Story vs Plot

Story: sequence of events in a chronological order, explicitly presented in the text plus the inferences made by the reader, listener. A text must have some kind of logic, some kind of recognizable sequence and that's what the story provides.

Plot refers to the sequence of events inside a story which affect other events through the principle of cause and effect. Plots can vary from simple structures to complex interwoven structures. It is related to the way thevauthor presents it to us, it is everything that the text explicitly presents, it is the narrative as it is read, seen, heard from the first to the last word or image.

A narrative can have the same story but different plots.

Fabula and Syuzhet

The literary theory of Russian Formalism in the early 20th century divided a narrative into two elements: the fabula and the syuzhet. A fabula is the events in the fictional world, whereas a syuzhet is a perspective of those events. Formalist followers eventually translated the fabula/syuzhet to the concept of story/plot. This definition is usually used in narratology, in parallel with Forster's definition. The fabula (story) is what happened in chronological order. In contrast, the syuzhet (plot) means a unique sequence of discourse that was sorted out by the (implied) author. That is, the syuzhet can consist of picking up the fabula events in non-chronological order.

Key Concepts and Fields of Study

Critical theory is a school of thought that stresses the reflective assessment and critique of society and culture by applying knowledge from the social sciences and the humanities. As a term, critical theory has two meanings with different origins and histories: the first originated in sociology and the second originated in literary criticism, whereby it is used and applied as an umbrella term that can describe a theory founded upon critique.

Core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That critical theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.

Narratology refers to both the theory and the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception. It examines the ways that narrative structures our perception of both cultural artifacts and the world around us. The study of narrative is particularly important since our ordering of time and space in narrative forms constitutes one of the primary ways we construct meaning in general

Infamous by Douglas McGrath

A film about the context of production of "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote.

Watch the film and pay attention to:

1. First scene with Gwyneth Paltrow. When an actor/actress has a brief appearence in a film it is called "a Cameo appearance"

2. Characterization of Truman Capote: clothes, voice, movement, attitude.

3. Binary oppositions between New York and Holcomb

4. Cinematography: camera shots, editing, mise-en-scene.

In the scene we are just looking at, we can see a low angle shot showing the faces of Al Dewey and other Journalists from Holcomb, all dressed in smar clothes. The previous shot shows a high angle shot of Truman Capote.

A theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon

According to its dictionary meaning, “to adapt” is to adjust, to alter, to make suitable.

An adaptation is a critical rereading, a critical revisiting of a text. I don’t necessary have to reproduce, to replicate it. Linda Hutchen statest that "[a]daptation is repetition, but repetition without replication". I’m moving from one system to another, from words to images, or sounds. 

It is a fundamental process by means of which literature survives, fundamental process by means of which culture is kept alive.

There is a dialogic connection between two texts as both are in constatn dialogue to each other, the source text and the target text. When we call a work an adaptation, we openly announce its overt relationship to another work.

Concerning fidelity, the author claims that "[a]n adaptation’s double nature does not mean, however, that proximity or fidelity to the adapted text should be the criterion of judgment or the focus of analysis."

Linda Hutcheon’s book on adaptation begins with the statement, “[a]dapting is a bit like redecorating,” which is an apt description of what is happening across the media landscape today.

Harper Lee & Truman Capote

In Cold Blood - Soundtrack

Truman Capote