Narrative

In non-technical terms, no matter what the context (whether scientific, philosophical, legal, etc) a narrative is a story, an interpretation of some aspect of the world that is historically and culturally grounded and shaped by human personality (per Walter Fisher). Derived from the Latin word, it came into English via the French language and it is used in a number of specialised applications.

Conceptual issues

Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs and studies the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and nonverbal elements, creating a discourse with different modalities and forms. In On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson argues that literature does not exist as a separate entity. He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are basically the same except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. 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 Vladimir Propp who analysed the plots used in traditional folktales and identified distinct functional components. It is continued in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes leading to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important epistemological questions about the concept of the text, its role in the contextual culture, and its manifestation whether as art, cinema, theatre, or literature comprising poetry, short stories and novels of different genres, etc. It is also appropriate to note that, outside the mainstream of Semiotics, Walter Fisher has also offered a comprehensive theory known as the Narrative Paradigm.

Related Topics:
Semiotics - Meaning - Signs - Codes - Communication - Modalities - Roman Jakobson - Encode - Russian Formalism - Victor Shklovsky - Vladimir Propp - Prague School - Claude Lévi-Strauss - Roland Barthes - Culture - Genre - Narrative Paradigm

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