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121-417: The confidant ( / ˈ k ɒ n f ɪ d æ n t / or / ˌ k ɒ n f ɪ ˈ d ɑː n t / ; feminine: confidante , same pronunciation) is a character in a story whom a protagonist confides in and trusts. Confidants may be other principal characters, characters who command trust by virtue of their position such as doctors or other authority figures, or anonymous confidants with no separate role in

242-524: A composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Abstract art , non-figurative art , non-objective art , and non-representational art are all closely related terms. They have similar, but perhaps not identical, meanings. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By

363-439: A "visual narrative instance". And unlike narratives found in other performance arts such as plays and musicals, film narratives are not bound to a specific place and time, and are not limited by scene transitions in plays, which are restricted by set design and allotted time. The nature or existence of a formative narrative in many of the world's myths, folktales, and legends has been a topic of debate for many modern scholars; but

484-853: A Circle (1911); František Kupka had painted the Orphist works, Discs of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors ), 1912 and Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs ( Fugue in Two Colors ), 1912; Robert Delaunay painted a series entitled Simultaneous Windows and Formes Circulaires, Soleil n°2 (1912–13); Léopold Survage created Colored Rhythm (Study for the film), 1913; Piet Mondrian , painted Tableau No. 1 and Composition No. 11 , 1913. With his expressive use of color and his free and imaginative drawing Henri Matisse comes very close to pure abstraction in French Window at Collioure (1914), View of Notre-Dame (1914), and The Yellow Curtain from 1915. And

605-507: A basis for a diversity of modes of abstraction. The following extract from The World Backwards gives some impression of the inter-connectedness of culture at the time: " David Burliuk 's knowledge of modern art movements must have been extremely up-to-date, for the second Knave of Diamonds exhibition , held in January 1912 (in Moscow) included not only paintings sent from Munich, but some members of

726-440: A character, for example whether they empathize with a character or not, feeling for them as if they were real. The audience's familiarity with a character results in their expectations about how characters will behave in later scenes. Characters who behave contrary to their previous patterns of behavior (their characterization ) can be confusing or jarring to the audience. Narratives usually have main characters, protagonists , whom

847-408: A coherent story or narrative explaining how they believe the event was generated. Narratives thus lie at the foundations of our cognitive procedures and also provide an explanatory framework for the social sciences, particularly when it is difficult to assemble enough cases to permit statistical analysis. Narrative is often used in case study research in the social sciences. Here it has been found that

968-582: A departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is impossible. Artwork which takes liberties, e.g. altering color or form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction , for instance, one

1089-490: A different ontological source, and therefore has different implications within a civilization. Frazer states: "If these definitions be accepted, we may say that myth has its source in reason, legend in memory, and folk-tale in imagination; and that the three riper products of the human mind which correspond to these its crude creations are science, history, and romance." Janet Bacon expanded upon Frazer's categorization in her 1921 publication— The Voyage of The Argonauts . In

1210-466: A dramatic work may also include narrative speeches). A narrative consists of a set of events (the story) recounted in the process of narration (or discourse ), in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (the plot , which can also mean "story synopsis"). The term " emplotment " describes how, when making sense of personal experience, authors or other storytellers structure and order narratives. The category of narratives includes both

1331-715: A few directions relating to abstraction in the second half of the 20th century. In the United States, Art as Object as seen in the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd and the paintings of Frank Stella are seen today as newer permutations. Other examples include Lyrical Abstraction and the sensuous use of color seen in the work of painters as diverse as Robert Motherwell , Patrick Heron , Kenneth Noland , Sam Francis , Cy Twombly , Richard Diebenkorn , Helen Frankenthaler , Joan Mitchell , and Veronica Ruiz de Velasco . One socio-historical explanation that has been offered for

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1452-799: A few of the exiled Europeans who arrived in New York. The rich cultural influences brought by the European artists were distilled and built upon by local New York painters. The climate of freedom in New York allowed all of these influences to flourish. The art galleries that primarily had focused on European art began to notice the local art community and the work of younger American artists who had begun to mature. Certain artists at this time became distinctly abstract in their mature work. During this period Piet Mondrian's painting Composition No. 10 , 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined his radical but classical approach to

1573-452: A further digraph where the actions are depicted as nodes and edges take the form "action a co-determined (in context of other actions) action b ". Narratives can be both abstracted and generalised by imposing an algebra upon their structures and thence defining homomorphism between the algebras. The insertion of action-driven causal links in a narrative can be achieved using the method of Bayesian narratives. Developed by Peter Abell ,

1694-500: A leading consciousness researcher, writes, "Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers." Stories are an important aspect of culture. Many works of art and most works of literature tell stories; indeed, most of the humanities involve stories. Stories are of ancient origin, existing in ancient Egyptian , ancient Greek , Chinese , and Indian cultures and their myths. Stories are also

1815-500: A manifesto defining an abstract art in which the line, color and surface only are the concrete reality. Abstraction-Création founded in 1931 as a more open group, provided a point of reference for abstract artists, as the political situation worsened in 1935, and artists again regrouped, many in London. The first exhibition of British abstract art was held in England in 1935. The following year

