Concepts of Narrative (original) (raw)
Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science, 2014
hen trying to glimpse at the possible realization of transdisciplinary, Basarab Nicolescu points throughout his work at the powerful potentials of the narrative, particularly in its literary manifestation. In response to that and with the intention to contribute to the further development of transdisciplinary theory and methodology, we aim to explore the potentials of the narrative as a form of transdisciplinary knowing that is rigorous yet escapes from the strict methodology imposed by positive science. Our contribution will explore the narrative in its aesthetic form (literature), in its form of vivid culture as well as in its form of cosmological fundamentals (stories and legends). It will analyze if and how the narrative offers a platform to entangle the abundant heritage of human experiences, both in a historic as well as in an individual way. It will finally asks if this lively, discontinuous and complex way of knowing may be a base for the construction of a more open, accessible and democratic house of knowledge.
Redefining our Understanding of Narrative
The Qualitative Report, 2015
This paper is born out of my concern about the increasing use of narrative as merely a different methodology. I argue that narrative as methodology ultimately depoliticizes the potentiality of narratives. Narrative simply becomes one of the many methods that belong to qualitative inquiry. We generally discuss narrative as storytelling. We also focus on doing good narrative analysis. In this paper I recast in narrative in language of cosmology so as to highlight the libratory potentiality that narrative affords persons who strive for a new and different world. I discuss narrative in terms of being in the world. I also unpack the implications that attend to this emergent way of understanding narrative for qualitative inquiry. The paper ends with a discussion of how our narrativeness complements a world that is increasingly seen as complex and quantum. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License. This article...
A Brief History of the Idea of Narrative
In Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Peters charts the arc not of communication methods or technologies, but the way in which we conceive of communication. Not how do we communicate, but how have we thought about communicating. Hawking is invoked, on the one hand, because contemporary conceptualizations of narrative, in particular their trajectories through the 20th century, are the progeny of multifarious efforts to develop a science of narrative. On the other, Hawking’s seminal monograph, A Brief History of Time (1988), distills an impossibly immense subject -- the history of the universe -- into an impossibly compact space. Narrative may not be so sprawling an object of study as the entire cosmos, but it is, nonetheless, an expansive topic. This paper represents an attempt to trace the variegated, interrelated, evolving, diffuse, and sometimes circuitous ways in which we conceive of narrative. This effort begins with a dispute between (who else?) Aristotle and Plato. Whereas Aristotle provided a rudimentary codification of narrative as form, Plato critiques its use. We then spring forward several millennia to find Georg Lukacs challenging the dominance of the Aristotelean framework, and anticipating by nearly a century Marie-Laure Ryan’s call for a “media-conscious narratology” (Ryan and Thon 4). I traverse the well-trod terrains of Russian Formalism and French Structuralism, and investigate how these movements and their devotees aspired to develop scrupulous empirical principles that would transform the study of narrative and literature into a science: narrative’s scientific turn. A Structuralist splinter faction turned their attention to temporal dynamics, laying the groundwork for narratology. Narratology focuses on the centrality of time (as both interior and exterior to narrative), narrative as a coagulant of historical and temporal coherence, and the twin influences of tradition and cultural context. As an important tangent to print-centric narratology, I discuss the recuperation of orality both as a formidable field in its own right, and as implicative of the importance of identifying medium-specific narrative affordances. In their indispensable accounts of oral storytelling systems, Albert Lord and Walter J. Ong illustrate how narrative, media, and cognition interrelate. Following orality, I provide a brief overview of how narrative theories and epistemologies filtered into other fields and disciplines such as postmodernism, historiography, and cognitive science. In the penultimate section, I will explore the dramatic narrative transmutations prompted by the ascendance of the computer, and the (still acrimonious) collision of stories and games. In closing, I will examine recent attempts to (once again) formulate a “unified theory” of narrative that can account for its protean, media-inflected instantiations, and I suggest several lines of inquiry for how the study of narrative might proceed from this point forward.
The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2008
What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives and the texts we read? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theater, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now thoroughly revised, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes two new chapters. With its lucid exposition of concepts and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
2014
Interdisciplinarity has been the name of the game for quite some time. One of the rich, but also problematic, tools for bridging gaps between disciplines is the concept of “narrative”. This essay will deal with different notions of “narrative”, broader and narrower interpretations of the term, and will then suggest my own view. Narratology and/vs. “the Narrative Turn” The centrality of “narrative ” in current thought and discourse derives mainly from narratology, poststructuralist literary and cultural theory, and constructivist ap-proaches in the social sciences, but its meanings and implications vary according to its provenance. As someone who participated in the development of narratol-ogy, I find the present-day use of “narrative ” across media and disciplines both exciting and somewhat bewildering. I came to this interdisciplinary junction with a fairly narrow definition in mind: “Someone telling someone else that something happened”, Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s definition (1981...
Merely telling stories? Narrative and knowledge in the human sciences
Poetics Today, 2000
Should we accept, as is, that differentiation between the main types of discourse, or between forms or genres, which sets science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc. against each other, turning each into some great historical individuality? We ourselves are not sure of the usage of these distinctions in our own discursive environment; let alone when it comes to analysing sets of statements which, at all the time of their initial formation, were grouped, classified and typified along quite different lines.
Towards a Conceptual History of Narrative
The basic idea of conceptual history is that all key social, political, and cultural concepts are both historical and, even when not always contested, at least potentially contestable. 1 The concept of narrative has become such a contested concept over the last thirty years in response to what is often called the " narrative turn " in