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Class 5 Slides - Framing
Class 5 Slides - Framing
Kieron Brown
Questions
[Play] could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some
degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would
carry the message “this is play” (Bateson 1972, p. 179)
Bateson
Social frameworks, on the other hand, provide background understanding for events that
incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being
the human being […] These doings subject the doer to "standards," to social appraisal of his action
based on its honesty, efficiency, economy, safety, elegance, tactfulness,
good taste, and so forth (Goffman 1986, p. 22)
Keys & Keying
A key is “a set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of
some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen
by the participants to be something quite else” (Goffman 1986, pp. 43–44).
Examples of keys include make-believe, contests, and various forms of ceremony. These
activities are usually accompanied by cues “for establishing when the transformation is to
begin and when it is to end” (Goffman 1986, p. 45).
Frames & Framings
Frames (cognitive frames, schema, schemata etc.) are “basic orientational aids
that help us to navigate through our experiential universe, inform our cognitive
activities and generally function as preconditions of interpretation (Wolf 2006, p.
6).
Frames & Framings
Framings are “codings of abstract cognitive frames that exist or are formed within,
or on the margins and in the immediate context of, the framed situation or
phenomenon and – like the corresponding frames – have an interpretive, guiding
and controlling function with reference to it” (Wolf 2006, p. 6)
Paratext
The paratext is an “‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone
without any hard and fast boundary” (Genette 1987, p. 1).
The “threshold” that the paratext entails is “always the conveyor of a commentary that
is authorial or legitimated by the author” (Genette 1987, p. 2). It constitutes a zone “not
only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a
strategy” (Genette 1987, p. 2).
Peritext & Epitext
The…
• Semiotic dimension concerns the codes and sensory channels that
support various media.
• Technological dimension regards the raw materials (e.g., clay for pottery, stone for sculpture, the
human body for dance) and the technologies that support the various semiotic types.
• Cultural dimension isn’t always predictable from semiotic type and technological support. Some
“distinct” media from a cultural point of view lack a distinct semiotic or technological identity. (Ryan
2006, pp. 18—23)
Key Frames: Medium
If I have been speaking all along of conventional delimitations and conventionally distinct media, I
have been doing this very consciously. In my view, the functioning of intermedial configurations is
always based on relations between media or ‘medialities’ that are conventionally perceived as
distinct, or, to put this in other terms, it is based on the possibility of calling up specific medially
bound frames in the recipient (Rajewsky 2010, p. 61).
Key Frames: Narrative
I suggest regarding the set of all narratives as fuzzy, and narrativity (or “storiness”) as a scalar property
rather than as a rigidly binary feature that divides mental representations into stories and nonstories:
Storyworlds are “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where,
why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate […] as they work
to comprehend a narrative” (Herman 2005, p. 570)
Genres may “emerge from the intertextual relations between multiple texts, resulting
in a common category” (Mittell 2004, p. 8) but such categories are necessarily
“culturally operative within a number of spheres of media practice, employed by
critics, industries, and audiences” (Mittell 2004, p. 10)
Key Frames: Genre
Competent readers of a genre are not generally confused when some of their initial
expectations are not met - the framework of the genre can be seen as offering
‘default’ expectations which act as a starting point for interpretation rather than a
straitjacket […] Familiarity with a genre enables readers to generate feasible
predictions about events in a narrative. Drawing on their knowledge of other texts
within the same genre helps readers to sort salient from nonsalient narrative
information in an individual text" (Chandler 2000, p. 8)
Key Frames: Fiction/Nonfiction
There are six important functions of the frame, which I call the function of
closure, the separative function, the rhythmic function, the structural
function, the expressive function, and the readerly function. All of these
functions exert their effects on the contents of the panel […] and, especially, on
the perceptive and cognitive processes of the reader (Groensteen 2007, p. 39)
Panel & Layout
Richard McGuire,
Here (2014)
Text
Baetens and Frey suggest four “rules” or assumptions of the use of text in comics. They refer
to this as the “rhetorical ‘unconscious’” (Baetens and Frey 2014, p. 160)
of the graphic novel’s use of text:
Many comics make it impossible to distinguish between text per se and secondary
aspects such as design and the physical package, because they continually invoke
said aspects to influence the reader’s participation in meaning-making. Material
considerations influence not only the total design and packaging of a publication but
also matters of style and technique (Hatfield 2005, p. 60)
Paratext/Materiality