Narrative, Media and Genre

Narrative means the story telling and basically it is a mental construct which describes a sequence of real and unreal event. According to literary theory narrative may be spoken, written or imagined story or a part of a story. Narrative is consisting of signs that are combined into codes to transmit messages. A narrative must have a form and also content. Great philosopher Aristotle said that a narrative has a beginning, middle and an end. Some formalist like Vladimir Prop, he identified the functional components and analyzed the plot of narrative. Another formalist Victor Shklovsky analyzed the relationship between composition and style. A narrative must have a structure and the structure can differ from one country to another country. Every country has fictional and non fictional stories but the structure of the story are not always same. For example, in our country we have popular fictional story. The structure of the narrative is – there is a king, a prince and his flying horse, princes poisoned by a giant and the prince rescue him and at last they marry and start living happily. To tell the narrative need a narrator. To disseminate narrative we use media. The media can be transmissive or semiotic. The transmissive media means radio, TV, internet, film and the semiotic media are sound, image, language etc. we transmitted narrative through the media and sometimes media define the shape of narrative like what kind of story can be told or not. As far as I have said, narrative has a form and content. Whatever the form is but the content is depending on social conventions and media decide what kind of content can be transmitted. Non fictional contents are concerning the real life events and peoples. Sometimes a single story can use many medium. For example, a person is telling a story of a book through the TV or radio. Genre is the way of telling story and genre is defined by the conventions chosen for both cultural and personal reason. We choose particular genre to tell the narrative.