Something to consider in analysis of your moving image prouct in both the Foundation and Advanced Portfolios. Whilst you may not be aware of it, the codes and concentions associated with various narrative types, genres etc. are deeply ingrained in our cultures, and therefore i your minds. Narrative theorists have attempted to create their own frameworks to explain how our narratives “work”. This post will hopefully become a jumping off pint for exploration of these theorists, so you are able to consider their ideas and then can apply them to your work once complete. Then you can use the information in the answer to question 1b in the G325 examination, if it is the area of focus in the question.
Note, as always, that a number of these theories conflict. You must consider them all, and pick your way through carefully in your exploration, but this considered approach should get you marks.
A nice powerpoint overview of several key players.
Mediaknowalls introduction to narrative
Propp
Vladimir Propp extended the Russian Formalist approach to the study of narrative structure. In the Formalist approach, sentence structures were broken down into analyzable elements, or morphemes, and Propp used this method by analogy to analyze Russian fairy tales. By breaking down a large number of Russian folk tales into their smallest narrative units, or narratemes, Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures. (Wikipedia)
You may find Propp’s theories quaint in their analysis of what areessentially fairy stories, but some of his observations may ring true with elements of your own chosen narratives. Look at some more detailed explanations of his work, especially his character list and 31 narrateme structure.
Todorov
TZVETAN TODOROV (Bulgarian structuralist linguist publishing influential work on narrative from the 1960s onwards) Todorov suggested that stories begin with an equilibrium or status quo where any potentially opposing forces are in balance. This is disrupted by some event, setting in chain a series of events. Problems are solved so that order can be restored to the world of the fiction.
11BTodorovStructuralAnalysisofNarrative-1(Courtesy of rlwclarke.net)
Adam Ranson’s nice, clear summation.
Barthes
Roland Barthes (12 November 1915 – 25 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes’ ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and post-structuralism.
cla.purdue.edu page on the 5 codes
A simpler version from changingminds.org
Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss, believes that underlying structures – whether in kinship systems, myths, rituals or objects such as masks – are evidence for the way the mind works. He assumes, like Chomsky, that the human mind always and everywhere works in the same ways. For Levi-Strauss, following in the footsteps of another linguist, Roman Jakobson, the leading idea is that the human mind operates in terms of binary oppositions and that such oppositions structure all the phenomena of human culture. Myths, for example, provide an imaginary resolution of the contradictions into which our binary ways of thinking lead us. So the Oedipus myth is a meditation on the conflict between a society’s belief that human beings spring from the earth (autochthony) and the evident fact that they are born of the union of man and woman. The Oedipus myth makes sense of this opposition by putting it into parallel with the opposition between overvaluing blood relations (Oedipus’s incest) and undervaluing them (Oedipus’s patricide). (See Levi – Strauss’s essay, `The Structural Study of Myth’, for a full exposition.) (courtesy of selectedworks.co.uk)
HX media 