Configural-Discourse Analysis |
ABSTRACT Sociological, linguistic, or script oriented frame analysis are concerned with the world perceived as actual. I am NOT suggesting that these types of frame analysis are incorrect but simply that they do not account for the imaginative construction of possible worlds as believable and the emotional impact these beliefs have on the persons who hold them. There is a longstanding tradition of mythographers who might be considered predecessors of frame analysts. After Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, narrative frame analysis came into being among structuralistic narratologists. I regard Configural Discourse Analysis as a recent development in this tradition. Many frame analyses are presented from a kind of “meta”-perspective, from some perspectiveless vantage point. I don’t believe this is possible. There two perspectives necessarily involved in any discourse—the speaker/author's and the listener/reader's. To analyze a discourse from the “authors”’s perspective is not as good an option as analyzing it from the readers’ perspective. The analyst is necessarily a reader and cannot know what the author had in mind but does know what effects the text has on him or her. Moreover, other readers can be queried. In Reading the Romance Janice Radway provides an example of the advantages of working with the perspective of readers. She demonstrates that an analyst can answer the question: how does the delineation of the situation structure a reader's disposition to respond? |
While configurations are certainly “frames” or “frameworks” of belief, neither the social nor the linguistic forms of this tradition of frame analysis are suited to their study. Cultural configurations are stories that persons believe possible. Traditional frame analysis emphasizes concepts rather than narratives. But even when frame analysis is applied to narrative scripts (Tannen), the story elements that lead to transpositions--the identifying marker of configuring--are not subjects of study. Sociological, linguistic, or script oriented frame analysis are concerned with the world perceived as actual. I am NOT suggesting that these types of frame analysis are incorrect but simply that they do not account for the imaginative construction of possible worlds as believable and the emotional impact these beliefs have on the persons who hold them.
Tannen employs records of the conversations persons have after they have seen a film and then analyzes them. This type of frame analysis does not capture what happens when a visitor to a VR scenario or a filmgoer configures a story, but it is obvioiusly related. The tendency to search for “meaning” or themes disguises the ways in which the audience has configured (is transported by) the story.
But how do we know that audiences have configured a story? Aside from studying its audience, the only data available is the telling of a story or the re-telling of a story. In the first case, we can assess the expectations built into the story with respect to the desires and conflicts it reveals. In the second case, we can assess the desires and conflicts that were taken up by someone from its audience. Whereas it is difficult to identify an author’s intention when it is delineated as the meaning of the story; it is not as difficult to identify the structure of desire that is markedly articulated in the story. It would be odd if not impossible for audiences of love stories to have expectations about whether lovers are united with their beloveds, for example.
Story tellers do evoke the" impact" built into their story worlds to an amazing degree. A recent TV show that I experience as a configurationl is "Monk." Evidently I am not the only one who does. The success of the program has led it’s producers to insert a clip in which the audience tuning into to an episode is asked: are you feeling Monkish today? This question implies that the producers recognize that may viewers identify with the central character, Adrian Monk, to the extent that they feel as if they are him in certain respects. This outcome would not be possible unless the audience configures a story world as a possible world in which they believe in which a self-figure behaves like Monk. Members of the audience do not mistake the story world for an actual world. They experience as a configuration, a pattern that is possible in the world in which they live.
Watching episodes of "Monk" who is characterized in an sympathetic way as an obsessive compulsive personality, members of the audience recognize themselves as behaving at times in obsessive-compulsive ways. To feel “Monish” is to recognize obsessive-compulsive patterns in your behavior, perhaps patterns that you had not noticed or admited beforehand. Probably if asked directly before the advent of the TV series, persons who later became devotees of it, me included, would have denied that they were obsessive-compulsive personalities. But after identifying with Monk we realize the extent to which we are obsessive-compulsive. The trait as performed by ? is not dangerously pathological but amusingly neurotic. This permits identification with Monk.
Frame analysis implies “frame-ology,”the study of frames. From Tannen’s point of view, the requisite data for such a study is socio-linguistic and draws heavily on the work of Charles Fillmore. I suggest that the work being done in cognitive linguistics (see Cognitive Linguistics) is particularly relevant. When audiences construe stories from their perspectives while identifying with a self-figure in them, they in effect place the story frame in their worldview. When audiences construe a story world as a configuration of their world, they frame its events as believable, as events that could occur in the world in which they believe.
