Narrating stories is the activity par excellence by which we make sense of our lives. The study of story-telling, narratology, is therefore a central discipline in the academic curriculum. The systematic analysis of stories has a long tradition in literary studies, but over the past 25 years it has considerably branched out.
Film and comics are primarily story-telling media, but there are also narrative dimensions in poetry, paintings, and games. However, as Marshall McLuhan famously pointed out, "the medium is the message." That is, a shift in medium and thus in the modalities it draws on (written language, spoken language, visuals, music, sound, gestures ...) inevitably affects the contents of a story.
Understanding the pertinent dimensions of story-telling (including narrative agency, focalization, characterisation, and the representation of time and space) will be an indispensable skill for assessing how a story in a particular medium, and in a particular socio-cultural context, can have meaning.
Learning outcomes
Students acquire a basic knowledge of the central concepts pertaining to narratology; are able to apply these concepts to discourses in different media; and understand both the opportunities and the constraints of different media to tell stories.
