It is impossible to put a hard line stance on what exactly people want to hear. Different people have different interests and values. It is those interests and values that shape what exactly those people may be interested in hearing about. These qualities are what Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck would refer to as “a quality that makes stories inherently worth telling, independently of their textualisation.” [1] This trend is essentially what makes a web browsing site such as Google worth millions of dollars. People all over the world type into a little box something that they are interested in and want to learn about and the results that they receive are the works of many other people. The creators of these works have written narratives that to these everyday browsers would seem to be “narratable.” But what about those who are uninterested in these searches?
Let’s say Person A is searching about soccer and Person B is searching for gardening. This is where Gerald Prince’s statement comes into play. Prince writes, “one narrator’s unnarratable can very well be another’s narratable.” [2] The way in which this applies to the scenario at hand is as follows, Person A might have no interest in what Person B is searching for and vice versa. To Person A, soccer would be defined as narratable whereas gardening would be unarratable. This is the problem that is represented by these terms. The bottom line is always whether or not what someone is saying really matters to you. Narratable vs. unarratable is more of an opinion rather than a definition. It is the viewer or reader that makes that distinction, not a critic or a dictionary.
[1] Herman, Luc/Vervaeck, Bart: "Narrative Interest as Cultrual Negotiation", Vol. 17, No. 1 (2009), p. 13
[2] Prince, Gerald. “The Disnarrated.” Style. 22.1 (1988): 1-8. Print.
Although what is narratable is definitely subjective to each person's interests there are still trends that are based on the general nature of human beings, and there are scholars who have statistically analyzed and discovered these trends [1][2]. For example, every country in the world has news about their elite, talking about there respective presidents, movie stars, or singers. While who exactly is discussed in the news is very different for each country, every country talks about elites more than common people.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, more globally dominant countries such as USA get more news coverage about them globally than lets say Botswana in Africa. This is a process of hegemony discussed in Herman's Narrative [2]. However, sometimes when news is intense enough like with the extremely chaotic and violent rebellions in Egypt and Libya, these countries get discussed as well, but it still takes enormously intense events.
[1] Gultung, Johan/Ruge, Mari Holmboe: The structure of Foreign News. The presentation of the Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2 (1965), pp 64-91.
[2] Harcup, Ton/O’Neill, Deirdre: What Is News? Galtune and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies 2001, vol.2, no. 2, pp. 261-280.
[3] Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 278.