Showing papers on "Narrative structure published in 2011"

Using Narrative in Research

Abstract: Narrative Beginnings Autobiography, Biography and Fiction What Is Narrative? Designing Research Projects with a Narrative Approach Ethics and a Narrative Approach Narrative Thinking Provoking and Sustaining Reflective Thought Collecting Narrative Data Analyzing Narrative Data Representative Constructions in Narrative Analysis Reporting Narrative Research

Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative

Abstract: The Phenomenological Framework for Narrative Analysis.- One Edgework: Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology of Narrative.- Two Multiple Contexting: The Story Context of Stories.- Three Presentation of Self in Storytelling.- Four Joint Storytelling: The Interplay of Discourse and Interaction.- Five Storyability and Eventfulness: Beyond Referential Theories of Narrative.- Six Taleworlds and Real: Ontological Puzzles about Narrative.- Appendix Transcription Devices.

The Language of Gaming

Abstract: The Language of Gaming examines the complex language of videogames and gaming from a discourse analytical perspective. Astrid Ensslin studies the discourses inscribed in videogames by their producers, as well as gamer and media meta-discourses, and focal areas include gamer slang, illocution, multimodality, and narrative structures.

Narrative Structures in Computer and Video Games: Part 1: Context, Definitions, and Initial Findings:

Abstract: This essay is the first of a two-part article examining the use of narrative in computer and video games, which provides an overview and discussion of the definitions and representation of stories,...

Literary geography: setting and narrative space

Abstract: This paper explores some of the ways in which analytical strategies developed within narrative theory might be combined with recent developments in literary geography in the study of setting and narrative space. It suggests that despite narrative theory's urge toward categorization and its associated tendency to conceive of space as relatively stable and fixed, the technical vocabulary developed within the discipline has much to offer the literary geographer. The first section of the paper reviews some of the areas of potential collaboration in this cross-disciplinary overlap, while the second section offers three brief case study readings designed to suggest the potential of a combination of the analytical specificity of narrative studies with the imaginative stretch of spatial theory. The case studies look at setting and narrative space as they emerge in relation to narrative voices and multiple audiences in three case study texts: P.K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), J.A. Mitchell's The Last ...

Automatic generation of video narratives from shared UGC

Abstract: This paper introduces an evaluated approach to the automatic generation of video narratives from user generated content gathered in a shared repository. In the context of social events, end-users record video material with their personal cameras and upload the content to a common repository. Video narrative techniques, implemented using Narrative Structure Language (NSL) and ShapeShifting Media, are employed to automatically generate movies recounting the event. Such movies are personalized according to the preferences expressed by each individual end-user, for each individual viewing. This paper describes our prototype narrative system, MyVideos, deployed as a web application, and reports on its evaluation for one specific use case: assembling stories of a school concert by parents, relatives and friends. The evaluations carried out through focus groups, interviews and field trials, in the Netherlands and UK, provided validating results and further insights into this approach.

The history and the narrative of risk in the media

Abstract: Daniel Defoe's The Journal of the Plague Year (2001/1722) was the first journalistic narrative of risk and it shaped subsequent narratives. When something is possible we can develop a new understanding by telling that the possible happened before. Doing so, we turn possibility into probability and uncertainty into risk. To prevent a possible new plague to affect London in 1720, Defoe wrote a fictional journal, based on previous research and on his memories of what happened in the terrible plague of 1665. This is a paradigmatic narration or ‘narrative matrix’ and my purpose is to illustrate how the media are still using this traditional narrative structure to describe the risk. I shall use several recent examples and the case of avian flu. The analysis of how El Pais, the most influential Spanish newspaper, has been reporting the avian flu in the last four years will be the main reference.

Transitional Justice Beyond the Normative: Towards a Literary Theory of Political Transitions

Abstract: 1 The article argues that narratives of transitional justice have been placed on a somewhat unexamined pedestal in the social sciences and the humanities. Within such narratives, transitional justice, as both a phenomenon and a conceptual tool, is regarded as inevitable and commonplace for anyone wishing to address the issue of past human rights violations. The article suggests that while the concept of transition, strictly speaking, is merely descriptive of processes of change and thereby assumedly a neutral signifier, it has been positively oversignified by various fields of study. The article also examines literary narratives that have political transitions as their foci, proposing that a literary theory approach to transitional narratives should not be dictated only by the privileged themes, forms and narrative structures of the normative narratives of transitional justice (such as truth commission reports), but be open to fictional narratives as having something valuable to contribute within the context of political transitions.

