Showing papers on "Narratology published in 2009"

Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production

Abstract: Many concepts have been developed to describe the convergence of media, languages, and formats in contemporary media systems. This article is a theoretical reflection on “transmedia storytelling” from a perspective that integrates semiotics and narratology in the context of media studies. After dealing with the conceptual chaos around transmedia storytelling, the article analyzes how these new multimodal narrative structures create different implicit consumers and construct a narrative world. The analysis includes a description of the multimedia textual structure created around the Fox television series 24. Finally, the article analyzes transmedia storytelling from the perspective of a semiotics of branding.

An Introduction to Narratology

Abstract: An Introduction to Narratology is an accessible, practical guide to narratological theory and terminology and its application to literature. In this book, Monika Fludernik outlines: the key concepts of style, metaphor and metonymy, and the history of narrative forms narratological approaches to interpretation and the linguistic aspects of texts, including new cognitive developments in the field how students can use narratological theory to work with texts, incorporating detailed practical examples a glossary of useful narrative terms, and suggestions for further reading. This textbook offers a comprehensive overview of the key aspects of narratology by a leading practitioner in the field. It demystifies the subject in a way that is accessible to beginners, but also reflects recent theoretical developments and narratology’s increasing popularity as a critical tool.

Handbook of narratology

Abstract: This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in narratology and is now available in a second, completely revised and expanded edition. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned narratologists elucidate central terms of narratology, present a critical account of the major research positions and their historical development and indicate directions for future research.

Taking off the Heat: Narrative Sensemaking in Post-crisis Inquiry Reports

Abstract: Crises represent moments when sensemaking fails. Official reports of post-crisis analyses re-establish patterns of sensemaking. Whereas scholars agree on the narrative basis of post-crisis sensemaking, the means by which meaning is recreated about the confusing events have not been fully investigated. To fill this gap, empirical data are drawn from the series of investigations that took place after the sudden and deadly heat wave that occurred in France during the summer of 2003. Introducing tools from narratology, this article analyses how these reports restore meaning by addressing the following questions: What happened? Was it foreseeable? and Who is responsible? The key narrative choices implied are mapped. A typology of crisis plots is proposed. Building on this typology, the article demonstrates that successive reports progressively built a focused, simplified story about the crisis. Methodological and practical implications for scholars and practitioners using inquiry reports for research and learn...

Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them

Abstract: One of the most interesting things about fictional nar ratives is that they do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it. Many narratives confront us with bizarre storyworlds which are governed by prin ciples that have very little to do with the real world around us. Even though many narrative texts teem with unnatural (i.e., physically or logically impossible) scenarios that take us to the limits of human cogni tion, narrative theory has not yet done justice to these cases of unnaturalness or the question of how readers can come to terms with them. In what follows, I define the term unnatural and outline a cognitive model that describes ways in which readers can make sense of unnatural scenarios. Second, I use these reading strategies to discuss examples of unnaturalness in postmodernist narratives.1 Arguing that ideas from cognitive narratology help illuminate

Narrative and Learning with Web 2.0 Technologies: Towards a Research Agenda

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of Web 20 technologies on the ways learning can be conceived of as a narrative process within contemporary contexts, using blogs as an illustrative example It is premised on the concept of narrative as a way in which individuals re-present and organize experience in order to learn from it and make it sharable with others within social contexts The first part of the paper offers a theoretical analysis of the role of narrative in the social construction of knowledge by the ways it enables users of Web 20 technologies to participate meaningfully in the exchange of experiences and ideas The second part of the paper offers a ‘situated’ analysis of the narrative practices engaged with by users of blogs A ‘narrative trail’ is used to provide a contextualized instance of the narrative practices which are involved The paper concludes by examining the research issues which are raised and suggests a research agenda which is needed to explore Web 20 technologies as social utilities affecting knowledge production, in which the adaptation of narrative theory is a central feature

Narratology and interpretation : the content of narrative form in ancient literature

Abstract: The categories of classical narratology have been successfully applied to ancient texts in the last two decades, but in the meantime narratological theory has moved on. In accordance with these developments, "Narratology and Interpretation" draws out the subtler possibilities of narratological analysis for the interpretation of ancient texts. The articles make a contribution to the theory of narrative as well as to our understanding of ancient literature including epic, lyric, tragedy and historiography.

