Narrative

Dramatic structure is the structure of a dramatic work such as a play or film. Many scholars have analysed dramatic structure, beginning with Aristole in his name


In his poetics the Greek philosopher Aristole put forth the idea that (A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end)
   


Aristoles three part view of a plot structure (with a beginning, middle and end - technically, the protasis, epitasis and catastrophe) prevailed until the Roman drama critic Horace said it should be no longer than 5 parts.
 




According to Freytag, a drama is divided into five parts, or acts, which some refer to as a dramatic arc:, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement.
Although Freytags analysing of dramatic structure is based on five act plays it can be applied (sometimes in a modified manner) to short stories and novels as well.
 




Exposition or intro
The exposition provides the background information needed to properly understand the story, such as the problem in the beginning of the story, characters and setting.
 




Rising action
During rising action, the basic internal conflict is complicated by the introduction of related secondary conflicts, including various obstacles that frustrate the protagonists attempt to reach his goal. Secondary conflicts can include adversaries of lesser importance than the story's antagonists, who may work with the antagonist of separately.
 




Climax
The third act that of the climax, or turning point, which marks a change for the better or the worse in the protagonists affair. If the story is a comedy, things will have gone badly for the protagonist up to this point; now, the tide will go well for him or her from now on. If its a tragedy it is the opposite of that.
 




Falling Action
During the falling action the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist unravels with the protagonists winning or losing against the antagonist.
 




Denouement, resolution or catastrophe
The resolution comprises events between the falling action and the actual ending scene of the drama or narrative and thus serves as the conclusion of the story. Conflicts are resolved, creating normality for the characters and a release of tension for the reader.
Simply put, the resolution is the unravelling or untying of the complexities of a plot. More modern works may have no resolution because of a quick surprise ending




(My intro follows Freytag's theory of a drama being divided into 5 parts, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement.)




Bordwell and Thompson


Narrative
In film art: an introduction, Bordwell and Thompson define narrative as a chain of events in a cause effect relationship occurring  in time (Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art 1980)


Diegesis
The internal world created by the story the characters themselves experience and encounter (hence non diegetic anything that is not part of the characters world experience)
 
Story and Plot
Story - all events referenced both explicitly in a narrative and inferred (including backstory
as well as those projected beyond the action)
 
Plot - the events directly incorporated into the action of the text and the order in which they are presented.
 
Unrestricted narration - A narrative which has no limits to the information that is presented
Restricted Narration - Only offers minimal information regarding narrative

encoding and decoding

Hall addressed the issue of how people make sense of media texts, presenting three hypothetical methods

1. The "preffered" reading
2. The "negotiated" reading
3. The "oppositional" reading

Different social situations lead to different social stances
The social position of some audiences puts them in direct conflict with the dominant position.

When an audience interprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. This results in a "prefferred" reading.

In a dominant-preffered reading, producers and the audience are in harmony, understanding, communicating, and sharing mediated signs in the established mindset of framing.
Not all audiences may understand what media producers may take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in understanding.

Negotiated positions are the result of the audience struggling to understand the dominant position or experiencing dissonance with those views.
These media consumers understand a text's contextual inflections and decode its messages by oppositional means

Oppositional audiences operate with an "oppositional" code which understands dominant hegemonic positions but finds framework to refute them
Stuart Hall believes that this position is necessary to begin a struggle in discourse or the "politics of signification"

My intro was about prostitution and the men trying to get the girl back, there are different ways the audience can react to the message I am trying to put accross. Stuart Hall came up with a theory, taking about preffered, negotiated and oppositional readings. My preffered reading for my intro is if the audience is in agreement to the message I was trying to put across about men taking advantage of woman and understanding the meaning I was trying to encode into my intro. My negotiated reading would be if my did not fully understand what I meant by the meaning of my intro but trying to pick out bits that they agree with but also have bit that they dissagree with.

My Opposional reading would be the audience completely disagreeing with the message I was trying to encode into my media text. 

Scripts

Theory - A statement about reality which seeks to predict or explain the relation between phenomena
Hypothesis - A specific predicted result derived from a theory

Theory - If I give someone a pencil they will like me more
Independent Variable - Giving of the pencil
Dependent Variable - The reaction different people give me

Scripts

These shared expectations get performed with hugely different degrees of commitment, or subversion, bypass, the actors (see Durkin; Goffman). They involve important images of how like may be lived; how to behave with others in particular situation, and so on.

Script Example 1

The very conventionalised ways in which romantic encounters are often portrayed may make you  feel you will know when 'true love' hits you because you've seen its stages scripted so many times. Maybe you have even rehearsed it in private fantasy moments

Script Example 2

You may have tried to copy the ways that being a 'real man/woman is framed and scripted by repeated media imagery, often involving, above all, notions of toughness/femininity.

All the men in my intro were macho as they were the bad guys and the hero and the woman was the victim and innocent.

Scripts and performances

These scripts often include a sense of when is the appropriate time to resort to be active of passive, use brute force or be gentle, and how to express or not express emotion etc. Of course they differ depending especially on ethnicity and class

Origins of the word stereotype

Where prejudices lurk, stereotypes are seldom far behind. The term stereotype coined in 1978 by the French printer Didot, originally referred to a printing process used to create reproductions.

Journalist Walter Lippmann (1922) later likened stereotyoes to "pictures in the head" or mental reproductions of reality, and from there, the term gradually came to mean generalizations -- or, quite often, over generalizations -- about the members of a group.

Walter Lippmann

In public opinion, his classic 1922 study of "public mind" and the forces that shape popular consciousness, Lippmann presented "stereotypes" as axiomatic (self evident or unquestionable) elements of human perception