A narrative or story is a construct created in a suitable format (written, spoken, poetry, prose, images, song, theater, or dance) that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events. Theatre (or theater, see spelling differences) is the branch of the Performing arts defined by Bernard Beckerman as what "occurs when one Dance (from French danser, perhaps from Frankish) is an Art form that generally refers to movement of the body usually rhythmic Fiction is the telling of stories which are not real More specifically fiction is an imaginative form of Narrative, one of the four basic Rhetorical modes. It derives from the Latin verb narrare, which means "to recount" and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning "knowing" or "skilled". Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. ^[1] (Ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root gnō-, "to know". ^[2]) The word "story" may be used as a synonym of "narrative", but can also be used to refer to the sequence of events described in a narrative. A narrative can also be told by a character within a larger narrative.

Stories are an important aspect of culture. Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate" generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic Many works of art and most works of literature tell stories. Art refers to a diverse range of Human activities creations and expressions that are appealing to the Senses or Emotions of a human individual Literature is the Art of written works Literally translated the word means "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter Most of the humanities involve stories. The humanities are academic disciplines which study the Human condition, using methods that are primarily Analytic, Critical, or Speculative Stories are of ancient origin, existing in ancient Egypt, ancient Greek, Chinese, and Indian culture. Ancient Egypt was an Ancient Civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now The Ancient Greek language is the historical stage in the development of the Hellenic language family spanning the Archaic (c Stories are also a ubiquitous component of human communication, used as parables and examples used to illustrate points. A parable is a brief succinct story in Prose or verse, that illustrates a Moral or Religious lesson Storytelling was probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment. Storytelling is the ancient art of conveying events in Words Images and Sounds often by Improvisation or embellishment See also Entertainment (disambiguation and The Entertainer (disambiguation Entertainment is an activity designed to give people

Contents 1 Conceptual issues 2 Literary theory 3 See also 3.1 Other specific applications 4 Sources 5 Further reading 6 External links

Conceptual issues

Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs — and semantics, the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. Semiotics, semiotic studies, or semiology is the study of sign processes (semiosis or signification and communication signs and Symbols both In Semiotics, the meaning of a sign is its place in a Sign relation, in other words the set of roles that it occupies within a given sign relation In Semiotics, a sign is "something that stands for something else to someone in some capacity" Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from In Semiotics, a code is a set of conventions or sub-codes currently in use to communicate meaning This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and nonverbal elements, creating a discourse with different modalities and forms. Communication is the process of conveying information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium in which the communicated information is understood the same way In Semiotics, a modality is a particular way in which the Information is to be encoded for Presentation to humans i In On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson argues that literature does not exist as a separate entity. Roman Osipovich Jakobson, (Russian Роман Осипович Якобсон) ( 11 October 1896 – 18 July 1982) was a Russian He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are the same except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. In Semiotics, the process of creating a Message for transmission by the addresser to the addressee is called encoding. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work of Vladimir Propp who analyzed the plots used in traditional folktales and identified distinct functional components. Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (or Shklovskii Виктор Борисович Шкловский Saint Petersburg,; Moscow, 6 December 1984) Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (Владимир Яковлевич Пропп &mdash 22 August 1970) was a Russian formalist scholar who Mythos (Aristotle In literature the plot comprises all the events in a story particularly rendered towards the achievement of some particular Artistic or Emotional This trend continues in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. The Prague Linguistic Circle or " Prague school " ( French Cercle linguistique de Prague, Czech Pražský lingvistický kroužek Claude Lévi-Strauss (klod levi stʁos born 28 November 1908 is a French Anthropologist. Roland Barthes ( November 12, 1915 &ndash March 25, 1980) (ʀɔlɑ̃ baʀt was a French Literary critic, literary It leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important epistemological questions: What is text? What is its role in the contextual culture? How is it manifested as art, cinema, theater, or literature? How are poetry, short stories and novels of different genres?