1936-445: A multitude of folklore genres , but there is a significance in distinguishing the various forms of folklore in order to properly determine what narratives constitute as mythological, as anthropologist Sir James Frazer suggests. Frazer contends that there are three primary categories of mythology (now more broadly considered categories of folklore): Myths, legends, and folktales, and that by definition, each genre pulls its narrative from

2057-429: A narrating voice". Still others have argued that narrative is a semiotic enterprise that can enrich musical analysis. The French musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez contends that "the narrative, strictly speaking, is not in the music, but in the plot imagined and constructed by the listeners". He argues that discussing music in terms of narrativity is simply metaphorical and that the "imagined plot" may be influenced by

2178-402: A narrative subject; these devices include cinematography , editing , sound design (both diegetic and non-diegetic sound), as well as the arrangement and decisions on how and where the subjects are located onscreen—known as mise-en-scène . These cinematic devices, among others, contribute to the unique blend of visual and auditory storytelling that culminates to what Jose Landa refers to as

2299-427: A narrative through a spoken or written commentary are examples of a technique called narration, which is required only in written narratives but optional in other types. Though narration is a narrower term, it is occasionally used as a synonym for narrative mode in a very broad sense. The plot is the sequence of events that occurs in a narrative from the beginning to the middle to the end. It typically occurs through

2420-403: A narrative, as Schmid proposes; the act of an author writing his or her words in text is what communicates to the audience (in this case readers) the narrative of the text, and the author represents an act of narrative communication between the textual narrator and the narratee. This is in line with Fludernik's perspective on what's called cognitive narratology—which states that a literary text has

2541-492: A number of voices to several characters in addition to narrator's, created a possibility of narrator's views differing significantly from the author's views. With the rise of the novel in the 18th century , the concept of the narrator (as opposed to "author") made the question of narrator a prominent one for literary theory. It has been proposed that perspective and interpretive knowledge are the essential characteristics, while focalization and structure are lateral characteristics of

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2662-476: A pivotal role in narrative structure; an analysis of the historical and cultural contexts present during the development of a narrative is needed in order to more accurately represent the role of narratology in societies that relied heavily on oral narratives. Narrative is a highly aesthetic art. Thoughtfully composed stories have a number of aesthetic elements. Such elements include the idea of narrative structure , with identifiable beginnings, middles, and ends, or

2783-465: A process of cause and effect , in which characters' actions or other events produce reactions that allow the story to progress. Put another way, plot is structured through a series of scenes in which related events occur that lead to subsequent scenes. These events form plot points, moments of change that affect the characters' understandings, decisions, and actions. The movement of the plot forward often corresponds to protagonists encountering or realizing

2904-400: A restoration or a return to equilibrium—a conclusion that brings the narrative back to a similar space before the events of the narrative unfolded. The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods that are more often used to analyse narrative fiction, to non-fictional texts such as political speeches. Other critiques of literary theory in narrative challenge

3025-477: A sequence of events is presented. Several art movements, such as modern art , refuse the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual . Narrative can be organized into a number of thematic or formal categories: nonfiction (such as creative nonfiction , biography , journalism, transcript poetry , and historiography ); fictionalization of historical events (such as anecdote , myth , legend, and historical fiction ) and fiction proper (such as literature in

3146-407: A technician, learning to use the tools and materials of modern production. Art into life! was Vladimir Tatlin 's slogan, and that of all the future Constructivists. Varvara Stepanova and Alexandre Exter and others abandoned easel painting and diverted their energies to theatre design and graphic works. On the other side stood Kazimir Malevich , Anton Pevsner and Naum Gabo . They argued that art

3267-527: A tree, while a fox-like animal stands below. This scene bears resemblance to the story of The Fox and the Crow in the Panchatantra . On a miniature jar, the story of the thirsty crow and deer is depicted, of how the deer could not drink from the narrow mouth of the jar, while the crow succeeded by dropping stones into the jar. The features of the animals are clear and graceful. Owen Flanagan of Duke University,

3388-400: A ubiquitous component of human communication, used as parables and examples to illustrate points. Storytelling was probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment. As noted by Owen Flanagan, narrative may also refer to psychological processes in self-identity, memory, and meaning-making . Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs ; semantics is

3509-558: A view from a single point, with modulated color in flat areas – became the basis of a new visual art, later to be developed into Cubism . Additionally in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe mysticism and early modernist religious philosophy as expressed by theosophist Mme. Blavatsky had a profound impact on pioneer geometric artists like Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky . The mystical teaching of Georges Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky also had an important influence on

3630-440: Is a first-person narrative , in which some character (often the main one) refers openly to the self, using pronouns like "I" and "me", in communicating the story to the audience. Contrarily, in a third-person narrative , such pronouns are avoided in the telling of the story, perhaps because the teller is merely an impersonal written commentary of the story rather than a personal character within it. Both of these explicit tellings of