Ricoeur on Time and Narrative: An Introduction to Temps et récit

Abstract: The object of this book, writes William C. Dowling in his preface, is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur s "Time and Narrative" available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument. The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur s "Temps et recit," Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms."Ricoeur on Time and Narrative"presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of "Temps et recit, " Ricoeur s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in "Temps et recit" on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed "Time and Narrative, "looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. "Ricoeur on Time and Narrative"communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur s dismantling of established theories and arguments Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another."The scholarship in William C. Dowling's"Ricoeur on Time andNarrative"""is impeccable; Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He highlights Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a limpid, concise language, and links them to the relevant nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical developments. Dowling's book provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of Ricoeur's major work, one that will be of considerable significance to philosophers, historians, and literary theorists." Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago"William C. Dowling's "Ricoeur on Time and Narrative"is a subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory already a considerable achievement, given the difficulty of Ricoeur's text. However, Dowling also shows us, sometimes explicitly, sometimes simply through the way he conducts his argument, why we should bother with Ricoeur what we have to gain from knowing him better than we do, however well we may think we know him." Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University"

Narrative Structures in Computer and Video Games: Part 2: Emotions, Structures, and Archetypes:

Abstract: This second of two articles concludes the examination of narrative in computer and video games. Where appropriate, results are schematically and chronologically presented to illustrate the unique n...

Narrative Form and Mahler's Musical Thinking

Abstract: The close relationship between music and other art forms is a well-established feature of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Interdisciplinary study since the 1970s, of the relationship between literature and music, reflects among other things a recovery of nineteenth-century concerns. This article equates Mahler's development of symphonic form with a development of narrative form within his works, by linking three phases of his symphonic output with his literary interests. The first phase links the early symphonies with the early nineteenth-century author Jean Paul. His novel Titan provides the subtitle of Mahler's First Symphony, and correspondences can be discerned between the character of Albano, the hero of the novel, and Mahler at this stage of his career (1888). The opening of the Finale of the symphony shows narratological similarity to the opening of the final volume of the novel. The second phase links the middle-period instrumental symphonies with Dostoevsky, who became Mahler's greatest literary and moral hero. The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies exhibit narrative structures different from those of the earlier symphonies; rather than ending with indivdualistic triumph, after the manner of Jean Paul, they pose the Dostoevskian question of whether some sort of redemption of their material is possible. The third phase links the late works with Mahler's contemporaries Robert Musil and Marcel Proust. In this context, the ending of Mahler's Ninth Symphony can be seen as a adaptation of musical narrativity analogous to the Modernist extension of the lengthy novels of these two authors.

'He Sang the Story' Narrative and Poetic Identity in Keats's Work

Abstract: Story-telling is a mode central to the practice and achievement of John Keats. In ‘Sleep and Poetry’, he refers to life as ‘The reading of an ever-changing tale’. This line suggests his sense of the centrality of narrative to human experiences. Yet the Keatsian narrative is as a medium for Keats to investigate the nature and development of his poetic identity. His idea of poetry and of the poet, and his narrative figuring of himself as a poet are my subject, as they are his, when in the phrase the thesis takes for its title Keats writes of a poet in Endymion, ‘He sang the story up into the air’ (II, 838). Recent scholarship has interpreted Keats’s narrative techniques in different ways. Critical approaches have modified the Bloomian concept of the anxiety of influence by using a reader response approach, or have taken on board or swerved from a McGannian New Historicist perspective. In the process Keats’s formal achievement, once celebrated by critics such as Walter Jackson Bate and Helen Vendler, has received comparatively little attention. This thesis, adopting ideas and approaches associated with narratology (including its application to lyric poetry), analyses Keats’s poetic career, focusing on the poetry’s narrative techniques and its treatment of the narrator’s role. My approach might be described as aiming to accomplish a ‘poetics of attention’. This thesis consists of eight chapters. Chapter one discusses ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’, poems that are crucial in understanding Keats’s use of narrative to explore his poetic identity. In chapter two, concentrating on Endymion’s enactment of imaginative struggle, I attempt to show the purposeful function of the poem’s ‘wandering’ and complex narrative structure, which allows Keats space to develop and examine his beliefs about mythology, beauty, and visionary quest. Chapters three and four examine narrative techniques and the narrator’s role in ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ as Keats questions the nature and function of ‘old Romance’, even as he employs it, thus bringing a modern self-consciousness to bear on his task. Chapters five and six are devoted to the narrativity shown in the odes. Such an exploration of the ‘lyric narrative’ seeks to shed new light on our understanding of Keats’s odes. Chapter seven considers the ambivalence that Keats creates in ‘Lamia’. Lamia’s enigmatic identity as a woman and a serpent makes the narrative complex and the narrator perplexed. Chapter eight analyses ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, arguing that Keats uses these two poems as narratives to explore his idea of poetry and of the poet. In his short creative life, Keats demonstrates different and various narrative skills. These narrative skills shape his ideas and ideals of poetry as well as of the poet. Via his use of narrative, we are able to see the evolution of his poetic identity. He presents himself as what he recommended a poet should be, a shape-changing figure, who might be best described as a ‘camelion Poet’.

