Cinematically Speaking: The Orality-Literacy Paradigm for Visual Narrative (Sheila J. Nayar)
	Quantity in Basket:none Code: 978-1-57273-964-2 Price:$65.00 Title: Cinematically Speaking Sub-title: The Orality-Literacy Paradigm for Visual Narrative Author(s): Sheila J. Nayar Publish Date: September 2010 Pages: 264 Format: Cloth
	Quantity:
Most people think of film narrative in fundamentally visual terms. But what if visuality is only one component of a larger epistemic framework for how film narrative “works”? In this book, the author argues just that, laying out the comprehensive terrain for what has already been described as a “controversial new theory of cinematic literacy.” Proposing that orality and literacy play a fundamental role in shaping visual storytelling, Nayar challenges the ways we think about how film stories get shaped, as well as the notion of film as an autonomous mode of storytelling construction. Narrative and aesthetic principles of film, the author demonstrates, are in fact significantly impacted by ways of knowing that have—or, in some cases, that have not—emerged as a consequence of a cultural investment in reading, writing, and print. Between close readings of 1950s-1960s Bollywood cinema and modernist art cinema, as well as of many cinemas in between, this book casts a pioneering lens on what goes into shaping screen stories worldwide. It is a theoretical work certain to alter our understanding and future exploration of the narrative-film species. ORALITY, LITERACY, AND AN EPISTEMIC APPROACH TO VISUAL NARRATIVE. EXCAVATING THE ORAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VISUAL NARRATIVE. A Context for Bollywood. Narrative Coherence, Spice-Mix Style. Of Weighty Words and Outsized Heroes. So Much Violence! … And Still “The Same Old Song”. The Cognitive Ties that Bind. Noetic Nationalism (and Internationalism). MAPPING THE LITERATE CHARACTERISTICS OF VISUAL NARRATIVE. A Context for Art-Cinema Narration. Narrative Coherence: A Preamble on Plots and Potholes. Sovereignty and Subjectivity (as Subversion). Realism, Restraint, and Disengaging From the Voice. Testual Poly-See-Me (See-Me-Not) and the Rise of the Implied Author. BETWEEN THE ORAL AND LITERATE EPISTEMES. Re-“Mixed” Cinema. Middle-Class Cinema through the Orality-Literacy Paradigm. Middle Cinema through the Orality-Literacy Paradigm. Millennial Bollywood through the Orality-Literacy Paradigm. Mixed Cinema as a Cinema of Compromise. THE FUTURE OF THE ORALITY—LITERACY PARADIGM, CINEMATICALLY SPEAKING. Readers, Reception, and Reception Studies. Genre Studies. The Politics of (Re)presentation. Digital Technology—and Beyond. Concluding Remarks. Appendix A: Reading Closely: the Orality of Baazigar. Appendix B: Titanic as American Orally Inflected Cinema Nonpareil. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.