Concepts of Narrative (original) (raw)
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Introduction, or another story of narrative
Studies in Narrative, 2013
As we seek to map out the many travels of the concept of narrative, we are very aware of the risks involved. To stretch the metaphorical expression of travelling one might ask, if narrative travels with enough baggage, and whether border control is tight enough. While the theme of this book is the travelling concept of narrative, it is by no means meant to function as a travel advertisement. Rather, while welcoming and encompassing new openings in narrative theory, this volume aims at collecting a number of questions that are recurrently raised in interdisciplinary discussions about research on narratives as well as narrative research. To use a distinction Paul Atkinson (1997) has used, our intention is not so much to celebrate the travels as it is to analyse the transformations, displacements and possible incommensurabilities between the old and new narrative languages.
Theory Matters: The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today, Ed. M. Middeke & C. Reinfandt, pp. 265-279., 2016
What Is Narrative in Narrative Science? The Narrative Science Approach
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2022
In current English, the term 'narrative' covers a lot of conceptual groundfrom an overarching position on some big issue, to all kinds of storytelling, to a general attention to language or metaphor. This chapter argues for narrowing our conception of 'narrative' to add value to scholarship in the history and philosophy of science (HPS). This narrower Narrative Science Approach treats narrative as a distinct and complex discursive form, subject to careful technical theorizing in its own right. By using analytical categories from narrative theory, we can identify in rigorous detail how scientific narratives are put together, what might distinguish them from other narrative forms, and the questions they raise for HPS and narrative enquiry. Similarly, when scientists use narrative ways of reasoning, tools from cognitive narratology enable us to reconstruct their imaginative activity. As a reciprocal movement, our Narrative Science Approach promises to enrich narrative studies. 2.1 Introduction: Narrative and the Narrative Science Approach What do we mean by 'narrative' in enquiry into narrative science? How does the Narrative Science (NS) Approach relate to other scholarly interest in narrative? In everyday English, we most often encounter 'narrative' used to refer to an overarching position, or set of positions, on some issuefor example, there are competing 'narratives' of climate change, 1 while marketers for a brand develop its 'narrative' to appeal to particular consumers (see, e.g., Salmon 2008). More basically, 'narrative' serves as a synonym for 'story'. The two gather literature into their associative constellation, such that it could seem straightforward in 2010 for Laura Otis to claim a 'close affinity' between literary studies and work in the 1 This is narrative in its noun form, unlike in French, for instance, where narratif exists only as an adjective. Cf. Elisa Vecchione's talk in the NS Public Seminar Series,
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.