Narrative And Narration

From mainstream blockbusters to art house cinema, narrative and narration are the driving forces that organize a film. Yet attempts to explain these forces are often mired in notoriously complex terminology and dense theory. Warren Buckland provides a clear and accessible introduction that explains how narrative and narration work using straightforward language. Narrative and Narration distills the basic components of cinematic storytelling into a set of core concepts: narrative structure, processes of narration, and narrative agents. The book opens with a discussion of the emergence of narrative and narration in early cinema and proceeds to illustrate key ideas through numerous case studies. Each chapter guides readers through different methods that they can use to analyze cinematic storytelling. Buckland also discusses how departures from traditional modes, such as feminist narratives, art cinema, and unreliable narrators, can complicate and corroborate the book’s understanding of narrative and narration. Examples include mainstream films, both classic and contemporary; art house films of every stripe; and two relatively new styles of cinematic storytelling: the puzzle film and those driven by a narrative logic derived from video games. Narrative and Narration is a concise introduction that provides readers with fundamental tools to understand cinematic storytelling.

How can a company that has never turned a profit have a multibillion dollar valuation? Why do some start-ups attract large investments while others do not? Aswath Damodaran, finance professor and experienced investor, argues that the power of story drives corporate value, adding substance to numbers and persuading even cautious investors to take risks. In business, there are the storytellers who spin compelling narratives and the number-crunchers who construct meaningful models and accounts. Both are essential to success, but only by combining the two, Damodaran argues, can a business deliver and sustain value. Through a range of case studies, Narrative and Numbers describes how storytellers can better incorporate and narrate numbers and how number-crunchers can calculate more imaginative models that withstand scrutiny. Damodaran considers Uber's debut and how narrative is key to understanding different valuations. He investigates why Twitter and Facebook were valued in the billions of dollars at their public offerings, and why one (Twitter) has stagnated while the other (Facebook) has grown. Damodaran also looks at more established business models such as Apple and Amazon to demonstrate how a company's history can both enrich and constrain its narrative. And through Vale, a global Brazil-based mining company, he shows the influence of external narrative, and how country, commodity, and currency can shape a company's story. Narrative and Numbers reveals the benefits, challenges, and pitfalls of weaving narratives around numbers and how one can best test a story's plausibility.

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative provides a unique and valuable overview of current approaches to narrative study. An international team of experts explores ideas of storytelling and methods of narrative analysis as they have emerged across diverse traditions of inquiry and in connection with a variety of media, from film and television, to storytelling in the 'real-life' contexts of face-to-face interaction, to literary fiction. Each chapter presents a survey of scholarly approaches to topics such as character, dialogue, genre or language, shows how those approaches can be brought to bear on a relatively well-known illustrative example, and indicates directions for further research. Featuring a chapter reviewing definitions of narrative, a glossary of key terms and a comprehensive index, this is an essential resource for both students and scholars in many fields, including language and literature, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, jurisprudence, communication and media studies, and the social sciences.

This edited volume focuses on Anglo-American modernist fiction, offering challenging perspectives that consider modernism in the instances in which it transcends itself, moving, broadly speaking, towards postmodernist self-irony. As such, the contributions here discuss issues such as being in creation; narrativizing being and creation; the relation between being and narrative; the situation of being in narrative time and space; the relation between authority and narrative; possible authority over narrative and the authority of narrative; interaction between narrative and the other; the authority of the other over and within the narrative; and the inter-referentiality of text and author. Divided into two parts, “Towards High Modernism” and “After Modernism”, the book allows the reader to chronologically follow how authors’ relations to literature in general evolved with the changing world and new perspectives on the nature of reality. This book offers an insightful contribution to the on-going discussion on the ambiguities inherent in the concepts of author, narrative, and being, and will stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field.

This concise and highly accessible textbook outlines the principles and techniques of storytelling. It is intended as a high-school and college-level introduction to the central concepts of narrative theory – concepts that will aid students in developing their competence not only in analysing and interpreting short stories and novels, but also in writing them. This textbook prioritises clarity over intricacy of theory, equipping its readers with the necessary tools to embark on further study of literature, literary theory and creative writing. Building on a ‘semiotic model of narrative,’ it is structured around the key elements of narratological theory, with chapters on plot, setting, characterisation, and narration, as well as on language and theme – elements which are underrepresented in existing textbooks on narrative theory. The chapter on language constitutes essential reading for those students unfamiliar with rhetoric, while the chapter on theme draws together significant perspectives from contemporary critical theory (including feminism and postcolonialism). This textbook is engaging and easily navigable, with key concepts highlighted and clearly explained, both in the text and in a full glossary located at the end of the book. Throughout the textbook the reader is aided by diagrams, images, quotes from prominent theorists, and instructive examples from classical and popular short stories and novels (such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’ J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, or Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, amongst many others). Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative can either be incorporated as the main textbook into a wider syllabus on narrative theory and creative writing, or it can be used as a supplementary reference book for readers interested in narrative fiction. The textbook is a must-read for beginning students of narratology, especially those with no or limited prior experience in this area. It is of especial relevance to English and Humanities major students in Asia, for whom it was conceived and written.

In this study, David Bordwell offers a comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of the film medium, and diverse story-telling patterns to construct their fictional narratives.

This open access book is a methodical treatise on narration in different types of media. A theoretical rather than a historical study, Transmedial Narration is relevant for an understanding of narration in all times, including our own. By reconstructing the theoretical framework of transmedial narration, this book enables the inclusion of all kinds of communicative media forms on their own terms. The treatise is divided into three parts. Part I presents established and newly developed concepts that are vital for formulating a nuanced theoretical model of transmedial narration. Part II investigates the specific transmedial media characteristics that are most central for realizing narratives in a plenitude of different media types. Finally, Part III contains brief studies in which the narrative potentials of painting, instrumental music, mathematical equations, and guided tours are illuminated with the aid of the theoretical framework developed throughout the book. Suitable for advanced students and scholars, this book provides tools to disentangle the narrative potential of any form of communication.

Telling stories in conversations is intricately interwoven with the interactive and local functions of story telling. Telling stories demands a certain kind of context and in itself establishes a particular interactive reality. Thus, narration is a specific kind of verbal interaction, governed by contextualizing devices, genre-specific cooperative regularities and corresponding verbal features. It plays an important role in institutional as well as in private modes of communication. The volume focuses on narration as a contextualized and contextualizing activity, which allocates specific structural tasks to the participants in the narrative process (narrator, co-narrator, listener). Thus, the research questions are oriented towards story telling under a functional and interactive perspective. The contributions analyze recordings of authentic narrations in different functions using different kinds of qualitative reconstructive methods. The data come from everyday as well as institutional settings and the languages covered are English, German, Greek, Hungarian, and Italian.