Lesson Plan 23.1.2010

23.1.2010

9.30 am to 1.00 pm
On Narratology/Narratives

1. Narrative orders time and space into forms
2. Narratives help us construct or deconstruct meaning
o Denotation/connotation
o Tradition (Conservative)/Contemporary (Modern, Post Modern, Deconstructionist - Liberal)
o Subversion – Eg. Use of the film “Intolerance” as an example of subversion. Subversion
o Forms/sequence/story
o Hayden White: "Far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted."
3. Narratives enable sharing of information, knowledge, wisdom.
• Extensions of narrative – Hebrew-Christian-Koranic
• Proprietary vs Open Source narratives
• Simple/Complex narrative – Eg. This the house that Jack built
4. Narrative-making must include choice of narrative genres and narrative media – print, video, digital, etc.
5. Narrative enables the analysis of culture.

Discourse and Story:
"Story" refers to the actual chronology of events in a narrative:

a) Beginning
b) Middle
c) End

3-act structure

a) First
b) Next
c) Then
d) After That
e) What
f) Finally


Discourse refers to the manipulation of that story in the presentation of the narrative. These terms refer, then, to the basic structure of all narrative form. Story refers, in most cases, only to what has to be reconstructed from a narrative; the chronological sequence of events as they actually occurred in the time-space (or diegetic) universe of the narrative being read. The closest a film narrative ever comes to pure story is in what is termed "real time." In literature, it's even harder to present material in real time. One example occurs at the end of the Odyssey (Book XXIII, pages 467-68); Odysseus here presents the story of his adventures to Penelope in almost pure "story" form, that is, in the chronological order of occurrence. Stories are rarely recounted in this fashion, however. So, for example, in the Odyssey, we do not begin at the chronological start of the story but in medias res (in the middle of things), when Odysseus is about to be freed from the isle of Calypso (which actually occurs nearly at the end of the chronological story which Odysseus relates to Penelope on p. 467). Discourse also refers to all the material an author adds to a story: similes, metaphors, verse or prose, etc. In film, such manipulations are extended to include framing, cutting, camera movement, camera angles, music, etc.

http://www.webwinds.com/odyssey/calypso.htm

“On the lush, luxuriant island of Ogygia, Odysseus in the Odyssey spends seven years of his ten year journey home with the beautiful seductive nymph Calypso, who virtually possesses him and compels him to live a sensual but vegetative existence. For ten years, surrounded by men, he lived out the male heroic ideal of warrior, then spent several years further testing himself against otherworldly obstacles. In the process, he lost all of his companions, and has nothing left but the little that remains of himself.”

The narrative gets complicated when various elements from other disciplines like psychology, history, anthropology etc, are brought in or when such readings are possible from the text.
Diegesis: A narrative's time-space continuum, to borrow a term from Star Trek. The diegesis of a narrative is its entire created world. Any narrative includes a diegesis, whether you are reading science fiction, fantasy, mimetic realism, or psychological realism. However, each kind of story will render that time-space continuum in different ways. The suspension of disbelief that we all perform before entering into a fictional world entails an acceptance of a story's diegesis. The Star Trek franchise is fascinating for narratology because it has managed to create such a fully realized and complex diegetic universe that the narratives of all five TV shows (TNG, DS9, STV, Enterprise,, the original Star Trek) and all the movies occur, indeed coexist, within the same diegetic time-space.
Narration refers to the way that a story is told, and so belongs to the level of discourse (although in first-person narration it may be that the narrator also plays a role in the development of the story itself). The different kinds of narration are categorized by each one's primary grammatical stance: either 1) the narrator speaks from within the story and, so, uses "I" to refer to him- or herself; in other words, the narrator is a character of some sort in the story itself, even if he is only a passive observer; or 2) the narrator speaks from outside the story and never employs the "I" (third person narration). Other narration modes are third-person omniscient narration; third-person-limited narration; and objective treatment.

Homework:

1. Find Homer’s Odyssey (available on the Web) and read Book 5 and Book 23.
2. Read Hills Like White Elephants
3. Write a 300-word description of your bedroom or create a 8-frame visual description of your bedroom as a narrative flow.