Exploring stories
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Gerald Prince
Abstract
Aiming to underline the link between storytelling content and ritual structure and to show how the building of community constitutes the meta-theme of storytelling in general and film narrative in particular, L. A. Alexander explores the notion of symbolic community and provides a detailed account of narrative (film) genres in terms of three parameters–their origin in a basic ritual, the cultural need they address, and the cultural function they fulfill–as well as sets of rules for the successful creation of fictional worlds. Though it does not pay much attention to such important narrational elements as distance, speed, and point of view, Alexander’s exploration sheds decisive light on the foundations, characteristics, and possibilities of fictional worlds represented in (film) narratives.
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Note
L. A. Alexander, Fictional worlds: Traditions in narrative and the age of visual culture. Brooklyn, NY: Storytelling on Screen, 2013.
©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Anthropological-semiotics of rhythm and animating modernity in China: A rhythmanalysis of Princess Iron Fan
- Individuating in the dark: Diagrammatic reasoning and attentional shifts
- The free slave paradox
- Size and shape depictions in the manual modality: A taxonomy of iconic devices in Adamorobe Sign Language
- The thematic structure of homepages: An exploratory systemic-functional account
- Revisiting dynamic space in film from a semiotic perspective
- A semiotic analysis of anti-identity construction in fictional narratives from the viewpoint of modeling systems theory
- Rethinking semiotics: Toward a theory of intentional sign
- Two approaches to defining internal, external, and zero-focalization
- Zero sign duality in visual semiotics
- Conceptual embodiment in visual semiotics
- Reading palm-up signs: Neurosemiotic overview of a common hand gesture
- Does one truly need to belong?: A case for the need to meaningfully exist
- Review articles
- Review of Speaking hatefully: Culture, communication, and political action in Hungary
- Exploring stories
