Bournemouth University, September 3, 2010
The Narrative Research Group (NRG), based in the Media School at Bournemouth University, hosted its first symposium on Friday 3 September. The day brought together academics working across a wide range of disciplines including media and cultural studies, journalism, political communication, literature, linguistics and business and management. The event also included contributions from practitioners, with a writing workshop run by Rosie Cullen from the Media School, and a performance of the monologue Little Boy, scripted by Bournemouth University Screenwriter in Residence, John Foster.
Panels explored the means by which ‘real people’ have been represented in a wide range of media discourses, including comics, television shows, political campaigns, oral narratives and new media forms. Many of the papers highlighted the importance of understanding the audiences of these narratives, and responding to their needs, desires and sheer presence. There was also considerable discussion of the borrowing of formats and structures across media, and of the capacity of narratives to both contain and foreground contradictions and complexities of various kinds, including those surrounding issues of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age. In addition, the ethical responsibilities of storytelling were explored, especially with regard to the methods used for accessing these narratives, and the means employed for their subsequent dissemination.
After a welcome address by Prof. Stuart Allan of the Media School, Prof. Sue Thomas of De Montfort University opened proceedings with a fascinating insight into the metaphors by which users of online media construct their experiences of cyberspace. Based on interviews with leading new media figures, as well as contributions provided by visitors to her website (www.thewildsurmise.com), Prof. Thomas’s research showed that the metaphors used rely heavily on natural and anthropomorphic imagery, but also draw on myths of migration and the notion of the frontier.
As part of the same panel focusing on ‘Narratives of Ordinary and Extraordinary People Online’, Ruth Page from the University of Leicester analysed celebrity stories featuring on the social media platform, Twitter. Dr Page’s data consisted of a representative sample of tweets from various male and female celebrities which she then compared to the tweets of ‘ordinary’ people. She found that celebrity tweets were much more information-laden, with any glimpses into the ‘private’ lives of these individuals being carefully chosen so as to highlight their public activities and personae. The research also found a high incidence of references to time in these narratives, with the use of non-finite verbs and temporal ambiguity contributing to the illusion of synchronicity for those following the celebrities on Twitter. Dr Page also explored the celebrity tweets as a kind of dispersed narrative in which external links and the phenomenon of retweeting helped to amplify and disseminate the stories told by the celebrities across different media platforms and across time and space.
In the second panel of the day (‘Past and Present’), Roger Sabin of Central St Martin’s College in London analysed the representation of the working classes in a comic from the late 19thcentury called Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. Dr Sabin argued that this comic positioned itself in opposition to mainstream publications such as Punch, and addressed a different audience, drawing on the traditions of the music hall and slapstick comedy in a way which was to be hugely influential for a wide range of popular cultural forms, especially film.
In her paper on counter-narratives of empire, Prof. Hilary Dannenburg of Trier University argued that the current obsession with history in televisual narratives provided an interesting backdrop for the exploration of different forms of nostalgia, ranging from the restorative to the reflective or ironic. The paper considered ways in which the cultural memory of empire could be interrogated and subverted in documentary forms and histories, but also in comic narratives, though it was recognised that traces of the restorative nostalgia could still be found in the ways in which the audiences of some of these programmes were constructed.
The afternoon session began with Marina Lambrou’s moving account of her research on the personal narratives of survivors of 7/7 and 9/11. Dr Lambrou (from the University of Kingston in London) highlighted the ethical issues faced by ethnographic researchers dealing with the traumatic accounts of ‘real people’. She played an excerpt from one of the interviews she conducted to demonstrate the difficulties such a situation can present, particularly where the trauma may extend to include the interviewer, and where the withholding of a response might derail the whole relationship built up with the interviewee.
Also focusing on narratives based on recent news events, Darren Lilleker, from Bournemouth University, explored the ‘wondrous stories’ of political communication, taking as his case study the Conservatives’ campaign in the run up to the 2010 United Kingdom General Election. Dr Lilleker argued that while some research has been conducted on the stories of individual politicians, very little attention has been paid thus far to the narratives employed by political parties. Dr Lilleker focused on the strategies employed in the Conservatives’ ‘Big Society’ campaign and contrasted the ways in which these were enacted in the party’s manifesto, and in various speeches delivered by the party’s leader. In a lively discussion following this paper, audience members suggested ways in which this research could be further developed to focus on narratives of personal crisis, crisis points for the parties, and the use of embedded narratives by politicians, especially David Cameron.
The remainder of the afternoon was given over to representations of ‘real people’ in various television formats, especially so-called ‘reality tv’. In an entertaining paper, Ben Highmore of Sussex University explored the popular tv show Come Dine with Me, and argued that the ironic voice-over, which is a key feature of the show, acts as a kind of Greek Chorus, cutting through and managing the audience’s affective response. The paper set out to find the social in the textual and to locate the analysis in the context of recent critiques of neo-liberalism in the media. Dr Highmore argued that although many of the techniques used on the show contributed towards a flattening out and deflation of emotion, the power of the affective moments remained, and may in fact have been facilitated by the presence of the ironic narrator. In the discussion which followed, Dr Paul Cobley of London Metropolitan University suggested that programmes such as these could be located within a wider metanarrative to do with the crisis of expertise in contemporary culture, exemplified by the ways in which participants often explicitly reject what is constructed as ‘good’ or ‘right’ and subvert the rules and premises implicit in the show’s construction.
Next, Pat Holland of Bournemouth University took us back to constructions of childhood in the 1980s. Set against the backdrop of the Conservatives’ attempts to replace the concept of society with that of the family, the paper argued that the contradictions implicit in such an ideology were often played out in the television programmes of the day. Contrasting factual programmes with a children’s drama from the period, it was argued that it was the fictional treatment that portrayed children as active, self-assertive citizens, whereas they tended to be cast as helpless victims in the documentaries and current affairs programmes.
In the final panel of the day, on Transformative Narratives, Dr Craig Batty of Bournemouth University presented his reworking of the narrative models provided in classic accounts ranging from Aristotle to present-day scriptwriting manuals, arguing that this is necessary if we are to accommodate any sense of the internality of individuals or do justice to what he called the emotional journey of the hero. Chris Pullen, also from the Media School at Bournemouth, analysed the representation of transgender identities in reality tv shows and argued that these often provided a challenge to essentialist ideas and heterosexist norms. Dr Pullen claimed that the narrative structures of these shows emphasised personal triumph and the overcoming of trials and tribulations, but also demonstrated the complexity of the Foucauldian notion of working on the project of the self. Finally, Peri Gilpin from the University of Southampton also explored the project of the self in relation to the often prescriptive and authoritarian narratives of health and beauty offered by reality tv shows. Illustrated by some graphic depictions of the project of purifying the body from the tv show Supersize vs. Superskinny, Dr Gilpin drew on Kristeva’s theory of the abject to provide some fascinating insights into the social and cultural fictions that reverberate around the healthy/ethical body.
The day concluded with a powerful performance of Little Boy, based on the story of Claude Eatherly, one of the pilots involved in the bombing of Hiroshima, who went on to lead a life of crime on his return to the United States. This was followed by a brief discussion relating the performance to some of the themes and issues discussed during the day.
It is hoped that this highly successful symposium will be the first of many to be convened by the Narrative Research Group. It is also hoped that such events will help to forge important links between those working on the intersections between narrative and media/cultural studies, both within the UK and beyond. If you are interested in finding out more about the work of the group, please contact Bronwen Thomas or Julia Round, or check out the group’s website at http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/imcr/cjcr/nrg/about_the_narrative_group.html