3751-544: Is any of the methods used for telling stories, and narrative poetry is the class of poems (including ballads, epics, and verse romances) that tell stories, as distinct from dramatic and lyric poetry. Some theorists of narratology have attempted to isolate the quality or set of properties that distinguishes narrative from non-narrative writings; this is called narrativity . Certain basic elements are necessary and sufficient to define all works of narrative, including, most well-studied, all narrative works of fiction . Thus,

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3872-503: Is any tension that drives the thoughts and actions of characters. Narrowly speaking, the conflict is the major problem a protagonist , or main character, encounters across a story. Often, a protagonist additionally struggles with a sense of anxiety, insecurity, indecisiveness, or other mental difficulty as result of this conflict, which can be regarded as a secondary or internal conflict. Longer works of narrative typically involve many conflicts, or smaller-level conflicts that occur alongside

3993-501: Is at times beneath the surface, forming a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, "arguing" for and against various positions; relies substantially on the use of literary tropes (see Hayden White , Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often intertextual with other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward Bildungsroman , a description of identity development with an effort to evince becoming in character and community. Within philosophy of mind ,

4114-446: Is being narrowly defined as fiction-writing mode in which the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. Until the late 19th century, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost , and poetic drama like Shakespeare ). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. But novels, lending

4235-418: Is called storytelling , and its earliest form is oral storytelling . During most people's childhoods, these narratives are used to guide them on proper behavior, history, formation of a communal identity, and values from their cultural standpoint, as studied explicitly in anthropology today among traditional indigenous peoples . With regard to oral tradition , narratives consist of everyday speech where

4356-575: Is centered on the interplay of institutional discourses (big stories) on the one hand, and everyday accounts (little stories) on the other. The goal is the sociological understanding of formal and lived texts of experience, featuring the production, practices, and communication of accounts. In order to avoid "hardened stories", or "narratives that become context-free, portable, and ready to be used anywhere and anytime for illustrative purposes" and are being used as conceptual metaphors as defined by linguist George Lakoff , an approach called narrative inquiry

4477-439: Is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism , which alters the forms of the real-life entities depicted. Patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livelihood for artists. Three art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art were Romanticism , Impressionism and Expressionism . Artistic independence for artists

4598-620: Is it emphasizes that even apparently non-fictional documents (speeches, policies, legislation) are still fictions, in the sense they are authored and usually have an intended audience in mind. Sociologists Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein have contributed to the formation of a constructionist approach to narrative in sociology. From their book The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World (2000), to more recent texts such as Analyzing Narrative Reality (2009) and Varieties of Narrative Analysis (2012), they have developed an analytic framework for researching stories and storytelling that

4719-568: Is its narrative mode , the set of methods used to communicate the narrative through a written or spoken commentary (see also " Aesthetics approach " below). A narrative is a telling of some actual or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, sometimes recounted by a narrator to an audience (although there may be more than one of each). A personal narrative is a prose narrative relating personal experience . Narratives are to be distinguished from descriptions of qualities, states, or situations and also from dramatic enactments of events (although

4840-428: Is no hope of returning to normal life. The third major type, the quest narrative , positions the illness experience as an opportunity to transform oneself into a better person through overcoming adversity and re-learning what is most important in life; the physical outcome of the illness is less important than the spiritual and psychological transformation. This is typical of the triumphant view of cancer survivorship in

4961-480: Is no qualitative or reliable method to precisely trace exactly where and when a tale originated; and since myths are rooted in a remote past, and are viewed as a factual account of happenings within the culture it originated from, the worldview present in many oral mythologies is from a cosmological perspective—one that is told from a voice that has no physical embodiment, and is passed down and modified from generation to generation. This cosmological worldview in myth

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5082-792: Is one reason why narratives are so powerful and why many of the classics in the humanities and social sciences are written in the narrative format. But humans can read meaning into data and compose stories, even where this is unwarranted. Some scholars suggest that the narrative fallacy and other biases can be avoided by applying standard methodical checks for validity (statistics) and reliability (statistics) in terms of how data (narratives) are collected, analyzed, and presented. More typically, scholars working with narrative prefer to use other evaluative criteria (such as believability or perhaps interpretive validity ) since they do not see statistical validity as meaningfully applicable to qualitative data: "the concepts of validity and reliability, as understood from

5203-429: Is the 'juridical' part of the sovereign function." This implies that gods of the first function are responsible for the overall structure and order of the universe, and those gods who possess juridical sovereignty are more closely connected to the realm of humans and are responsible for the concept of justice and order. Dumèzil uses the pantheon of Norse gods as examples of these functions in his 1981 essay—he finds that

5324-424: Is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive . But figurative and representational (or realistic ) art often contain partial abstraction. Both geometric abstraction and lyrical abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color

5445-406: Is what provides all mythological narratives credence, and since they are easily communicated and modified through oral tradition among various cultures, they help solidify the cultural identity of a civilization and contribute to the notion of a collective human consciousness that continues to help shape one's own understanding of the world. Myth is often used in an overarching sense to describe

