ABSTRACT
Narratives take many shapes. Both opera and soap opera depend upon narrative, as do theatre, ballet, news and documentary. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, there are two particularly dominant forms of fictional narrative: the visual narrative forms of cinema (and television); and the prose forms of the novel (and short story). Not infrequently, the same stories circulate between the different media, so reinforcing the distinction developed in previous units between story (narrative content) and discourse (narrative form). One of the underlying justifications for making this distinction is the observation that the same story may be told in different forms and in different media – in a novel, for instance, or as film. In this unit we explore this distinction further, by looking at some of the similarities and differences between narration in film and in prose fiction.
