Narrative Theories - Pre-Reading

Narrative is commonly known as a structure of a story  which has a beginning, middle and end.

Tim O'Sullivan stresses that all media text must have some kind of story to it. Media texts are ways of telling different stories of people as a group of people or and individual person.

Narrative theory shows that what we experience when reading a text to understand a particular set of constructions and conventions and it's important to be aware of how these constructions are put together.

Important words and meaning;

Narrative - structure to a story 

Diegesis - the fictional space and time implied by the narrative - what's being created e.g the world in which the story takes place.

Verisimilitude - the quality of appearing to be real of true. - Verisimilitude - following the rules of continuity, temporal and space coherence 

 Classical Narritive - Pam Cook

Linerity of cause and effect within an overall trajectory of ENIGMA RESOLUTION.

A high degree of narrative closure

A fictional world that contains verisimilitude especially governed by spatial and temporal coherence

Kate Domaille 

Every story ever told can be fitted into one of eight narrative types. Each of these narrative types has a source, an original story upon which the others are based, These stories are as followed:
Achilles - The fatal flaw
Candide - The indomitable hero
Cinderalla - dream comes true
Circe - The Chase
Faust - Selling your soul
Orpheus - the gift that is taken away
Romeo and Juliet - The love story
Tristan and Iseult - The love triangle

Vladimir Propp concluded that regardless of the individual differences in terms of plot characters and setting, such narratives would share common structural features.