Narrative Texts

Subgenres: neopicaresque novel, bildungsroman, detective and crime novel, thriller, historical and science-fiction novels, short stories
Story: chronological sequence of narrated events (what?) (content)
Discourse: shaping of this material by the narrator (how?) (narration)
Events: happenings within a plot in which a situation changes
Existents: characters and setting
narrativity: dements of form and content that characterise narrative texts

Whatever happens is being recounted from a narrative perspective (point of view)

Story: chronological sequence of events without consideration of causal relations
Plot: Story is transformed into a plot when the events are also linked causally and logically to one another

Closed: all problems solved and the plot concluded in a logical manner
Open: a conflict unresolved and the fate of the characters left open
Expected: poetic justice (fair allocation of reward and punishment)
Deus ex machina: unexpected intervention of an external agency which is unknown to the plot

-> based on mode, person and perspective
Mode: narrator/reflector
Person: First/third person
Perspective: internal-/ external perspective

- neopicaresque novel, bildungsroman, detective and crime novel, thriller, historical and science-fiction novels, short stories

Story (what happens?) - The chronological sequence of events (content)

Discourse (how is it told?) - The narrator's shaping of events, including selection, emphasis, language and perspective

Events: Actions that change the situation in the plot

Existents: The characters and setting that make up the world of the story

The formal and content elements that define a text as a narrative, including plot, character, temporality and perspective

- Structuralist narrative theory: Narrative texts are characterized by a chronologically organized sequence of events
- They have a plot!!

- This approach considers a narrative text's "mediacy" (its being mediated narratively) to be the most essential generic feature

- Transmission/The act of narration/ "Point of view"

A story doesn't just exist; it is told by a narrator

Narration is an active process where events are selected, arranged and presented

The perspective from which the story is told shapes how we understand characters and events

- Features concerning content: the ability of narrative texts to give expression to experiences by means of narrative structure
- Stories are always accounts of experiences; readers draw from their experience to interpret narrative texts

Smallest plot unit, propels action and changes the situation of characters, can be small/natural occurrences

Kernels: Major, plot-changing events: Drive the main plot; Essential for story progression

Satellites: Minor, descriptive or background events; Add depth but can be removed

- With the birth of the protagonist
- launch into the middle of the action
- beginning with the end of the story and gradually revealing the conditions of the beginning

The way in which characters, events, plot elements or internal, psychological processes are presented

1. Structure of Narrative Transmission
-> This involves how the story is communicated ti the audience (dialogue, narration or description)
2. Point of view
-> The narrative perspective from which the story is told (1st person, third person)
3. Constitutive Generic Feature
-> The narrative situation is a fundamental aspect of genre because different genres tend to employ different narrative situations

- Internal: Inside the character's thoughts
- External: describing only observable actions, like a camera

Narrator: Who tells?

Focalizer: Who sees/perceives?

-> What does the focalizer perceive and know that the narrator doesn't tell

- Focalization is external if the focalizing subject is located on the narrative transmission
- Internal if the focalizer is within the story (a character's perspective)
- Fixed Focalization -> Stays with one character throughout the story
- Multiple Focalization -> Shifts between different characters' perspectives
- Variable Focalization -> The focalizer changes dynamically within the same text

- Discourse time refers to the period of time required in order to narrator or read a text (or watch a film)

"Story time" refers to the chronological sequence of events as they happen within the narrative world. Its the "real" or "in-universe" time of the story.

Intradiegetic: refers to communication that takes place within the world of the party

Extradiegetic: refers to communication that is outside of the world of the story. (Narrator addresses the audience from a perspective that is not directly involved in the story's events.

Homodiegetic: refers to a narrator who is a character within the story world. The narrator is actively involved as a participant

Heterodiegetic: refers to a narrator who is not a character in the story world. The narrator exists outside the story and has no direct involvement.

-> restricted to the neutral transmission of information
-> create fictional worlds and only provide minimal narrative functions performed by every narrating instance

-> Overt = narrator as an individualized speaker and concrete persona

-> Covert = ananymous voices, about which the readers are given no infos

-> conception, structure and presentation of locations, objects, scenery and natural world. "Place" primarily used for drama, "space" for novels
-> identifying wether the perception of space is filtered by a character or described by a heterodiegetic narrator

-> how many times events are narrated
- one event, depicted once: singulative narration
- one event, depicted several times
- multiple similar events, depicted once: iterative narration

Basically: A means of storing and transmitting information

Entertainment, knowledge, communication, perceptions, feelings, memory, processing of information and individual socialization

-> study of media, technology and communication and how they affect human environments, culture and communication

-> Interference between different types of media where a drawing, painting, piece of art is verbally described in a literature.

High-brow: literature that is valued by experts and is likely to be included in canons

Low-brow: literature that does not fulfill the "value" mentioned above

-> no single specific origin medium, but apparent in multiple forms simultaneously

-> blending of two or more fields of media

Medium: print, acoustic, audiovisual
Main function: report, appeal, reflection, game, reproduction
Relation to reality: credible/not credible; factual/non-factual; fictitious; live; recorded

Cinematography
1. image
2. sound
3. story
4. narrative modes

-> the arrangement of the scenery, props, etc. on the stage of a theatrical production or on the set of a film

-> setting or surroundings of event

Theory: conceptual framework, connects many concepts with each other -> concept always part of theory
Method: systematic procedure; it describes the way to get to that goal
Model: formal/graphic representation of theory
Concept: part of a theory, "sort of mini theories"

-> interdisciplinary-discourse with effects outside an original disclipline
Analytical 6 speculative - attempt to work out what is involved in certain aspects of life/science