Narrative

Fiske, J. (1987). Narrative. In J. Fiske, Television culture. London: Routledge

-Narrative and language two main cultural processes shared by all societies. 
-Narrative is a way of making sense of our experience of the real
-Narrative is a fundamental cultural process -> television is predominantly narrational in its mode.
-Narrative works as a sense-making mechanism primarily through two dimensions: 
1- Syntagmatic: upon which it links events rationally - so as to make them understandable and meaningful
2- Paradigmatic: narrative takes character and settings and makes a non-temporal sense of them that serves as an additional unifying agency


Realistic narrative is dominant on television
Classic realist narrative: construct a self-contained, internally consistent world which is real-seeming.
features by Kuhn, (1985)

1. linearity of cause and effect 
2. high degree of narrative closure
3. fictional world governed by spatial and temporal verisimilitude
4. centrality of the narrative agency of psychologically rounded characters

Structuralist approaches to narrative:

concerned to reveal and investigate the discursive nature of all cultural constructs

Mythic narrative:

One way which structuralism tried explaining what diverse narratives have in common is through myth.

Levi-Strauss, a structural anthropologist, and Barthes, a Marxist semiotician, share the same idea that myth making is a universal cultural process and the deeper truer meanings of myths are not immediately apparent.

Levi-Strauss' "logic of the concrete": process of transforming the binary oppositions such as good:evil, nature:culture, humankind:gods, into concrete representations.

Hero/Heroine: Myth produces hero and heroine with characteristics from both opposed categories. 

- Hero has excessive meaning, extra ordinary semiotic power and acts as a mediator between the opposing concepts

-acts as embodied resolutions of the conflict between the forces of order and those of disorder  

-For Barthes, myth works as to naturalize and universalize the class interests of the bourgeoisie-> ideological 
-For Barthes, myth is bourgeois: it always promotes interests of the dominant classes by making the meaning that serve these interests appear natural and universal. 


Narrative structures:
Propp's (1968) structure: 
- Preparation
- Complication
- Transference
- Struggle
- Return
- Recognition
According to Propp, they are always in the same sequence and common to all fairy tales
Character is defined in sphere of action 
Universal structure of popular narrative of which individual stories are transformations
Struggle between the hero and the villain in Propp's structure, is a metaphorical transformation between the forces 
of order and forces of disorder, good and evil, culture and nature. - fundamental to all stories and narrative explores the role of human and social agents in it.


Todorov's (1977) model of narrative: also emphasizes the social over individual- narrative begins with a state of equilibrium or social harmony.
Two kinds of elements: 1- State: either equilibrium or disequilibrium
2- Passage: from one state to another, through an event or chain of events


Barthes(1977)' functions and indices: 
functions are events that are strung together to form the sequence of the narrative.  - distributional and syntagmatic
indices: are the constants that are involved in the narrative sequence, but not advance it - characters, settings, atmosphere. - integrational and paradigmatic
e.g popular tv series like cop and adventure shows, aimed for mean and children, tend toward functional, serials like soap operas, aimed at women, more towards indicial
- Functions have two types: nuclei, which are essential to the progress of the narrative and catalyzers, which fill in between the nuclei and could be dispensed with.
- Indices have two types: indices proper, narrative agents, mood, atmosphere, and informants, which identify or locate in time and space. 
Informants are called realism operators by Barthes, that make the world of narrative close to real. These functions are then structured into sequences, like words into phrases.


Narrative codes:
Structuration, process by which meaning is structured into narrative by writer-reader, for if there is a universal in narrative it lies in this structuration in which the writer and the reader engage on equal terms.
Voices shared by reader and writer, according to Barthes, organized into five codes:
1- Symbolic code: organizes fundamental binary oppositions that are important in a particular culure e.g. masculine:feminine, good:evil - Levi-Strauss would prioritize above all other codes.
2- Semic code: voice of the person, to construct the meaning of character, objects,and settings. - the means by which a figure individualized into a character. Figure, cultural stereotype common - more Levi-Straussan than Propp's.
3- Referential code: which a text refers out beyond itself, not to reality in an objective, empirical sense, but to cultural  knowledge
4- Code of actions: relates most directly to Barthes' earlier structuralism - suggests that we understand any action in a narrative by our experience of similar actions in other narratives and that our narrative experience is an aggregation of details arranged in generic categories of actions
5- Hermeneutic: sets and resolves the enigmas of the narrative and is motivated by the desire for closure and truth. - controls the pace and style of narrative by controlling the flow of information that is desired by the reader to solve the enigma or make good a lack.


Televisual Narrative:
Feuer arguesTelevision produced distinctive forms of narrative that invite producerly relations with the text.
Series and Serial are the dominant narrative forms on TV.
Time in television: -In soap opera, time is metaphorical equivalent of real time, and the audiences constantly engaged in remembering the past, enjoying the present and predicting the future.
-In series, the future may not be part of the diegetic world of the narrative. Even though characters do not act like they will be with us next week, we know they will.
In television, hermeneutic code is more imperative, the engagement it requires is more equal  
According to Feuer, television has three diegetic worlds that intersect and interrupt each other: 1- Television program, 2- ads and promos, 3- viewing of the family