Describing a story world as a “framework”of belief suggests a kind of “mythography”because that term underscores that fact that configurations are imagined, possible worlds. Like its cousin metaphor, a configuration is constructed from remembered past experiences and reassembled into a pattern of behavior shaped by the analogy the story provides. All of this takes place in the mind, with the working memory playing a central role, and thus the configuration is always virtual and never actual. Since the Greek word, mythos, means “story,”and the English word “myth”means something that is believed but not real, describing (graphe) an imagined, believable story (mythos) might aptly be called mythography.
Mythography has a history. It is a descriptive technique that has its origins with Boccaccio and works its way through the centuries into the mythographies inspired by Jung’s theory of archetypes. Though I find the work of archetypal mythographers instructive, I do not share their archetypal theory. I take a more anthropological view in my account of the dissemination of configurations (mythoi). Adding a cognitive dimension (e.g., mental spaces and mapping in Giles Fauconnier's work) to the socio-linguistic studies of Tannen and others would provide conceptual tools for what I have been called a "mythography." In this view, framing as a cognitive operation expresses itself in story telling and retelling.
I have used the term, mythography, to name some of the analyses of cultural configurations I have done. The term, however apt conceptually, has proved confusing to students to whom I have presented it, most of whom have difficulty with the idea that their worldviews are "myths." As a result, I use the term, "configural," to name these analyses. Configural analysis is a cognitive-linguistic technique for describing possible worlds as configurations. As a cognitive operation, framing functions across a broad spectrum of linguistic phenomena; Configuring is a special instance of framing that constructs possible worlds as configurations. The social dimension of configurations is that, when shared, they enable cultures. For example, The Hare and the Tortoise is a cultural configuration that disposes persons to enact a cultural practice authorized by beliefs shared by persons who belong to the culture of which it is a part.
This is an issue for Cognitive Linguists because of the way they conceive of linguistic frames. (See David Lee’s comments on discourse analysis.) Frames are the backgrounded “knowledge base” that individuals deploy in deriving meaning from a discourse. The extent to which any “frame” is shared by individuals is difficult to assess. Deborah Tannen, for example, in Framing in Discourse uses frames to identify the various, different, and sometimes contradictory ways in which individual’s construe situations rather than the ways in which individuals share construals.
How could an analyst detect “shared frameworks”? Given the assumption that language is understood by persons with respect to their varying cognitive frameworks, one might have to explore a notion propounded by Swales—discourse communities, namely readers who share reading strategies (frames).
theorectical assumptions
In analyzing "The Hare and the Tortoise," I employ a "configural" variant of frame analysis, derived from cognitive linguistics and narratology. The type of analysis advocated here is indebted to the work of Vladimir Propp and Gerald Prince as well as the mythographic tradition of analysis and focuses on the "story structure" underlying the narrative.
This mode of analysis is suited to the description of cultural configurations, the mythoi that enable our cultures--legends, folk tales, fairy tales, and myths (including contemporary stories that are repeated so often in a culture that to recognize them is to identify yourself with that culture). Cultural configurations delineate the patterns of behavior that members of the cuture believe provide them with "equipment for living," as Kennth Burke puts it. "The Hare and the Tortoise" is one of the cultural configurations that belongs to western civilization.
When a tale is retold not simply repeated, the analog version of the protolog differs. The differences mark the selectivity with which retellers organize the tale and the additions they make. Comparing the tales with respect to the details that are selected, the details that are omitted, and the details that are added provide evidence about the way in which the revised language instructs audiences to construct the story world in their imaginations. (It is not evidence of the reteller's intenton.)
