the reading. first off, let me say how wide my eyes went in pleasant surprise when i saw how short this reading was! like seriously… why can’t they all be like this? it would give me so much more time to do the actual proper and important work for each subject. then i actually started reading it and realised that if it was any longer i may never get through it. ok, it wasn’t that bad. the start was ok, but a lot of the last half just went straight over my head, i had no idea what was going on.

from what i got, Ryan was discussing narrative and what it is that really makes up or defines a narrative, especially in regards to the rise of transmedia stories and storytelling that don’t conform to the to the norm of narrative storytelling. however, Ryan suggests that while the current definition of narrative must be broadened to allow for the new types of media, it must also be constrained, otherwise every text across every medium will be regarded as narrative.

Ryan provides a description of narrative as the combination of story and discourse. story being the sequence of events and discourse as the events being represented. thus, narrative is the textual actualisation of th story while the story is the virtual form of the narrative. so many words twisted in and upon themselves, i started to lose track of what was what and what was doing what in regards to what. this is where the study of narrative become very confusing. sadly, it didn’t end there. because then we moved on to other ways we can have narrative which can be  representation which are “medium free”. Ryan claims we cannot confine narrative to one medium but that it can transcend across all mediums, it is not simply verbal anymore.

expanding on the previous stuff, Ryan explains that story is not events, it consists of events. thus story is not found naturally in the world. story is a representation of events as a cognitive construction, a mental image rather than physical as discourse is. so story, and in a further sense, narrative, does not really exist anywhere, it is constructed in the minds of the reader as they are reading and interpreting texts or events. Ryan states that the ability to evoke stories to the mind distinguishes narrative discourse from other text types. any text can create a narrative in the mind of the reader. thus we can never be sure that sender and the receiver have the same story in mind.

there was also a big list about what defines a narrative and then a list following that about why that first list doesn’t always work. although that was probably there to help us understand more, it kinda just made everything slightly more confusion. but i was not a huge fan of the first list because it gave definitions that were too rigid. narrative and stories can and should be about anything and everything. they do not need to be bound by set rules, otherwise they’d all be the same. the good thing about stories is that they can all be different. i guess what it’s saying is, they can’t just be life. or about a rock that just is. that’s not a narrative. that’s just a rock. however, one of my favourite pints from the article was describing narrative as “world construction”. the idea of every story being it’s own world is interesting. everything that occurs, all the events and characters and reactions, are within a world that is solely confined to that story or narrative. again, it’s all looping back in on each other. but for me the idea is to create a world and then put everything in it.

but where does that leave us with our korsakow films? i rested each video i made separately, with no connection or bigger picture in mind. so, will they automatically form their own narrative world when i put them together. because these last two readings focused heavily on narrative, i still can’t tell whether they want our korsakow films to follow narrative structure or to be random and abstract. i guess what we learned from last weeks reading is that even abstract experimental films can have a narrative sooty. and form this we learn that narrative is really the ability for the mind to create a story out of the events that occur. so really, it doesn’t matter what we make, it will always be possible for someone to connect the events and create a story.