From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema

Abstract: With this lucid translation of Du litteraire au filmique, Andre Gaudreault's highly influential and original study of film narratology is now accessible to English-language audiences for the first time. Building a theory of narrative on sources as diverse as Plato, The Arabian Nights,and Proust, From Plato to Lumiere challenges narratological orthodoxy by positing that all forms of narrative are mediated by an .underlying narrator. who exists between the author and narrative text. Offering illuminating insights, definitions, and formal distinctions, Gaudreault examines the practices of novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers and applies his theory to the early cinema of the Lumiere brothers and more recent films. He also enhances our understanding of how narrative develops visually without language - monstration - by detailing how the evolution of the medium influenced narratives in cinema. From Plato to Lumiere includes a translation of Paul Ricoeur's preface to the French-language edition as well as a new preface by Tom Gunning. It is a must-read for cinema and media students and scholars and an essential text on the study of narrative.

Point of view, perspective, and focalization : modeling mediation in narrative

Abstract: Stories do not actually exist in the world but are created and structured - modeled - through the process of mediation, i.e. through the means and techniques by which they are represented. This is an important field, not only for narratology but also for literary and media studies. The articles in this volume, contributed by international scholars from seven countries, address this problem anew by reviewing the differentiation of mediation and re-defining its dimensions both in literary texts and other media such as drama and theater, film, and computer games.

Narratology in the age of cross-disciplinary narrative research

Abstract: Narrative Research has over the last 15 years developed into an international and interdisciplinary field. This volume collects fifteen essays which look at narrative and narrativity from various perspectives, including literary studies and hermeneutics, cognitive theory and creativity research, metaphor studies, film theory and intermediality, as well as memory studies, musicology, theology and psychology. The topics touch on a wide range of issues, such as the current state of narratology and its potential for development, narrativity in visual and auditive art forms, the cultural functions of narrative, and the role of narrative concepts across the disciplines.

Dramatology in life, disorder, and psychoanalytic therapy: A further contribution to interpersonal psychoanalysis

Abstract: Action and interaction, and emotion and thought as the inner wellsprings of action, play a central role in the lives of individuals, families, and society, spanning the continuum between everyday life and disorder. Until now, the narrative tradition has been the main methodology for portraying and formulating human action and interaction, and little has been written about the dramatic approach to life, disorder, and therapy. Since the essence of drama is action, dialogue, character, and emotion, it is time to give drama its due. The author proposes a methodological concept – dramatology – analogous to narratology, to highlight the dramatic method of investigating action and interaction in life, disorder, and therapy. Breuer and Freud presented both aspects of dramatology: dramatization in dream and fantasy, and dramatization in act, focusing on the person. This approach was elaborated by psychoanalysts with an interpersonal orientation, focusing on the person and speech as action. Dramatology is ...

Narratology in the Archive of Literature

Abstract: To chart accurately the contours of the novel, literary historians are in the process of recovering the variety and complexity of its generic practice across its history. "Narratology in the Archive" surveys this recovery and discusses its methodology, differentiating this recovery from symptomatic reading. The article then illustrates this method with the recovery of sea adventure fiction as an influential transnational practice of the novel from Defoe to Conrad. I suggest that sea adventure plots are defined by readers9 playful manipulation of information to solve problems posed by the text.

The Concept of Performativity in Narratology

Abstract: This essay traces the travelling concept of performativity across the field of narratology. Distinguishing different forms of interdisciplinary transfer, the text offers a definition of performativity in narratology and attempts to give a systematic account of how the concept has been adapted to narratological research. I argue that the concept of performativity can refer to two distinct levels of the narratological investigation – to the story level and to the narrator's agency or act of narration, and that this act can also be considered in a wider pragmatic and cultural context. Special attention is given to the relation between the concepts of performativity and performance on the one hand, and the relation between performativity and speech act theory on the other.

Hell on Earth Threats, Citizens and the State from Buffy to Beck

Abstract: A number of security scholars and policy-makers now approach the fictional narratives of popular culture as both a source of and a tool for imagining current and future threats and risks following the ‘failure of imagination’ that was 9/11. Building on this line of thought, this article assumes that contemporary popular fiction may be important to explorations of national and global security not only because elements of the security community have begun to turn to popular fiction in security scenario thinking and planning, but because people themselves have long turned to the popular cultural works that surround them as a particularly accessible source of security scenarios, thinking and even security practices. With the help of critical literary and cultural theories around the supernatural and crime narratology, as well as existing critical security studies scholarship, this article examines two contemporary popular cultural narratives, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ from the United States and the Martin Beck series from Sweden, and asks how each narrative can be said to depict the new global security environment and the notion of borderless threats. How does a popular cultural fantasy narrative about energetic teens and demons in America’s low-welfare ‘Ownership Society’ represent the internal—external security boundary as compared with a long-standing popular realist narrative about tired cops and crime in Sweden’s high-welfare ‘People’s Home’? Although such a comparison may at first seem far-fetched, in this article I argue that comparing apples and oranges in this instance proves valuable, since the differing fictional modes at work in ‘Buffy’ and ‘Beck’ not only have much to say about the kinds of internal—external security images and actors that are presented in each, but also the kind of ‘security imagination’ that each narrative makes possible.

