NARRATIVES AULA 5 TEXTO

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Profª Liane Mühlen
CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES -
LANGUAGE, CINEMA, AND 
LITERATURE
Aula 5
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In-Between (Narratives)
– Language, Cinema and 
Literature: Narrative Matters
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Now and then, the old and the new
The art of narration and
artificial narrative intelligence
Authorship: the who(s)
Is there room for criticality?
Interculturality: what role does it play?
Today’s focus
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Contrasting narratives from different times
Bits and pieces of narratives though times
An overview:
insights of how things were like in the past 
and what they look like in the present
Now and then, the old and the new
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Revisiting: distinct feelings on people
– reals with memories
Narratology is embedded with memories
– made of them
Independent of one’s age:
reflective moments involve memories
Power of provoking old and new emotions
Affecting our multiple identities
question processes
Now and then, the old and the new
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According to Chamberlain and Thompon
(2003, p. xiii):
“Memories contain and are contained
by a narrative which orders, links and 
makes sense of the past, the present
and the future”
Narratives and memories
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“At the same time they contain
para-narratives, which weave in and out 
offering a counterpoint here, a substance 
there”
“Placing memory, in all its multifaceted and 
multilayered dimensions, within the longue 
durée of a narrative suggests more an act
of creativity than a finite text, where the 
process of recall is as vital as the substance 
remembered”
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Vladimir Propp – a model for folktales, based 
narratives on seven spheres of action and 31 
functions – Morfologiya skazki (1928)
Claude Lévi-Strauss – an outline of a grammar of 
mythology – Anthropologie structurale (1958)
Algirdas J. Greimas
– a system of six structural units called “actants” 
– Structural Semantics (1966)
Narratology theorists and their 
creations/propositions
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Tzvetan Todorov
– Introduction of the term narratologie
– The Grammar of the Decameron (1969)
Gérard Genette
– Codification of a system of analysis
– Figures III (1972),
Narrative Discourse Revisited (1983)
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Roland Barthes, Peter Brooks, Paul Ricoeur, 
Gerald Prince, Claude Bremond,
Seymour Chatman, and Mieke Bal
Contributed to its development
and recognition as science
Other influential narratology theorists
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Zipes (2012, p. 5) highlights the idea of 
evolution of communication in terms of 
modes
“It is impossible to locate and study the 
history of stories and the evolution of 
genres because people began speaking 
and told stories thousands of years before 
they learned to read, write, and keep 
records”
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“And even when they learned how to write, 
only a tiny minority of humans was capable 
of reading and writing, and these elite 
groups were preoccupied with their own 
interests, which had little bearing on the 
general or popular modes of 
communication”
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“Nevertheless, there are certain grounded 
assumptions that we can make about the 
evolution of communication and storytelling 
as well as the origins of fairy tales”
“It is also possible to demonstrate how
all stories are linked to one another,
yet distinct in their personal and social 
functions”
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Zipes (2012, p. 5):
The relevance of tales has to do with memory, 
tradition, and culture, all possible in the plural
“Genres of storytelling and tale types 
originated from the application of storytelling 
and stories to social as well as biological life
—that is, daily occurrences”
“Those tales that became relevant for families, 
clans, tribes, villages, and cities were retained 
through memory and passed on as traditional 
verbalizations of actions and behaviors”
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“Different cultures throughout the world 
employed many of the same sequences of 
events or patterns in the communication
of stories, but the application of the 
verbalization that included specific 
references to specific realities, customs, 
rituals, and beliefs led to various tale types, 
variants, and differences”
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Contemporary societies still tell
stories which are relevant to them
Narratives can vary in style, length, 
structure, mode, and content,
but they keep being told by writers,
tellers, narrators, characters,
directors, or ordinary people
They still deal with actions
and behaviors in social life
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The Art of Narration and
Artificial Narrative Intelligence
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Narratives have changed as time went by
Narration is an art
– one of the most relevant regarding 
language (any of them)
Understand the main aspects of art and AI 
(Artificial Intelligence) in narratives
The art of narration and artificial
narrative intelligence
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Uncountable evidence has proven that
there are various ways of narrating
Narratives consist of innumerous features,
not always easily aligned among diverse
points of view of who composes them
It would not be arduous to find scholars, 
theorists, or even writers assuring there is not 
such a thing like artificial narrative intelligence
The art of narration and artificial
narrative intelligence
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Riedl (2016, p. 2):
On computational narrative intelligence
“Despite the importance of storytelling as 
part of the human experience, computers 
still cannot reliably create and tell novel 
stories, nor understand stories told by 
humans”
“When computers do tell stories, via an 
eBook or computer game, they simply 
regurgitate something written by a human”
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“They do not partake in the culture
