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Inevitability vs Alienation
This chapter gives a very clear outline of the kinds of effects Brecht wanted to achieve in his vision of an 'epic theatre', and in his development and use of techniques of alienation: Verfremdungseffekt.
“the audience must be discouraged from losing its critical detachment by identification with one or more of the characters: the opposite of identification is the maintenance of a separate existence by being kept apart, alien, strange…�
A key aspect of the kind of theatre that Aristotle described is the privileged position of the audience. Dramatic irony – when you know something a character in a narrative does not – depends on the audience’s ability to see all the action. The audience has the comfort of having a kind of omniscience – being informed of the disparate events that characters are not party to. Those events have causes and effects, which unfold as causes and effects do – and try as they might, the characters are unable to circumvent their fate: the outcome of the narrative is inevitable, inexorable – the way of the world or the will of the Gods.
So Brecht wanted his audience not to ‘immerse’ themselves in the diegesis of the story. Rather than avoiding ‘disturbance’ as Aristotle advised, Brecht wanted to encourage disturbance. He wanted his audience to retain their critical faculties, to retain their disbelief. This way, perhaps they might concentrate on why and how events unfolded before them, instead of blindly accepting them as the inevitable destinies of mankind. If destinies are not inevitable, then destinies can change; we need not look to the Gods or to fate to determine the future: we can act and make the future ourselves.
Tags: alienation aristotelian brecht epic narrative narratives-3 theatre verfremdungseffekt
Universal, international, transhistorical, transcultural
Barthes's career rather spans the movement from structuralism to post-structuralism. This essay is very much the former, with its emphasis on finding the fundamental units of narratives, whether these are functions, indices, or narremes... whatever. He's interested in looking for the 'universal' elements of story - pure structuralism.
And yet... he concludes on what we can recognise as a post-structuralist note: what 'happens' in narrative is nothing... language alone, the adventure of language...
A Scientific Approach to the Study of Culture
In this essay on the Oedipal myth, Levi-Strauss laments that various accidents in the field of anthropology have led to the undermining of prospects for the ‘scientific study of religion’. He goes on to say that analysing the instances of the Oedipal myth, what is aimed for is a ‘logical treatment of the whole’ that will lead to uncovering the ‘structural law of the myth’.
These descriptions of his programme start to outline one key aspect of what structuralists want to do: approach the object of their study scientifically. Levi-Strauss emphasises this by noting that when poetry is translated from one language to another, serious distortions of the original poem occur, but translations of myths do not suffer in the same way. He describes myth as ‘timeless’, and as something that functions at a ‘high level’, which ‘takes off’ from language. These are characteristics which make myths translatable, reproducible: they have ‘constituent units’ which are governed by laws in just the same way that particles have laws which are governed by the laws of physics.
Tags: narrative narratives-2
Formalist reduction of narrative
Propp's reduction of folk tales into 'irreducible elements' is a deeply interesting and stimulating approach to understanding narrative.
However, doesn't reducing narratives down to these structures mean that we lose something? Once you get down to the basic units of narrative that Propp describes, we can't put them back together again.
Tags: narrative narratives-1
Entry-level overview of narratology
Gripsrud's book is an excellent place to start for any topic to do with media culture, but the chapter on narratology in particular is a really good entry-level overview of narrative theory.
Tags: narrative narratives-1
A gentle introduction to theories of narrative
A good, nice, gentle introduction to narratology - the theory of narrative.
The opening chapter nicely weaves in specific examples of narrative from images, books, critics, etc.
In particular, Abbott emphasises how narrative is thought by some theorists to be as fundamental to human nature (hard-wired into us biologically) as language and grammar.
Tags: narrative narratives-1
Flaneur vs Anti-flaneur
An interesting note about how 'touristic' travel is not quite so 'free-floating' and 'voyueristic' as social sciences often make out. The 'flaneur' of Benjamin is often shown up as the model for understanding the playful gaze of the tourist / consumer, as though they are abstracted non-committal players. Actually, people are often rushed, breathless, purposeful, preoccupied, and stressed, and want either to seek out - or avoid - family and friends.
Tags: communication flaneur gaze imagination place social space virtual
The banality of communicative travel?
On page 5 the authors refer to the importance of physical co-presence. Here is where I start to detect banality, padding and bullshit. I mean, it is really quite banal to say that physical co-presence (i.e. people meeting) is important and takes primacy over other forms of communication. Perhaps if the authors mean to imply that drawing attention to this is a way of estranging the reliance we place on communicative travel, then it may be justified, but are we really at a place where we think sending emails is equivalent to 'meeting'?
Actually, maybe we are :-(
Tags: alienation communication physicality social space travel virtual
Technology, imaginative and virtual travel
Is there a trend in social sciences to see travel as a set of neutral technologies? Or... when people think of modernity and postmodernity, they certainly see the ease of transportation as significant, but the experience of travel disappears.
This is exemplified by the different kinds of travel the authors identify: physical (which always seems to be 'postivised' - or turned into faceless statistics); imaginative (the classic armchair traveller who vicariously experiences the world through books and TV); virtual ("on the internet" according to the list given here); and communicative (live person-to-person messages via email, phone, text, etc).
I wonder what they think the difference between imaginative and virtual actually is?
Tags: imagination place space technology travel virtual
Places, non-places and strangers
The authors refer to the idea that mobility destroys authentic senses of place - an inauthenticity of place results in placelessness - or what I've noticed that Auge call 'non-place'. The focus is on locations rather than communities (think of the Estate Agent's blurb); or function rather than aesthetic merit (the utilitarian industrial estate or motorway bridge vs the human centred open space - the park, the square, the lounge bar or saloon, the common room).
There's an interesting reference to the work of George Simmel (which I'm not yet familiar with), who looks at the notion of the stranger - the stranger is of course a different figure in the city (where he is everyman) than he is in the countryside, (where he is a threatening invader). Simmel uses the stranger figure to explore the the tension of closesness and proximity as against alienation and anonymity. Strangers are 'nearby' while 'close ones' are likely to be distant.
Tags: alienation anonymity geography non-place place proximity space stranger