METHODOLOGIE 1.2 September 7, 2010 [email protected].

METHODOLOGIE 1.2

September 7, 2010

[email protected]

• Leren begrijpen van narrativiteit als universeel gegeven.

• De relevantie van een instrumentarium bij de beantwoording van een onderzoeksvraag

The universality of narrative

• Narrative is something we all engage in.

• We construct narratives many times a day.

• Narrative is thé distinctive human trait.

• Narrative capability shows up in infants in their

3 or 4th year, from that point on memory is

present.

Roland Barthes, authority on narrative / myth / semiosis

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a extraordinary variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or in moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news-items, conversation.

Narrative is present in every age, every class, every place, culture and society. Combination of nature (in our

genes just like grammar) and nurture (intertextuality).

This is a painting, and a story.

We can read this painting as a narrative.

Some introductory concepts and definitions

• Narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of space and time.

• Clock time Narrative time, details added, sequences disturbed or slowed down, complexity

J.M. Coetzee, South-African novelist

• For the reader, the experience of time bunching and becoming dense at points of significant action in the story, or thinning out and skipping or glancing through nonsignificant periods of clock time or calendar time, can be exhilarating – in fact it may be at the heart of narrative pleasure. As for writing and the experience of writing, there is a definite thrill of mastery – perhaps even omnipotence – that comes with making time bend and buckle, and generally with being present when signification takes control over time.

Narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events.

Event = action (there are actors involved) Continuity and coherence

Narrative requires a narrator-position (actor / camera / eye of the painter / eye of the reader)

Narrative = a double temporal logic: duration of the sequence of events and duration of the presentation of the text / film / play

Important notions

• Story

• Fabel

• Narrative discourse

• Sujet

• Plot

Life in spite of Everything:the Art of Narrative

• 14 stories• 14 narrators / actors in

a play

• Narrative on life: message is that life goes on, that humans ‘have to live’

Narrative studies / Narratology

• M. Bahktin, V. Shlovsky [Russian Formalism]• F. Stanzel, Wolfgang Iser [German Rezeptions

ästhetik]• Claude Bremond, Gerard Genette, A.J. Greimas,

Roland Barthes [French structuralism]• Mieke Bal [Holland, UvA], Bart Vervaeck

[Belgium, Ghent]• Wayne C. Booth, James McPhelan, Brian McHale

[USA]

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Narratiede complexiteit van verhalen vertellen

Interpretatiede complexiteit vanbetekenis toekennen

Elementen in een verhalende tekst zijn deels objectiveerbaar en moeten geinterpreteerd worden (P. Ricoeur)

• Presentatie (direct aanwezig stellen) en representatie (vertellen bij monde van identificeerbare spreker)

• Referentie en autonomie

Porter Abbott 6, 7, 8Most important notions/ ideas

Instruments:

Narrator Focalization Voice Distance Implied author Monoloque intérieur Stream of consciousness Gap Closure Crux

Reflection on Interpretation:

Analysis Evaluation/judgment Understanding Explanation Intentional reading Underreading Overreading

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• Stream of consciousness (William James): continual stream of thoughts and associations, without rational order. (indirect style )

• Interior monologue: flow of feelings of one person (direct style, immediate evocation without reflection of ordening)

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Subtle differences

• Real author – narrator – character / focalization

• Implied author – message --- intention

• Interpretation – comprehension – explanation

(verstehen und erklären: Dilthey and Ricoeur)

Hermeneutics =The tradition of text exegesis

Whole and part / part and whole

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3 Reading strategies

• Intentional readingIntention= purpose / meaning / planAuthor is in charge, responsible

• Symptomatic readingContext / frame / paratext /

deconstruction

• Adaptive readingIntertextuality / modification

Main problem: legitimacy of the interpretationFinding evidence in textConvincing other readers

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Text and World

There is no discourse so fictional that it does not connect up with reality. But such discourse refers to another level, more fundamental than that attained by the descriptive, constative, didactic discourse we call ordinary language. My thesis here is that the abolition of a first order reference , an abolition effected by fiction and poetry, is the condition of possibility for the freeing of a second order reference, which reaches the world not only at the level of manipulable objects, but at the level that Husserl designated by the expression Lebenswelt and Heidegger by the expression ‘being-in-the-world’ .

The unique referential dimension of the work of fiction and poetry raises the most fundamental hermeneutical problem. (141)

Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 1981

Text = written discourse

SCHEPPINGSVERHAALJ. Slauerhoff

Gods kind had blokken in zijn boezelaar,Waarmee het in de wolken had gespeeld.Maar toen zij op wou bergen, moe, verveeld,Zag ze in de doos en wist niet hoe ze daar

In passen moesten, keurig ingedeeld.Want God was streng, maar sliep – dus geen gevaar.Zij liet ze vallen, zag er niet meer naarOm en ging vlug naar een mooi engelbeeld.

De blokken vielen door een leeg heelalEn kwamen op een leege wereld, waarZe bleven zooals ze er heen geworpen.

De meeste sprongen stuk tot berg en dal;En die heel bleven vormden hier en daarDe groote steden en de kleine dorpen.

Life in spite of everything

How can we use the narrative devices?

• Narration / voice / distance• Themes / motifs• Repetition• Dialogues / free direct

speech• Implied author

Overreading +Underreading ?

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Characters• Each character in the documentary

takes part in real life, but can also be identified as type: there is the student, the actress, the boxer, the artist, the housewife, the fisherman, the ambulance driver, the Kung Fu teacher, the farmer, and the man from the grocery shop who dreams of becoming mayor.

• We meet both flat and round characters: the flat ones are stable in their behaviour and ideas; round characters are those that develop and that can surprise us in the ambiguity of normality.

14 characters = narrators

Reliability ?

2 cities = historical reality

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Development of character

• Round character is hairdresser Yafa Malka in Sderot: at first sight, a naive and sensation-seeking person, the typical blonde. She becomes more interesting when she shows us her comfortable house, including, quite surprisingly, the shelter room beneath it. This woman is ambitious and adores her grown-up soldier son. She is smart in misleading her neighbour when he is counting on her vote, and she performs the role of the perfect heroine when she defends an Arab toy seller who is being abused by an Israeli passer-by.

AmbiguityGapsClosureCruxes

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Splitscreen• Viewers compose their own version

of the story on the basis of the split-screen-divided material. The split screen is at once a scar and a hyphen. Never can we escape the impression that the two worlds are separated and linked, doomed to be connected.

• Wanneer lezen we de tekst en welke verschillen ontstaan tussen 2008 en 2010?

Intentional,Symptomatic,AdaptiveReading ?

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