we are immersed in, as manifested 
through journalistic news articles,
the movies we watch, or the books
we read” 88
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Livytska (2019) on understanding the 
context of the art of narration and artificial 
narrative intelligence relations
“Artificial narrative intelligence is viewed 
as a part of Computational Literary 
Analysis incorporating story generating 
programs, based on the frames and 
scenarios simulating sentence grammar” 
(p. 309)
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Livytska (2019, p. 313):
on how AI sees storytelling,
narration, and narratology
“Storytelling in AI story world 
construction/story generation has 
more to do with the multimodality of 
narration, transmedial narratology
and remediation processes”
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“In the case of using different modes of story 
production (e.g. words, images, utterance, 
gestures, etc.) to evoke the story world, the AI 
narratologist makes a choice between preserving 
the same sequence of multimodal images in the 
digital story generator or removing/changing
the mode of the action/event mode for the
sake of strengthening the plot (story) at
the meta-discourse level (i.e. how the plot 
rearranges and manipulates the events
in the story may influence the story world 
reconstruction by the reader/viewer/performer)”
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Livytska (2019):
To work with narrative in the AI
context, researchers need to know:
Narratological models
How to apply these models
“outside the literary domain, bridging
the gap between the humanities and 
computational linguistics” (p. 313)
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Livytska (2019, p. 314) on basic differences 
in narrative analysis in the Humanities and 
AI
Narrative analysis
Humanities: style, rhetoric structure,
implicit and explicit meanings analysis. 
Attention to pragmatic side of the discourse
AI: style is not analysed. The main aim is
to extract core concepts as instruments
for generating further understanding
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Programming language comprehension
Humanities: n/a
AI: Detailed analysis of text components 
for text generating purposes 88
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Creative writing
Humanities: aesthetic value and stylistic coloring 
and devices. Cognitive models of writing 
representation. The notions of inter-textuality, 
creativity and rhetorical modus
AI: Text is seen as documentation of program. 
Stylistic richness is not recommended and leads 
to distortion/changing in plot representation
Programming language writing
Humanities: n/a
AI: Primary aim and form oftext generation
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Narrative reception
Humanities: narrative reception Barthes’ 
reception aesthetics. Cognitive linguistic 
theory of schema activation. Notion of 
experientiality (Fludernik, 1996)
AI:
Notion of Interactive Digital Text/Narrative. 
Text-Reader/Player axis
Narrative discourse
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Humanities:
semiotic approach to narrative.
Remediation is not equal.
Possible world theory critique
AI:
n/a (discourse domain is connected with 
general knowledge database production 
together with historical situational context)
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Key points:
There are gaps between the two fields
Some of the gaps might take
some time to be overcome
Others may take longer,
or even may never be bridged
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Riedl (2016, p. 6) on narrative
intelligence in the computational field:
“Narrative intelligence is central to many
of the things we as humans do, from 
communication to entertainment to learning”
“Narrative is also an effective means
of storing and disseminating culture. […]
We argue that future artificial intelligences 
should be instilled with computational 
narrative intelligence so that they can
act like humans, or understand human
wants, needs, and desires”
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“Artificial intelligences instilled with 
computational narrative intelligence may 
be more effective at communicating with 
humans and explaining their behavior. 
Finally, computational narrative 
intelligence may be a practical step 
towards machine enculturation”
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Riedl (2016) views possibilities for 
the future of computational narrative 
intelligence, especially in more 
effective communication
Some improvement is required
until it gets to the next level
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Authorship: The Who(s)
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Discuss the roles of authorship
related to narratives
Definition of authorship – three definitions:
“1) the profession of writing;
2) the source (such as the author)
of a piece of writing, music, or art;
3) the state or act of writing,
creating, or causing”
(Merriam-Webster, 2022, p. 1)
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Referring to authorship in
the sense of who tells narratives
Topic title:
“the who(s)” – to address questions of voice 
and authority in the practice of authorship
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Lake and Zitcer (2012) understand authorship 
more as voice and authority to write (and speak) 
In working with communicative planning theory 
and participatory research methods – two 
relevant questions concerning authorship:
“1) Whose voice appears on the page in 
narrative reports of planning research?
2) Whose voice should appear on the page,
and why does it matter?” (p. 2)
They question, for instance, if who collected 
data should not be considered author as well
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Foucault (1994, p. 101) – “What is an author?”
”The coming into being of the notion of 
‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment 
of individualization in the history of ideas, 
knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the 
sciences”
“Even today, when we reconstruct the history 
of a concept, literary genre, or school of 
philosophy, such categories seem relatively 
weak, secondary, and superimposed 
scansions in comparison with the solid and 
fundamental unit of the author and the work”
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“What is an author?”