Narrative pedagogy and art interpretation.

Abstract: Contemporary practices in nursing education call for changes that will assist students in understanding a complex, rapidly changing world. Narrative pedagogy is an approach that offers teachers a way to actively engage students in the process of teaching and learning. The narrative approach provides ways to think critically, make connections, and ask questions to gain understanding through dialogue. The hermeneutic circle of understanding offers a way to interpret stories and discover meaning. Narratives exist in art forms that can be interpreted to evoke discussions and thinking that relate to nursing practice. Art interpretation is a way to gain access to others and acquire a deeper appreciation for multiple perspectives in the teaching-learning process.

Narrative Tensions: Perilous And Productive

Abstract: We focus on four major tensions pervading much narrative inquiry to date, tensions that threaten to divide the field into alienated enclaves. Of specific concern are psychological vs. social explanations of narrative, structural vs. process orientations to research, approaches that celebrate experience vs. those that textually deconstruct experience, and accounts that center on singularity of self-narratives vs. incoherent multiplicity. Finally, we open discussion on a relational constructionist account of narrative, with an eye toward reconciling these disparate orientations.

Exploring the therapeutic power of narrative at the end of life: a qualitative analysis of narratives emerging in dignity therapy

Abstract: Objective To understand the therapeutic effect of a narrative intervention, specifi cally dignity therapy, in patients at the end-of-life. To examine the thematic dimensions and shared narrative features of the stories that emerge in dignity therapy and theorise their relationship to the intervention’s clinical impact. Design Resident physicians, as part of an educational intervention, co-administered the dignity therapy protocol with the principal investigator. Interviews were transcribed, edited, and then, within a week, read back to the patient and provided as a document for the patient to keep. A constant comparative approach was taken to identify narratives and thematic patterns. Participants 12 Patients at the end-of-life were administered dignity interviews by 12 resident physicians, accompanied by the principal investigator. Setting Palliative care settings in two University of Toronto academic hospitals. Results Three narrative types emerged, each containing several themes. Evaluation narratives create a life lived before illness, with an overarching theme of overcoming adversity. Transition narratives describe a changing health situation and its meanings, including impact on family and on one’s world view. Legacy narratives discuss the future without the patient and contain the parables and messages to be left for loved ones. Conclusions While the interview protocol guides patients’ responses, the commonality of narrative structures across interviews suggests that patients draw on experiences with two familiar genres: the eulogy and the medical interview, to create a narrative order during the chaos of dying. The dignity interview’s resonance with these genres appears to facilitate a powerful, and perhaps unexpected sense of agency.

Why paris needs hector and lancelot needs mordred: using traditional narrative roles and functions for dramatic compression in interactive narrative

Abstract: This paper proposes that we think of traditional story patterns as an available abstraction technology, containing strategies of parameterization and encapsulation that could be useful for creating digital narratives with meaningful variation of story elements. An example domain of a woman with two or more potential sexual/romantic partners is used to illustrate how such an approach could leverage the dramatic compression of narrative traditions to identify meaningful variations, in order to support coherent composition by authors and increase dramatic agency for interactors.