5566-404: Is yet to be said regarding narratives in music, as there is still much to be determined. Unlike most forms of narratives that are inherently language based (whether that be narratives presented in literature or orally), film narratives face additional challenges in creating a cohesive narrative. Whereas the general assumption in literary theory is that a narrator must be present in order to develop

5687-654: The Abstract expressionists and the New York School . In New York City there was an atmosphere which encouraged discussion and there was a new opportunity for learning and growing. Artists and teachers John D. Graham and Hans Hofmann became important bridge figures between the newly arrived European Modernists and the younger American artists coming of age. Mark Rothko , born in Russia, began with strongly surrealist imagery which later dissolved into his powerful color compositions of

5808-456: The Bauhaus . By the mid-1920s the revolutionary period (1917 to 1921) when artists had been free to experiment was over; and by the 1930s only socialist realism was allowed. As visual art becomes more abstract, it develops some characteristics of music : an art form which uses the abstract elements of sound and divisions of time. Wassily Kandinsky , himself an amateur musician, was inspired by

5929-645: The breast cancer culture . Survivors may be expected to articulate a wisdom narrative , in which they explain to others a new and better view of the meaning of life . Personality traits, more specifically the Big Five personality traits , appear to be associated with the type of language or patterns of word use found in an individual's self-narrative. In other words, language use in self-narratives accurately reflects human personality. The linguistic correlates of each Big Five trait are as follows: Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate

6050-415: The social sciences , and various clinical fields including medicine, narrative can refer to aspects of human psychology. A personal narrative process is involved in a person's sense of personal or cultural identity , and in the creation and construction of memories ; it is thought by some to be the fundamental nature of the self . The breakdown of a coherent or positive narrative has been implicated in

6171-496: The Ancient Greek tale of Icarus refusing to listen to his elders and flying too close to the sun), explaining forces of nature or other natural phenomena (for example, the flood myth that spans cultures all over the world), and providing an understanding of human nature, as exemplified by the myth of Cupid and Psyche . Considering how mythologies have historically been transmitted and passed down through oral retellings, there

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6292-565: The Bauhaus went to America. During the 1930s Paris became the host to artists from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries affected by the rise of totalitarianism . Sophie Tauber and Jean Arp collaborated on paintings and sculpture using organic/geometric forms. The Polish Katarzyna Kobro applied mathematically based ideas to sculpture. The many types of abstraction now in close proximity led to attempts by artists to analyse

6413-463: The Bayesian likelihood ratio of the link. Subjective causal statements of the form "I did b because of a " and subjective counterfactuals "if it had not been for a I would not have done b " are notable items of evidence. Linearity is one of several narrative qualities that can be found in a musical composition. As noted by American musicologist Edward Cone , narrative terms are also present in

6534-628: The German Die Brücke group, while from Paris came work by Robert Delaunay , Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger , as well as Picasso. During the Spring David Burliuk gave two lectures on cubism and planned a polemical publication, which the Knave of Diamonds was to finance. He went abroad in May and came back determined to rival the almanac Der Blaue Reiter which had emerged from the printers while he

6655-477: The Norse gods Odin and Tyr reflect the different brands of sovereignty. Odin is the author of the cosmos, and possessor of infinite esoteric knowledge—going so far as to sacrifice his eye for the accumulation of more knowledge. While Tyr—seen as the "just god"—is more concerned with upholding justice, as illustrated by the epic myth of Tyr losing his hand in exchange for the monster Fenrir to cease his terrorization of

6776-527: The Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism . The raw language of color as developed by the Fauves directly influenced another pioneer of abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky . Cubism , based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to cube , sphere and cone became, along with Fauvism , the art movement that directly opened

6897-445: The ability to manifest itself into an imagined, representational illusion that the reader will create for themselves, and can vary greatly from reader to reader. In other words, the scenarios of a literary text (referring to settings, frames, schemes, etc.) are going to be represented differently for each individual reader based on a multiplicity of factors, including the reader's own personal life experiences that allow them to comprehend

7018-447: The absence of a known author or original narrator, myth narratives are oftentimes referred to as prose narratives . Prose narratives tend to be relatively linear regarding the time period they occur in, and are traditionally marked by its natural flow of speech as opposed to the rhythmic structure found in various forms of literature such as poetry and haikus . The structure of prose narratives allows it to be easily understood by many—as

7139-500: The analytical language about music. The different components of a fugue — subject, answer, exposition, discussion, and summary — can be cited as an example. However, there are several views on the concept of narrative in music and the role it plays. One theory is that of Theodore Adorno , who has suggested that "music recites itself, is its own context, narrates without narrative". Another, is that of Carolyn Abbate , who has suggested that "certain gestures experienced in music constitute

7260-538: The ancient wisdom of the sacred books of India and China in the early years of the century. It was in this context that Piet Mondrian , Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint and other artists working towards an 'objectless state' became interested in the occult as a way of creating an 'inner' object. The universal and timeless shapes found in geometry : the circle, square and triangle become the spatial elements in abstract art; they are, like color, fundamental systems underlying visible reality. The Bauhaus at Weimar, Germany

