Thanks for the responses juv3nal and Corvus! Again, this was thickly academic and I didn’t meant for my response to go that direction… some day I’ll take the time to write this up in the language of games..

Exactly my point. Marketing works because plot can be used to manipulate and communicate authoritative intent through various means of encoding recognizable symbols into the text.

If you’re implying that the semiological approaches *do* consider reading/playing/listening to be based on logical, conscious operations, I think you’re doing them a disservice.

*hand-wavy generalization:* More what I think they were getting at is that interesting insights might be derived from examining in a logical manner the un-/sub-/or just plain-conscious processes that go on when reading/playing/listening.

“While it is hubris to claim that szujet is ascendant over fabula, it strikes me as overly cynical to suggest that only fabula matters. If that were true, marketing wouldn’t work so damn well.”

Marketing works because it’s targeted at groups of people that already share some common discursive context. Consider how well an advertisement in Korean works in a for someone who neither speaks nor reads Korean. Or a radio commercial for a deaf person; a billboard for a blind one etc.

As a purely theoretical point, it is not impossible to imagine that an audience member is only conversant in a language which is completely different from that authors and yet each sequence of characters or phonemes in one’s language represents a different concept in the other’s such that the audience member can hear/read the story and come away not only thinking it was syntactically sound, but also meaningful. Never happen in the real world, but this, I think, is where those who would claim only fabula matters are coming from.

It sounds to me like you’ve hit the nail exactly on the head and this is precisely where I’m headed. I’m no more comfortable with the narratology vs. formalism debate than I am the narratology vs. ludology debate. While it is hubris to claim that szujet is ascendant over fabula, it strikes me as overly cynical to suggest that only fabula matters. If that were true, marketing wouldn’t work so damn well.

Time and time again, as a professional storyteller, I have seen stories act as cultural bridges, as a means of forging communication between people and of exploring relationships. How can this not be true, on some level, of all storytelling?