Defining narrative

Martin Kreiswirth offers a basic starting ground to define a narrative: ”Something happened”, and, consequently, “someone [is] telling someone else that something happened.”[2] In order to capture the two-directional role of the narrative, I refer to Marie-Laure Ryan’s definition of narrative: A narrative is “in a short way, perhaps the only one, to give meaning to life.”[1] I employ the term narrative to a human disposition to hear stories, as well as a human skill to tell stories. Therefore, I try to include the dimension of storytelling as well as what I call storyhearing into my cyber media approach. This concept of “making sense of life” can be found on both the sides, of the narrator as well as the narratee.

The term narrative embodies the poetic representation of an event. A narrative is a representation of a real event; therefore, and my terminology concentrates on factual narratives,[3] i.e. news media relevant events within cyberspace, formerly represented in traditional media as news stories, as narrative.

My working definition of narrative roots in Gerald Prince’s conceptualization in his Dictionary of Narratology:

The representation (as product and process, object and art, structure and structuration) of one or more real […] EVENTS communicated by one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATORS to one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATEES.[4]

Gerald Prince defines the distinction between the narrator and the narratee as a grammatical one: “the narrator is the first person [the one who speaks], the narratee a second person [the one who is spoken to], and the being or object narrated about a third person.”[5] The narrator “may or may not be a participant in the events [s]he recounts”[6], i.e. a character or not.

Marie-Laure Ryan identifies the following challenges towards the traditional communication model in cyberspace:

• “interactive and reactive nature”
• “volatile signs and variable display”
• “multiple sensory and semiotic channels
• “networking capabilities”.[7]

The World Wide Web, while still being a mass medium, is creating a net(work) of individuals who interact constantly and shape their own discourse, intensifying this community experience within the net(work) itself. The character of this community is vital to the cyber discourse, and the dynamics of the community ground in the narrative. Furthermore, from an economical standpoint, the traceability technology enables that Web users are highly targetable.

The internet combines all preceding media forms–the printed word, the spoken utterances and sound waves, photo-graphs, and moving imagery as well as audio sounds of television and film–in a hybrid and virtual mode. Cyberia creates an inherent synaesthetic experience. This hybrid character makes it necessary that the textual approach evolves from a transmedial to an intermedial approach.

---

[1] Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.): Narrative Across Media. The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 2004 (Frontiers of Narrative), p. 8.

[2] The original quote is: “Something happened; or, better, someone telling someone else that something happened”. Kreiswirth, Martin: Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences. Poetics Today 21:2 (Summer 2000), p. 294.

[3] Genette, Gérard: Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative. Poetics Today 11, pp. 755-74.

[4] Prince, Gerald: Narrative. In: A Dictionary of Narratology, p. 58.

[5] Prince, Gerald: Narratology, p. 7.

[6] Prince, Gerald: Narratology, p. 13.

[7] Ryan, Marie-Laure: Avatar of Story (Electronic Mediations, Volume 17). London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 98.