“Who is an author?”
Consider that the reflection is 
about authorship as the relation 
between text and author
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Foucault (1994, p. 103): pointing to
essential aspects relating authorship
“It is a very familiar thesis that the task
of criticism is not to bring out the work’ s 
relationships with the author, nor to 
reconstruct through the text a thought or 
experience, but rather to analyze the work 
through its structure, its architecture, its 
intrinsic form, and the play of its internal 
relationships”
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“At this point, however, a problem arises: 
What is a work? What is this curious unity 
which we designate as a work? Of what 
elements is it composed? Is it not what an 
author has written? Difficulties appear 
immediately. If an individual were not an 
author, could we say that what he wrote, 
said, left behind in his papers, or what has 
been collected of his remarks, could be 
called a ‘work’?”
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Without author there is no work
and without work, there is no author
Foucault (1994) still about the intrinsic 
relationship of text and author:
“even when an individual has been
accepted as an author, we must still ask 
whether everything that he wrote, said,
or left behind is part of his work” (p. 103) 
Foucault (1994): an author must be accepted like 
that, they cannot just speak of them as such, 
which means that an author must be legitimized 
by others as someone who composes
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Foucault, (1994, p. 118):
“We are accustomed […] to saying that the 
author is the genial creator of a work in 
which he deposits, with infinite wealth
and generosity, an inexhaustible world of 
significations. We are used to thinking 
that the author is so different from all 
other men, and so transcendent with 
regard to all languages that, as soon as he 
speaks, meaning begins to proliferate,
to proliferate indefinitely”
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“The truth is quite the contrary:
the author is not an indefinite source of 
significations which fill a work; the author 
does not precede the works; he is a certain 
functional principle by which, in our culture, 
one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, 
by which one impedes the free circulation, 
the free manipulation, the free composition, 
decomposition, and recomposition of fiction”
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“In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the 
author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of 
invention, it is because, in reality, we make
him function in exactly the opposite fashion”
“One can say that the author is an ideological 
product, since we represent him as the
opposite of his historically real function.
(When a historically given function is 
represented in a figure that inverts it,
one has an ideological production.)
The author is therefore the ideological
figure by which one marks the manner in
which we fear the proliferation of meaning”
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The figure of an author:
a cultural representation and status
reviewed and changed as times goes by
Authors were seen and had significance in 
their own ways in the past, quite differently 
from what is considered an author nowadays, 
especially with the advent of the internet, 
when basically anyone requests the title of 
author
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Concerning narratives, who is considered 
author? The ones who write, compose,
publish, and present? Or also the ones
who narrate?
The topic title:
“who(s), in the plural: authorship means 
authority, voice, and recognition of all
parts involved in telling a story”
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Is There Room for Criticality?
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Neglected in many different fields of studies
What exactly is criticality?
What does it mean to think critically?
Why is it important?
The importance of narrative and criticality
Criticality as for critical language awareness
Criticality
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Any educational program should include 
language awareness in its curricula
Archakis and Tsakona (2013, p. 50),
based on Fairclough (1992):
“Critical language awareness is an application 
of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to the 
domain of education. Its goal is to enrich 
educational programs of language awareness 
with critical views disclosing the ways 
language or communicative phenomena 
disguise and/or perpetuate sociolinguistic 
inequality, racism, or sexism”
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Archakis and Tsakona (2013, p. 50):
What critical language awareness does
“it attempts to cultivate students’ critical 
consciousness by enabling them to approach 
the social world as a -linguistic and/or
semiotic-human construction, which is,
on the one hand, based on power relations
and, on the other, is subject to constant 
negotiation and fluctuation”
(Fairclough, 1989; Clark; Ivanič, 1997)
Criticality
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Working with a critical approach to discourse
Cultivating critical language awareness meansadopting a literacy model which stimulates “the 
emergence of multiple literacy practices in class” 
(Archakis; Tsakona, 2013, p. 51)
Classroom practices include often
include narratives (typical ones),
in pre and elementary school
When those students grow older,
it seems this genre becomes scarce
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Why? lack of connection between narratives
and students in later school years
Such distancing may have happened because the 
type of everyday narratives to which students 
are familiar with are mostly not part of the 
school curricula
Twenty-first century students have as everyday 
narratives: oral, conversational narratives, 
narratives from the web
What most of them have some familiarity
with is news stories. That is why investing in 
critical literacy models is seen as essential
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Archakis and Tsakona (2013, p. 49):
“Critical literacy models, in particular,
aim at rendering students capable of 
identifying and scrutinizing the
(more or less hidden) ideologies
in the discourses surrounding them 
(Fairclough, 1992)”
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“Whatever we say or write interacts with locally 
or globally dominant discourses, hence we 
constantly position ourselves in relation to such 
discourses and construct various identities 
depending on our particular needs and goals
in any given context (Davies; Harré, 1990)”
“Since such dimensions are not always explored 
in contemporary language teaching, students 
are not usually aware of the fact that discourse 
actually constitutes a mirror reflecting reality 
from a particular ideological point of view”
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Exercise of critical language
awareness related to narratives
Students questioning: relations of characters, 
discourse dominance, identities and so on
Archakis and Tsakona (2013, p. 54),
based on Bamberg (1997/2004):
a. What are the relationships between the 
narrative characters, as constructed by 
the narrator in the narrative world?
