Has anyone hear read any theory on narrativity while also being

Also, would this be better asked on /jp/? I don't want to shit up either board with my autism.

OP, I feel guilty for not knowing more about your topic because that does sound interesting to discuss.

I think I get some of the basic gist of what you're saying but really I'm just dumb as shit sorry OP

>>152952934
>like Mishima
his plays are way fucking better than his novels

>>152953066
>>152953119
I am making it sound way more pretentious than it needs to be, sorry guys. I also said "hear" instead of "here" in the OP, so fuck me.

>>152953161
Didn't he do his plays in the traditional Japanese style? Maybe that's worth looking into in its own right since he clearly could move between both styles easily and at a high level.

I imagine high cultural figures, especially once with Western educations like Mishima, could move between both worlds. But what really interests me is when the average Japanese person has a foreign culture's style of storytelling, thousands of years old, partially imposed on him by capitalism or cultural exchange, but also partially ignored.

Like I said, when I watch some anime there is a part of me that is frustrated by how many story elements are superfluous. I know some of this is just down to the serial nature of the material, but even the shittiest Western comic books still think in terms of "arcs" where everything has to "add up," and interruptions of the pacing or multiple climaxes to a single arc are seen as frustrating and bad for the reader.

>>152952934
>it's a more organic fusion that is worth studying in its own right.
It's this option, and the best way to learn more about it is take your head out of your fucking ass.

OP, I think the best way to delve more into the topic is to find a Japanese author admitting that he used a Western narrative mode. You have to give proof that "adoption of a Western narrative mode" is not simply "coincidental similarity to a Western narrative mode", and that itself is difficult.

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>expecting English majors on a japanese cartoon board

>>152952934
If you haven't yet, you should watch Aoi Bungaku. It's an anime adaption of a few 20th century Japanese short stories. It might give you some insight on those glaring issues you're seeing

>>152953262
Kimi no na wa is done downloading, so you've got like 15 minutes tops, but I have read quite a bit of Japanese lit so I should be able to help you. Again, if you want to get anywhere with this, discuss it without bringing up the most basic literary devices like it's actually relevant to the conversation. This is the lit equivalent of the Philosophy major who won't shut the fuck up about Also Sprach Zarathustra because it's the only thing he's read.

Is your goal to understand anime, or Japanese literature?

>>152953315
I think maybe people are misunderstanding that I'm saying Japan is simply copying something Western at a superficial level.

What I mean is more a jumble of a bunch of theories, from Aristotle and Barthes on how stories "must" have a beginning-middle-end structure where nothing is superfluous, guys like Ricoeur saying that we fundamentally think in that sort of narrative structure on some fundamental level, or guys like Ong and Anderson saying that the fiction novel's narrative structure is a very distinctive, historically contingent, modern Western thing, maybe responsible for things like Western subjectivity and interiority.

I don't mean any of these in particular, just the general idea that floats around.

>>152953371
A man can dream

>>152953379
I will check it out, thank you

>>152953495
Well, like I said, I'm less interested in how Westernised high cultural figures are capable of having one foot in both worlds, and more interested in how average people, who don't consciously plan their styles of storytelling but go with what "feels" right, have fused horizons between traditional Japanese and Western styles. Even recent popular anime is probably too muddled by people who have tons of experience of Western literature.

My ultimate goal would be to understand how this happened historically, but especially with the introduction of Western mass media and mass participation in media in Japan. I mentioned the theory stuff because I was hoping some English major would say
>Oh yeah, you want to read [major scholarly book on this topic], duh.
right off the bat. I mostly study hermeneutic phenomenology, so I only learned about narrativity through that, but my interest is in cultural fusions at the unconscious and unintentional level in general.

I've found this:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-anime-machine

And skimming over this:
http://www.kyoto-seika.ac.jp/researchlab/wp/wp-content/uploads/no_alba_torrents.pdf
makes it seem like Lamarre + this article will have good bibliographical starting points for traditional narrative analyses of anime. And they both criticise this approach, it looks like. Guess I'll start there.

Sageing so I don't keep bumping my own shit.

>>152953659
Shouwa-era post war media was what was really influenced by the west, by you can clearly see western influences in Meiji-era works as well, and even before that.

>Some anime I watch is just so bizarrely disjointed to me, even when it's enjoyable

Anime can be hard to understand if you have little cultural reference, but for your purposes you're probably going to have to dig a bit deeper.