Literary theory

For general purposes in Semiotics and Literary Theory, a "narrative" is a story or part of a story. Epistemology (from Greek επιστήμη - episteme, "knowledge" + λόγος, " Logos " or theory of knowledge Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate" generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic A genre (ˈʒɑːnrə also /ˈdʒɑːnrə/ from French "kind" or "sort" from Latin: genus (stem gener-) is a loose set Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of Literature and of the methods for analyzing literature Mythos (Aristotle In literature the plot comprises all the events in a story particularly rendered towards the achievement of some particular Artistic or Emotional It may be spoken, written or imagined, and it will have one or more points of view representing some or all of the participants or observers. In stories told verbally, there is a person telling the story, a narrator whom the audience can see and/or hear, and who adds layers of meaning to the text nonverbally. A narrator (or the extremely rarely used female equivalent narratress) is within any story (literary work movie play verbal account etc The narrator also has the opportunity to monitor the audience's response to the story and to modify the manner of the telling to clarify content or enhance listener interest. This is distinguishable from the written form in which the author must gauge the readers likely reactions when they are decoding the text and make a final choice of words in the hope of achieving the desired response. In Semiotics, the process of interpreting a message sent by the addresser to the addressee is called decoding.

Whatever the form, the content may concern real-world people and events. This is termed personal experience narrative. When the content is fictional, different conventions apply. Fiction is the telling of stories which are not real More specifically fiction is an imaginative form of Narrative, one of the four basic Rhetorical modes. The text is projecting a narrative voice, but the narrator is ontologically distant, i. In Philosophy, ontology (from the Greek, genitive: of being (part e. belongs to an invented or imaginary world, and not the real world. An imaginary world is a setting, place or event or scenario at variance with Objective reality, ranging from the voluntary Suspension of The narrator may be one of the characters in the story. Roland Barthes describes such characters as "paper beings" and fiction comprises their narratives of personal experience as created by the author. Roland Barthes ( November 12, 1915 &ndash March 25, 1980) (ʀɔlɑ̃ baʀt was a French Literary critic, literary When their thoughts are included, this is termed internal focalisation, i. e. when each character's mind focuses on a particular event, the text reflects his or her reactions.

In written forms, the reader hears the narrator's voice both through the choice of content and style (the author can encode voices for different emotions and situations, and the voices can either be overt or covert), and through clues that reveal the narrator's beliefs, values, and ideological stance, as well as the author's attitude towards people, events, and things. In Semiotics, the process of creating a Message for transmission by the addresser to the addressee is called encoding. An ideology is a set of beliefs aims and Ideas especially in politics It is customary to distinguish a first-person from a third-person narrative (Gérard Genette uses the terms homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative respectively). See also First person First-person narrative is a Narrative mode in which a Story is narrated by one character, who explicitly The third-person narrative is a Narrative mode applying the third person. A homodiegetic narrator describes his or her personal and subjective experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know anything more about what goes on in the minds of any of the other characters than is revealed through their actions, whereas a heterodiegetic narrator describes the experiences of the characters who do appear in the story and, if the story's events are seen through the eyes of a third-person internal focaliser, this is termed a figural narrative. In some stories, the author may be overtly omniscient, and both employ multiple points of view and comment directly on events as they occur.

Tzvetan Todorov (1969) coined the term narratology for the structuralist analysis of any given narrative into its constituent parts to determine their function(s) and relationships. Tzvetan Todorov (Цветан Тодоров (born on March 1 1939 in Sofia) is a Franco - Bulgarian Philosopher. Narratology is the theory and study of Narrative and Narrative structure and the ways they affect our perception For the use of structuralism in biology see Structuralism (biology Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze For these purposes, the story is what is narrated as usually a chronological sequence of themes, motives and plot lines. Hence, the plot represents the logical and causal structure of a story, explaining why the events occur. The term discourse is used to describe the stylistic choices that determine how the narrative text or performance finally appears to the audience. Discourse (L discursus, "running to and from" means either "written or spoken communication or debate" or "a formal discussion One of the stylistic decisions may be to present events in a non-chronological order, say using flashbacks to reveal motivations at a dramatic moment.

