Propp

CHARACTERS FUNCTION TO PROVIDE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE:

1. Hero
2. Helper
3. Princess
4. Villain
5. Victim
6. Dispatcher
7. Father
8. False Hero

Narrative Functions

1. PREPARATION
2. COMPLICATION
3. TRANSFERENCE
4. STRUGGLE
5. RETURN
6. RECOGNITION

Todorov

Most stories can be easily broken down into a BEGINNING / MIDDLE / END. :

• Equilibrium
• Disruption
• New equilibrium

Levi – Strauss

NARRATIVES (=myths) are STRUCTURED around BINARY OPPOSITIONS eg: good v evil; human v alien; young v old etc etc.

Chatman

• Kernels: key moments in the plot / narrative structure
• Satellites: embellishments, developments, aesthetics

Barthes

• Proairetic code: action, movement, causation
• Hermenuetic code: reflection, dialogue, character or thematic development
• Enigma code:

Memento

• non linear narrative
• no clear beginning, middle or end.
• staggered narrative
• clear kernels and satellites

Key Words / Ideas

• not real time / live – Elision or Ellipsis
• Flashbacks
• Flash forwards
• Simultaneous
• Parallel
• Foreshadowing
• Dramatic Irony
• Non – sequitars
• Light & Shade
• Proairetic
• Hermenuetic

• A way of seeing the world
• understood by terms: RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE
• parody vs pastiche
• pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist
• parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

Intertextuality

• deliberate references to other texts
• their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’  – Shuker (music videos)
• Surface and style over substance
• The emphasis is on the surface, in other words, if the main focus is the idea of just connecting one product to another, then the focus is superficial, shallow, lacking depth, so ‘in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture‘ – Strinati
• frivolous, trite, casual, surface, throw-away. It may even be ironic, joking, or literally, ‘just playing’. However, it is always a deliberate copy (of the old).
• become more vulnerable when we only focus on the surface
• Duty to enjoy yourself

The loss of a metanarrative

• postmodernism is surface and style no deep meanings no religion/ higher power
• From a societal perspective the ‘real’ seems to be imploding in on itself, a ‘process leading to the collapse of boundaries between the real and simulations’ (Barker & Emma, 2015:242). A process which the French intellectual Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms SIMULACRA. 
• Simulacra: simulations of reality

Orientalism

• the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism – Edward Said
• the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience – Edward Said
• creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness – Edward Said
• we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not
• we are so obsessed with reading magazines, listening to music, watching films, videos and television because, essentially, we are exploring ‘The Other’ as a way of exploring ourselves.

Louis Althusser

• Ideological state apparatus (ISA)
• ISA describe the way in which structures of civic society – education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity.
• the notion of ‘Interpellation’
•  the way in which your subject identity is formed and which, more often than not, corresponds to the dominant ideology.

Frantz Fanon

• The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
•  a key text in the development and ancestry of postcolonial criticism.
• mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared – Fanon
• Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
• Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
• Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony

• how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others
• a flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand – Said
• exercised through a whole set of institutions . . . the place where encounters between private individuals occur – Ibid

THE ‘OTHER’ – Lecan

•  we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not.
• It is possible to see why we are so obsessed with reading magazines, listening to music, watching films, videos and television because, essentially, we are exploring ‘The Other’ as a way of exploring ourselves.
• The Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

Louis Althusser

• Ideological state apparatus (ISA), is a theoretical concept developed by (Algerian born) French philosopher Louis Althusser which is used to describe the way in which structures of civic society – education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity
• ‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.‘

 Hegemonic struggle- Gramsci

• ‘from America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The ‘black world’ will see the light‘ – FRANTZ Fanon
•  the first step required for ‘colonialised’ people to reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity.
• The second, is to begin to erode the colonialist ideology by which that past had been devalued

• Feminism and sexism are closely linked
• ‘sexism was coined by analogy with the term racism in the American civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Defined simply, sexism refers to the systematic ways in which men and women are brought up to view each other antagonistically, on the assumption that the male is always superior to the female‘  – Michelene Wandor
• individual textual levels
• company levels
• how different genders are represented
• who has the power to represent gender difference
• “the camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion”

Laura Mulvey

• ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’
• cinema is biased towards men
• split between active/male and passive/female
• scopophilia (pleasure in looking)
• controlling and subjective gaze (male)
• vouyerism (sexual pleasure in looking)
• fetishism – close ups on parts of the body which are objectified or sexualised

Sut Jhally

• a connection between the aesthetics of pornography and the codes and conventions of the music video.
• “There’s no such thing as communication that doesn’t have something behind it, that it is always constructed by someone. And I want people to be active in the construction of their own world because if you’re not active in the construction of your own world then you’re a victim of someone else’s construction. “

Third wave feminism (raunch culture)

• began in the early 90’s
• younger and newer looks at feminism compared with older generation feminism
• emphasis on the difference among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and DIY tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyber activism
• ‘Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’
• the re appropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

Essay in planner – gender as performance p1

• Usually linear and sequential
• Time and space
• Beginning, middle and end
• Often chronological
• Distinction between Narrative, Story and Plot

Todorov

• Tripartite narrative structure
• Equilibrium
• Distribution
• New equilibrium
• Exposition – Climax – denouement (does not have to be in that order)
• Inciting incident

Levi – Strauss

• Binary oppositions – Good v Evil, Old v Young, Urban v Country.

Propp

• character types (Stock Characters)
• Stock functions
• Hero – Helper – Princess – Villain – Victim – Dispatcher – Farther – False hero

Chatman

• Satellites: Embellishments , developments , aesthetics
• Kernels: Key moments in the plot / narrative structure

1.  Pastiche – any form of creative work that imitates the work of another artist or group of artisits.
2. • Bricolage – work created out of a diverse range of things that happened to be available
3. • Intertextuality – the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text.
4. • Implosion – a therapeutic technique in which clients imagine and re-live aversive scenes associated with their anxiety
5. • cultural appropriation. –  the adoption of an element or elements of one culture by members of another culture

COLONIALISM – When a country attemtps to gain authority over people and territories. Usually with the aim of economic dominance.

Post Colonialism – The academic study of colonialism and imperialism

Diaspora – The dispersion of people from theire homeland

Bame – A word used in the UK to describe minorities

Double Consciousness – A term to describe the internal conflict faced by colonized people of an oppresive society

Cultural Absolutism – There are certain principles and sets of values that are objectivly right and wrong.

Cultural Syncretism – Disticnt aspects of different cultures merge together to create something new and unique.

Orientalism – The way the west views easten cultural

Appropriation – When certain cultures adopt aspects of other cultures

Cultural Hegemony – It is usually achieved through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and behavior of the rest of society

The Public Sphere – an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems and influence political action

THE ROLE OF PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING IN TERMS OF FAIR REPRESENTATION OF MINORITY GROUPS / INTERESTS – often biased when representing minority groups which causes society to develop stereotypes.