![]() ![]() Sometimes these rules are actively enforced (normative genres), while at other times they act simply as established customs. Prescription : Genres institute standards and rules that guide writers in their work. These groupings, which have been used since ancient times by writers, readers, and critics, serve a variety of functions:Ĭlassification : By identifying the features that are worthy of attention, genres help us to place a particular text among similar texts and distinguish it from most other texts. 2Ĩ Genres are conventional groupings of texts (or other semiotic representations) based on certain shared features. ![]() Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society it begins with the very history of mankind and there has never been a people without narrative. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances - as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. The narratives of the world are numberless. 2 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative, ’ in A Roland Barthes Reader (.).To conclude this chapter, we will consider how short stories and novels spread beyond the written word and become interconnected with other media in contemporary culture. In order to understand this model, it is essential to grasp the distinction between story and discourse, which will guide our discussions throughout the book. Here, we will follow a semiotic model to study and interpret narrative structure and meaning. We will then try to define and frame the two genres of prose fiction that are more common nowadays and from which we will draw the examples in this textbook: short stories and novels.Ĥ Not everyone approaches these genres in the same way. We will also present the main genres into which literary narratives have been divided historically, and how these genres have evolved from their origins until today. It is fair to say, then, that stories, and most particularly fictions, in their various forms and genres, constitute the backbone of literature.ģ In this chapter, we will introduce some basic ideas about storytelling, and in particular about the narrative forms of literature and the ways in which they create meaning. But if there is one medium that has shown itself particularly well-suited to tell engaging and lasting stories throughout the ages, it is written language. Video games, comics and manga, songs and musicals, stage plays, and YouTube blogs, they all tell stories in their own ways. And even more people like to watch movies, whether in the cinema or streamed to their laptop or smartphone. ![]() These are the kind of stories we call ‘fiction.’ Many people like to watch series or soap operas on TV. And we would not be able to make sense of our world and our lives without them.Ģ We also enjoy reading, watching, or listening to stories that we know are not true, but whose characters, places, and events spark our imagination and allow us to experience different worlds as if they were our own. These are usually not invented stories, but they are stories nonetheless. We are constantly telling each other stories, usually about events that happen to us or to people we know. 1 In one form or another, stories are part of everyone’s lives. ![]()
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