34 results
10 - The genres of television
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 125-139
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Each medium develops its own ways of telling stories. These different ways of telling stories encompass the devices of the plot, the technical aspects of the medium, and the codes and conventions of types of stories. Another way of putting this, which employs terms you will have encountered in earlier chapters, is that different media allow different possibilities of diegesis (telling the story) and mimesis (performance) and the relation between the two. Whether as readers (audiences) of texts or as producers of them, we recognise these combinations and categorise them, in order to advise or predict what kind of story this is going to be.
These categories of story may be identified as genres (the French word for types or kinds). On the one hand, genres can be seen as offering an important way of framing texts that assists comprehension. Genre knowledge orientates competent readers towards appropriate attitudes, assumptions and expectations about a text, which are useful in making sense of it. On the other hand, genres may be seen ideologically, as constraining interpretation, as limiting the available meanings of the text. What is a genre? Texts concerned with the study of television, such as Williams (1990), Tulloch (2000) or Creeber (2001), offer genres (or forms, as Williams calls them) of television program, such as news, drama, ‘variety’, sport, advertising, ‘cop series’, soap opera, documentary, cartoons, situation comedy, children's television and ‘popular entertainment’. Some of these are broken down still further by Creeber (2001).
4 - Stories and plots
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 47-59
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
There are many ways to think about film as a medium; its narrative properties represent only one component of a very complex whole. For example, it would be perfectly legitimate to approach film from its technological aspect, or to consider its function in sustaining a certain political culture, or to concentrate on its pictorial aesthetic qualities, or on its musical, rhythmic or chromatic properties. Nevertheless, both within the purview of this book, and more generally in the way we tend to think about and discuss the medium, films are predominantly considered as narrative forms. Indeed, it would be possible to contend that film was the dominant narrative medium of the twentieth century; a fact not without its own interesting history, some of which we will glance at below.
As a narrative medium, film – like other narrative media: epics, novels, dramas, operas and the various media considered in this book – has established many interlocking conventions to make its storytelling comprehensible. Many of these conventions concern the unique art of editing: the splicing together of different shots to make one coherent narrative whole. But other conventions have to do with how the image is composed ‘within the frame’ of any given shot. Traditionally, these two distinct areas in film aesthetics are known as, respectively, montage and mise en scène.
16 - Print news as narrative
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 218-244
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In his book on American television culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman argued that ‘television speaks in only one persistent voice – the voice of entertainment’ (Postman 1985, chap. 5). In its lack of contextualisation, analysis and seriousness, he says, television news has become pure entertainment. This kind of ‘tabloid television’, deplored by many commentators (Smith 1992; Langer 1998), is the visual reflex of a type of narrative news first popularised in tabloid newspapers and now a staple item of most mainstream newspapers. The increasing narrativisation of news, both in print and on television and radio, is seen as an inevitable result of market forces exerting pressure on news outlets to become substantially more focused on profits and audience size.
This chapter begins by accounting for some of the ways in which news is structured and circulated as ‘stories’ at an institutional level. It will then examine and critique a conventional division between ‘information’ and ‘narrative’ models of print news, suggesting that this division needs to be collapsed and restated as a generic distinction between (non-narrative) ‘information’ and (narrative) ‘news’. In setting out the narrative strategies of news stories, I argue that these strategies undermine journalistic ideals of objectivity. Finally, I review some of the ideological consequences of constructing and reading print news as narrative.
News as construct
Although it has become a truism of media studies to assert that news is a construct, it is worth explaining this idea in terms of how ‘news’ circulates in the form of deliberately structured stories that people tell to each other.
6 - Narrative voice
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 73-85
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The relations between narration proper and the points of view of the characters being narrated are every bit as complex as the relations between story time and ‘plot’ time. In any narrative form, there is a spectrum of what we can call ‘distances’ between a narrator's ‘voice’ and the mental and sensory states of his or her characters: from alpine and godlike superiority, through gradations of nearer proximity and outright identity to the point where the characters know more than the narrator. This spectrum of relations clearly hinges on a question of apparent ‘knowledge’, although we also know that, in some ultimate sense, the film ‘knows itself’ throughout; it produces various narrators to tantalise us with their different degrees of knowledge.
Consider for a moment the intricate patterns of knowing and unknowing in Brian Singer's Usual Suspects (1995). One principal narrator, ‘Verbal’ Kint, spins a dizzying yarn to one principal narratee, Dave Kujan. Internal to Kint's story, various other narrators tell their stories (Keaton, Kobayashi and so on). Meanwhile, external to it, Kujan interrupts with his own versions of some events, while a survivor of a mysterious waterfront atrocity is telling, in Turkish, the story of seeing Keyser Söze. By interlacing these distinct voices, Singer achieves a formidable density of narrative texture and moreover works towards his astonishing final revelation: that Kint is himself Keyser Söze, and that almost everything he has been telling Kujan (and us) is a welter of lies, fiction and misrepresentation.
