This is a response to Carl Djerassi’s post on the topic of IMAGING IN ART AND SCIENCE as part of the Virtual Symposium On Visual Culture and Bioscience.
The public discussion is at http://visualcultureandbioscience.blogspot.com/
Immaculate Misconception! What a great title! I would love to see the play; it sounds very interesting.
This series of comments reminds me of the similarities between scientific narrative as it is presented in, for example, journal articles and the dramatic narrative evident in theater and film. The common narrative arc for science (introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion) depends very much on cause and effect and follows closely the style of narration in film (exposition, some change in knowledge, a goal-oriented plot, investigation, and finally the climax).
I’m curious about the didactic quality often associated with information transmission and its role in pedagogy. Alfred Hitchcock remarked that, “Suspense is the most powerful means of holding onto the viewer’s attention… It is indispensable that the public be made perfectly aware of all the facts involved… [The] conditioning of the viewer is essential to the buildup of suspense”.
Suspense is vital to narration in theater and film and is implicitly embedded in scientific communication both within the discourse of science and between researchers and the “public” audience.
One might argue that the usual style is a broad kind of suspense that keeps the audience in the dark about what will happen next and creates uncertainty. This kind focuses only on the protagonists so that when anything significant happens, it is a surprise to the viewer. As such, their responses can vary more widely depending their prior knowledge, which may or may not prepare them.
A second kind of suspense keeps the audience attentive through the use of deadlines and frequent shifts in perspective from the protagonist to other “actors” human or non-human.
I’d be curious to hear what theater folks and others who deal with stories and plot structures have to say about the use of these tactics to shape and moderate scientific narration.
