Narrative

Roland Barthes

 

Barthes lists 5 codes of narrative:

Semantic Codes: Parts of the narrative that connotes or suggest additional and several meanings.

Action Code: sequential elements of action in the narrative (add suspense to narrative).

Symbolic code: Symbolism within the narrative (greater and deeper meanings) within the narrative/story

Enigma code: Refers to the mystery within the narrative(clues within the narrative, that make the audience want to know more and engage them)

Narratives might be open (unfolds and could end in many ways) or closed where there is one clear direction

 

Claude Levi-Strauss

The theory of Binary Opposites : Good vs evil or insane vs insane. The concepts can be anything but have to oppose each other clearly. Narrators have constantly argued that Strauss' theory of Binary opposition has become an essential part of shaping/structuring and understanding in depth a narrative.

 

Vladimer Propp

Narratives always have certain character types(archetypes) who perform certain actions for example the villain always takes on the role of the evil/troublesome character- Or the hero adopts the role of the person who resolves the situation or saves somebody

                             

Pam Cook

There is a distinct and clear Hollywood narrative structure that includes:“linearity of cause and effect within an overall trajectory of enigma resolution”

 

 

 

Audience

 

Straurt Hall

Reception theory: "Encoding-Decoding" Meanings are encoding by the sender(artist) and decoded by the receiver(audience). The meanings can be decoded differently depending on the individual.

 

Denis McQuail

Uses and gratification theory; Audiences consume media texts for; information. escapism, personal Identity, interrogation and social interaction.

 

Ien Ang

“Audiencehood is becoming an even more multifaceted, fragmented and diversified repertoire of practices and experiences.”

 

 Tzetvan Todrov

Narratives have a structure of Equilibrium, Disequilibrium and then New Equilibrium.

 

Representation

Collective Identity

 

Judith Butler

"There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender. Gender identity is not defined by our biological make-up but by our socialisation- our stereotyped  and allocated gender roles are learnt performances- social conditioning/ social expectation

 

Laura Mulvely

"The male gaze"- women in media are represented through the perspective and opinion a man. This leads to obvious hegemonic ideologies in society; Men are dominating over women who are seen as objects and powerless for the gratification and use of men.

 

Michel Foucault

Gender identity is a"shifting, temporary,construct" Meaning that gender is never a concrete and stable idea- changes with time and generation

David Gauntlett

“Identity is complicated- everybody thinks they’ve got one” A person’s identity is formed and confirmed by their own perspective but others may believe that that person actually has a completely different identity

 

Genre

 

Andrew Goodwin

6 conventions in the music video:

 

-A relationship between the lyrics and the visuals, which illustrate, amplify or contradict the lyrics.

-Thought beats: seeing the sounds (the relationship between the music and the visuals, which illustrate, amplify or contradict the music.)

Intertexuality

-Genre-related style and iconography present.

-Multiple close-ups of the main artist or vocalist

-Voyeurism                                        

 

"Music videos ignore common narrative as they are essentially advertisements. As consumers, we make up our own meaning of a song with our own ideas and perceptions: a music video can anchor meaning and gives the record company/artist a method of anchoring meaning"

 

Denis McQuail

“The genre may be considered as a practical device for helping any mass medium to produce consistently and efficiently and to relate its production to the expectations of its customers.”

Gunther Kress

“a kind of text that derives its form from the structure of a (frequently repeated) social occasion, with its characteristic participants and their purposes.”

 

Christine Gledhill

'Genres... are not discrete systems, consisting of a fixed number of listable items' 'differences between genres meant different audiences could be identified and catered to... This made it easier to standardise and stabilise production'

 

John Fiske

“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 it used by the viewer to decode it, and by the producer to encode it.

 

 

David Buckingham

“Genre is not simply given by the culture, rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change.”

 

Katie Wales

'Genre is an intertextual concept'

 

Christian Metz

4 developmental stages that can be applied to genre; Classical,Experimental, Parody and Deconstruction

 

Nicholas Abercombie

'the boundaries between genres are shifting and becoming more permeable' 'genres permit the creation and maintenance of a loyal audience which becomes used to seeing programmes within a genre'