Could someone please explain DIEGESIS for me?

in film studies terms (as established by the neoformalists, who were adapting the term from the russian formalists, who were adapting the term from aristotle), the "diegesis" is all the information/circumstance that occurs within the world of the fiction being presented.

for example, music shown as blasting from a car radio in the film would be diegetic. soundtrack music with no apparent source onscreen would be non-diegetic.

there are other, slightly different concepts of "diegesis" but this is the concept within a film studies context.

thanks, guys....i read that definition in wikipedia, wordiq and a few other sites. i thought i'd gone insane.

(Someone else may know the specifics, but a linguistics prof told me once that there's a discipline that uses langue and parole in the opposite way they were intended, and aren't bothered when this is pointed out. This may be apocryphal.)

tep: there is another example of such a switch in the classic martin lawrence/tim robbins comedy nothing to lose

i've never encountered a film academic, in the states or abroad, who would disagree with the definition as we here in this thread have agreed on...i'd like to find out who submitted that definition in wikipedia...

" Mimesis is a species of imitation, although the word has specialized uses ensuring that it is not a straightforward synonym. Mimesis is the enactment of the elements of a text as opposed to the imagination of them -- in other words, the showing of things as opposed to the telling of things (diegesis). An actor performing a play engages the text mimetically, whereas a reader of a play engages it diegetically. "

another question: what else is this term useful for besides music? can you have a non-diegetic character? a non-diegetic gin and tonic?

I think the reverse of the music thing would be rarer because you're talking about changing the audience's default assumption -- even though that assumption's correct. Most of the music in most major movies (or television) is non-diegetic; I think we parse it that way when we don't have any reason not to. So you'd have to signal that it's actually in the scene, but then point out that it isn't ...

Dialogue's the other way around, on the other hand. If a scene opens and we hear dialogue that isn't obvious VO, we'll assume it's in the scene even if we don't see a source.

http://www.degrassi.ca/Archives/Index/Lyrics/zit-song.htm

Everybody get ready and get into gear,
the Degrassi sensation,
the one and only,
Zit Remedy is here.* (The Zits are here)
Everybody wants something, they'll never give up.
Everybody wants something, they'll take your money and never give up.
Everybody face up to the facts as they are,
Dedication is hard but, you'll be somebody and you will go far.
Everybody wants something, they'll never give up.
Everybody wants something, they'll take your money and never give up.

Narrative is composed of things that happen in the story, combined with comments the storyteller makes about those things. It seems like Tep's saying EVERYTHING that can be construed as comment - like editing techniques - is non-diegetic, i.e. cutting from one person to another doesn't happen in real-life. But shifting your attention from one person's face to another does happen in real life, so I'm not sure about that.

(It's for one of those "essays about TV shows" collections on My So-Called Life, and the diegesis of the show is one of the main things I'm talking about. According to my abstract, anyway.)

going rate for excerpts is $0.35/word.

If I use "diegesis" as the opposite of/complement to "mimesis" -- the former being the "tell" of "Show, don't tell" -- would I be betraying all the rest of my narratological impulses? Which is to say, I'd better not use "diegesis" to refer to the narrative world? Is the diegesis/mimesis pair still used in academic settings, even?