WEEK 4 READING: Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

I liked this reading in the way that it addressed narrative as something which is constantly evolving through the changes of culture, society and philosophy. It explains how the point of its residual meaning has become so complex after these changes, leaving the interpretation of narrative to be completely up to the producer and the receiver of said narrative. Rather than blabber on about how it is so complex and not propose any solution, Marie-Laure Ryan proposes that “the main problem facing the trans-medial study of narrative is to find an alternative to the language-based definitions that are common fare in classical narratology” (pg.6). The term “language-based” made me become quite curious about how we cannot define some things to a single term or structure, and can only be shown through image or expression, or to what the popular comedic expression “I can only show you through interpretive dance” refers to. Sorry, I couldn’t resist not mentioning that. Back on topic.
However, I found the point which has been reiterated thousands of times by aueters that “story is an agent or sequence of events” to be boring. Yes, we know! But I was then stopped in my condescending tracks as Ryan then proposes that “narrative discourse is those events represented” and that “narrative in this view is the textual actualisation of story, while story is narrative in a virtual form.” Did somebody say Korsakow. Now, this made me truly get why we are using Korsakow. It is an experimental, philosophical and entirely visceral experience, to which the auteur presents a different form of narrative to create a new ‘web’ of encoding and decoding the material presented to the recipient. This is truly artistic.