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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 (2014) 934 – 939
WCLTA 2013
Narratology As An Interpretative Model, And A Narrative Analysis
As An Interpretative Key Of Basic Teaching Tools In Textbooks
And In Data-Video Presentation – Static Visual Texts
Jiří Pavelka*
Masaryk University, Faculty of Social Studies, Joštova 10, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
Abstract
Media texts can be analyzed and interpreted from different theoretical resources and using different methodological tools. The
starting theoretical frameworks of a qualitative research and the associated methodological tools, and in a broader context,
individual communication competencies, including the items such as faith or prejudices, determine and define how to interpret
media texts. The postmodern concept of a social reality as a product of narrative activities and narrative analysis represent
promising interpretative models and keys to media texts. The aim of the study is to explain these resources and methodics of
interpretation of static visual image texts – photos, fine-art paintings, illustrations, and posters that have become the basic
teaching tools in textbooks or video data presentation, from these viewpoints.
© 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and
Selection and peer-review
peer-reviewunder
underresponsibility
responsibilityofofthe
theOrganizing
OrganizingCommittee
CommitteeofofWCLTA
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2013.
Keywords: Narratology, methodics of interpretation, teaching tools, media text, static visual text;
1. Resources, theme and objectives of the study
The communication pragmatic concept of culture, which I refer to, it is based on assumption that culture and its
components – products, production, distribution, and consuming systems and technologies arise depending on the
processes of communication and that culture is simultaneously also an essential prerequisite of the environment and
communication and social action unwinding from it (Pavelka, 2004). A part of this approach is also a post-modern
social constructivist concept of social reality (Berger & Luckman, 1966) and storytelling activities (Lyotard, 1984;
White 2010; Geertz, 1977; Holstein & Gubrium, 2012).
*
Corresponding author: Jiří Pavelka Tel:+420- 549-49-5792
E-mail address: [email protected]
1877-0428 © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of WCLTA 2013.
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.05.162
Jiří Pavelka / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 (2014) 934 – 939 935
In terms of the communication and pragmatic concept of culture, media texts act in different roles on several
stages simultaneously, and therefore they become a very complex subject to analysis. They represent a sign
structure, but also a narrative structure (Genette, 1982; Barthes, 1975). They represent a tool of communication, but
also a communication product. They are sensually perceivable phenomena, but they also bear different kinds of
information (meaning, mediated content). They represent a tool of communication, but also a product of
conceptualization of the world (human cognition and knowledge). They exist thanks to media and media systems,
but they are also as a constitutive component of media. They are an externalised expression and a means of mental,
but also social behavior. They are an expression and product of social behavior, but also a normative basis as well as
an integrating element of this behavior. They are a tool that expresses the aesthetic perception of the world, but also
the millieu in which these relationships are formed and changed. They represent a tool of description and
interpretation of the cosmic, natural and human world, but also a semiotic universe. They represent a tool
participating in building this culture, but at the same time they are also the components of this culture. They form an
archive of culture, and at the same time they are interpretations of this culture.
Media text – if we look at it as an object of an analysis – has a large number of more-or-less autonomous and
also interconnected aspects, levels, plans, and contexts, including semiotic, narrative, communication, receptive,
information, media, discursive, epistemological, cognitive, aesthetic, social constructivist, archival, and interpretive.
Therefore the media text should be viewed from various and different viewpoints, without the ambition of using and
processing all of them within one paper/study. The various methods (including the narrative theory, e.g. Bal, 1985;
Sommer, 2004) and interpretation keys (including the narrative analysis as a research method, e.g. Clandinin &
Connelly, 2000; Elliot, 2005; Riessman, 2008) bring research opportunities, but also have their limits and
drawbacks.
Semiotic and narrative structure of the text takes a primary and basic position among the levels and text plans
(Chatman, 1980; Fulton, 2005; Block, 2007; Webster & Mertova, 2007; Pavelka, 2008). They are constructed on it
in fact, since any other aspects, levels, schedules and contexts of the text are related to them. This also applies to the
interpretation of mediated contents hiding in media texts, it means to the central goal of communication activities.
Interpretations always depend on the sign character and narrative structure of the text, on the extent to which the
interpreter is able to detect interconnection, conditionality, utilization and functional orientation of the expressional
means of the text. Interpretations are much more complex process. They depend on a large number of additional
knowledge and skill competencies of the interpreter and on the context and course of the communication in that
interpreter as one of the communication subject enters.