The Narrative-Communication Structure in Interactive Narrative Works

Abstract: Interactive work on new media platforms differs from familiar work on more traditional media, such as literature, theatre, cinema and television, in terms of their narrative-communication situation. Interactive works, unlike cinematic works, allow the viewer to participate to a different extent, involving a reciprocal communication process. In this paper I propose a bi-directional communication structure for interactive storytelling systems, based on narratology theory and communication film theory. I adapt existing narrative-communication models of conventional media, mainly those of Seymour Chatman and Vivian Sobchack, to suggest a detailed narrative-communication model for interactive storytelling systems, which would facilitate the formulation of a better definition of the various constituent elements of interactive storytelling communication, and the functions they fulfill.

Lost in the Gutter: Within and Between Frames in Narrative and Narrative Theory

Abstract: One of the most difficult and confusing of narratological concepts is that of the "narrative frame." While numerous studies refer to and examine the frame, its defin- ition remains somewhat elusive. The central reason for this is the sheer quantity of concepts and ideas to which this singular appellation refers. Internal narrators and narratives, paratexts, advertisements, blurbs, the covers of a book: all of these have been referred to as "frames," in addition to more metaphorical applications. In "Framing in Wuthering Heights," for example, John Matthews looks not only at "em- bedded narratives," but also at the metaphorical frame of the human body, and the general concept of boundaries in order to elucidate how the novel explores "empty middles" and Lacanian psycholinguistic "lack." That is, a look at a more or less ob- jectively identifiable narrative feature (narratives within other narratives) is soon treated figuratively, as "liminality" of both form and content, generating a metaphor- ical slippage that may be productive for understanding the individual novel, but is less so for understanding the concept itself. Indeed, as I will argue, constitutive of the difficulty in pinpointing the term is the link between the literary frame and framing in the visual arts, particularly painting. Some of the earliest discussions of the liter- ary frame attempt to map the typical notion of the picture frame onto literature with problematic and confusing results. In order to address this problem, I divide this essay into two primary parts. First, I discuss the shortcomings of the "picture frame" model, particularly in its con- flation of two distinct concepts: the physical liminality of frames and their capacity to direct interpretation. Through a use of a simple two-axis graph, I illustrate how the conflation of these two functions blurs understanding of the various kinds of frames

Narrative Convergence, Cross-Sited Productions and the Archival Dilemma:

Abstract: / This article addresses the speculative role of digital preservation from the standpoint of convergent literatures. `Cross-sited narratives', multimodal stories told across media channels, are introduced here as a specific mode of narrative instrumentality. It is argued that contemporary models of the archive structured on organizational models such as genetic criticism and on preservational models such as emulation and migration are not equipped to handle cross-sited works, as they are premised on mono-media sensibilities. Primarily exploring Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000) and Neil Young's Greendale (2003), two works that resist digitization both materially and thematically, the claim is made that although there are no functional models that might accommodate either of these productions, by speculating about their future we not only can obtain a better understanding of the implicit assumptions of digital preservation, but also of cross-siting itself.

Curveship: An Interactive Fiction System for Interactive Narrating

Abstract: Interactive fiction (often called "IF") is a venerable thread of creative computing that includes Adventure, Zork, and the computer game The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as innovative recent work. These programs are usually known as "games," appropriately, but they can also be rich forms of text-based computer simulation, dialog systems, and examples of computational literary art. Theorists of narrative have long distinguished between the level of underlying content or story (which can usefully be seen as corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression or discourse (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer and user). While IF development systems have offered a great deal of power and flexibility to author/programmers by providing a computational model of the fictional world, previous systems have not systematically distinguished between the telling and what is told. Developers were not able to control the content and expression levels independently so that they could, for instance, have a program relate events out of chronological order or have it relate events from the perspective of different characters. Curveship is an interactive fiction system which draws on narrative theory and computational linguistics to allow the transformation of the narrating in these ways. This talk will briefly describe interactive fiction, narrative variation, and how Curveship provides new capabilities for interactive fiction authors.

