Theories of Narrative

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Theories of Narrative
Vladimir PROPP (1895-1970)
The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, 1928
Propp examined hundreds of fairy tales in the
generic form the folk wondertale.

• He identified
• 8 character roles (or spheres of action)
• 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 (eg. If Sleeping Beauty touches a spinning
  wheel, she will die)

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Theories of Narrative
Vladimir PROPP (1895-1970)
The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, 1928
Propps 8 character roles or spheres of action

• The villain
• The hero - a seeker character motivated by an
  initial lack
• 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
• villains schemes
• Her father, who validates the hero
• The dispatcher, who sends the hero on his way
• The false hero

adapted from (Branston and Stafford, 1996)
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Theories of Narrative
Vladimir PROPP (1895-1970)
The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, 1928
Propps 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 eg fairy tales always
have happy endings or the princess always marries
the handsome prince.
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Theories of Narrative
Vladimir PROPP (1895-1970)
The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, 1928
Propps theory can be applied to generic
structures in Western culture, such as popular
film genres.
Thus genre structures form expectations in the
mind of an audience that certain rules apply to
the narrative. However, cultural change can force
structures to change eg a hero can now be a woman
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Theories of Narrative
Vladimir PROPP (1895-1970)
The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, 1928
Attempt to identify as many of Propps 8 spheres
of action from the films we have studied as you
can -

• The villain
• The hero - a seeker character motivated by an
  initial lack
• 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
• villains schemes
• Her father, who validates the hero
• The dispatcher, who sends the hero on
• his way
• The false hero

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Theories of Narrative
Tzvetan TODOROV
Bulgarian structuralist 1960s
Todorov developed the theory of disrupted
equilibrium

• He identified that stories follow a typical
  pattern of
• Equilbrium
• Disequilibrium
• Equilibrium
• This applies equally well to film texts

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Theories of Narrative
Tzvetan TODOROV
Bulgarian structuralist 1960s
Equilbrium - the status quo where things are as
they should be Disequilibrium - the status quo
is disrupted by an event Equilibrium - is
restored at the end of the story by the actions
of the hero
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Theories of Narrative
Tzvetan TODOROV
Bulgarian structuralist 1960s
What is the equilbrium at the beginning of a
crime genre or horror genre film? What sort of
event disrupts the equilibrium to cause
disequilibrium in a crime or horror film? (Give
two examples of actual events from films we have
studied) How and when is equilibrium restored
in a) a crime film? b) a horror film?
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Theories of Narrative
Tzvetan TODOROV
Bulgarian structuralist 1960s
There can be several moments in the plot where
resolution of equilibrium takes place, for
example when pieces of the detectives puzzle
fall into place.
An example from The Black Dahlia is where Bucky
Bleikert fits the puzzling words of the
pathologist to precise attributes of the Stag-
film set - the injury caused by the crown, the
river to wash away the blood.
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Theories of Narrative
Tzvetan TODOROV
Bulgarian structuralist 1960s
Todorov later developed this into a 5 stage
pattern

• a state of equilibrium at the outset.
• a disruption of the equilibrium by some action.
• a recognition that there has been a disruption.
• an attempt to repair the disruption.
• a reinstatement of the of the equilibrium.

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Theories of Narrative
Roland BARTHES
French theorist
Barthes believes the there are 5 action codes
that enable an audience to make sense of a
narrative.

• hermeneutic (narrative turning-points)
• we know where the story will go next
• proairetic (basic narrative actions)
• eg detective interviews suspect or femme fatale
  seduces hero (see Propps 31 functions)
• cultural (prior social knowledge)
• eg our attitudes to gender or racial stereotypes
• semic (medium-related codes)
• intertextuality
• symbolic (themes)
• iconography or a theme such as image versus
  reality (Curtis Hanson)

