2. What is narrative?
In Media Studies narrative is how the story of a
media text is constructed and how it relays its
information to an audience.
To analyse how a narrative is constructed you need
to look at how it is put together using audio codes,
visual codes, structure and the characters.
For example a television news programme like BBC
News at Ten will have the same narrative
construction each evening, although the content of
the news stories will be different.
3. Theorist- Roland Barthes
He suggested that there are 5 codes in narrative-
O The Hermeneutic Code(the voice of the truth)-Is the way
the story avoids telling the truth or revealing all the facts,
in order to drop clues in through out to help create
mystery.
O The Enigma/ Proairetic Code (empirical voice)-The way
the tension is built up and the audience is left guessing
what happens next
O The Semantic Code (the voice of the person)-The
semantic code points to any element in a text that
suggests a particular, often additional meaning by way of
connotation which the story suggests.
Connotation= cultural/underlining meaning, what it
symbolises.
4. O The Symbolic Code(the voice of symbols)-This is very
similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at a wider level,
organizing semantic meanings into broader and
deeper sets of meaning. This is typically done in the
use of antithesis, where new meaning arises out of
opposing and conflict ideas.
O The Cultural Code(the voice of science)-Looks at the
audiences wider cultural knowledge, morality and
ideology.
