How Useful Are Theories Of Narrative In Helping Us To UnderstandMedia Texts ?

Narrative theories are a means of looking at a media text in more depth, helping to reveal how a text is constructed and the ideologies that lie behind it. To demonstrate how useful narrative theories actually are for readers of media texts, a selection of four have been used and applied to the television documentary ‘Painted Babies’, a programme based on child beauty pageants in America. The theories are Todorov, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Prop. They all help to analyse a text in great detail, exploring specifically the belief that all media texts follow certain rules in the way in which they are constructed.
Todorov’s theory claimed that all media texts are constructed to follow the pattern of an equilibrium, a disruption and a closure. When applied to ‘Painted Babies’, this seems to be correct. The equilibrium is the two children that the programme focuses on, Brooke and Asia, practising for the beauty pageant. The taking part in the pageant is the disruption that ...