On the 31st October week 7, my classmates and I was taught the methodology narrative and discourse by our lecturer. From what I understood about narratives before the lecture was that in order for a person, author/ film writer to create a reasonably good structured book or film, they need to have a consistent narrative story.
Our lecturer said that a narrative is a structure of multiple events that forms a story.
A story has to consist of a main leading character, sub characters and an antagonist, it also needs some sort of setting and events to create a pleasant story.
Strauss Levi said that in order to have a story, you need to know how characters act and behave, you need notions of the good and the bad, some kind of power structures but overall it needs to relate in some way to culture.
Throughout history society has changed drastically especially in stories, the changing of characters and their narrative functions has changed creating a new story all together for example the story Red riding hood which has been told at least once to every generation has changed, so from a girl being scared of a wolf it is now portrayed as the girl not being scared of the wolf this can be seen in a film called ‘Hoodwinked’.
We also learned that in order to create a narrative you need a ‘discourse schemas’ essentially a sequence that provides the building blocks to construct a structured story.
The reading for that week was ‘Narrative’ by Jason Mittel. He explains that “one of the crucial aspects of narrative theory is outlining the various ways that a single story might be told via very different techniques of narrative discourse and understanding the impact of such storytelling changes”. In short, he mainly points out that in order to write an adequate story piece you most likely need to use narrative discourse techniques.
In terms of this methodology, I actually didn’t have no issues at all, and I was generally ok with it.
Bibliography:
Hoodwinked. (2005). [DVD] Directed by C. Edwards. United Kingdom: The Weinstein Company.
Kackman, M. and Kearney, M. (2018). The craft of criticism. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, p.35.
