is made up of two talks presented in French and English, at two conferences : a symposium organized by Matti Hyvarinen and Kai Mikkonen, at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki, and a series of conferences which I organized at Paris 7-Denis Diderot University. The title, which is borrowed from Marc Dominicy's work on Jakobsonian poetics, sets out to analyze narrative theory from an epistemological viewpoint. On the one hand, I focus on Genette's narratology as it is presented in "Discours du recit", Figures III and Nouveau discours du recit (I also take into account Rene Rivara's attempt in La Langue du recit to give narratology a linguistic base, using enunciative linguistics). On the other hand I explore what I call, following S.-Y. Kuroda's cue, "non-communicational" theories of fictional narrative, of which Ann Banfield has developed the most formalized version. In spite of their very unequal popularity, I consider these theories as objective, which is to say, debatable and capable of being the object of a rational critique. Moreover, it is a matter of choosing between the two. The analysis is developed in three parts. The first concerns the object of narrative theory, in other words, the narrative as a constructed object, both in narratology (where the narrative is likened to a narrative discourse and attributed, in the case of fictional narrative, to a fictive narrator) and in Kate Hamburger's narrative theory (where the fictional narrative and discourse are mutually exclusive categories): this part poses the problem of the encounter between a theoretic object, defined by a certain number of properties and historical or empirical factors (notably those which deal with the distinction between "first person" narrative and "third person narrative"). The second part of the article examines whether or not the theory's assertions lend themselves to falsification. I consider in particular Gerard Genette's assertion, according to which "all narrative is, explicitly or not, in the first person, because its narrator can at any moment designate himself by the pronoun I", in light of Ann Banfield's theory of narrative and free indirect speech (free indirect speech as Ann Banfield defines it constituting a singular case of observation that falsifies the hypothesis of Genette and narratology). The third part of the article concerns the "reductionism" of narrative theory (or the way in which the theory's assertions are reducible to another level, in this case the linguistic level). Leaving aside Genette's narratology which never took interest in the "language of narrative", this part considers, successively, Rivara's enunciative narratology and Ann Banfield's theory of narrative and free indirect speech. This part shows that Rivara's program of enunciative narratology is based on a series of reductions that are difficult to justify and which leave room for real contradictions (in particular concerning the status of the "omniscient" narrator). It also shows that the assertion by Ann Banfield according to which the behavior of elements and constructions characteristic of free indirect speech, considered as a sub-category of narrative style, is part of the language and is capable of being formalized in the grammar of this language. It shows as well how Ann Banfield's assertion that the behavior of elements and characteristic constructions of free indirect speech, considered as a sub-category of narrative style, is part of language and can be formalized in the grammar of this language, this assertion is inseparable from the elaboration of "another grammar", which is to say, another conception of language. The conclusion proposes that the relation between the theory and the analysis of fictional narratives be reconsidered.

Rhetorical aesthetics and other issues in the study of literary narrative

Abstract: The current study of literary narrative is a vibrant and various activity, marked not by a single orthodoxy but by multiple approaches. Within that variety there are five especially salient issues currently being investigated: nonmimetic narrative; digital narrative; the fact/fiction distinction; narrative space; and rhetorical aesthetics. Rhetorical aesthetics moves not toward a universal standards of literary quality but toward an understanding of how narratives work on their own terms and of appropriate general criteria for judging those terms. These criteria, as a comparison of the endings of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the novel to film suggests, typically are not purely aesthetic but involve the interrelation of form, ethics, and aesthetics.

New environments of media exposure : Internet and narrative structures: From media education to media pedagogy and media literacy

Abstract: New environments of media exposure : Internet and narrative structures: From media education to media pedagogy and media literacy