According to teacher Zhang Yuhua's introduction in the book, the narrative research of TV series can be carried out from two aspects: first, the study of narrative structure, that is, paying attention to the story plot, action elements and other issues, focusing on the construction of abstract theoretical models; The second is narrative discourse research, that is, it tends to narrative behavior and explores discourse methods and techniques to convey good stories.
The first is the study of narrative orientation. As for narrative orientation, the word "narrative perspective" is often used in classical narratology theory, and todorov's "three-way method"-omniscient perspective, internal perspective and external perspective is widely popular. When a TV director enjoys the supreme right to speak and shows all kinds of people and things under his lens, it is called omniscient perspective. For example, a considerable number of TV dramas such as The Years of Burning Passion are based on this omniscient perspective, which is also the most commonly used narrative perspective in long TV dramas.
Internally, the drama director is equal to the characters in the TV series, and all his thoughts and feelings are attached to the characters in the TV series. For example, many of Aunt Qiong Yao's TV plays express sympathy or recognition for Xiao San's superior position, and more or less have her personal portrayal in them.
External perspective means that the drama director is limited to watching from the outside. No matter the words or characters in the lens, there are only visible and audible behaviors such as environment, foreign trade, behavior, sound and human voice, and there are few expressions of the thoughts and feelings of the characters in the play. However, due to the stylistic features of TV series and the limitations of mass media platforms, it is undoubtedly inappropriate to adopt an external perspective, and there is a risk of losing the audience. Therefore, the narrative angle of external perspective is more common in movies.
In this book, the author prefers to use the terms defined in Genette's novels and writing: the third-person indirect narrative is "heterogeneous narrative", and the other is the first-person personalized narrative, which is called "homologous narrative". In addition, the deviant perspective also has a unique aesthetic value in the narrative discourse of TV dramas. In order to overcome the limitations of the established perspective and realize the depth of meaning transmission and the high quality of aesthetic transmission, I, who was not present in the first person, can confidently show the facts I didn't see as a witness, or become an omniscient perspective. The deviant narrative perspective makes each monologue more important, not just a sentence. Instead, everyone shows their performance about the same thing to the audience and speaks all their minds. On the basis of all their discussions, the audience can get their own profound understanding of the connotation of TV series, rather than superficial cognition, and induce the audience to become the accomplice of the director of the drama, and pay attention to the meaning of the text together in the aesthetic interface, so as to maximize the aesthetic value.
Secondly, what impressed me the most was the concept of "space-time knot". Bakhtin once put forward the concept of "time-space knot" when studying the narrative style of novels, and defined it as an area where time and space intersect each other. Drawing on this theory, the existence of a representative and meaningful "time-space knot" in TV plays also provides theoretical support for the author's analysis.
The living room has undoubtedly become a witness to the solution of contradictions. Just as the pre-war planning and post-war summary of ancient marching wars were all carried out in camps, the living room in urban love dramas also became a concentrated expression of ideas and opinions, conveying the director's intention. In the book, the author takes Living Room as an example to introduce the different time and space stories of Li Xuezhi's family. As such an intersection of time and space, the living room brings people from different occupations, positions, classes, ages, customs and regions together, breaking the original social space distance, thus performing contrast, conflict and integration in the "time-space knot".