See also

• Applied Drama
• Literary technique
• Folklore
• Narrator
• Narratology
• Narrative structure
• Narreme as the basic unit of narrative structure
• Organizational storytelling
• Organization story

Other specific applications

• A narrative case study is a case study that tells a story. Applied Drama is an Umbrella term for the wider use of Drama practice in a specific social context and environment A literary technique or literary device is an identifiable Rule of thumb, convention or Structure that is employed in Literature History The concept of folklore developed as part of the 19th century ideology of Romantic nationalism, leading to the reshaping of oral traditions to serve modern ideological A narrator (or the extremely rarely used female equivalent narratress) is within any story (literary work movie play verbal account etc Narratology is the theory and study of Narrative and Narrative structure and the ways they affect our perception Narrative structure is generally described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a Narrative is presented to a reader listener or viewer Narreme is the basic unit of Narrative structure. According to Helmut Bonheim (2000 the concept of narreme was developed three decades ago by Eugene The study of organizational storytelling, sometimes called “Narrative Knowledge” attempts to recount events in the form of a Story within the context of an organization Organizational stories are the texts spoken or written that usually involve a plot of different interconnected events binding different characters together about an Organization
• Narrative environment is a contested term that has been used for techniques of architectural or exhibition design in which 'stories are told in space' and also for the virtual environments in which computer games are played and which are invented by the computer game authors. A narrative environment is a space whether physical or Virtual, in which stories can unfold (in other words anyplace The term virtual is a concept applied in many fields with somewhat differing connotations and also differing denotations
• Narrative film is film which uses filmed reality to tell a story, often as a feature film. Fictional film or narrative film is film that tells a Fictional story or Narrative. In the Film industry, a feature film is a Film made for initial distribution in theaters and being the "main attraction" of the screening
• Narrative history is a genre of factual historical writing that uses chronology as its framework (as opposed to a thematic treatment of a historical subject). Narrative history is the practice of writing History in a story-based form Definition A chronology may be either relative &mdashthat is locating related events relative to each other&mdashor ''absolute'' &mdashlocating
• Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story. Narrative poetry is Poetry that tells a story The poems may be short or long and the story it relates to may be simple or complex
• Narrative Therapy is a school of (family) psychotherapy. Narrative Therapy was initially developed during the 1970s and 1980s largely by Australian Michael White ( Dulwich Centre and his friend and colleague David Epston, of New

Sources

Further reading

• Clandinin, D. J. & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass.
• Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
• Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). "Five Misunderstandings About Case Study Research." Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 2, 219-245.
• Genette, Gérard. (1980 [1972]). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. (Translated by Jane E. Lewin). Oxford: Blackwell.
• Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery (1991). "Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge. " Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Jakobson, Roman. (1921). "On Realism in Art" in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist. (Edited by Ladislav Matejka & Krystyna Pomorska). The MIT Press.
• Labov, William. (1972). Chapter 9: The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax. In: "Language in the Inner City. " Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1958 [1963]). Anthropologie Structurale/Structural Anthropology. (Translated by Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf). New York: Basic Books.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1962 [1966]). La Pensée Sauvage/The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mythologiques I-IV (Translated by John Weightman & Doreen Weightman)
• Linde, Charlotte (2001). Chapter 26: Narrative in Institutions. In: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen & Heidi E. Hamilton (ed. s) "The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. " Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
• Norrick, Neal R. (2000). "Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Everyday Talk. " Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
• Polanyi, Livia. (1985). "Telling the American Story: A Structural and Cultural Analysis of Conversational Storytelling. " Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishers Corporation.
• Shklovsky, Viktor. (1925 [1990]). Theory of Prose. (Translated by Benjamin Sher). Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Dalkey Archive Press is a small publisher of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary criticism, specializing in the publication or republication of obscure and out-of-print
• Todorov, Tzvetan. (1969). Grammaire du Décameron. The Hague: Mouton.
• Toolan, Michael (2001). "Narrative: a Critical Linguistic Introduction"
• Turner, Mark (1996). "The Literary Mind"

External links

• Some Ideas about Narrative notes on narrative from an academic perspective
• StoryCode - is a free book recommendation service based on the analysis of narrative structures.
• Narrnet - The Narratology Network
• Manfred Jahn. Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative
• New York Narrative - NYC Story Blog This is a clog (community blog) where writers can share their narratives.
• [1] Narrative archive at Texas Tech University

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