7381-419: The author or creator selects in framing their story: how the narrative is told. It includes the scope of information presented or withheld, the type or style of language used, the channel or medium through which the story is presented, the way and extent to which narrative exposition and other types of commentary are communicated, and the overall point of view or perspective. An example of narrative perspective

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7502-454: The center of everyday life. These "functions", as Dumèzil puts it, were an array of esoteric knowledge and wisdom that was reflected by the mythology. The first function was sovereignty —and was divided into two additional categories: magical and juridical. As each function in Dumèzil's theory corresponded to a designated social class in the human realm; the first function was the highest, and

7623-463: The conflict, and then working to resolve it, creating emotional stakes for the characters as well as the audience. (The audience's anxious feeling of anticipation due to high emotional stakes is called suspense .) The setting is the time, place, and context in which a story takes place. It includes the physical and temporal surroundings that the characters inhabit and can also include the social or cultural conventions that affect characters. Sometimes,

7744-543: The dense, contextual, and interpenetrating nature of social forces uncovered by detailed narratives is often more interesting and useful for both social theory and social policy than other forms of social inquiry. Research using narrative methods in the social sciences has been described as still being in its infancy but this perspective has several advantages such as access to an existing, rich vocabulary of analytical terms: plot, genre, subtext, epic, hero/heroine, story arc (e.g., beginning–middle–end), and so on. Another benefit

7865-661: The depiction of objects. Even earlier than that, with her "spirit" drawings, Georgiana Houghton 's choice to work with abstract shapes correlate with the unnatural nature of her subject, in a time when abstraction was not yet a concept (she organized an exhibit in 1871). Expressionist painters explored the bold use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations, and intense color. Expressionists produced emotionally charged paintings that were reactions to and perceptions of contemporary experience; and reactions to Impressionism and other more conservative directions of late 19th-century painting. The Expressionists drastically changed

7986-418: The development of psychosis and mental disorders , and its repair said to play an important role in journeys of recovery . Narrative therapy is a form of psychotherapy . Illness narratives are a way for a person affected by an illness to make sense of his or her experiences. They typically follow one of several set patterns: restitution , chaos , or quest narratives. In the restitution narrative,

8107-429: The door to abstraction in the early 20th century. During the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or , where František Kupka exhibited his abstract painting Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs ( Fugue in Two Colors ) (1912), the poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists including Robert Delaunay , Orphism . He defined it as, "the art of painting new structures out of elements that have not been borrowed from

8228-702: The early 1950s. The expressionistic gesture and the act of painting itself, became of primary importance to Jackson Pollock , Robert Motherwell , and Franz Kline . While during the 1940s Arshile Gorky 's and Willem de Kooning 's figurative work evolved into abstraction by the end of the decade. New York City became the center, and artists worldwide gravitated towards it; from other places in America as well. Digital art , hard-edge painting , geometric abstraction , minimalism , lyrical abstraction , op art, abstract expressionism, color field painting, monochrome painting , assemblage , neo-Dada, shaped canvas painting, are

8349-410: The early formations of the geometric abstract styles of Piet Mondrian and his colleagues in the early 20th century. The spiritualism also inspired the abstract art of Kasimir Malevich and František Kupka . At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque , André Derain , Raoul Dufy and Jean Metzinger revolutionized

8470-460: The emphasis on subject matter in favor of the portrayal of psychological states of being. Although artists like Edvard Munch and James Ensor drew influences principally from the work of the Post-Impressionists they were instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century. Paul Cézanne had begun as an Impressionist but his aim – to make a logical construction of reality based on

8591-401: The end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology , science and philosophy . The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time. Abstraction indicates

8712-469: The following essential elements of narrative are also often referred to as the elements of fiction. Characters are the individual persons inside a work of narrative; their choices and behaviors propel the plot forward. They typically are named humans whose actions and speech sometimes convey important motives. They may be entirely imaginary, or they may have a basis in real-life individuals. The audience's first impressions are influential on how they perceive

8833-409: The form of prose and sometimes poetry , short stories , novels, narrative poems and songs , and imaginary narratives as portrayed in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances). Narratives may also be nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by an unreliable narrator (a character ) typically found in the genre of noir fiction . An important part of many narratives

8954-448: The god Freyr —a god who was closely connected to acts of debauchery and overindulging. Dumèzil viewed his theory of trifunctionalism as distinct from other mythological theories because of the way the narratives of Indo-European mythology permeated into every aspect of life within these societies, to the point that the societal view of death shifted away from a primal perception that tells one to fear death, and instead death became seen as

9075-455: The gods. Dumèzil's theory suggests that through these myths, concepts of universal wisdom and justice were able to be communicated to the Nordic people in the form of a mythological narrative. The second function as described by Dumèzil is that of the proverbial hero or champion . These myths functioned to convey the themes of heroism, strength, and bravery and were most often represented in both

9196-431: The growing prevalence of the abstract in modern art—an explanation linked to the name of Theodor W. Adorno —is that such abstraction is a response to (and a reflection of) the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial society . Frederic Jameson similarly sees modernist abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money, equating all things equally as exchange-values. The social content of abstract art

