Literature studies
Marie Mianowski, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4, 38000 Grenoble, France
As a professor of Anglophone literature, I work on representations of space and time in literatures of the former British Empire. I am interested in the manner in which ‘place’ and ‘home’ are represented, particularly in contexts of migration and transcultural creation. Storytelling is thus at the heart of my work as a teacher and researcher.
At the time of my studies in Paris in the early 1990s, narratological analysis was booming. Narrative was as such something that needed to be formalizable in the form of charts. The narrator had a narratee [narrataire], implicit or otherwise. At best, the analysis of narrative processes would lead to the elaboration of a semiotic square. This kind of analysis had its beauty. But after years of narratological lectures and the tightly codified writing of French university exercises, I took the time to rid myself of that narrative approach which I thought of, even at the time, as a straightjacket.
I employ the term narration in the sense of ‘narrative’ [récit]. But in relation to the word ‘narrative’ for this text, I prefer adding the suffix ‘-tion’ of ‘narration,’ which emphasizes the rolling-out, the deployment process of the story. Today, I think of narration as the deployment of a voice before I look at it as a form. As a reader, my eye and my ear are first taken in by the echoes, the omissions, the unspoken, the rhythm. In my reading, I seek out the times and places (contextual but also material) by which the narrative voice or voices elaborate the story, the meanderings through which the narration sneaks around, weaves sense outside of its fundamental structure, with its musicality, its rhythm, its resonance. Only during a later stage, and sometimes quite late in the reading process, do I examine the textual structure more closely, its form, its frames, its thresholds.
Through a game with voices, narration offers a point of view, possibly several. It is when storytelling multiplies its points of view that it becomes paradoxically unique, since it thus surpasses all other forms of discourse – be they philosophical, sociological, political – granting access to a plurality of perspectives, going so far as to even evoke the beyond of words and that which they cannot say.
The texts that I read with my students and for my research are texts coming from Anglophone literature, though English isn’t always the authors’ first language. Their narration sometimes borrows its rhythm from an oral tradition, from tales in certain socio-historic contexts that are then told in the language of the colonizer or oppressor. The narration in this case provides a means of connecting two histories, of bringing them together in confrontation or in reconciliation. To conclude, I’d like to offer two examples: a short story that I have cherished now for thirty years: “Kew Gardens” by Virginia Woolf, included in the collection A Haunted House edited and published by Leonard Woolf in 1944, three years after Virginia Woolf’s death; and another more recent discovery: “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
More from this author:
Marie Mianowski, Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts, London: Palgrave, 2012
Marie Mianowski, Post Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction, London: Routledge, 2016
Marie Mianowski, “Making Room: Place and Placelessness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hema and Kaushik” in Unaccustomed Earth’”, Pascale Tollance, Claire Omhovère eds., Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 42, 2, 2020, September 2020 [online] : https://journals.openedition.org/ces/2172?lang=fr (29/11/21)
Cite this item: Marie Mianowski, “Narration”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177557
Computer Science studies
Rémi Ronfard, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Inria, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LJK, 38000 Grenoble, France
I have an educational background in engineering and I’ve spent my entire career in computer science research, first in the industry then with Inria [National Institute of Research in Science and Technologies] where I currently work as a director of research.
My research team, ANIMA’s principal theme is the creation and staging of virtual narrative worlds. In the anglo saxone world, we speak of the ‘story world’ in order to describe the fictional world represented in a 3D animated film or a video game. The term ‘narrative world,’ attempts to translate this simple notion, raising theoretical questions that are quite interesting to the computer sciences.
At the outset, narrative worlds are described with words, in the form of a script. The script is, in itself, a very particular literary form using the present tense which recounts the unfolding events of a film or a game that does not yet exist. My research team is specifically interested in the various stages of creation that allow a script’s written words to transform into the images of a movie or game. For us, the intermediary representation between these words and images is geometric and consists of a precise description of moving tridimensional forms which make up the narrative. But this foray of geometry between the narration and staging is not self-evident.
The problem can be represented as follows: if a digital program was capable of inventing stories, and another computer program was able to stage these stories within animated virtual worlds, in what way would these softwares communicate between each other?
Would it be necessary to ask the first program to write a script using natural language, and the second program to decipher this script in order to understand the story and translate it into images? This would mean that we would need to resolve the daunting problems of generating and analyzing natural language, which seems far-off from our initial task. Or, does an intermediary language already exist, a “lingua franca” (Ronfard and Szilas, 2014) that would permit the first program to communicate narrative elements to the second program that would then translate them into images?
This is a dizzying conundrum to which my research team tasks itself to respond. We know that this “interlingua” must contain a strong geometric component, but it must also undoubtedly call upon the physical, the semantic element of the story, and the aesthetic of its staging. Seen from this particular angle, narration is a source of infinite inquiry for computer sciences generally, and for computer graphics in particular.
More from this author:
Rémi Ronfard, Nicolas Szilas, “How generative digital media is reshaping narrative”, International Conference on Narrative, Harvard, USA, March 2014 [online]: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00983261 (03/11/21)
Rémi Ronfard, Nicolas Szilas, “Where story and media meet: computer generation of narrative discourse”, Computational Models of Narrative, Quebec, Canada, July 2014 [online]: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01005381 (03/11/21)
Cite this item: Remi Ronfard, “Narration”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177557