Becoming bilingual : exploring language and literacy learning through the lens of narrative

Abstract: In this thesis, I investigate the nature of change that two adult language learners/users have experienced in learning to become bilingual through the mediation of autobiographical narrative writing. The major purposes of the thesis are to identify the nature of change that adult language learners/users have experienced in learning and using plural languages through the mediation of autobiographical writing in L2, and to examine the usefulness of narrative inquiry as a complementary research approach to understand the complexity of language and literacy learning from the learner‘s perspectives. To this end the following research questions have been posed. 1. What can learners‘ stories tell about the long-term processes of language and literacy learning? 2. What role can written autobiographical narrative play in processes of language learning? 3. What is the potential contribution of narrative inquiry to research in the field of language and literacy learning? In addressing these questions, I have drawn on socio-cultural and narrative theory to undertake a longitudinal study of two language learners/users – Satoko, a young Chinese-Japanese woman, and myself. Thus, the study comprises Satoko‘s biographical study and my own autobiographical study, in which I am simultaneously the subject and the object of inquiry. I have analysed how processes of becoming bilingual for both of us were represented in autobiographical narratives, and, in turn, how the act of writing autobiographical narratives mediated ways in which we learned to become bilingual. By utilising narrative inquiry, I have attempted to broaden the locus of research into language and literacy learning from language development to learner development. A feature of the research design implemented in the thesis is its layered approach to narrative construction and analysis. This approach has enabled me to provide detailed insights into the complex interrelationships between linguistic and non-linguistic dimensions of language learning. In particular it has enabled me to highlight the multifaceted nature of learners‘ change and the significance of affect, social relations, and transformation of identities as learners work between two languages. It has also enabled me to address ways in which learners‘ engagement with written narrative impacted both their linguistic and non-linguistic development. Outcomes from the research suggest that complex processes of language and literacy learning can be profitably examined through the notion of becoming bilingual, which entails continuous translation across languages – hence the use of the term becoming bilingual in the title of this thesis.

Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel

Abstract: "'Scientific people/ proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space'" (The Time Machine 268). What is at stake in treating time "as a kind of space," politically, philosophi cally, and narratologically? While time travel has often been dismissed as merely a popular science-fictional gimmick, it seems far more productive to regard it as an in scription of a specific ideology of temporality. The roots of this ideology are in the evolutionary debate of the fin-de-siecle but its contemporary offshoots have become part of postmodernity's problematic relationship with time and history. The post modern trouble with time finds its expression in the "spatial turn" in narrativity, which includes the topos of time travel (Smethurst 37). In this essay, I will trace the development of time travel, from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine to postmodern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity. As opposed to most narrative conventions, time travel originates in a single text, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895).1 In his first novel, Wells invents not just a new plot but a new chronotope. Chronotope, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is the spa tial-temporal configuration of the narrative text, "the intrinsic connectedness of tem poral and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (15). The

How to Read Technology Critically

Abstract: Narrative theory takes the ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ to be the basic unit of meaning for understanding and explaining human action. Philosophers such as Arthur Danto (1968), Alasdair MacIntyre (1982) and Paul Ricoeur (1984, 1986, 1988) claim that narratives capture the temporal, historical and contextual character of human experience better than shorter linguistic units of meaning, like the ‘utterance’ or the ‘sentence’. A narrative creates the most comprehensive interpretation possible by synthesizing diverse plot elements into a meaningful story. Both non-fictional and fictional stories relate episodes of human experience, the former as they actually happened, the latter as if they happened. Yet traditional narrative theories are prejudiced in favour of persons over things.1 They treat people as if only they deserve to have their stories told; non-humans, natural events and things are props or circumstances to be dealt with but never themselves the subject of their own stories. Mere things get explanations; persons get stories. As a result, the ‘narrative turn’ has had far less of an effect on the philosophy of technology as elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences. Philosophical frameworks prejudiced against things are not particularly helpful when it comes to understanding the philosophical dimensions of technologies.

Let me tell you a story: narratives and narration in health communication research

Abstract: The area of study known as health communication has traditionally been a very empirical, social scientific field of research. In the last fifteen years, however, researchers have begun expanding the horizons of health communication by employing and legitimizing alternative approaches to the understanding of communicative processes as they relate to health and illness and to the delivery of health care. Notable amongst those approaches is an application of narrative theory and an examination of the role of narratives and stories in the health, healing, coping, and dying processes. This chapter will provide an overview of how this approach has come to be applied within the area of health communication. It will begin with a conceptualization of narrative and the process of narration. The overarching social functions of narration will be discussed, followed by an exploration of varying perspectives on narrative and narration. The focus will then move to a more specific application of the concepts of narrative and narration to health, healing, illness, and coping. Discussion will focus on narration as it functions to facilitate understanding of patients and health conditions, on narration in the self-identify process and how that relates to coping and healing, the broader roles of narration in coping and healing (beyond identity concerns), narration as it helps us understand the nature of health and illness, narration as it impacts healing, and narration as it helps tell us how to live. Particularly interesting and insightful examples of the application of narrative theory and the examination of health/illness/coping narratives will be highlighted.