11 - Television news as narrative
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 140-152
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
I think that the same process is involved in the construction of any event televisually … You constantly draw on the inventory of discourses which have been established over time. I think in that sense we make an absolutely too simple and false distinction between narratives about the real and the narratives of fiction.
(Stuart Hall 1983)Recognition of a text as belonging to a particular genre can help readers (listeners, viewers) make judgements about the ‘reality status’ of the text, most fundamentally whether it is fictional or non-fictional. News is a very recognisable non-fiction genre. That it is non-fiction does not mean it will not use narrative, however, despite the fact that we might associate narrative (storytelling) with the imagined and invented. Television news is not only a popular source of information but also it enjoys a high degree of credibility. Public opinion polls and ratings surveys have shown that since the 1990s television news has become both the primary and the most believed source of news for a majority of viewers, in countries such as the USA, the UK and Australia.
This reflects the phenomenon referred to in chapter 10, observed by Ellis (1992) and Williams (1990), that television images appear to be ‘really happening’ in the present moment. The characteristic visual and audio codes and narrative structures of television news work together to construct such news values as truth and balance, as well as to convey authority and immediacy.
14 - Structures of radio drama
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 191-202
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The history of radio drama is to a large extent a history of theorising the radio medium; it charts the discovery of the nature of radio and its relationship to the listener. Radio plays began as plays on radio. In the early days of radio, few writers thought to write specifically for radio. It was considered a good medium on which to broadcast plays written for the theatre; its distinguishing feature, the absence of the visual dimension, was not considered a problem. Plays are, after all, a literary form, and the canon of classical drama was prized for its language, its use of words, rather than for what you could see happening on stage. Andrew Crisell, who has written extensively about radio (1994, 1997, 2000), has pointed out that until the sixteenth century at least people spoke of ‘hearing’ a play rather than seeing it, reflecting the relationship of drama to poetry in rhythm and rhyme. There are examples of this usage in Shakespeare's plays: Hamlet says, ‘Follow him friends; we'll hear a play tomorrow.’ The word ‘audience’ is derived from the Latin ‘audire’, to hear.
Crisell (2000) attributes an increased concentration on visual effects in theatre to the development over time of new staging technology – such as perspective in scenery at the end of the seventeenth century – and artistic innovations, such as the elaborate machinery, spectacular sets and costumes of the Paris Opera of the early eighteenth century.
13 - Soap operas and sitcoms
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 172-188
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Ideology
In chapter 2 I introduced the concept of the Umwelt, to describe human understanding of reality, the objective world (in a Peircean sense) of experience and imagination. The term ‘ideology’ is variously used, but here it is used to mean the perspectives that a person takes up towards his or her Umwelt, the ethical values that seem unproblematic, unarguable, objectively ‘natural’ in her or his world. In ‘A Policeman's Lot’, chapter 12 of their book, Reading Television, John Fiske and John Hartley discuss the ideology of several police series of the 1970s: A Man Called Ironside, The Sweeney, Starsky and Hutch. I quote their specific comments on Ironside to exemplify the general concept of ‘ideology’ in the sense above:
Ironside's team is presented as a harmonious society – part hunting party out of American mythology, part microcosm of Western class structures. But in terms of the way this ‘society’ is presented in the series itself, Ironside's team derive their satisfying meaning not only from their metonymic reference but also by binary opposition to each other:
male: female
white: black
cerebral: physical
age: youth.
The left-hand set of terms show the ‘esteemed’ or dominant values of this series. It is interesting to notice how the integration of these values into a harmonious society is presented as natural, and this offers us a graphic example of what Barthes terms the ‘ex-nominating’ process that operates in the ideology of our society. […]
Part 4 - Radio and print journalism
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 189-190
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
17 - Analysing the discourse of news
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 245-268
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the last chapter, I described some of the main features of print news construction that work to bring the genre of news into the broader textual category of narrative. The chapter also raised some of the ideological consequences of the production and consumption of news as narrative.
In this chapter, I outline some strategies for analysing the discourse of print news. Like any kind of critical text analysis, interpretation of news discourse needs to be grounded in an understanding of how language choices in a given context construct particular meanings. This is in fact what discourse means: language choices related to a specific social context, or, as Norman Fairclough defines it, ‘language as a form of social practice’ (Fairclough 1989: 20).