The theme of this study belongs to the analysis and interpretation of media texts. However, it has a relatively
narrow scope. First, it focuses only on one specific type of media texts, on the static, two-dimensional and mimetic
fine-art and photographic texts; second, it includes only one of many levels and plans of this type of media texts, the
semiotic and narratologic plan. The aim of the study is to offer methodics for the interpretation of this type of texts
(e.g. paintings, prints, photographs, digital images, etc.). These are in fact the essential and most frequent tools for
teaching either in printed textbooks, or in electronic and digital presentations.
2. Signs of visual texts
Sign texts represent a collage created from the existing words in dictionaries, which the communicating entities
have at their disposal. The phonetic units (in spoken texts) or graphemes (in literary texts) are basic, smallest and
indivisible building units of a sound or literary plan of a language text. Then they form higher building blocks of a
text, among others, even the words that are basic, smallest, and indivisible building blocks of a meaningful plan of a
language text.
Language words are of a discrete character – they are easily identifiable and from other words easily
distinguishable. These are then used for building higher semantic units – phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc.
Language words and language texts are composed in a linear way; it means that phonetic units or letters forming
words and even words forming language texts are piled up sequentially, one after the other in time (phonetic units)
or in space (letters), so the language words and language texts have a beginning and an end. On this line, the
meaning of the text is being gradually articulated through the language words.
We can also determine the smallest constructional elements with the two-dimensional visual texts. This role is
played by points, lines, curves, surface and colors and their tinges. Then higher units are built that can carry the
meanings. The basic position among them is taken by fine-art words because they represent the smallest the smallest
936 Jiří Pavelka / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 (2014) 934 – 939
constructional units of meaning in a fine-art text.
A two-dimensional static fine-art text has a completely different character of a design than language text, even if
– like language text – it is generated with the help of sign codes and communication conventions as a collage of the
existing words, which feature a fine-art vocabulary. A composition of a fine-art text created from the visual words,
phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc., does not have a linear form. Its structural components are composed in one
spatial line but they fill all directions of a two-dimensional space, if it is not stopped by a "frame ". Therefore, the
meaning of a two-dimensional static fine-art text does not articulate gradually in one direction, set by the linear
composition, but immediately, on the base of the general reception of the total text.
This form of reception is provided by a special signs of static images of visual texts. Fine-art words have
different reference potency than language words. Language words designing objects from the cosmic, natural, socio-
cultural or mental world denote (with the exception of a number of proper names), not individual objects, but a class
of objects. The texts designed like that are difficult to consume because they require a high level of interpretive
activity – instantiation, thinking through and making up. On the contrary, mimetic fine-art words usually denote
directly individual and specific objects. The same is true for fine-art signs in general, in cases when they express
additional reference positions and also denote – in addition to objects – events, activities, actions, relationships and
attributes from the external natural or physical world, and psychological inner world (dreams, fantasies, desires). If
mimetic words, in some cases, have the status of a cultural symbol, it means that at the primary level of meaning
they designate individual objects, and at secondary level they express symbolic, general or abstract meanings (see
symbolic systems of plants, animals, tools, food, clothing, historical and mythical characters, etc.).
Another important feature of fine-art building units enabling a rapid and perhaps easy consumption of fine-art
visual texts is their high level of integration. Fine-art words, but also structurally complex semantic building units,
permeate with other fine-art words and often them intergrown into other words, so they create semantically
inseparable sentences, phrases and paragraphs together. In some texts, such as in the children's drawings (e.g. a pig
formed by a triangle and a dot /head/, a rectangle /body/, and four lines /legs/ and a curved spiral /tail/), the
boundaries between words, sentences, paragraphs and text merge together. A similar situation is also increasing in
photographs with a lower resolution. Media texts of that type cannot be segmented into lower units of meaning, but
on the contrary they take the form of a quickly and easily perceivable super-sign.
3. Motives as the basis of the narrative text of the media plan
The basic and smallest building units of a narrative plan of the text are narrative motives. The basic narrative
categories are designed by the motives, among others the characters, narrator, narration, the composition (storyline,
plot), narrative strategies, receptive author, story sequences, the story, addressee, time and space. All motives
occurring in media texts are expressed with the help of signs. Verbal signs gain a narrative status in the text only if
the media text plays a role of a motive and by means of it they construct a narrative plan of the text. Nevertheless,
the motives construct primary functions or roles that they play within the plan of a media text, and the reference
facts are only in the second place. Similar situation is at higher building units of a narrative plan of the text. Specific
motives perform or may perform different roles in the narrative texts. The main themes, Leitmotifs, and secondary
motives fulfil and achieve specific and often contradictory functions. For example, the main motives depict events
that make up the main storyline of the text, while the secondary motives, on the contrary, scatter or retard the main
story line, among others, by creating side – blind and digresive – story lines.