(…)
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(…)
b. What sort of relationships
could be developed between
the narrator and his/her audience
(or his/her co-narrators)
throughout the narrative event?
(…)
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(…)
c. In relation to what dominant meanings and 
discourses does the narrator position 
him/herself?
d. What sort of identities does the narrator 
choose to project: does s/he appear to agree, 
question, resist, or even disaffiliate from the 
dominant meanings and values, namely from 
what is widely considered as ‘normal’ or 
‘expected’ in given circumstances?
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Implementing critical literacy and critical 
language awareness in education means 
having not only students who are critical 
but also who think and act critically
Results in society: people will be able, for 
example, to analyze discourses and get 
meanings far beyond words and phrases
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Pashangzadeh, Ahmadian and Yazdani (2016)
on critical thinking (CT), justify the need of 
working with it because
“in the world of today, incredible speed of 
scientific and technological developments
has turned CT into a more vital necessity for 
current generation who needs more education, 
in comparison with older ones, since, it seems 
through a fast-changing contemporary 
scenario, the world both in educational and 
non-educational areas has become a more 
complicated and sophisticated place to live in”
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“Only a few minutes of internet searching 
can provide everyone with an enormous 
wealth of available information which 
creates a ‘paralysis of analysis’ as we
think in what manner to make our
selection of data from existing
ever-expanding databases
(Davidson, 1996 cited in Halpern, 2003)”
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Few societies have tried to implement 
programs on critical thinking in their 
school curricula
The sooner we begin making the 
necessary changes, the earlier
we are getting results
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Pashangzadeh, Ahmadian and Yazdani
(2016, p. 101), in the EFL/ESL (English as 
Foreign Language/English as Second Language) 
Context, cite Bean (1996) as the one who
“put under consideration the ability of thinking 
critically as a teachable skill” and Iakovos 
(2011), who “argues that the ability to think 
critically seems not to be organized and 
developed spontaneously and naturally”
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Mora (2021), when writing on his 
experiences with critical thinking
involving education, arguments that
“raising questions is at the core
of a critical mindset” (p. 64)
Depending on the context:
risk of being seen as someone who asks
too many questions, but it is worth it
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Mora (2021, p.65) on critical literacy and 
language teaching:
“critical literacy always invites teachers 
and teacher educators to ask bigger 
questions about language in society and 
how to foster the use of, in our case, 
English and other second languages 
(Mora, 2013b) as tools for equity and 
social agency”
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Adopting critical thinking as a tool in 
working with languages (but not only) 
leads to a completely new perspective for 
students and teachers
Such change will affect everyone around. 
There is no way to go back to the old 
system after learning critical thinking
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Mora et al. (2021b, 465) make a point in 
what critical literacy means:
“Critical literacy is not just a buzzword or 
something we do. Critical literacy shapes 
who we are as teachers, as researchers,
as scholars, as community members, and 
as family members”
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Mora (2021, p. 69):
“Critical literacy is more than instructional 
practices, it is embodied actions and life 
lessons that become lesson plans and 
activities. It is life turned into questions 
that our students can embark upon by 
using the languages they are learning as 
their conduit”
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Three verbs which involve the issue
come to our minds: be, think, and act
Mora (2021, p. 69):
“we cannot think of critical literacy
(or criticality for that matter) as 
instrumentality. It is life epistemology 
(Mora, 2016); it is an ethos that begets 
techniques”
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“Through the learning and teaching process 
of critically thinking, narrative plays such a 
crucial role once, as strategy, it allows us to 
approach discussions of topics other texts 
would not have the same acceptance. It is 
what we could call ‘the perfect excuse’”
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Interculturality:
What Role Does it Play?
