instructure/instructuring |
Working Definition:
Instructure is the ways the textual structure of a story instructs its audiences to build a story world inhabited by various figures interacting with each other. I will term the instructive aspects of stories their “instructure” and the dynamic telling as “instructuring.
Disciplinary Definitions:
Since I coined the term, there are no disciplinary defintions of it other than mine.
Comments:
Traditional descriptions of conventions assume a static view of the texts they describe. Configural analysis, since it attempts to account for the relation between story elements, beliefs, and emotions, takes a more dynamic view of stories. It is an account of story telling or the “structures of expectation” (Tannen’s phrase in Framing in Discourse, 15) that the story uses to involve its audiences. The two main “pathways” are the course of desire and the course of conflict. Thus configural analysis describes the temporal dimension of stories (albeit as points in the story-space) as its “telling.” However, the account is not introspective or phenomenological. It describes the stories’ temporal and spatial axis. And the description can be tested against the language of the text. But a configural description of a text includes retellings of it. Matching the “telling” and “retelling” of a story reveals the extent to which it has been configured because it shows whether the audience followed the instructions given in the text to construct the possible worlds they imply. The fact that the instructions given by the text can be described does not reveal whether they were followed. Recall Tim O’Brien’s reconstruction of Lewis Milestone’s antiwar film, Pork Chop Hill, in terms of the configuration that is given in films celebrating soldiering that he had seen such as To Hell and Back and Sands of Iwo Jima
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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