Narrative concepts and theorists

1. Narrative
Harry Isaacs

2. Claude Levi-Strauss and Narrative
Claude Levi-Strauss was a French man who studied social and cultural developments of humankind as a social anthropology. Since he
studied culture and society, some of the theories he had were relative to both literature and media, and had significant analogies of
how art has been culturally structured as a convention.
Claude Levi-Strauss came up with the idea that narratives are driven by two contrasting forces, or binary opposites. The binary
opposites theory assumes that every force within a narrative has an opposing side which contrasts with each other. Studying an
narrative therefore involves looking at these contrast within the story.
Examples of binary opposites would be:
 Light/Dark
 Good/Evil
 Noise/Silence
 Youth/Age
 Right/Wrong
 Poverty/Wealth
 Strength/Weakness
 Inside/Outside
Claude Levi-Strauss suggests that these opposites drive the narrative on until there is balance (equilibrium) as a resolution to the
situation.

3. Vladimir Propp and Narrative
Vladimir Propp was a Soviet famous for studying Russian folk tales of the 1920’s
and devising a mythology, through reading and comparing their narrative
elements. He figured that there are only a certain number of characters that
appear within narratives.

4. Tzveten Todorov and Narrative
Tzvetan Todorov is a Bulgarian born Frenchmen who experts in sociology,
literature, history and philosophy. He developed similar theories on narrative to
that of Vladimir Propp. He identified that most narratives have a consistent three
part structure, which involves a beginning of peace (equilibrium), the
disturbance of that peace and finally its restoration, or a resolution that sees a
new form of peace.

5. Roland Barthes and Narrative
Roland Barthes was a French semiotician, as well as linguist, and he developed a theory about both
media and literature texts. He believed that texts had series of connotations and denotations, and that
these could either be open to interpretation or intentionally given a closed and preferred meaning. In
other words, what ever appeared in a piece of literature or a scene in a film can have many different
meanings, or is made by the author of the text/film to be interpreted in only one obvious way from all
perspectives.
In summary:
 Roland Barthes identified that literature and film contained denotations and connotations, and that
these can have open meanings or preferred meanings (closed)
 Open narrative – when the narrative can be interpreted with multiple perspectives to find different
meanings
 Closed narrative – when the narrative aims to get across one preferred meaning which is expected
to be interpreted in one way

6. Multistrand Narrative
A multistrand narrative is when you tell a story through more than one
perspective, or it can be a narrative with two separate plot lines that end up
intervening. This for instance could be used in a film to show what happened on
a day when two people met, and how they met for instance. Another example of
where this could be used is to show plots from different peoples perspective that
could lead up to an event.

7. Robert McKee and Narrative
Robert Mckee is a writing instructor who is famous for conducting seminars as to how to write, which are
named ‘Story Seminars’. He is most famous for ability to teach people how to make good stories with
compelling narratives, teaching scriptwriting/story telling as an art. He developed his ‘Story seminars’
as a part time professor at the university of southern California.
Robert Mckee has a simple 5 part structure for narratives:
 Inciting incident
 Progressive complications
 Crisis
 Climax
 Resolution