around narratives

metanarratives (Baudrillard)
"In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, who famously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there was no longer any room for "metanarratives." (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of forward progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."


Narrative Discontinuities in Contemporary Arts: Film, Literature and New Media.
Discipline; 10 credits / at LACE - University Network
"Recent films have shown that a story can be told in non-linear fashion, even backwards (e.g. Memento by Christopher Nolan) or without immediately evident causality (works by David Lynch come to mind). The same tendencies appeared in literature. Writers have offered us various narrative experiences where time, in the plot or in the telling, is fragmented, disorganised, non-linear (see Sterne or Proust) or consistently reversed (Martin Amis' Time's arrow); where a causal chain is not explicitly constructed (e.g. the French Nouveau Roman and postmodern novels such as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by J.S. Foer). Even though narratology has argued that narrative texts can be characterized by two main logics - "chrono-logic" (temporal logic: a happened, then b happened followed by c etc.) and causality ( a caused b and b caused c etc.) -, telling in contemporary arts is not always (perhaps even rarely) a matter of continuity regarding these logics. As a spectator or a reader, one faces the challenge of reorganising the elements of the artefact. For example, when viewing Memento, it becomes fairly clear that, together with the character, we must rebuild, rearrange some sort of linearity (causal and temporal) in order to understand the plot. Doing so, we are reframing the film in a new narrative that we create, using cues and clues taken from the picture."


Metanarrative (Wiki)
"In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative (from metagrand narrative) is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience".[1] The prefix meta- means "beyond" and is here used to mean "about", and narrative is a story constructed in a sequential fashion. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within totalizing schemes."

LPDT2
"LPDT2 is the Second Life incarnation of Roy Ascott’s groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte (“The Pleating of the Text”), created in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris during that same year. The title of the project, “La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale,” alludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation “distributed authorship”, a term coined by Ascott has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2."



Beyond Myth and Metaphor*
-The Case of Narrative in Digital Media
by Marie-Laure Ryan
"If we compare the field of digital textuality to other areas of study in the humanities, its most striking feature is the precedence of theory over the object of study. Most of us read novels and see movies before we consult literary criticism and cinema studies, but it seems safe to assume that a vast majority of people read George Landow before they read any work of hypertext fiction. In this paper I would like to investigate one of the most important forms that this advance theorizing of digital textuality has taken, namely the use of narrative concepts to advertise present and future product."

Multivariant Narratives
Marie-Laure Ryan
Media theorists divide the history of writing into four periods delimited by technological innovations: the oral age; the chirographic age (manuscript writing); the print age; and the digital age. The material support of language passed from unique to freely copiable; from restricted to a live audience to widely distributed; and from evanescent to durable, only to return to a strange combination of evanescence and durability: though digital texts can be stored in a wide variety of memory devices, computer systems become rapidly obsolete and their archives unreadable.