Extensive linear narratives (e.g. epics, novels, theatre performances or feature films) are consequently
characterized by a large redundancy of secondary motives, while the short linear narratives (e.g. proverbs,
anecdotes, epic songs or advertising spots) are charged with the main motifs and have low or zero representation of
secondary motives. A similar situation, like with short linear narratives, spring from static fine-art and mimetic texts
such as the cartoons or photo-jokes or scientific illustrations, in which the story is usually expressed only allusive or
in an embryonic stage (e.g. a display of Darwin's concept of human evolution through several statures representing
developmental stages within primates).
4. Composition, themes and topics of media texts
A key component of the narrative plan of media texts is a composition. Long before narratology appeared, poetic,
theory of literature and genre dealt with the research of the narrative structure of the text (Aristotle, 1996). The
Jiří Pavelka / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 (2014) 934 – 939 937
composition can be viewed from different viewpoints, among others in terms of particulate motivic text construction
(motivic analysis), or in terms of integrating storyline and storytelling construction of the text (narrative analysis).
The motives form the composition of linear media texts at primary and basic narrative level. Distribution,
organization, linking and hierarchy of the individual (major and minor) motives within the text direct to the display
of space, time, characters and their mental, communication and social behaviour. At the same time, they create a
higher content unit of the text – themes. Narrative and story procedures, segments and lines integrate media text and
give a signal, which theme is a central one, and therefore it is the subject of the text, and which themes, on the
contrary, are marginal.
With linear dynamic media texts (e.g. theatre performances and film work) and static media text (e.g. book
novels, comic books, newspaper editorial) the composition usually takes the form of a sequence of consecutive
motives (and they are usually related in time and causal relationships). There are also exceptions as nonsense,
absurd and surreal texts. For non-linear static media texts (e.g. paintings and photographs) the motives are arranged
in two-dimensional (factual or illusory three-dimensional) space, so that they make additional narrative content units
of a higher type, e.g. the characters and environment. The character of some image texts can stand in the role of
narrator. His/her fine-art language can depict his/her narration and his/her relationship to the narrative content,
whereas its components can be formed by a storyline or even by the story itself (e.g. a teacher drawing Darwin's
concept of evolution of man with a chalk on the blackboard can be shown in the photograph).
The basic, initial communication and narrative space of static fine-art texts may contain additional, relatively
autonomous, communication and narrative spaces that are integrated into the general composition of the text. A part
of the work of art or photography may be drawings or paintings on the wall or photographs on the book cover,
which creates additional communication area. These structures and contexts have a strong narrative potential.
5. Space-time and a narrator of messages contained in a media text
Time and space are basic categories of narrations that frame the storytelling and the construction of the text. The
real author anchors the story included the media text in specific space-time, either the one in which he lives or that
he knows well, or in the more or less distant and unknown, in the fictitious past or future socio-cultural space-time.
The real author is a communication assumption, a receptive author and narrative time and space are textual
structures, even if the receptive author shows common features with the real author and narrative time and space
with real time and space.
The story has always its narrator, too. Any media text has its narrator, however, too, whether it carries the story
and storytelling, or its story and storytelling are missing. There is a significant quantity of created narrative positions
or narrative modes. In terms of basic typology, however, these positions can be divided into several areas. The most
frequently used mode of storytelling, also for video communication, are first-person narrative (ich-form) and third-
person narrative (er-form), while we-person narrative (wir-form) is characteristic for a language communication. A
perspective narrative position that has a strong interactive potential is second-person narrative (du-form). This
applies in the communication areas and genres, such as, among others, e-learning, guide books, do-it-yourself
manuals or role-playing games. The basic construction principle ranking motives within these narrative techniques
is causality and chronology. With the cultural paradigm of modernism and postmodernism narrative procedures
showing the stream of consciousness are connected, it means the procedures uncontrolled by traditional
narratological principles (Tumanov, 1997).
The narrator is expression textual means, a tool by means of which functions and objectives of the text are
pursued and achieved. The symptoms of low media literacy are the fact that the consumers of media texts entering
the mass communication identify a real author with a narrator or any of the characters in the story. The narrators
always represent a purposeful narrative construction, serving the aims for which the texts were produced, which is
documented either by the genre of a biography or an autobiographical novel.
