Section 3 - Narrative: A media Studies key aspect

Narrative -
Narrative theory - Theory about the ways in which stories are structured in order to create meaning for the audience.

• Narrative is the media term for story telling.
• Narrative is the way the different elements in a story are organised to make a meaningful story. Some of these elements can be facts as in a documentary, or characters and action as in a drama.

What is it?

• When we look at narrative we see that stories throughout the media share certain characteristics. This often links them to genre.
• Different media tell stories in a variety of different ways. 

Narrative  structures -

• This is the way the story or plot unfolds.
• Is the story an open or closed structure?
• A closed structure means the story ends satisfactorily as in most films - this is known as closure.
• An open ending means there is no final conclusion to the story - a television soap has no final ending, it just has minor endings.
• Some texts have an interactive structure e.g. Big brother
• A multi-strand structure means there are several narratives running at the same time. This is very common in TV, such as Holby city, and The Bill.
• Other narrative structures include point of view (pov) (documentaries often do this)
• A popular narrative device is the enigma. The plot constructs a puzzle that the audience is asked to solve while the characters act out the story.

How is it informed?

• Narrative is informed by character, action and location.
• Characters have functions such as heroes or villains, or someone who assists the hero or villain as a helper or messenger.
• The action determines how the events in the narrative occur and the influence they have.
• The location of a film or television programme is an important ingredient in how the story unfolds. Dracula must have a castle.
• Narrative is often delivered to the audience by expectation, suspense, tension and closure.
• The audience is led to expect certain things to happen which leads to tension and excitement.
• Expectation, suspense and tension are created by the use of media language.

Our job -

• Directors and producers use many techniques to get a story to an audience in an involving, interesting, exciting and entertaining way. Our job as media students is to find out what these techniques are, and see where and how they are sued and what they mean in media texts. This is known as textual analysis.

Narrative theory -

These are four main theorists to consider:

1. Tzvetan Todorov
2. Vladimir Propp
3. Roalnd Barthes
4. Levi - Strauss

Todorov -

• Tovorovs theory has 3 main parts:

1. The text begins with a sate of equilibrium - Everything appears to be normal or calm.
2. There is some kind of disruption or disequilibrium - this is often a threat to the normal situation or it could be just a setback
3. A new equilibrium is produced to end the narrative. In the best narratives there is some kind of change for the better perhaps in the main characters behaviour or outlook on life.

Todorov suggest there are five stages to how the narrative progresses:

1. The equilibrium has to be carefully shown (otherwise the disruption may not be dramatic enough to create a strong plot)
2. There is a disruption
3. There is a recognition  that a disruption has happened.
4. There is an attempt to repair the damage done by the disruption
5. A new equilibrium is achieved.

• Here narrative is not seen as linear but as circular.
• The narrative is driven by the characters' attempts to restore the equilibrium, although the end result is not quite the same as the beginning.

Propps theory -

• Propp studied folk tales and he proposed ways of grouping characters and their actions into eight broad character types or 'spheres of action'
• N.B. One character may occupy more than one sphere of action

Spheres of action -

1. The villain
2. The hero, or character who seeks something, usually motivated by a lack of something (money, love etc.) The hero doesn't have to be heroic in the way most people would understand it - heroes can be male or female, brave or cowardly.
3. The donor, who provides an object with some magic property.
4. The helper, who aids the hero.
5. The princess, reward for the hero, and object of the villains schemes. Again, this is not necessarily a beautiful damsel in distress - the princess can be male!
6. Her father, who rewards the hero.
7. The dispatcher, who sends the hero on his way.
8. The false hero, the character who also lays claim to the princess but is unsuitable and causes complications.

Levi - Strauss -

• He introduced the notion of binary oppositions as a useful way to consider the production of meaning within narratives.
• he argued that all construction of meaning was dependent, to some degree, on these oppositions.
• Examples - good vs evil
• male vs female
• Humanity vs technology
• nature vs industrialisms
• east vs west
• dark vs light
• dirt vs cleanliness