Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative

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Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert
Walter de Gruyter, 2009 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 305 pages

Stories do not actually exist in the (fictional or factual) world but are constituted, structured and endowed with meaning through the process of mediation, i.e. they are represented and transmitted through systems of verbal, visual or audio-visual signs. The terms usually proposed to describe aspects of mediation, especially perspective, point of view, and focalization, have yet to bring clarity to this field, which is of central importance, not only for narratology but also for literary and media studies. One crucial problem about mediation concerns the dimensions of its modeling effect, particularly the precise status and constellation of the mediating agents, i.e. author, narrator or presenter and characters. The question is how are the structure and the meaning of the story conditioned by these different positions in relation to the mediated happenings perceived from outside and/or inside the storyworld? In this volume, fourteen articles by international scholars from seven different countries address these problems anew from various angles, reviewing the sub-categorization of mediation and re-specifying its dimensions both in literary texts and other media such as drama and theater, film, and computer games.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
The DNS of Mediacy
11
Where Do We Go from Here?
41
Two ConceptsOne Meaning? An Attempt at Conceptual Differentiation
59
A Brief Introduction to an Enunciative Approach to Point of View
79
The Case of Overt Narration
99
Cognitive Grammar and Focalization Theory
119
Wandering Perspectives in WeNarration
143
Focalization the Subject and the Act of Shaping Perspective
183
Narratology and the Visual
201
Focalization and the Superordinate Narrative System in Drama and Theater
221
Focalization Ocularization and Auricularization in Film and Literature
243
Who Tells? Who Shows? Who Focalizes? Narrative Mediation in SelfReflexive Fiction Films
259
Perspective in Contemporary Computer Games
279
Backmatter
301
Copyright

A Comparative Analysis of Indices of Narrative Point of View in Bulgarian and English
163

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