narrative & story

story grand & storyline

In the flow of our lives, it is through and with narrative that we construct meaning for ourselves. Walter Fisher states that human beings primarily make and use symbols to create narratives (63). We use stories in order to contextualize what we are saying so that our audience gets a sense of time and space. As Miller notes, plot is the most important feature of narrative (66, "Narrative"). It is the plot of the story, from beginning to middle to end, that helps us follow it.

There are many different perspectives from which we can consider narrative - formalist, Bakhtinian dialogical, Chicago Neo-Aristotelian, psychoanalytical, hermeneutic, phenomenological, structuralist, semiotic, tropological, Marxist, sociological, reader-response, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist (67, Miller, "Narrative"). I will not go into detail about all of the above, but I believe that such perspectives should be noted if only to show that the meaning and place of narrative in our lives has been, and continues to be, studied intensely.

To best conduct this study of narrative, I need to make some distinctions between the terms narrative, story, storyline, and story grand. Narrative and story are easily confused and closely linked. In this dissertation, story is the signified, the narrative content of a text (Genette, 27). Narrative is the signifier, the formal discourse of the text itself (27). In addressing narrative, I will consider four key characteristics; setting, character, plot and theme. The setting is where the story occurs, the characters are the personalities within the setting, the plot is the course of action and the theme is an overall meaning found within the story. The story grand refers to the whole story that occurs across several mediums or texts. The storyline refers to the specific story occurring in a particular medium or text. So, narrative changes from medium to medium and text to text across the story grand, and the story grand is a story composed of several storylines from various mediums and texts.