9317-420: The human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms, and registers" (Lodge The Art of Fiction 97; see also the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin for expansion of this idea); a narrator or narrator-like voice, which "addresses" and "interacts with" reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth -esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which

9438-461: The human world and the mythological world by valiant warriors. While the gods of the second function were still revered in society, they did not possess the same infinite knowledge found in the first category. A Norse god that would fall under the second function would be Thor —god of thunder. Thor possessed great strength, and was often first into battle, as ordered by his father Odin. This second function reflects Indo-European cultures' high regard for

9559-407: The literary text in a distinct manner from anyone else. Film narrative does not have the luxury of having a textual narrator that guides its audience toward a formative narrative; nor does it have the ability to allow its audience to visually manifest the contents of its narrative in a unique fashion like literature does. Instead, film narratives utilize visual and auditory devices in substitution for

9680-401: The main one. Conflict can be classified into a variety of types, with some common ones being: character versus character, character versus nature, character versus society, character versus unavoidable circumstances, and character versus self. If the conflict is brought to an end towards the end of the story, this is known as resolution . The narrative mode is the set of choices and techniques

9801-861: The more international Abstract and Concrete exhibition was organized by Nicolete Gray including work by Piet Mondrian , Joan Miró , Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson . Hepworth, Nicholson and Gabo moved to the St. Ives in Cornwall to continue their constructivist work. During the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s many artists fled Europe to the United States. By the early 1940s the main movements in modern art, expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism , and dada were represented in New York: Marcel Duchamp , Fernand Léger , Piet Mondrian , Jacques Lipchitz , André Masson , Max Ernst , and André Breton , were just

9922-475: The most common consensus among academics is that throughout most cultures, traditional mythologies and folklore tales are constructed and retold with a specific narrative purpose that serves to offer a society an understandable explanation of natural phenomena—oftentimes absent of a verifiable author . These explanatory tales manifest themselves in various forms and serve different societal functions, including life lessons for individuals to learn from (for example,

10043-603: The narrative generally starts at the beginning of the story, and ends when the protagonist has resolved the conflict. These kinds of narratives are generally accepted as true within society, and are told from a place of great reverence and sacredness. Myths are believed to occur in a remote past—one that is before the creation or establishment of the civilization they derive from, and are intended to provide an account for things such as humanity's origins, natural phenomenon, and human nature. Thematically, myths seek to provide information about oneself, and many are viewed as among some of

10164-402: The narrative. The confidant is a type of secondary character in the story, often a friend or authority figure, whose role is to listen to the protagonist's secrets, examine their character, and advise them on their actions. Rather than simply acting as a passive listener for the protagonist's monologues , the confidant may themselves act to move the story forward, or serve to guide and represent

10285-452: The narrator. The role of literary theory in narrative has been disputed; with some interpretations like Todorov's narrative model that views all narratives in a cyclical manner, and that each narrative is characterized by a three part structure that allows the narrative to progress. The beginning stage being an establishment of equilibrium—a state of non conflict, followed by a disruption to this state, caused by an external event, and lastly

10406-555: The oldest forms of prose narratives, which grants traditional myths their life-defining characteristics that continue to be communicated today. Another theory regarding the purpose and function of mythological narratives derives from 20th Century philologist Georges Dumézil and his formative theory of the " trifunctionalism " found in Indo-European mythologies. Dumèzil refers only to the myths found in Indo-European societies, but

10527-612: The penultimate act of heroism—by solidifying a person's position in the hall of the gods when they pass from this realm to the next. Additionally, Dumèzil proposed that his theory stood at the foundation of the modern understanding of the Christian Trinity , citing that the three key deities of Odin, Thor, and Freyr were often depicted together in a trio—seen by many as an overarching representation of what would be known today as "divinity". Abstract art Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create

10648-632: The performer has the licence to recontextualise the story to a particular audience, often to a younger generation, and are contrasted with epics which consist of formal speech and are usually learned word for word. Narrative is found in all mediums of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech , literature , theatre , music and song , comics , journalism , film , television , animation and video , video games , radio , game -play, unstructured recreation , and performance in general, as well as some painting , sculpture , drawing , photography , and other visual arts , as long as

10769-402: The person sees the illness as a temporary detour. The primary goal is to return permanently to normal life and normal health. These may also be called cure narratives . In the chaos narrative, the person sees the illness as a permanent state that will inexorably get worse, with no redeeming virtues. This is typical of diseases like Alzheimer's disease : the patient gets worse and worse, and there

10890-497: The plays of Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille . In Racine and Corneille, the confidant became a more complex and partial character—though the abbé d'Aubignac complained that Corneille's use of the confidant was "without grace". Shakespeare scholar Francis Schoff argued that in Hamlet , Horatio serves "even more than the Racinian confidant [as] a mere reporter of events and auditor for

11011-483: The plots used in traditional folk-tales and identified 31 distinct functional components. This trend (or these trends) continued in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes . It leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important theoretical questions: In literary theoretic approach, narrative