Although most of us can describe in general terms the difference between an ‘objective’ news story and a sensationalised human interest story, accounting for those differences requires a reasonably sophisticated toolbox of linguistic and interpretive concepts that can be applied to different kinds of texts. A semiotic methodology of critical analysis enables us to show how meanings are made and ideologies are reiterated. Systematically identifying specific linguistic choices and their semiotic potential is also effective for calibrating the differences between various genres of news narratives.
Some basic tools for text analysis, based on the work of Michael Halliday and his theory of language as a ‘social semiotic’, have already been introduced and applied in this book (see especially chapters 8 and 12).
12 - Aspects of narrative in series and serials
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 153-171
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
One understanding of postmodern style is that of fragmentation. What is fragmented, broken up, will depend on what is usually understood to have ‘coherence’ in a particular medium and discourse. In poetry a postmodern style can be read as a dispersal of the unified persona of the traditional lyric; in prose fiction, such as the novel, it could be an incoherence of character, event or setting. (Is that the same character? Has this event already happened? I don't understand!)
The Hollywood tradition of film narrative has on the whole pursued the tight coherence of the nineteenth-century classic realist novel (the American D. W. Griffith, producer and director of the much-studied 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, was said to have been very influenced by Dickens' novel structure). In comparison, the smaller European markets have allowed more aesthetic freedom. European films offer examples of narrative disruption from the earliest period, from the surreal distortion of setting in the German film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) to the ambiguity of character and event in the French film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). For film, greater aesthetic freedom, relative to economic constraints, can favour experimentation, including various types of fragmentation. But in contrast, for television, it is the very economic constraints within which it is produced that oblige the television product to be fragmented in particular ways. These ways have led to the series and the serial being the dominant modes of narration in television.
Contributors
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp x-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Acknowledgements
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp xi-xii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
19 - Advertising narratives
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 285-299
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In chapter 3 of this book it was pointed out that structuralist studies of narration typically study the text as object, looking for structures and relations within the text. In contrast, post-structuralist studies of narration typically focus on the text in relation to the subject, the subjectivity of the one who is interpreting or producing the text. Thus post-structuralist studies are usually concerned with ideology, with the assumptions of what is ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ to the subject in producing meaning. Post-structuralist studies of narration, then, focus on the ideological orientation of narrative. What stories are told? What stories are repressed? In whose interests is it to tell particular stories, or to repress them? And so on.
In this chapter I bring a post-structuralist perspective to bear on narration in print-culture advertising. Again, I illustrate my general remarks with examples from the October 2001 issue of Australian Women's Weekly.
Magic and information
The collection Media Studies: A Reader, edited by Paul Marris and Sue Thornham, includes seven extracts in the section ‘Advertising’. The first extract is by Raymond Williams, ‘Advertising: The magic system’, written in 1960 but published in 1980 in his book, Problems in Materialism and Culture (Marris & Thornham 1996: 461–5). This is a much-quoted article. For example, it is one of only two articles included under the heading ‘Consumption and the market’ in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During (1993: 320–36). I will first describe Williams' account in some detail, then suggest some modifications.
15 - Radio news and interviews
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 203-217
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
No matter what the radio station, ‘the news’ is a distinctive form of radio sound. It is obviously not music, and it differs from other radio ‘talk’ in a number of identifiable ways. News is usually at the ‘top of the clock’; that is, the main bulletins occur on the hour. The fact that news usually starts at the top of the hour is an important part of the way radio structures time throughout the radio day. News on the hour is usually announced with an audio ‘call to attention’. This could be as simple as a voice cue from an announcer or the ‘pips’ of a time signal, or it could be as elaborate as the appropriately named ‘Majestic Fanfare’ that heralds the radio bulletins on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the most widely recognised news theme in Australia. Whatever it might be, nearly all radio stations have some kind of aural cue to the listener that the news is about to begin.
Most radio is live to air; part of establishing the credibility and authenticity of news is that it comes to listeners in the here and now, even though the voice reports of the journalists might have been pre-recorded. In its distinguishing structure and sound, news can be called a genre of radio programming. And just as media theorists and news practitioners distinguish between tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, so we can distinguish subgenres and discourses of radio news.
9 - Film narrative and visual cohesion
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 108-122
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the previous chapter, I discussed ways in which the structures of film narrative are able to create meanings, themes and concerns that could be different from those expressed in a corresponding novel. In this chapter, further examples from the two films The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The English Patient will focus mainly on tenor and mode and how they are realised in film, particularly through sound, character, focalisation and cohesion. By examining the technical production of these effects, we can see how they provide complex sites of signification for viewing audiences.
