1. Media conventions: Narrative

2. Definitions – Plot vs. Narrative
Plot: The sequence of incidents or events that comprise a story.
Narrative: The way a story is told; how information is presented to an audience.

3. What Narratives Do in Media Texts
Simplify & organize
Familiarize & allow for prediction

4. Features of Narrative Structure of time Point of view
Linear/Chronological – ex. most ‘biopics’ (biographies)
Non Linear – ex. Pulp Fiction, Memento
Cyclical – ex. Groundhog Day, Run Lola Run
Point of view
Single/Multiple viewpoints (restricted vs. omniscient)
Motivations, Causes & Effects
Open or closed
Episode of a TV sitcom vs. a film

5. Narration, Story & Plot
Diegesis – a term for the world of the story, which can include music.
Story – consists of all the events in a narrative, both the ones explicitly presented and those the viewer infers.
Plot – “everything visibly and audibly present in the film before us', including all the story events directly depicted”
Narration – 1st person, 3rd person & omniscient (voice over)
Unrestricted narration– the audience knows more, sees more, hears, more than all the characters. Also called omniscient narration, especially in historical narratives, where the audience knows the outcome of an actual historical event (i.e., Civil War) that the characters are living on screen.
Restricted narration – The characters and the audience learn story information at the same time.

6. Vladimir Propp Russian Formalist
The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928)
Stated that all fairytales have common narrative structures and character functions (stock characters)

7. Propp’s Analysis of Fairytales
Propp examined hundreds of fairy tales and identified:
31 functions which move the story along
Examples include the punishment of the villain (usually at the end of the story); the ban of an action (i.e. if Sleeping Beauty touches a spinning wheel, she will die)
Not all 31 had to be present, however, they did always follow the same sequential order
These functions were performed by one of 8 main character types/roles that advanced the action 8 character roles (or‘spheres of action’)

8. Propp – (Stock) Characters & Roles
Propp’s 8 character roles or‘spheres of action’
The hero, who is motivated by an initial lack
The villain, who tries to defeat the hero
The donor, who provides an object with some magic property
The helper, who aids the hero
The princess, a reward for the hero and object of the
villain’s schemes
Her father, who validates the hero
The dispatcher, who sends the hero on his way
The false hero, who presents a contrast with the real hero

9. Modern Day Examples

10. Propp – Narrative as Structure
Propp’s theory is a form of structuralism, which is a view that all media is inevitably in the form of certain fixed structures.
These structures are often culturally derived and form expectations in the mind of an audience from within that same culture (fairy tales always have happy endings or the princess always marries the handsome prince).
Genre plays an important role in structuring our expectations and understanding which rules can apply in the narrative. In other words, we know the rules that determine how certain kinds of narratives will ‘behave’ (detective stories vs. romantic comedies)

11. Tvzetan Todorov
Franco-Bulgarian philosopher who coined the term narratology, meaning to look at units of meaning in a text.
Claimed all stories had a basic structure based on equilibrium.

12. Todorov – Narrative & Equilibrium
Equilibrium (sense of order/calm, the status quo)
A disruption of this equilibrium by an event
A realization that a disruption has happened
An attempt to repair the damage of the disruption
A restoration of the equilibrium which may be a new or changed one

13. Roland Barthes French semiologist
Identifies different‘codes’ of narratives

14. Barthes – The Enigma Code (Puzzles)
The narrative poses questions or ‘puzzles’ that create suspense and move the story along.
As audiences, the unravelling of these codes and thinking about the questions posed by events provide viewing pleasure.
We should feel at the end of a good detective story or thriller that we have been pleasurably puzzled, so that the‘solution’—our piecing together of the story in its proper order out of the evidence offered by the plot—will come as a pleasure. We should not feel that the plot has cheated; that parts of the story have suddenly been revealed which we couldn’t possibly have guessed at (ex. In a murder mystery, the butler cannot, at the last minute, suddenly be revealed to be a poisons expert).

15. Claude Levi-Strauss French anthropologist
He looked at narrative structure and themes in texts in terms of binary oppositions.
Binary oppositions are opposite values that reveal the structure of media texts (he also argued that cultures are structured in a similar way).
These oppositions create tensions and conflicts that structure stories.

16. Levi-Strauss – Binary Oppositions
Hero
Coward
Natural
Artificial
Good
Evil
Male
Female
Rational
Emotional
Strong
Weak
Day
Night

17. Binary Oppositions in a ‘Western’ film
Homesteaders
Native Americans
Christian
Pagan
Domestic
Savage
Weak
Strong
Farm/Garden
Wilderness
Inside society
Outside society

18. Summary PROPP – ‘Stock’ character types with prescribed roles
TODOROV – Equilibrium is disturbed and then restored
BARTHES – Narratives provide puzzles for us to solve
LEVI-STRAUSS – Binary oppositions create conflicts and tensions that propel the narrative