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Theories of Narrative
Claude LEVI-STRAUSS
French structuralist, 1970s
Claude Levi-Strauss is most noted for his theory
of Binary Oppositions.
In order to find those oppositions, Levi-Strauss
was less interested in syntagmatic relations
i.e.how events line up in the narrative structure
to develop the plot, than paradigmatic relations
i.e. those events and features that belong to the
theme of the piece, especially within genre based
texts.
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Theories of Narrative
Claude LEVI-STRAUSS
French structuralist
Levi-Strauss used the Western film genre to
develop his theory of Binary Oppositions.
Homesteaders Native Americans Christian Pagan
Domsetic Savage Weak Strong Garden Wilder
ness Inside society Outside society
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Theories of Narrative
Claude LEVI-STRAUSS
French structuralist
What binary oppositions can you think of from the
crime or horror genres?
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Theories of Narrative
Claude LEVI-STRAUSS
French structuralist
Levi-Strauss used the Western film genre to
develop his theory of Binary Oppositions.
detective villain princess femme
fatale? criminal straight weak strong safe
streets mean streets sane mad poor
? rich
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Theories of Narrative
DIEGESIS
The theory of diegesis applies to narrative
events, just as it did to sounds.
Diegetic narrative events take place before the
audience, within the field of vision. Non-diegeti
c narrative events take place off-screen - before
the movie started, between scenes, simultaneously
but in another room. Diegesis is the Greek for
the narrative world However, to understand
this term, we need to know the difference between
the plot, the story and screen time.
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Theories of Narrative
Victor SHKLOVSKY
Russian theorist 1920s
Shklovsky attempted to distinguish between the
plot, which he defined as the events we actually
see in the narrative and the story, which
contains all the information or events affecting
the characters both on and off screen.
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Theories of Narrative
Victor SHKLOVSKY
Russian theorist 1920s
He gave them typically difficult names
fabula the story i.e. the whole world of the
story before during and after what we see or
hear syuzhet only the events that we see or
hear within the field of vision
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Theories of Narrative
David BORDWELL and KristinTHOMPSON
American Film Studies theorists 1990s
In their book Film Art (1997), Bordwell and
Thompson give three different time zones for film
narratives
story the set of all the events in the
narrative, both the ones explicitly presented and
those the viewer infers, compose the story plot
the term plot is used to describe everything
visibly and audibly present in the film before
us. screen time the time taken to broadcast
the film Diegesis is therefore the Greek for
the narrative world of the plot during the
screen time.
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Theories of Narrative
Gill BRANSTON and Roy STAFFORD
British Media writers 1990s
Branston and Stafford happen to very usefully
apply the relevance of fabula/syuzhet theory to
the crime genre
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 couldnt possibly have
guessed at. The butler cannot, at the last
minute, suddenly be revealed to have been a
poisons expert.
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Theories of Genre
Advanced intertextuality
Intertextuality is a key component in
understanding how genre texts succeed by being at
once both Similar and Different
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Theories of Genre
John FISKE
American Professor of Communication Arts, 2000s
Fiske develops Barthes semic code
A representation of a car chase only makes sense
in relation to all the others we have seen -
after all, we are unlikely to have experienced
one in reality, and if we did, we would,
according to this model, make sense of it by
turning it into another text, which we would also
understand intertextually, in terms of what we
have seen so often on our screens. There is then
a cultural knowledge of the concept 'car chase'
that any one text is a prospectus for, and that
is used by the viewer to decode it, and by the
producer to encode it. (Fiske 1987, 115)
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Theories of Genre
Roland BARTHES
French semiotic theorist
A scene from the Hollywood film The Day After
Tomorrow
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Theories of Genre
Roland BARTHES
French semiotic theorist
A real image of people fleeing the dust cloud
in the aftermath of 9/11
25
Theories of Genre
Jacques DERRIDA
French philosopher
Jacques Derrida proposed that
'a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be
without... a genre. Every text participates in
one or several genres, there is no genreless
text' (Derrida 1981, 61).
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Theories of Genre
Jacques DERRIDA
French philosopher
Derridas point helps to explain why commentators
on September 11th could only understand what they
were seeing as like a movie. This is perhaps
what Fiske means by saying we make sense of it
by turning it into another text.
Compare this to what Fiske says about never
having experienced a car chase. If we encounter a
real-life genre experience the decoding system in
our brains becomes confused.
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Theories of Genre
Claude LEVI-STRAUSS
French structuralist, 1970s
Levi-Strauss developed the concept of bricolage
Levi-Strauss saw any text as constructed out of
socially recognisable debris from other
texts. He saw that writers construct texts from
other texts by a process of Addition Deletion
Substitution Transposition
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Theories of Genre
Gerard GENETTE
French structuralist, 1990s
Genette developed the term transtextuality and
developed five sub-groups, but only 4 apply to
film

• intertextuality quotation, plagiarism, allusion
• architextuality designation of the text as part
  of a genre by the writer or by the audience
• metatextuality explicit or implicit critical
  commentary of one text on another text
• hypotextuality the relation between a text and a
  preceeding hypotext - a text or genre on which
• it is based but which it transforms, modifies,
• elaborates or extends (including parody,
• spoof, sequel, translation)

Which of our viewed films give examples of each
type?
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http//www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/int
genre1.html