Story And Discourse: Narrative Analysis Of Advertising Texts

Classical Narratology established a systematic set of theories and approaches to deal with narrative texts. And post-classical Narratology extend its research horizon from fictions to many other types of narratives, including advertising texts. However, narrative studies in advertising texts are far from systematic, with some basic problems being neglected and some concepts confused. This paper aims to establish a research framework, drawing on narrative theories in literature and films, to do a comprehensive and systematic analysis on advertising narrative texts, taking TV commercials as samples. The paper consists six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical background and status quo of narrative study on advertising texts and elaborates the purposes, approaches and significance of this paper. Chapter 2 confirms the legitimacy of narrative study into TV commercials by answering the question "to what extend TV commercial is a kind of narrative". Chapter 3 establishes a research framework on the basis of the Narratological dichotomy between story and discourse. Chapter 4 analyzes TV commercial narratives on the story level, covering the concepts of time and space circumstance, actor/character, the superficial structure and the underlying structure. Chapter 5 goes into the discourse level of TV commercial narratives, focusing on the concepts like narrator/narratee, layer of narration, focalization, and time of narration. Chapter 6 comes to a conclusion of the paper and points out the future directions of Narratological study of advertising texts.