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The concept of interculturality is
by large and far difficult to define
One reason is that there are other
terms around, like multiculturality,
which may confuse some people
Dietz (2018) brings an initial definition 
of what interculturality means.
His notion on it comes from the 
anthropological and social sciences field
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Dietz (2018, p. 1)
“In broad terms, interculturality is defined
and classified in anthropological and social 
science literature according to three different 
but complementary semantical axes:
(1) the distinction between interculturality as 
a descriptive rather than as a prescriptive 
concept; 
(2) the underlying, implicit assumption of a 
static versus a dynamic notion of culture; 
and (…)
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(…)
(3) the rather functionalist application
of the concept of interculturality for 
analyzing the status quo of a given 
society versus its critical and 
emancipatory application for
identifying inherent conflicts and 
sources of societal transformations”
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Diversity in Multicultural and Intercultural 
Discourses
Interculturality
interethnic, interreligious
and/or interlingual
relations
Multiculturality cultural,
religious and/or 
linguistic diversity
Factual level
=
Status quo
Interculturalism
coexistence in diversity:
1. principle of equality
2. principle of difference
3. principle of positive
interaction
Multiculturalism
recognition of difference: 
1. principle of equality 
2. principle of difference
Normative level
=
pedagogical,
sociopolitical or
ethical proposals
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Key differences between the concepts of 
multiculturality/multiculturalism and 
interculturality/interculturalism
Interculturality:
because it as a broaderconcept
It is not only being aware of diversity
and recognize differences of principles 
(equality and difference): 
multiculturality/multiculturalism
is based on that
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It has to do with the interrelations and 
coexistence in diversity
Interculturality/interculturalism contains
the principles of equality and difference; 
brings the principle of positive interaction
Recognizing differences in not enough
Coexistence is key to live in society
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Manara (2011, p. 31) on narratives in 
intercultural relations, working with oral
and written productions in EFL context:
“Reading and listening to the learners’ 
personal narratives, I felt that narratives 
enlivened classroom discourse”
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“It is a site of exploration, most importantly, 
exploration of self. The use of learners’ 
personal narratives works as a self-inquiry 
mode of learning. Through journal writing, 
the learners were engaged in a reflective 
learning of experiencing these concepts in 
their linguistic and (inter)cultural lives
– a dialogic act of understanding the self 
and their world”
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“The written narratives display the learners’ 
responses of opinion, belief, and tension
as a process of making sense of their
inter-cultural and inter-linguistic self
in an English-speaking Western
(Holliday, 2005) context”
“Most importantly, I found narrative to
be a form of ongoing work of co-creating 
meaning or co-producing knowledge
in a teaching and learning activity”
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Narratives used as mode of learning 
make students aware of the intercultural 
aspects of their own lives
Such process allows people of different 
cultures to construct together
By developing intercultural awareness, 
leaners can use narratives to create 
meaning in several distinct ways
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Rodrigo-Mateu (2018, p. 45):
raising intercultural awareness as building 
relations between us and the others:
“Through intercultural awareness we 
establish relations among cultures and 
observe similarities and differences that 
help us understand better those relations” 
“At the same time, it means an awareness 
of how each community is perceived by 
others”
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“General competences play an important 
role in language learning when this is 
understood as intercultural contact, since 
individuals use their own references and 
life experiences to decode and understand 
messages”
“Sociocultural approaches emphasise that 
knowledge is built from an I related to the 
others”
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Intercultural contact as a premise to establish 
relations
Not enough to know that there are differences 
among people and cultures and respect them
There is diversity around us
What interculturally claims is that we must 
interact, interrelate, construct together
One thing is knowing and respecting but
keeping a distance
Another, completely different is knowing, 
respecting and interact, integrate
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Rodrigo-Mateu (2018) on narratives and 
interculturality
“we must be able to see in stories some point 
of connection to our own lives. We will find 
some narratives that strike us as more 
insightful or true to the way the world
is than others” (p. 46)
Learning about different cultures through 
narratives requires effort because people
have distinct beliefs, reasons, feelings,
fears, which may challenge us a bit
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Rodrigo-Mateu (2018), regarding language, 
culture and interculturality through narratives:
“the whole project and its publication entailed a 
joint development of linguistic, communicative 
and intercultural skills among participants. 
Through their stories, they shared ideas, ways 
of reasoning and behaviours that characterise
their culture and that, at the same time, 
differentiate them from other cultures” (p. 55)
So much in terms of interculturality is
possible to be done in our language classes
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Creating projects aiming the hearing and 
writing of narratives can reveal and reflect 
both students’ and teachers’ languages, 
identities, and cultures
Allowing ourselves to meet the new, the 
different, to explore and build together: 
make a better society
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