State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 10025 Krin Gabbard Associate Professor Comparative Literature 212 749-1631 06-Jun-1995 03:22pm EDT FROM: KGABBARD TO: Remote Addressee ( [log in to unmask] ) Subject: Re: Diegetic Forgive me for being pedantic, but I have just written a long footnote justifying my use of the terms diegetic and extradiegetic in my book, _Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema_, to be published in March by the Univ. of Chicago Press. Here it is: The terms diegetic and extradiegetic have become essential to the discussion of narrative and sound in films. Plato used the term diegesis in _The Republic_ to describe a story or narration, as in "all mythology and poetry is a _diegesis_ of events, either past, present, or to come" (392D). In the _Poetics_, Aristotle distinguished between two modes of poetic _mimesis_: a story told in narration, _diegesis_, and one that is acted out in front of spectators, _drama_ (1448a). Literary theorists such as Gerard Genette appropriated the term diegesis to describe the narrating of events that take place "within the world of the characters" as opposed to those portions of a novel or story in which the narrator might philosophize or recall some old history. In film study, diegetic sound refers to what the characters might actually hear while extradiegetic sound is something taking place elsewhere, for example in the voice-over narration by an unseen character. Diegetic music, then, can emerge from the radio in a character's room or from an orchestra in a concert hall. Extradiegetic music is usually the "background" score that the characters do not hear. Although we might speak of a radio playing music "in the background," this is still diegetic sound if it is in the world of the characters. Unfortunately, these terms are not always adequate: there are many cases in which the music in a film does not perfectly fit either category. What do we say, for example, about the song which a young man associates with his long lost sweetheart and which plays on the soundtrack whenever he is thinking about her? The music is not in the room with him, but since he can be understood as hearing the song in his head, it can also be understood as "within the world of the characters." In _Unheard Melodies_ (1987), Claudia Gorbman has coined the term "metadiegetic" to describe this kind of music (22-23), and in his _L'Oeil-camera: entre film et roman_, Francois Jost has developed an elaborate chart labeled "Classification narratologique des combinaisons audio-visuelles" that creates even more categories for distinguishing among the varieties of hearing in a fiction film (57). Nevertheless, because the terms diegetic and extradiegetic have entered the basic language of film scholarship, I use them throughout this study. ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]