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Structure and Suspense

Page history last edited by Bruce Mason 16 years, 10 months ago

This group focuses on how multimodal narratives are structured, how suspense and reader/viewer engagement are created.

 

This wiki page was updated live as we held our workshop.

Members of the Suspense Squad here at the workshop:  Astrid, Bruce, Karlsen, Colin, Kai, Michael, Anne, Jess, Jennifer, Alice. There was one other person but I missed her name.

Here are some online narratives for you to look at:

 

 

Possible questions to comment on/respond to:

 

 

Question 1:

 

How does the semiotic structure of multimodal online narratives contribute to the creation of suspense? Do we need to expand/revise our traditional concept(s) of suspense? Consider the following quotes:

 

  1. 'Suspense is evoked by postponing the story's outcome, curiosity is evoked by presenting the outcome before the preceding events, and surprise is evoked by an unexpected event.' (Hoeken H.; van Vliet M. [2000] Suspense, curiosity, and surprise: How discourse structure influences the affective and cognitive processing of a story, Poetics 27, 4: 277-286)  
  2. 'Although the anticipation of surprise and novelty may be considerable upon addressing a hypertext [...] [or hypermedia narrative], the main risk inherent in [browsing through] it is the loss of suspense and attention resulting from the ultimate awareness of being 'lost in hyperspace'...In this respect, effects like ‘confusion’ and ‘disorientation’ ought to be seen less as inhibitory features than as distinctive varieties of suspense – if understood in an unconventionally challenging sense of ‘uncertainty, anticipation and curiosity’ (Cuddon, 1999: 883) (Ensslin A. [2007] Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions. London: Continuum, p.35)

 

Responses

We mostly looked at Inanimate Alice.

Questions arising:

Does suspense rely on familiarity? (Inanimate Alice is familiar story.)

How does IA compare to "traditional" anti-linear hypertext? Jess notes that IA is very simple in chapter 1 but chapter 4 is more complex with various games.

 

There was a claim that IA is full of anxiety but not suspense.  There is a difficulty of complex storytelling and using an 8 year old's perspective. Huck Finn was mentioned as a comparison.

Alternately:the delay in allowing us to move forward produces suspense.

Note that not everyone actually likes suspense.

Did we care about whether Alice found her dad?

We struggle to find ourselves immersed - reading text made it hard to concentrate on image?

This leads to the question: how do we read a screen?

Some of us noticed musical motifs.

 

A question: what makes you read on? One person said that her students say "the arrows"

Is there an icon for the end? How do you know when it has ended? Come to that if you reach the end but haven't read all the intervening elements, have you really finished.

JD boulter claims that hypertext is antithetical to immersion. (This is in his book The Remediation of Print.) "hyperimmediacy" example of Jeep.

 

considering teaching

Structure should create suspense in IA or hypertext.

How does this correlate with surprise?

Back to the Lesson Plan

You might also like to have a look at this lesson plan  put together by Jess which uses Inanimate Alice to look at narrative issues too.

 

Question 2:

 

How would you analyse, explain or use these narratives in relation to your own interests in narrative theory and/or practice?

 

Question 3: (teaching)

 

Design a task for final year undergraduate students, stimulated by one of the online narratives, which helps them to explore an aspect of narrative theory and/or practice.  The task can be for a small group, or individual reflection, use the online narrative alone or blend this with other media (e.g. print texts, film, music).

 

 Responses

  • How can we analyse this as literature?
  • Jess claims:that we need to focus on other modes such as music
  • playing games as immersion killing.
  • How do you closely read a hypertext/media?
  • How do students share experiences when they may not read overlapping nodes.
  • Have we lost a "stable text"? There was much inconclusive debate about this.
  • sugestion: divide students into focusing on modes.
  • also can we find ways to teach in the medium?
  • Assertion: most hyperfictions are quite stable.
  • "Just cause its possible doesn't mean we should." Which is to say that just because hypertext authors can produce wild, confusing hypertexts, we don't have to.

 

 

Question 4: Certain theorists see a pull between immersion (plot and therefore suspense) and interaction.  Marie-Laure Ryan, for example, suggests that immersion (although she is referring to a virtual reality scenario, let's expand it to include web fiction and hypertext etc...) is largely due to  "the vividness of the display."  How might this idea of "vividness" be elaborated alongside narrative development (structure and suspense) especially if online we have the potential to read very vivid stories (like Dinsmore's High Crimson and Pullinger and Joseph's Inanimate Alice) that make use of multiple modes (graphic, sound, moving video, interaction, etc...)? Do suspense and immersion only come at the expense of interaction?

 

Didn't really get to this.

 

Comments (3)

Anonymous said

at 7:28 am on Apr 28, 2007

I teach an introductory course in literature to first-year students, and often use texts presented in various media, from print, graphic novels, anime, television, music, film and so on. I would be very interested in introducing my students to Inanimate Alice as part of the course, in particular to encourage them to anatomise the strategies employed by the writers, and to evaluate the success of the project. Inanimate Alice is not a demanding text and would be highly accessible; as well, the range of experience brought to the class by individual students would provide the opportunity to explore the role of context in interpretation. I wouldn't be inclined to explain the text at all; I think Jess's lesson plan is a fine example of ways of structuring student encounters with the narrative; I wonder, though, whether students lacking the vocabulary of narrative analysis -- traditional or more contemporary -- will be able to penetrate much beneath the surface of the obvious, or or their own reactions. I'll be curious to see what happens.

Anonymous said

at 7:29 am on Apr 28, 2007

I've written a paper ("Context, Culture and Cognition: Playstation behaviour in a cultural database") about behaviour in multimodal environments that asks whether it is preferable to exploit users' own "natural" strategies in constructing multimodal environments. Using a relevance-theoretic approach, I suggest that we observe what people do now in VRs where they already choose to spend a great deal of time -- eg, games -- and look at what makes these activities so attractive (vividness may not be the key here, not after multiple encounters; furthermore, familiarity doesn't seem to affect users' satisfaction with their experience, at least not for a considerable period of time). I argue that successful cultural databases are more likely to incorporate the features of gaming environments, strategies and devices than conventional "hypertextual" elements. These remarks may appear tangential, but I'm moving towards engaging with the same topic -- the pull between immersion and interaction. Where do gamers fall? How can people return to the same narrative, over and over, when they already know how it will end? How can suspense be experienced when every possible outcome has been explored? If Inanimate Alice sacrifices interaction at the expense of suspense (and I'm not sure this is the case), then does this say something about the readers, narrativity, or the specific text?

Bruce Mason said

at 8:14 am on May 17, 2007

I've tidied this up a bit post-workshop as the space bar wasn't working well at the time. As can be seen, most of our responses were further questions rather than answers. My take on it was that there were two foci of anxiety:
1: the problems of the medium (in as much as it can be called a medium) when it came to creating suspense.
2: A worry about whether these kinds of texts might be too unstable to allow shared "readings".
I don't think we came to any consensus about this.

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