11132-412: The positivist perspective, are somehow inappropriate and inadequate when applied to interpretive research". Several criteria for assessing the validity of narrative research was proposed, including the objective aspect, the emotional aspect, the social/moral aspect, and the clarity of the story. In mathematical sociology, the theory of comparative narratives was devised in order to describe and compare

11253-419: The possibility of marks and associative color resounding in the soul. The idea had been put forward by Charles Baudelaire , that all our senses respond to various stimuli but the senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level. Closely related to this, is the idea that art has The spiritual dimension and can transcend 'every-day' experience, reaching a spiritual plane. The Theosophical Society popularized

11374-485: The primary assertion made by his theory is that Indo-European life was structured around the notion of three distinct and necessary societal functions, and as a result, the various gods and goddesses in Indo-European mythology assumed these functions as well. The three functions were organized by cultural significance, with the first function being the most grand and sacred. For Dumèzil, these functions were so vital, they manifested themselves in every aspect of life and were at

11495-399: The process of exposition-development-climax-denouement, with coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality including retention of the past, attention to present action, and future anticipation; a substantial focus on character and characterization, "arguably the most important single component of the novel" ( David Lodge The Art of Fiction 67); different voices interacting, "the sound of

11616-512: The protagonist". Interpreters such as Georg Lukács have remarked that the role of the confidant has diminished in modern literature, pointing to "the significant absence of the confidant(e) in the isolated situations in which the protagonists of the new drama find themselves", and the eclipse of the relationship of trust that exists between a hero and a confidant by a characteristically modern sense of dislocation and absence. Narrative The social and cultural activity of sharing narratives

11737-589: The reactions of the audience. The presence of the confidant in Western literature may be traced back to Greek drama and the work of Euripides . The characters of Agamemnon in Hecuba and Pylades in Orestes serve as confidants, acting as both counsellors for the protagonists and expositors of their character. The role of the confidant assumed particular significance in 17th-century French drama, however, coming to prominence in

11858-457: The rectangle and abstract art in general. Some artists of the period defied categorization, such as Georgia O'Keeffe who, while a modernist abstractionist, was a pure maverick in that she painted highly abstract forms while not joining any specific group of the period. Eventually American artists who were working in a great diversity of styles began to coalesce into cohesive stylistic groups. The best-known group of American artists became known as

11979-490: The same, except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky 's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work of Vladimir Propp , who analyzed

12100-449: The school was moved to Dessau and, as the Nazi party gained control in 1932, The Bauhaus was closed. In 1937 an exhibition of degenerate art , 'Entartete Kunst' contained all types of avant-garde art disapproved of by the Nazi party. Then the exodus began: not just from the Bauhaus but from Europe in general; to Paris, London and America. Paul Klee went to Switzerland but many of the artists at

12221-602: The search continued: The Rayist (Luchizm) drawings of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov , used lines like rays of light to make a construction. Kasimir Malevich completed his first entirely abstract work, the Suprematist , Black Square , in 1915. Another of the Suprematist group' Liubov Popova , created the Architectonic Constructions and Spatial Force Constructions between 1916 and 1921. Piet Mondrian

12342-514: The setting may resemble a character in the sense that it has specific traits, undergoes actions that affect the plot, and develops over the course of the story. Themes are the major underlying ideas presented by a story, generally left open to the audience's own interpretation. Themes are more abstract than other elements and are subjective : open to discussion by the audience who, by the story's end, can argue about which big ideas or messages were explored, what conclusions can be drawn, and which ones

12463-493: The shortest accounts of events (for example, the cat sat on the mat or a brief news item) and the most extended historical or biographical works, diaries, travelogues, and so forth, as well as novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms. In the study of fiction, it is usual to divide novels and shorter stories into first-person and third-person narratives. As an adjective, "narrative" means "characterized by or relating to storytelling"; thus, narrative technique

12584-582: The story revolves around, who encounter a central conflict, or who gain knowledge or grow significantly across the story. Some stories may also have antagonists , characters who oppose, hinder, or fight against the protagonist. In many traditional narratives, the protagonist is specifically a hero : a sympathetic person who battles (often literally) for morally good causes. The hero may face a villain : an antagonist who fights against morally good causes or even actively perpetrates evil. Many other ways of classifying characters exist too. Broadly speaking, conflict

12705-448: The structures (expressed as "and" in a directed graph where multiple causal links incident into a node are conjoined) of action-driven sequential events. Narratives so conceived comprise the following ingredients: The structure ( directed graph ) is generated by letting the nodes stand for the states and the directed edges represent how the states are changed by specified actions. The action skeleton can then be abstracted, comprising

12826-412: The theory of Bayesian Narratives conceives a narrative as a directed graph comprising multiple causal links (social interactions) of the general form: "action a causes action b in a specified context". In the absence of sufficient comparative cases to enable statistical treatment of the causal links, items of evidence in support and against a particular causal link are assembled and used to compute

