Information AboutNarrative |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT NARRATIVE | |
| narratology | |
| semiotics | |
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It derives from the Latin verb ''narrare'', which means "to recount" and is related to the adjective ''gnarus'', meaning "knowing" or "skilled".Oxford English Dictionary Online, "narrate, ''v.''". Oxford University Press, 2007 (Ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root ''ghnu'', "to know".) The word "story" may be used as a synonym of "narrative", but can also be used to refer to the sequence of events described in a narrative. CONCEPTUAL ISSUES ? How is it manifested as art, cinema, theatre, or literature? How are poetry, short stories and novels of different Genre s? LITERARY THEORY General purposes in Semiotics and Literary Theory , a 'narrative' is a Story or part of a story. It may be spoken, written or imagined, and it will have one or more Points Of View representing some or all of the participants or observers. In stories told verbally, there is a person telling the story, a Narrator whom the audience can see and hear, and who adds layers of meaning to the text nonverbally. The narrator also has the opportunity to monitor the audience's response to the story and to modify the manner of the telling to clarify content or enhance listener interest. This is distinguishable from the written form in which the author must gauge the readers likely reactions when they are Decoding the text and make a final choice of words in the hope of achieving the desired response. Whatever the form, the content may concern real-world people and events. This is termed ''personal experience narrative''. When the content is Fiction al, different conventions apply. The text is projecting a narrative voice, but the narrator is Ontologically distant, i.e. belongs to an invented or Imaginary World , and not the real world. The narrator may be one of the characters in the story. Roland Barthes describes such characters as 'paper beings' and fiction comprises their narratives of personal experience as created by the author. When their thoughts are included, this is termed ''internal focalisation'', i.e. when each character's mind focuses on a particular event, the text reflects his or her reactions. In written forms, the reader ''hears'' the narrator's voice both through the choice of content and style (the author can Encode voices for different emotions and situations, and the voices can either be overt or covert), and through clues that reveal the narrator's beliefs, values, and Ideological stance, as well as the author's attitude towards people, events, and things. It is customary to distinguish a first-person from a third-person narrative ( Gérard Genette uses the terms ''homodiegetic'' and ''heterodiegetic'' narrative respectively). A homodiegetic narrator describes his or her personal and subjective experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know anything more about what goes on in the minds of any of the other characters than is revealed through their actions, whereas a heterodiegetic narrator describes the experiences of the characters who do appear in the story and, if the story's events are seen through the eyes of a third-person internal focaliser, this is termed a ''figural narrative''. In some stories, the author may be overtly omniscient, and both employ multiple points of view and comment directly on events as they occur. Tzvetan Todorov (1969) coined the term Narratology for the Structuralist analysis of any given narrative into its constituent parts to determine their function(s) and relationships. For these purposes, the story is ''what'' is narrated as usually a chronological sequence of themes, motives and plot lines. Hence, the plot represents the logical and causal structure of a story, explaining why the events occur. The term ''discourse'' is used to describe the stylistic choices that determine ''how'' the narrative text or performance finally appears to the audience. One of the stylistic decisions may be to present events in a non-chronological order, say using flashbacks to reveal motivations at a dramatic moment. WALTER FISHER'S NARRATIVE PARADIGM Outside the mainstream of semiotics, Walter Fisher has offered a comprehensive theory known as the '' Narrative Paradigm ''. This involves the claims that rather than organising data as facts in logical relationships, most people retain their everyday information as anecdotal narratives with characters, plots, motivations, and actions, and that, at its broadest level, all Communication is a form of Storytelling . SEE ALSO
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