ENG 6283: Narrative Theory

"Oh my gosh, I've like never heard this in my life" "I'd be attempted to just leave...." "Who buys a journal with perforated pages!?"  "My towel smelled awful ..." These are the pieces of stories floating around me at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon in Zera's, and they're refreshing. I think deep down I've always preferred stories shared by word-of-mouth because there's an organic liveliness and agency that blooms as each story is told and received. However, as I glance up from my laptop I'm noticing that more people are telling stories electronically--including me. This tech-craze bothers me because I'm left wondering if the stories being told on surrounding phones and laptops are more engaging, humorous, serious, or off-hand than the spoken ones. I see the growing necessity for technology, but not for understanding narrative. We've been digesting narratology and several narrative theorie...

“Hush, hush, keep it down now, voices carry!”  My little sister says my musical tastes are stuck in the 1980s. That’s mostly fair. This refrain comes by way of ‘Til Tuesday’s 1985 title track. In the video, lead singer Aimee Mann sits next to her boyfriend. They’re in a movie theater. It might as well be a church. Or a school board meeting. Or a forum in the U.S. House of Representatives. Or an American classroom. She wants to talk, but he says, “Hush, hush, keep it down now …” Why don’t we tell stories in these spaces? What is the purpose of the silence? What’s going on here? What’s the story? I’m reminded of Foucault’s “docile body.” Punished, disciplined, and/or well-trained, we are compelled to regimentation, control, and silence, like soldiers marching or monks praying. The training, the “subtle coercion,” as Foucault calls it, is so embedded that we accept it. We comply. Imagine, for example, that you’re in class. Are the desks arranged in neat rows, straight li...

"I thought I was going to listen to you die." - my mother, January 2018 In January 2018, I left my fiancee after two and a half years together. In February 2019, I started counseling for victims of domestic violence. Everyone interprets narratives a little differently. We can all read Harry Potter , but we're all going to interpret it differently. Some people may see Dumbledore as a bad manipulative man for instance, while others may see him as a hero . I saw my fiancee as a hero, but everyone else saw her as a villain. We met on Tinder while I was working in Sherman, Texas as a Teaching Assistant one summer in undergrad. She was in her mid, while I was just 19. She was an officer at a Juvenile Detention Facility and in grad school. She had her life together, and I couldn't believe she was interested in someone like me. In domestic violence situations, the victim does not often see themselves as a victim. They think they deserve the abuse. When she ...

I wasn't going to do this post. For me, the majority of stories involving narratives that I see differently from someone else would involve failed relationships, broken marriages, and sexual assaults, and given the other posts on the docket for this week, I just couldn't add to that. And then I had a conversation with my husband, who can be kind of genius sometimes. When I told him that I was skipping this one because my PTSD couldn't handle it, he said "Hmmm. How you felt about a book at 16 vs how you felt rereading at age XX?" and I knew exactly what to write about.  I went through a really weird phase when I was 16 and spent that entire summer (1992, if you must know) reading romance novels. This was back before paranormal romance was really a thing so I was reading straight-up, bodice ripping, heteronormative Harlequin bull****. I bought them from the grocery store, and checked them out by the armful from the library. I was a very romantic girl, and these ...

Varying interpretations of narratives is the thing that gives any fandom a rich life, but it is also the thing that can destroy it. I have seen the rise and fall of many fandoms, torn apart by shipping wars and storylines that deliberately pit one character against another (I’m looking at you, MCU). However, no fandom has been as violently divisive in recent history as the Glee fandom. Photo credit Glee started as a beacon of inclusivity, where every outsider could find someone they related to in some way. And for a while, it was good. Unfortunately, the showrunners kept trying to find new ways to top their previous work, which transformed a semi-realistic show about a bunch of teenage theatre dorks into a melodramatic fever dream of single-episode gimmicks and every possible relationship problem, but mostly cheating. It did wear on the viewer to have to watch the characters and couples go through similar motions over and over again, like eating the same dry cookies with differe...

As always, I started this week’s blog writing session by spending an unnecessary amount of time pondering what this prompt might be asking me. I’ve decided that iI have two possible routes to go down here. The first option would be telling you of a specific time where I’ve misunderstood, or simply had a different interpretation, of a narrative than someone else. If I were to take that option, I would probably tell you about the times when my story and bruises on my body didn’t match with the information my ex was currently giving to the police. Or maybe I could tell you about a time that I had a petty squabble with a friend that could have been avoided if we were interpreting the narrative in a similar way. I don’t like this option, though. It seems too restricting and doesn’t answer the question the way I want to. I think that keeping this question broad and responding to it in a similar fashion will help me to reach the most satisfying answer. What I’m getting at here is: Isn’t ...

There is a misinterpretation of representation in film adaptations. Hollywood would like to believe that only straight, white, able-bodied men and women are talented enough to be on screen - both television and movie. They attempt to create their own narratives. There aren’t enough talented people of color. Nobody with a disability came out to auditions. This straight guy, who has played gay characters before, is much better at it than any actual gay man. This master narrative constructed by casting directors misrepresents the world’s diverse population and is destructive to many people’s view of the world and those deemed “other” by an exclusive society.      American Crime Story is guilty of buying into this master narrative not once, but twice. In its first season The People v. O. J. Simpson, David Schwimmer plays Robert Kardashian, one of O. J.’s friends and attorneys. My boyfriend, who's Armenian, and I could hardly take any of Robert Kardashian’s sc...