LESSON OBJECTIVE:

 To understand the range of Narrative theories

 To be able to apply narrative theories to the analysis of media text.
 To evaluate the usefulness of Narrative theories

WHAT IS NARRATIVE?
 In media studies, it is important to tell the difference between narrative and story.
 STORY- a sequence of events, also known as the plot

 NARRATIVE- the way those events are put together to be presented to an audience.

 Therefore, when analysing narrative we analyse the construction of the story. And the
way it has been put together, not the story itself

 All media texts have a narrative, whether they are a six hour TV miniseries or a one
paragraph newspaper story or a glossy magazine photograph.

WHAT IS THEORY?
“Theories are explanations of a natural or social behavior, event, or phenomenon. More
formally, a scientific theory is a system of constructs (concepts) and propositions
(relationships between those constructs) that collectively presents a logical, systematic, and
coherent explanation of a phenomenon of interest within some assumptions and boundary
conditions,”

THEORIES SHOULD EXPLAIN WHY THINGS HAPPEN,

RATHER THAN JUST DESCRIBE OR PREDICT.
Narrative Theory starts from the assumption that narrative is a basic human
strategy for coming to terms with fundamental elements of our experience, such as time,
process, and change, and it proceeds from this assumption to study the distinctive nature of
narrative and its various structures, elements, uses, and effects.

More specifically, narrative theorists study what is distinctive about narrative (how it is
different from other kinds of discourse, such as lyric poems, arguments, lists, descriptions,
statistical analyses, and so on), and how accounts of what happened to particular people in
particular circumstances with particular consequences can be at once so common and so
powerful. Thus a key concern is whether narrative as a way of thinking about or explaining
human experience contrasts with scientific modes of explanation that characterize
phenomena as instances of general covering laws. Narrative theorists, in short, study how
stories help people make sense of the world, while also studying how people make sense of
stories.

To this end, narrative theorists draw not only on literary studies but also on ideas from such
fields as rhetoric, (socio)linguistics, philosophical ethics, cognitive science (including
cognitive and social psychology), folklore, and gender theory to explore how narratives work
both as kinds of texts and as strategies for navigating experience. Narratives of all kinds are
relevant to the field: literary fictions and nonfictions, film narratives, comics and graphic
novels, hypertexts and other computer-mediated narratives, oral narratives occurring
during the give and take of everyday conversation, as well as narratives told in courtrooms,
doctors’ offices, business conference rooms—indeed, anywhere. Because of the
pervasiveness of narrative in our culture and the diversity of the texts, media, and
communicative situations narrative theory examines, narrative theory constitutes an
exciting new frontier of English Studies, one that promises to bring English Department
faculty and students into closer contact with their counterparts in a variety of social-
scientific, humanistic, and other disciplines.

NARRATIVE THEORISTS AND THEORIES.

VLADIMIR PROPP- he proposed that it was possible to classify the characters and their
actions into clearly defined roles and functions.
TODOROV- suggests most narratives starts with equilibrium which is where everything is
normal and protagonists are happy.
ROLAND BARTHES- suggests that narrative works with five different codes which
activate the reader to make sense of it.