To analyze the construction of a story world sets parameters on the possible world that can be created from the instructuring. This is not evidence of authorial intention. Nor is it evidence of a particular reader's reconstruction of the tale in her imagination. It is only evidence of a particular story world structured in a particular manner as described by an analyst using specific analystical tools (concepts). Though it does not predict the way an individual reader might read the text, it does make explicit the instructuring of the story world to a degree that can be replicated by another analyst (or challenged). Although the instructing description is likely to account for a large percentage of readings of the tale, the exact measure can only be determined by ethnographic or interviewing methods. Nonetheless, having the instructuring details available to an ethnographer or interviewer can be of considerable assistence to these researcher in developing their prompts.
This example of protolog analysis uses a fable as its subject matter for purposes of clarity and to avoid controversial material. Protolog analysis is designed for the analysis of news or media. (See the C-P analysis of the combat film) It is suitable for the analysis of news reporting because the Associated Press provides the protolog which is repeated as an anlog in various sources of news.
I was recently on a dissertation prospectus committee concerning “Framing the Internet.” The candidate indicated that her research question was: “how did the traditional media frame the Internet?” (Newspaper articles on the Internet consituted the data.) From a cognitive linguistics point of view the candidate's question is too difficult to answer. Granting that a specific reporter may have written the article, the paper’s policies would affect him or her, not to mention the circumstance that persons working in print media are commenting on an electronic media that is a threat to their livelihood.
In cognitive linguistics, every discourse is expressed from someone’s perspective and that perspective (framework, if you will) is personal, and in many respects private. So, to analyze a discourse from the “authors”’s perspective is not as good an option as analyzing it from the readers’ perspective. The candidate responded to my observation by saying that that the two perspectives were collapsed in the prospectus. I believe that many analyses are presented from this kind of “meta”-perspective, from some perspectiveless vantage point. I don’t believe this is possible.There two perspectives necessarily involved in any discourse—the speaker/author's and the listener/reader's. To analyze a discourse from the “authors”’s perspective is not as good an option as analyzing it from the readers’ perspective. The analyst is necessarily a reader and cannot know what the author had in mind but does know what effects the text has on him or her. Moreover, other readers can be queried.
Examining the readers’s perspective does present many problem but some of them can be addressed to a greater extent than problems with authorial perspective can. Granting that a reader just as a writer communicates from a personal and individual perspective, nonetheless, readers can be interviewed.
I recall reading Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance for the first time. She did an ethnographic analysis of women who read Harlequin romances. It was shocking to me to discover the difference between her approach and the standard literary critical approach. Critics attempting to interpret the meaning of a text believe that (1) they are revealing the author’s intentional meaning, or (2) revealing the meaning as a publically accessible textual construct (meaning being an inherent property of language even if the author’s intention is not accessible). What Radway demonstrated, is that romance readers did not read texts in the manner of literary critics. For example, whereas the critic might claim a romance shows a woman who is subordinate to the man in the story, the readers often bracketed out the passages portraying her in that fashion and focusing on the heroine’s initiative, courage, and intelligence.
Feminist analysts of 40’s films make a similar assessment of audiences. Since, for a variety of reasons, Hollywood had to villify aggressive women in films, women in the audience disregarded scenes, endings, and punishments while enjoying the moments in the film when the women successful outwitted men. Readers frame texts whether novels or films in ways that belong to the community of interpreters of which they are members. In Radway’s case, the Harlequin romance readers she studied purchased their romances from the same bookstore and read the Harlequin newsletter, etc. Nonetheless, she was able to do an ethnographic study about they way these texts affected them.
an answerable research question
What would be an answerable research question?
Admitedly, the frame analyst of a discourse looks at it from his or her perspective. From that perspective it is possible to map the “scaffolding” (Gee) or the frames in the text. However, to assume that all readers of the text structure it in a similar way seems to me problematic.
Without doubt, however, in a political analysis the textual effects on the audience would be specific “dispositions” either to act in a specific way (vote for x) or to believe in the world the text presents (the hothouse effect had nothing to do with the flooding of New Orleans). I think such dispositions can be researched in an interview or ethnographic investigation.
If the analysis is configural—concerned with the underlying narrative structure in the situation—then an answerable question would be: how does the delineation of the situation structure a reader's disposition to respond? In answering this question, the analyst assumes the role of a typical reader from a specific socio-cultural background. The resulting analysis becomes a set of interview questions for further ethnographic investigations.
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last revised:
June 16, 2010
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