12947-532: The various conceptual and aesthetic groupings. An exhibition by forty-six members of the Cercle et Carré group organized by Joaquín Torres-García assisted by Michel Seuphor contained work by the Neo-Plasticists as well as abstractionists as varied as Kandinsky, Anton Pevsner and Kurt Schwitters . Criticized by Theo van Doesburg to be too indefinite a collection he published the journal Art Concret setting out

13068-541: The very role of literariness in narrative, as well as the role of narrative in literature. Meaning, narratives, and their associated aesthetics, emotions, and values have the ability to operate without the presence of literature, and vice versa. According to Didier Costa, the structural model used by Todorov and others is unfairly biased toward a Western interpretation of narrative, and that a more comprehensive and transformative model must be created in order to properly analyze narrative discourse in literature. Framing also plays

13189-463: The visual sphere, but had been created entirely by the artist...it is a pure art." Since the turn of the century, cultural connections between artists of the major European cities had become extremely active as they strove to create an art form equal to the high aspirations of modernism . Ideas were able to cross-fertilize by means of artist's books, exhibitions and manifestos so that many sources were open to experimentation and discussion, and formed

13310-435: The warrior class, and explains the belief in an afterlife that rewards a valiant death on the battlefield; for the Norse mythology, this is represented by Valhalla . Lastly, Dumèzil's third function is composed of gods that reflect the nature and values of the most common people in Indo-European life. These gods often presided over the realms of healing, prosperity, fertility, wealth, luxury, and youth—any kind of function that

13431-462: The way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and non-verbal elements, and creating a discourse with different modalities and forms. In On Realism in Art , Roman Jakobson attests that literature exists as a separate entity. He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are

13552-504: The work's creator intended. Thus, the audience may come to different conclusions about a work's themes than what the creator intended or regardless of what the creator intended. They can also develop new ideas about its themes as the work progresses. In India, archaeological evidence of the presence of stories is found at the Indus valley civilization site, Lothal . On one large vessel, the artist depicts birds with fish in their beaks resting in

13673-425: The work's title or other programmatic information provided by the composer. However, Abbate has revealed numerous examples of musical devices that function as narrative voices, by limiting music's ability to narrate to rare "moments that can be identified by their bizarre and disruptive effect". Various theorists share this view of narrative appearing in disruptive rather than normative moments in music. The final word

13794-628: Was advanced during the 19th century. An objective interest in what is seen can be discerned from the paintings of John Constable , J. M. W. Turner , Camille Corot and from them to the Impressionists who continued the plein air painting of the Barbizon school . Early intimations of a new art had been made by James McNeill Whistler who, in his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket , (1872), placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than

13915-435: Was easily related to by the common peasant farmer in a society. Just as a farmer would live and sustain themselves off their land, the gods of the third function were responsible for the prosperity of their crops, and were also in charge of other forms of everyday life that would never be observed by the status of kings and warriors, such as mischievousness and promiscuity. An example found in Norse mythology could be seen through

14036-672: Was essentially a spiritual activity; to create the individual's place in the world, not to organize life in a practical, materialistic sense. During that time, representatives of the Russian avant-garde collaborated with other Eastern European Constructivist artists, including Władysław Strzemiński , Katarzyna Kobro , and Henryk Stażewski . Many of those who were hostile to the materialist production idea of art left Russia. Anton Pevsner went to France, Gabo went first to Berlin, then to England and finally to America. Kandinsky studied in Moscow then left for

14157-428: Was evolving his abstract language, of horizontal and vertical lines with rectangles of color, between 1915 and 1919, Neo-Plasticism was the aesthetic which Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and other in the group De Stijl intended to reshape the environment of the future. Many of the abstract artists in Russia became Constructivists believing that art was no longer something remote, but life itself. The artist must become

14278-557: Was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius . The philosophy underlying the teaching program was unity of all the visual and plastic arts from architecture and painting to weaving and stained glass. This philosophy had grown from the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the Deutscher Werkbund . Among the teachers were Paul Klee , Wassily Kandinsky , Johannes Itten , Josef Albers , Anni Albers , and László Moholy-Nagy . In 1925

14399-563: Was in Germany". From 1909 to 1913 many experimental works in the search for this 'pure art' had been created by a number of artists: Francis Picabia painted Caoutchouc , c. 1909, The Spring , 1912, Dances at the Spring and The Procession, Seville , 1912; Wassily Kandinsky painted Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor) , 1913, Improvisation 21A , the Impression series, and Picture with

14520-445: Was proposed, resting on the epistemological assumption that human beings make sense of random or complex multicausal experience by the imposition of story structures. Human propensity to simplify data through a predilection for narratives over complex data sets can lead to the narrative fallacy . It is easier for the human mind to remember and make decisions on the basis of stories with meaning, than to remember strings of data. This

14641-464: Was reserved for the status of kings and other royalty. In an interview with Alain Benoist, Dumèzil described magical sovereignty as such, "[Magical Sovereignty] consists of the mysterious administration, the 'magic' of the universe, the general ordering of the cosmos. This is a 'disquieting' aspect, terrifying from certain perspectives. The other aspect is more reassuring, more oriented to the human world. It

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