6. Interpretation of a media text
The basic idea of the media product is articulated at the level of a narrative, respectively storytelling construction
of a media text. In some cases, however, this part of the content plan is already expressed in the names of media
products. The interpretive titles usually represent in terms of a construction the most difficult and complex part of a
media text. They have ambition to express clearly, attractively and in a concentrated way the theme, purpose and
938 Jiří Pavelka / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 (2014) 934 – 939
mission media text. In other words, they try to interpret the level of the meaning of the text in a condensed form on
an extremely small language area. And on the contrary, interpretation of the text media in a few words may serve as
a main title.
Interpretive titles thus become another design factor, which further accelerates and automates the reception and
consumption of static pictorial fine-art texts. With a linear speaking, literary or film text, it is possible to reach an
appropriate interpretative title up to the gradual, often even several-hour perception, consumption and analysis and
interpretation of the text. If the title is missing with the nonlinear static fine-art visual text framed by an area, which
human sensory organs encompass suddenly, the interpretative title can be reached only on the base of motive and
narrative analysis of the text.
The essential difference between these types of narrative texts is that perception and consumption of a long
media text requires gradual, repetitive, long and often interrupted analytical and interpretive efforts, while the
perception and consumption of a small image-visual media text takes only a few seconds and usually is also
completed within this time horizon. Therefore, it is difficult to separate the individual stages of perception, analysis
and interpretation of the text, or to describe the individual parts of the process leading to the formulation of the
contents mediated by the text.
Nonlinear static two-dimensional pictorial visual texts do not have – on the contrary from linear texts, e.g. the
spoken, literary, comics, musical, theatrical and film texts – either beginning or end, only the frame, adjusting or
installation context. This fact causes serious interpretive problems. It is difficult to choose a place – the beginning of
the text analysis. Due to these reasons, the consumer has the opportunity to start the communication process of
consumption with the fine-art visual texts in more places, where those signs-motives attract his/her attention. And at
the same time, he/she usually has a choice of several options during communication; the consumer has usually a
choice of several options which direction to take. Due to these reasons, the semiotic and motive analysis is the most
appropriate starting point for the interpretation of static pictorial visual texts. Here, the order in which the individual
segments of the text will be analyzed is not important. The theme structure represented by the composition of the
text directs the consumer and the interpreter which direction to go.
7. Conclusion
There are two basic ways how with the use of a narrative to conceptualize human cognition in human
communication. One way is represented by linear texts containing the story; the other is represented by nonlinear
pictorial visual texts. We can view the storyline of linear language texts and pictorial visual ones from the position
of cognitive science (Thagard, 2001; Herman, 2003). The cognitive aspect and cognitive function story are very
specific, clear-cut and irreplaceable. The story serves to the communication entities as a basic format archiving
human knowledge so that they could remember and catalogue it. The communities in the stories form and structure
the basic units of cognitive networks – concepts.
The concepts are results of the stories, they live in the stories, and thanks to the stories they are transported from
one media to another, and thus also into other socio-cultural time-spaces. The human world is modelled and the
continuity of socio-cultural reality is kept with the help and through the stories and concepts. The stories and
narrative modes also construct social identity of the communication entities (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000).
Conceptualization through the stories in linear texts has its drawbacks. The media bearing linear texts (e.g. theatrical
performances, books, film screenings and television) allow to bear extensive texts and stories that require long, often
even interrupted consumption.
Nonlinear static texts, although there are exceptions (see e.g. ceiling Michelangelo's fresco in the Sistine Chapel),
are usually due to nature of the media that carry them (their medium can be e.g. a rock, paper, photo paper, poster,
or the Internet), significantly less demanding as far as time and reception is concerned. One "picture" can be
consumed in an instant. This fact is reflected in the design and consumption of the sign text, but it also influences
the choice of tools and procedures for their analysis and interpretation. Non-linear texts are manifestations of
narrative activities, although they do not culminate by a story. Book covers, illustrations of literary and visual
accompaniment of textbooks show that the nonlinear static pictorial visual texts contain a strong conceptual ability
to charge – they have the ability to conceptualize human knowledge through visual and cultural symbols and icons,
but also through the stories (Pavelka, 2013). It is also the main reason why pictorial visual texts – despite its
drawbacks – serve as illustrative, frequent and effective tool of teaching and learning communication in print and
digital media.
Jiří Pavelka / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 (2014) 934 – 939 939
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