Curveship's automatic narrative style

Abstract: Curveship, a Python framework for developing interactive fiction (IF) with narrative style, is described. The system simulates a world with locations, characters, and objects, providing the typical facilities of an IF development system. To these it adds the ability to generate text and to change the telling of events and description of items using high-level narrative parameters, so that, for instance, different actors can be focalized and events can be told out of order. By assigning a character to be narrator or moving the narrator in time, the system can determine grammatical specifics and render the text in a new narrative style. Curveship offers those interested in narrative systems a way to experiment with changes in the narrative discourse; for interactive fiction authors and those who wish to use of the system as a component of their own, it is a way to create powerful new types of narrative experiences. The templates used for language generation in Curveship, the string-with-slots representation, shows that there is a compromise between highly flexible but extremely difficult-to-author abstract syntax representations and simple strings, which are easy to write but extremely inflexible. The development of the system has suggested ways to refine narrative theory, offering new understandings of how narrative distance can be understood as being composed of lower-level changes in narrative and how the order of events is better represented as an ordered tree than a simple sequence.

Exposure to life-writing as an impact on autobiographical memory

Abstract: This article combines narrative and genre theory with recent studies of memory processing and reporting to propose that contact with published biography and autobiography, both direct and indirect, has an influence on autobiographical narrative, memory and self-formation. Exposure to durable and pervasive modes of life-writing, transmitted culturally, provides frameworks for meaning-making that normalize certain narrative structures and shape the content and organization of autobiographical memory. This article traces the transfer of conventions found in life-writing genres in recently reported autobiographical memory studies, to argue that further consideration should be given in empirical research contexts to the impact of cultural and educational factors on memory.

A consideration of the elements for narrative generation and a trial of integrated narrative generation system

Abstract: A goal of this research is to integrate various elements of narrative generation and develop an “integrated narrative generation system” Previously, we have been developing various prototyping elements under top-down designing And we connected several elements in a pilot version of integrated narrative generation system In this paper, first, we introduce elements and a pilot integrated system And we consider on the expansion of the system mainly framework of narrative structural techniques and generation control mechanism

Narrative Time and Speculative Fiction: Reflection of Social Conditions in Temporal Implications

Abstract: Speculative fiction, with elements of fantasy integral to narrative, has developed as a literary genre with some underlying postulates and textual strategies that challenge the boundaries of narrative realism. It is often examined as a search for the definition of human beings and their status in the universe and an impact of scientific and technological advances upon human beings. It is believed that the world view created by development of science and technology at a particular period influences the choices made for various narrative devices, such as point of view, narrative time sequence, plot structure, character and language in speculative fiction. This paper examines temporal implications of the plots in two speculative fiction novels, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1972) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), written in two different periods which are about ten years apart. Using Ricoeur’s (2002) distinction between episodic and configurational dimensions for the conception of time, the paper aims to uncover different ways of using narrative temporality in the configuration of plots in these two novels, and relate these differences to broader social conditions happening at the two respective stages in the postmodern age. Key words: Narrative Time; Plot; Temporal Implications; Social Conditions, Speculative Fiction

The Complicated Relationship Between Media and Morality

Abstract: This contribution reflects content and effects of moral messages in media from a narrative perspective. Building on Tamborini’s (2011) Model of Moral Intuition and Media Enjoyment, several issues are raised: First, the difficulty of conceptually and empirically defining “morality” in media entertainment is elaborated. Several options of moral ambiguity arising from the narrative structure of a story are sketched. Then, the link between processing moral content and positive media experiences such as enjoyment and appreciation is considered. Finally, issues of effects, especially on the long-term, are raised and implications for empirical questions are discussed.

Supposing Bleak House

Abstract: Supposing ""Bleak House"" is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens's and nineteenth-century England's greatest work of narrative fiction. Focusing on the novel's retrospective narrator, whom he identifies as Esther Woodcourt in order to distinguish her from her younger, unmarried self, John Jordan offers provocative new readings of the novel's narrative structure, its illustrations, its multiple and indeterminate endings, the role of its famous detective, Inspector Bucket, its many ghosts, and its relation to key events in Dickens's life during the years 1850 to 1853. Jordan draws on insights from narratology and psychoanalysis in order to explore multiple dimensions of Esther's complex subjectivity and fractured narrative voice. His conclusion considers Bleak House as a national allegory, situating it in the context of the troubled decade of the 1840s and in relation to Dickens's seldom-studied A Child's History of England (written during the same years as his great novel) and to Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Supposing ""Bleak House"" claims Dickens as a powerful investigator of the unconscious mind and as a ""popular"" novelist deeply committed to social justice and a politics of inclusiveness.

