Oldal 19 [19]
OCR
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 knowledgepreserving 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.
