Narrative Studio 08, section C

Major Studio 2: Narrative - 5795 - PGTE 5201 – C
Spring 2008: Wednesdays & Fridays 12:00 pm – 2:40, 55 W13th St. Rm 304
Melanie Crean creanm@newschool.edu 917.696.8522
Office hours Friday after class or by appointment

Narratives of personal transformation and social change

Overview

"The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious 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 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 item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives … Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself."

- Roland Barthes, Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives, Image-Music-Text 1966

What is the meaning of narrative? As consumers of culture, do we ascribe to the traditional meaning that narrative is a string of events, connected by cause and effect? As artists, do we not include the exploration of context and form, which can them selves determine content? As political subjects, where do we source our information and construct our individual views? As members of a civic community, at a seemingly intense juncture in history, do we believe that narrative is something that embodies change, at its most abstract?

The course will investigate a broad definition of narrative: change over time. This focus not only essentializes the meaning of narrative, but investigates change as a current cultural buzz word. We will look at the concept both in terms of personal evolution and political change.

Administration

To download the complete Narrative Syllabus, click here

Readings

• David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Chapter 3 “Narrative as a Formal System” from Film Art
• Scott McCloud, "Time Frames," from Understanding Comics

• H. Porter Abbott, "Narrative and Life," Chapter 1 from The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

• H. Porter Abbott, "Closure," Chapter 5 from The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

• H. Porter Abbott, "Character and Self in Narrative," Chapter 10 from The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

• Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” from the New York Times Magazine, 5.23.04

• David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Chapter 7 “Sound in Cinema” from Film Art

• David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Chapter 6 “The Relation of Shot to Shot: Editing” from Film Art

• Gonzalo Frasca, "Simulations vs. Narrative: Introduction to Ludology," from Video/Game/Theory

• Marie-Laure Ryan, “Beyond Myth & Metaphor, the Case of Narrative in Digital Media,” from Games Studies