Supporting children's narrative composition : the development and reflection of a visual approach for 7-8 year-olds

Abstract: At the heart of present literacy, and narrative, learning paradigms are the "literate behaviours" usually associated with aspects of learning to encode and decode print. These paradigms have been criticized for placing written and verbal language in a privileged position. Furthermore, whilst an increasing number of theorists and educators are asking for the inclusion of multimodal approaches to learning narrative, current curricula, and the research that informs it, continue to be founded on "verbocentric" approaches and linear forms of narrative expression. Through the development and evaluation of a curricular approach to narrative learning for 7-8 year-olds based on the visual arts, this study aims to ascertain whether there is a need for broader conceptions of narrative as well as for complementary modes of narrative composition than those currently being used in primary schools. Documentation in the form of the children‘s painted narratives and transcripts of the children's oral accounts of their narratives was the major component of data collection. Individual and small group interviews and participant observation were supplementary sources to assist in the interpretation of the narrative paintings the children composed. The children‘s narratives were analysed using a narratological semiotic model, which divides narrative into 'discourse' and 'story' and distinguishes between the 'content' and 'form' of each of these elements.

Oral narratives produced by Aboriginal Australian children :dilemmas with normative comparisons

Abstract: This study investigated the characteristics of oral narratives produced by six Aboriginal children aged between 6;6 and 9;6 years in North Queensland Fictional narrative retellings were analysed at microstructure and macrostructure levels Results were compared to a narrative story retell database included in the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software Most children gained lower results on measures of narrative microstructure, such as mean length of C-unit and number of different words, but performed well on several measures of narrative structure, namely the Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) total score and component scores for Introduction, Character Development and Conclusion Older children performed within normal limits, or better, on more NSS measures than the younger children Implications for the development of appropriate assessment measures for Aboriginal children are discussed

Opening Pandora's Box: An Autoethnographic Study of Teaching.

Abstract: Teachers use narrative structures, both biographical and fictitious, to examine their teaching philosophies and practices simultaneously. Applying autoethnographic research methods to teaching data can result in cultural criticism, personal reflexivity, and empowerment. Autoethnographic research can have aesthetic and emotional or empathetic value. However, this approach to research becomes increasingly difficult as teachers gain experience simply because of the volume of evidence to consider. This article is an example of how a myth, Pandora’s Box, can become a narrative metaphor and a research tool for reducing large amounts of biographical teaching evidence in order to critically examine philosophies of practice and ideals in a particular cultural context.

Interactive Visualizations of Plot in Fiction

Abstract: In this paper, we expand on our presentation at ICDS2010 (Dobson et al., 2010) in describing the design of several new forms of interactive visualization intended for teaching the concept of plot in fiction. The most common visualization currently used for teaching plot is a static diagram known as Freytag's Pyramid, which was initially intended for describing classical and Shakespearean tragedy. It has subsequently been applied to a wider range of fiction, but is not always applicable. The alternative interactive forms that we propose allow a more dynamic approach that can be customized by the teachers and students to accommodate various interpretations of a single piece of fiction. We provide a mechanism for people to select significant features of a story, such as characters, objects, events and transitions in time or space, and see how the different models react to the presence of these features. Our designs include one that is primarily sequential, another that emphasizes the structural complexity of the story and a third that places a single feature as a central focus. The data for this visualization is provided through an XML encoding of the significant features of a given story. INTRODUCTION In this paper, we investigate the possibility for 3D visualizations related to the notion of plot in fiction. In teaching narrative forms, teachers, particularly in North American K-12 classrooms and to a lesser extent in undergraduate university programs, have relied on the five-stage plot mapping first described by Gustav Freytag (1863) in Die Technik des Dramas. This mapping, developed in consideration of ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, has widely become known as "Freytag's Pyramid" figure 1). However, since many plots follow other patterns, the superimposition of this model on forms beyond those it was originally intended to describe is often confusing and at worst can be downright misleading (Dobson, 2002). Kurt Vonnegut Jr. famously attempted to address this problem with the plot diagrams figure 2) he proposed for his MA thesis, which were concerned with changes in the fortune of the protagonist over time, and which are published in Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut, 1973). Although simple to read and deeply revealing in nature, like much of Vonnegut's own writing, the diagrams are limited in scope by their reliance on the Cartesian graph. As Van Peer and Chatman (2001) observe, the "diverse narratives of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries" (p. 5) are incompatible with contemporary narrative models because most of these models reflect a Western perspective. Further, as Dobson (2006) has noted, they do not take account of new media genres. Considering the latter, some, such as Bernstein (1998), have proposed twodimensional plot patterns that account for various narrative forms emerging in digital media. Others, such as MIT's Drew Davidson (2005·), have been exploring diagrammatic representations of plot in video games, demonstrating that the Freytag schema is inappropriate to the new context. The problem of how best to visualize plot, though, was identified as a challenge long before Freytag or Vonnegut. Sterne's Tristram Shandy, published in nine volumes over ten years commencing in 1759, is often cited as an example of complex narrative structure- a precursor of later experimental forms in print and a harbinger of hypertext (e.g., Bolter, 2001). The novel is replete with digressions and temporal disruptions to which Sterne takes pains to alert readers. In volume VI, for example, he draws a series of five plot lines figures 3 and 4). The first four graphs, he explains, represent the "lines I moved in through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes" (Sterne, 1847, 287). He offers the following explanation for his final graph (figure 4): ... except at the curve marked A, where I took a trip to Navarre, and the indented curve B, which is the short airing when I was there with the Lady Baussiere and her page, I have not taken the least frisk of a digression, till John de la Casses devils led me the round you see marked D; for as for CC CCC they are nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs incident to the lives of the greatest ministers of state (287). …

