Narrative: Form and Content

The reason we're starting this class with an examination of basic formal features of narrative, textual and visual, is to investigate the relation between form and content. An interesting demonstration of the notion that how something is said is what it says can be found in Raymond Queneau's work, Excercises in Style. Exercises in Style is a short, two-paragraph story retold 99 times, each time in a different rhetorical style, narrative structure, genre, or point of view. Although it is "the same story," it is also a quite different story in every iteration because the effect on the reader changes significantly. A sonnet situates a reader differently than a joke does, a linear and a non-linear narrative require different readers.

For our examination of visual narratives, it might be fruitful to look at a visual reworking of Queneau's project, Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Here, Madden retells the same simple series of actions each time shifting perspective, diction, style (both textual and visual), genre and so forth. I think a look at some of Madden's exercises will quickly illustrate the differences between basic film shots and camera angles, as well as assumptions encoded in genre.

Here is the story template (click on pictures to enlarge them):

and here is the same story retold as a first person narrative or monologue:

 Here is another first person narrative, but this time told in flashback:

A subjective camera or point of view shot (again corresponding to a first person narrative):

Here the "camera" is placed upstairs. Same story but now a different character's point of view is highlighted:
And here the "camera" functions like a voyeuristic third person narrator:

Here the "camera" is placed inside the refrigerator for a different kind of third person shot:

Here we have the story rendered as told by a third person limited narrator (as opposed to third person omniscient):

Here we have the story told in reverse chronological order:

Here the situation is played for humor:

And here the genre has been changed to horror comic:

And here we have the conventions of the superhero genre:

It might be useful to think how each version situates the reader/viewer in a different place: physically in relation to the action, but also emotionally and intellectually. What reactions or conclusions are encouraged in each version? What reactions and conclusions might be precluded?