Table Of ContentIKONTIHRS OF NARRATIVE
Scries Editor
I )avitl 1 Ierman, North Carolina State University
Narrative
across Media
The Languages of Storytelling
Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan
University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London
(' ■) 200.} by the Board of Regents of the University ol Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
©
Acknowledgments for the use of previously published material appear on page vii, which
constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Narrative across media: the languages of storytelling / edited by Marie-Laure Ryan,
p. cm.—(Frontiers of narrative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8032-3944-0 (cl.: alk. paper)—isbn 0-8032.-8993-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Narration (Rhetoric) z. Mass media. I. Ryan, Marie-Laure, 1946- II. Series.
PN2J2 .N3727 2004
808---dc22
2003015225
1 III HI. Idl III <
*U.’' HI (. IA
11 A t f 111 M * I
Contents
Acknowledgments, vii
Introduction
Marie-Laure Ryan, i
Part i: Face-to-Face Narration, 41
1. Toward a Transmedial Narratology
David Herman, 47
2. Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology of Narrative
Katharine Young, 76
3. Gesture and the Poetics of Prose
Justine Cassell and David McNeill, 108
Part 2: Still Pictures, 139
4. Pictorial Narrativity
Wendy Steiner, 145
5. Art Spiegelmans Mans and the Graphic Narrative
Jeanne Ewert, 178
Part 3: Moving Pictures, 195
6. Neo-Structuralist Narratology and the Functions of- Filmic Storytelling
David Bordivell, 203
7. Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/Content Dilemma
Kamilla Elliott, 220
8. Ordinary Horror on Reality tv
Cynthia Freeland, 244
Part 4: Music, 267
9. Overview ol the Music and Narrative Field
Emma Kafhlenos, 275
vi Contents
10. Music as a Narrative Art
Eero Tarasti, 283
11. Music, Genre, and Narrative Theory
Peter J. Rabinowitz, 305
J
Part 5: Digital Media, 329
12. Will New Media Produce New Narratives?
Marie-Laure Ryan, 337
13. Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse
Espen Aarseth, 361
14. The Myths of Interactive Cinema
Peter Limenfcld, 377
Coda: Textual Theory and Blind Spots in Media Studies
Liv Hausken, 391
Contributors, 405
Index, 409
/
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions or foreign language translations of some of the essays pub
lished in this volume have been published elsewhere:
David Bordwell, “NeoStructuralist Narratology and the Functions of Fil
mic Storytelling,” appeared in Swedish translation under the title “Neo-
struktrualistisk narratologi och filmiska berattarfunktioner,” in Aura:
Filmvetenskaplig tidskrift i.i (1995): 47~57- Reprinted by permission of
the author.
Justine Cassell and David McNeill, “Gesture and the Poetics of Prose,”
appeared in Poetics Today 12.3 (Fall 1991): 375—404. Copyright (c) 1991,
Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. All rights reserved. Reprinted
by permission of Duke University Press.
Liv Hausken, “Textual Theory and Blind Spot in Media Studies,” appeared
in a longer version as “Tekstteoretiske utfordringer i den medieviten-
skaplige disiplin,” in Norsk medietidsskrift 1 (2000): 99—113. Reprinted
by permission of the author.
Peter Lunenfcld, “The Myths of Interactive Cinema,” appeared in The New
Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: British Film Institute, 2002).
Reprinted by permission of bfi Publishing.
Marie-Laure Ryan, “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?” is an
expanded version of an article published in Frame 16.1 (2002): 19-35.
Reprinted by permission of the journal.
Wendy Steiner, “Pictorial Narrativity,” is a shortened version of chapter 1
of Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature
by W. Steiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Reprinted
by permission of the University of Chicago Press.
Katharine Young, “Fdgework: Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology
of Narrative,” is a revised, slightly shortened version of chapter 1 of
'Idleworlds and Storyreahns by K. Young (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff,
1987). Reprinted by permission o{ the author.
'The work of the editor was supported in pan by a fellowship from the
Guggenheim Foundation.
Narrative across Media
Introduction
Marie-Laure Ryan
Narrarology, the formal study of narrative, has been conccived from its
earliest days as a project that transcends disciplines and media. In 1964
Claude Bremond wrote: “IStoryJ is independent of the techniques that bear
it along. It may be transposed from one to another medium without losing
its essential properties: the subject of a story may serve as argument for a
ballet, that of a novel can be transposed to stage or screen, one can recount
in words a film to someone who has not seen it. These are words we read,
images we see, gestures we decipher, but through them, it is a story that
we follow; and it could be the same story.”1 This statement has remained
in theoretical hibernation for over forty years—occasionally contested by
opponents of the form and content dichotomy, which it seems to imply,
occasionally invoked as inspiration for concrete comparative studies, but
never developed into a full-scale transmedial narrative theory. Nearly forty
years later, in a period of swelling interest in both comparative media
studies and narrative (the latter demonstrated by the so-called narrative
turn in the humanities), the question of how the intrinsic properties of
the medium shape the form of narrative and affect the narrative expe
rience can no longer be ignored. The study of narrative across media is
not the same project as the interdisciplinary study of narrative: whereas
one project directs us to the importance of narrative in mostly language-
based practices, the other focuses on the embodiment, that is to say, the
particular semiotic substance and the technological mode of transmission
of narrative. Its categories are language, image, sound, gesture, and, further,
spoken language, writing, cinema, radio, television, and computers rather
than law, medicine, science, literature, and history.
Even when they seek to make themselves invisible, media arc not hollow
conduits lor the transmission ol messages but material supports of infor
mation whose materiality, preiisely, “matters” lor the type ol meanings
I
2 Ryan
that can be encoded. Whether they function as transmissive channels or
provide the physical substance for the inscription of narrative messages,
media differ widely in their efficiency and expressive power. In the words of
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, their built-in properties “open up possibilities
and impose constraints which . . . shape the narration, the text, and even
the story" (160). The present collection of essays takes a close-up look at
some of these constraints and possibilities—which we may call, following
the psychologist J. J. Gibson, “affordances”—with a broader question in
mind: what docs it mean “to narrate,” and what kinds of stories can be
told in different medial environments?
To prepare for this journey, let me attempt to package narrative and
media into transportable definitions. It is not my intent to develop a for
mula that captures the position of all the contributors to this volume,
but in the process of working my own definition I hope to give a rea
sonably comprehensive view of the options that underlie my decisions.
The parameters that make up ihis field of possibilities should provide a
common denominator for the comparison of differing individual positions.
The definitional considerations will be followed by a survey of some of
the milestones of media studies, from which we should get a clearer idea
of what needs to be done to turn its flirtation with narrative theory into
a productive partnership for both parties. This introduction will not in
clude a survey of narratology, mainly because the field is too vast to be
presented in a limited space but also because several essays in this book
involve a discussion of key narratological concepts: those in particular by
David Herman and Wendy Steiner. For a presentation of the individual
essays and an overview of the state of narrative research in each area,
the reader should consult the specializxd introductions to the individual
sections.
Narrative: What It Could Be
^1 he phenomenon of narrative has been explored in many terms: existential,
cognitive, aesthetic, sociological, and technical. These explorations range
from broad considerations about the nature of narrative to narrow defini
tions. The existential type (represented by Paul Ricoeur and Peter Brooks)
/tells us that the act of narrating enables humans to deal with time, destiny,
and mortality; to create and project identities; and to situate themselves as
embodied individuals in a world populated by similarly embodied subjects.
It is in short a way, perhaps the' only one, to give meaning 10 life. Through
narrative we also explore .iliern.ile realities and expand our meni.il hoi i/on