Stories in Pictures (and Non-Pictorial Objects) – A Narratological and Cognitive Psychological Approach

Abstract: Narratological studies have quite frequently focused upon linguistic structures, considered to be paradigmatic cases of narrativity, whereas pictorial signs (such as icons and symbols) or indices have received comparably much less attention. In this paper, however, I intend to outline some basic and regularly occurring narrative aspects of pictures and non-pictorial objects. As a point of departure, I shall suggest (influenced by approaches from cognitive psychology, e.g. the work of Roger Schank) that cognition basically consists of the storage and retrieval of action scripts or schemata (i.e. narrative structures) which may occur on various levels of abstraction. These schemas incorporate generalized knowledge about event sequences (e.g. the order in which specific events will take place; causal, enabling, or conventionalized relations between these events, and what kind of events occur at all in certain action sequences). Moreover, there are also scene schemas which are rather characterized by spatial than temporal relations. This means that we have mentally stored inventory information, i.e. what kinds of objects normally appear in such situations, as well as spatial-relation information, i.e. concerning the usual spatial layout of a scene. Through previous experiences we acquire a large amount of such culturally based event and scene stereotypes (along with idiosyncratic variations), either due to our previously acquired, direct familiarity with instances of events, or due to our acquaintance with written, oral, and of course pictorial descriptions of them (e.g. religious or mythological tales). They include settings, sub-goals, and actions in attempting to reach specific goals. The production and comprehension of pictorial signs, as I will claim, is frequently based upon the existence and activation of such mentally stored action and scene schemas on part of the beholders. Actually, even things in general, whether artificial or natural objects, are capable of expressing or triggering such narrative structures, thus “telling us stories”. In this paper, I shall present some examples of pictures and non-pictorial objects where narrative structures become activated and, indeed, their recognisability and comprehensibility as such presupposes these structures. (Less)

Analyzing the game narrative: structure and technique

Abstract: With rapid innovation in computational technologies, storytelling has found a new home in interactive digital media. Among all forms of interactive narrative, story-based digital games are clearly the most prosperous domain thanks to their incredible popularity. Narrative design for such games, however, is often under studied in the current practice of game analysis due to the lack of a mature discourse model specifically for games and interactive narratives. To facilitate a deep understanding of game narratives, powerful analytical instruments are needed to characterize game narratives and describe how narrative works in games. This research seeks to develop a descriptive framework to characterize and describe interactive and game narratives by applying and extending narrative theory. The framework aims to bring out new insights on interactive storytelling by observing how game narratives are constructed, what narrative techniques are used, and how narrative structure and technique affect the narrative and gameplay experience. By applying this framework to three games, the in-depth analyses systematically unravelled how various narrative principles and techniques operate in games and demonstrated the utility of the framework as an analytical instrument for the observation and understanding of the structure of interactive narratives.