[Narrative is] able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation... [and] narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society...... Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural; it is simply there, like life itself.
-- Barthes, 1977:79
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