Schrödinger’s Duck-Rabbit: Ambiguity and Meta-Framing across Media
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Alberto Godioli
Abstract
Frame theory provides a useful conceptual tool to get a grip on viewers’ interpretive operations. Frames are ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that help to set expectations, steer attention, recognize patterns, detect novelties, determine salience, evaluate available information and choose further actions. Framing then refers to the activity of selecting the clusters of knowledge and interpretive stances deemed the most appropriate in response to a given situation. Certain textual, audio, and audiovisual narratives resist the routines of framing, or better, they don’t allow for routinely settling on a single frame. Providing challenges that test and play on readers’, listeners’, or viewers’ reliance on their available knowledge clusters, they problematize, perpetuate or even foreground these basic processes. The present contribution will theorize the use and values of frame switching across media, building on the analysis of three different case studies: complexity in film, ambiguous irony in music, and dark humor in literature and cartoons.
Abstract
Frame theory provides a useful conceptual tool to get a grip on viewers’ interpretive operations. Frames are ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that help to set expectations, steer attention, recognize patterns, detect novelties, determine salience, evaluate available information and choose further actions. Framing then refers to the activity of selecting the clusters of knowledge and interpretive stances deemed the most appropriate in response to a given situation. Certain textual, audio, and audiovisual narratives resist the routines of framing, or better, they don’t allow for routinely settling on a single frame. Providing challenges that test and play on readers’, listeners’, or viewers’ reliance on their available knowledge clusters, they problematize, perpetuate or even foreground these basic processes. The present contribution will theorize the use and values of frame switching across media, building on the analysis of three different case studies: complexity in film, ambiguous irony in music, and dark humor in literature and cartoons.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- By Way of Introduction – Reflections on Narrative and Values, and the Value of Narratives 1
- The Ethical Potential and Risks of Narratives: Six Evaluative Continuums (and Sofi Oksanen’s Open Letter to Melania Trump) 23
- Narrative, Values, and the Place of the Human: Coordinating Anthropocentrism and Biocentrism 43
- The Circulating Professor: Narrative Configuration in Nabokov’s Pnin 61
- Multi-authored Yet Authorless Film Photonovels, an Ethical Paradox? 75
- Schrödinger’s Duck-Rabbit: Ambiguity and Meta-Framing across Media 93
- “Find me a motive!” Accusatory Rhetoric, Narrative and Values in Emile Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ 117
- The Right to Speak: The Cultural Archive and the Public Sphere in South Africa 133
- Dangerous Narratives: How Fake News and Narrative Journalism Shed Light on Journalism’s Epistemological Foundations and Self-understanding in the Twenty-first Century 155
- Beating Illness Into Shape: Applied Narratology and the Dangers of Storytelling 181
- Contributors 205
- Index 209
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- By Way of Introduction – Reflections on Narrative and Values, and the Value of Narratives 1
- The Ethical Potential and Risks of Narratives: Six Evaluative Continuums (and Sofi Oksanen’s Open Letter to Melania Trump) 23
- Narrative, Values, and the Place of the Human: Coordinating Anthropocentrism and Biocentrism 43
- The Circulating Professor: Narrative Configuration in Nabokov’s Pnin 61
- Multi-authored Yet Authorless Film Photonovels, an Ethical Paradox? 75
- Schrödinger’s Duck-Rabbit: Ambiguity and Meta-Framing across Media 93
- “Find me a motive!” Accusatory Rhetoric, Narrative and Values in Emile Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ 117
- The Right to Speak: The Cultural Archive and the Public Sphere in South Africa 133
- Dangerous Narratives: How Fake News and Narrative Journalism Shed Light on Journalism’s Epistemological Foundations and Self-understanding in the Twenty-first Century 155
- Beating Illness Into Shape: Applied Narratology and the Dangers of Storytelling 181
- Contributors 205
- Index 209