Kokoro is really the quintessential piece of Meiji-era literature, at least read that if you want ANY understanding of Japanese lit. Rakugo became quite popular in the Shouwa-era, so listen to some of that as well. Japanese comedy is relatively easy to understand, read up on tsukommi/boke and you should be good to go, watch a few episodes of Gaki no Tsukai.

4koma also have strict narrative structure, which is often translated to anime as far as specific scenes go.

Meiji and Shouwa era works are really where you start to see the effects of the end of isolationism and Japan moving into a more global sphere as a whole. I can't give specifics if you're looking for
>and more interested in how average people, who don't consciously plan their styles of storytelling but go with what "feels" right
But that is the time period you should focus on. Maaaaaybe early Edo period stuff if you want to read about Japan getting wrecked by America and persecuting Christians. That was really the exact opposite of what you are looking for though, there were groups who adopted Western styles, and a strong reactionary movement that denied everything Western and returned to tradition. No real fusion.

>>152953884
My eyes glazed over like three pages into the Kyoto Seika article. What did it say?

>>152952934
>Some anime I watch is just so bizarrely disjointed to me, even when it's enjoyable.
Such as? There's a difference between Tatami Galaxy (which is intentionally disjointed) and a seasonal SoL that's simply badly presented.

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>>152954317
>Indeed, if we look for the promised novelty in the resolution of the plot we encounter a paradox: in the end there is indeed a revolution, but Utena fails to be a prince to Himemiya and ‘save’ or ‘liberate’ her. In Revolutionary Girl Utena there is no possibility for identity and this is why the end of the series is pure event. There is no "resolution" in Revolutionary Girl Utena’s plot, because the revolution is not carried out in any of the times representing the narrative order.

Basically complete and utter failure to understand simple themes and plot points. She isn't wrong about the school existing existing in some sort of exclusivity of time, but that is brought up on multiple occasions in the show itself. It's a metaphor for youth, Ruka maturing (leaving the school) and the subsequent duel with Juri evidence this even before the last few episodes, which hammer it into your head. The "revolution" is internal, Utena starts the series as a child, and ends the series as an adult. That's about as resolved as you can get, and is fairly clear cut.

Can't be bothered to read any more, it fell into the same pitfall that almost everything else does.
>I'm going to write a paper about something I fundamentally don't understand!

Fucking why.

Just kidding, I read further just to confirm the point I had made

>Puella Magi Madoka Magica presents all the elements typical of the magical girl genre, but
constitutes at the same time an exploration of its limits, incorporating aspects of antithetic
genres, as psychological horror, and surrealist stylistic traits.

>The only thing I know about Mahou Shoujo is what wikipedia told me and somehow think adding "psychological horror" and surrealism is breaking new ground

Not even worth the data it took to store it.

>>152954167
That's awesome. Thanks for taking the time to write this. I was assuming that the real developments would be postwar with mass capitalism but it makes sense to start with previous, especially slower/more obvious stuff.

>>152954781
>>152954317
Yeah I only skimmed it, kind of glad now. I'm more familiar with Bergson than Deleuze but the article is so theoretically top-heavy and I'm so unfamiliar with the anime being discussed that it's a pain to read.

I like some of the things I read while I skimmed. I like the idea that anime authors have a lot of different modes of temporality and narrativity to play with, from a lot of different sources. But pinning down exactly what's going on underneath that is giving me a headache.

>>152954347
It's admittedly a pleb observation. I don't necessarily mean disjointed in a bad way though. It's actually refreshing, because you're not predicting entire arcs ahead of time, which is usually what happens when stories are cliched. Though I'm also unfamiliar with Japanese cultural cliches.

>>152954969
Well if you're just getting into anime then it's bound to be refreshing. Anime is heavily commercialized and most seasonal stuff is heavily predictable and cliched.

Obviously if you stick with intentionally ambiguous shit like Utena and Lain then you'll find plenty of things to interpret. Unfortunately the vast majority of anime are readerly texts and you'll have a find time applying continental philosophy to some seasonal cute idol shit.

Just my two cents.

>>152955153
*hard time

>>152952934
Got to admit OP, I've never really though about this kind of stuff because the whole 3 arc Hollywood style has been in basically everything I deal with.

And honestly, what sort of differences between the narrative structures are you even talking about?