Sound
The sound of a film is one of its most versatile signifiers, since it contributes to field, tenor and mode as a powerful creator of meaning, mood and textuality. Diegetic sounds are those that belong to the on-screen ‘reality’, able to be heard by the characters on screen, such as dialogue, sound effects (the striking of the staff on the bridge) and ambient noise (the noise of the sandstorm in the desert). Non-diegetic sounds come from outside the filmic world, and are not ‘heard’ by the characters. These conventionally include soundtrack music and voice-overs.
While dialogue clearly contributes to the tenor of a film, as the main means by which relations between characters and their attitudes to each other are constructed, sound effects and ambient noise, over-determined by technology, help to construct the semantic field.
20 - Conclusion: postmodern narrative and media
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 300-306
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
At the beginning of Tom Tykwer's film Run, Lola, Run (1999), the voice-over says: ‘Countless questions in search of an answer … an answer that will give rise to a new question, and the next question will give rise to a second question, and so on.’
This announcement calls attention to the instability of meaning, which is a central concept of post-structuralist theory and lies at the heart of postmodern representation. The content and structure of the film challenge the conventions of causality, temporality, motivation and closure that characterise realist narrative and offer instead something closer to a postmodern narrative based on uncertainty, repetition with variation, multimodalism and a constant disruption of the movement from signifier to signified that stabilises meaning. Yet the idea of a ‘postmodern narrative’ appears to be something of an oxymoron, since postmodernism explicitly rejects totalising narratives with their neat explanations and carefully signposted points of closure. Is such a concept possible?
There is no doubt that contemporary media texts, and their narrative modes, continue to locate themselves comfortably in the aesthetic of classic realism. Emerging at the same time as the rise of industrial capitalism, in the late nineteenth century, the mode of realism enacts a specific ideological agenda, ‘not only in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as the position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding’ (Belsey 1980: 67).
2 - Narrative concepts
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 11-27
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Narrative is realised in many different media. In this book we look at narratives in film, in television, in radio and in various media of popular print culture. These could be called ‘mass media’ in that all are assumed to be shown or broadcast to a scattered and diverse audience.
I want to begin here, however, with a narrative in a very different medium: a handwritten letter from one person to another person. This is a much simpler textual situation than that of many of the media texts we will later consider, yet, in an introductory way, we can identify certain features of this letter and its relation to its social context as exemplifying more general ‘concepts of narrative’. In the comments following the letter, the concepts, when first mentioned, are in bold. In the latter part of this chapter and in the next, chapter 3, many of these concepts are more generally described (see also the glossary, at the end of the book).
Introducing some concepts of narrative
In 1830 Isabella Parry ‘went to live at Port Stephens on the edge of the settled areas north of Sydney’, capital of what was then the British colony of New South Wales. Isabella's husband Edward had been knighted for his involvement in Arctic exploration; now he was appointed Commissioner of the Australian Agricultural Company. Isabella's letters home have been preserved. On 19 December 1831 she wrote to her mother in England:
We have lately experienced another disadvantage of a newly cultivated country, and have witnessed what I have only heard of before, and read in Cooper's novels – I mean the burning of the woods, and it is, indeed, a fearful and extraordinary sight. […]
Bibliography
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 313-319
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Index
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 320-329
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
5 - Narrative time
- Edited by Helen Fulton
- Rosemary Huisman, University of Sydney, Julian Murphet, University of Sydney, Anne Dunn, University of Sydney
-
- Book:
- Narrative and Media
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2005, pp 60-72
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
To begin with the very obvious, all storytelling is necessarily extended in time: narrative is a temporal mode. To tell a story is to articulate represented events in a sequence, putting one thing after another, drawing causal connections between them, until we have moved (as Aristotle said) from beginning, to middle, to end. And this takes time; it occupies and could even be said to ‘flesh out’ time. Narrative has generally been thought of as a pleasurable way of spending time, or filling it, and from time to time we are even conscious of going to the movies to ‘kill time’. From the moment our caregivers start telling us bedtime stories, we are woven into narrative textures and use these textures to orient us in our daily experience of time. The fact is that our very notion of time, the way we represent it intimately to ourselves, is entirely bound up with the forms of narrative to which we have been exposed. Try to imagine your own personal history ‘outside’ some kind of narrative shape; the closest you can get is a set of simultaneously juxtaposed images, from which precisely the element of time is missing. Narrative is the medium in which we ‘think time’, although it might as well be said that time itself, if we can imagine it outside human consciousness, has nothing narrative about it.
![](/core/cambridge-core/public/images/lazy-loader.gif)