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Marie-Laure Ryan, ed. Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004. 422 pp.
Independent scholar Marie-Laure Ryan's work on narrative has made significant contributions to the area of media studies, and her latest effort proves no different. Narrative across Media offers a comparative study of narrative across five medial spheres: face-to-face narrative, still pictures, moving pictures, music, and digital media. In contrast to what Ryan calls the media ecology school, this collection seeks not to apply existing overarching theoretical models, but to create a narrative media studies or "cross-medial narratology" from the ground up. Such an approach allows us to discover "how the medium configures the particular realization of narrative" (23).
Some of the most important segments of the book appear to be introductory in nature but actually provide an important framework for the study. Ryan's comprehensive prefaces to each of the five sections, as well as her extensive introduction to the entire volume, carefully sketch out the foundations for a more fruitful relationship between media studies and narrative theory. In the introduction, Ryan explains that her collection explores the questions "what does it mean 'to narrate/ and what kinds of stories can be told in different medial environments" (2). She primarily addresses these questions by unpacking the two major terms framing them: "narrative" and "media." While there have been numerous explorations of narrative, including existential, cognitive, aesthetic, sociological, and technical, Ryan privileges a cognitive approach because it best allows for a medium-independent definition of narrative, which is essential for studying narrative across media. Under this approach, narrative meaning is a type of "cognitive construct, or mental image, built by the interpreter in response to the text" (8). Such a construct makes clear that a text must bring to mind a particular representation, or script, in...