Oldal 19 [19]
18] Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
became the most important means of cultural transmission, enabling the
historical reconstruction of the past. Ihe use of narrative structure is the most
adaptive form of all the cultural products of human knowledge transmission.
The next turning point in relation to the transfer of knowledge was the
development of a means of storage. In the theoretical culture, writing and
then printing appeared, and with them - in Donald’s terminology - external
symbolic storage systems, which are considered as technological knowledge¬
preserving hardware. The cognitive capacities of our species were augmented
and transformed by these physical repositories. Humans placed (and continue
to place) their knowledge outside the biological boundaries of their bodies,
as knowledge in memory storages outlives the narrator. Access to external
memory storages makes one’s memory virtually unlimited as well as more
accurate; however, to decipher the codes one must learn to read, write and
know how to search and store information in external systems.
New tools and new media are being invented to pass on memories and
ideas, be they written, visual or audiovisual. In the world of external storages,
information can be found in books, newspapers, photos and films, and this
contributes to building a relationship with the person who once created the
content. Donald notes that human culture has been networked from the very
beginning, since the first human associations, and that increasingly complex
cognitive, affective and memory networks emerged. Today’s digital narratives
are gaining publicity across borders through being shared on the Internet, and
their virtual nature makes them independent of space and time, manifesting
a new form of knowledge transfer.
Since the various human representational systems can all become active in
varying degrees at the same time, we can experience quite subtle and complex
states of consciousness. [...] A well-made film in particular can tease the brain
simultaneously on the episodic, mimetic, and linguistic levels, sometimes
conducting a different theme on each level. (Donald, 1993, p. 370)
CHAPTER 2.
NARRATOLOGICAL APPROACHES
Narratology, or the science of narrative (Todorov, 1969), is a multidisciplinary
field developed in the 1960s that examines the structural organization of
narrative texts. The structural analysis of narratives is not without precedent
in the humanities: narrative syntax is concerned with the structure of texts,
semantics with their meaning, and pragmatics with the circumstances of their
use. The discipline has been directly inspired by the generative grammar of
Noam Chomsky and by Russian formalism, including Propp’s morphology,
while narrative pragmatics is inspired by speech act theory.