MEDIA CONVENTIONS:
NARRATIVE
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.
What Narratives Do in Media Texts
1. Simplify & organize
2. Familiarize & allow for prediction
Features of Narrative
Structure of time
• 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
Vladimir Propp
• Russian Formalist
• The Morphology of the Folk Tale
(1928)
• Stated that all fairytales have
common narrative structures and
character functions (stock
characters)
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’)
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
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)
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.
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
Roland Barthes
• French semiologist
• Identifies 5 ‘codes’ of narrative:
• hermeneutic (narrative turning-points)
we know where the story will go next
• proairetic (basic narrative actions)
Ex. A detective interviews a suspect
• cultural (prior social knowledge)
Ex. our attitudes about gender or race
• semic (medium-related codes)
intertextuality
• symbolic (themes)
iconography
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).
Barthes – The Semic Code (Intertextuality)
John Fiske develops Barthes’ semic code
• A representation of a car chase only makes sense in
relation to all the other car chase we have seen.
• This process of using one media text to make sense of
another is called intertextuality. We are unlikely to have
experienced a car chase in reality, but even if we did, we
would still make sense of it by making reference to
existing media texts (since they shape our concept of ‘car
chase’)
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.
Levi-Strauss – Binary Oppositions
Hero
Natural
Good
Male
Rational
Strong
Day
Coward
Artificial
Evil
Female
Emotional
Weak
Night
Binary Oppositions in a ‘Western’ film
Homesteaders
Christian
Domestic
Weak
Farm/Garden
Inside society
Native Americans
Pagan
Savage
Strong
Wilderness
Outside society
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