Borderlands of Narrativity

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

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.

In universities and academic institutions globally, opinion was divided. There existed sensations of tension, confusion and anger from those involved. Keith Windschuttle sat in his office, staring at a crumpled copy of Simon Schama's 'Dead Certainties'. Questions and accusations streamed through Windschuttle's mind. One kept coming forward the most. How can this 'historian' think it permissible to 'invent some of his own facts, and introduce into his work passages he knows to be fiction'? 1 Windschuttle sat there, infuriated. What did works like Schama's mean? Were 'historians' like Schama and White trying to destroy history altogether? Did they wish to completely merge the obligations and practices of historians with those of novelists? Storm clouds gathered overhead, on the other side of the world, White felt a shiver piercing his peaceful rest. There was a disturbance somewhere; empiricists were angry. This disturbance may not be resolved easily…

This essay explores the relationship between story structure and systems of power. I will demonstrate that every story written so far serves to either defend or overthrow property relations and the discourse of family. In the course of the Neolithic revolution, the cultural process that developed in patriarchal society spawned narrative structures, most notably tragedy, to channel trauma caused by systemic aggression and subjection. Yet pre-patriarchal narratives, as found in cave paintings and in residues of contemporaneous myth, suggest a different form potential and attest to the existence of another power structure effecting both gender and property. After briefly addressing the history of narratives and analyzing current contradictions between social relations and formal problems in storytelling, I will argue that serial storytelling and games could merge to become a new form of audio-visual narrative by combining empathy-driven dramatic storytelling and interactivity.

2021

The paper first reviews the paradoxical situation of the crisis in narratology, highlighting the fragility of an expansionism undermined by empiricism, due to the thinly stretched links between current research and the theoretical frameworks of narratology, which have been reduced to a succinct box of tools, disconnected from any interpretive issues. More than just a facile critique of formalism, the paper questions the relevance of theoretical modelizations given a wider cultural and political crisis. Secondly, it responds to Raphaël Baroni’s questioning of the reluctance of certain researchers to consider themselves to be narratologists, despite the fact that their work has shed new light on narrative analysis; referring to his own work, the writer covers some of his disagreements with the narrative theories of the 70’s. Thirdly, he tries to define the pragma-enunciative, rhetorical-textual concepts that characterize his approach and that transcend the category of narrative. Fourt...

We focus on four major tensions pervading much narrative inquiry to date, tensions that threaten to divide the field into alienated enclaves. Of specific concern are psychological vs. social explanations of narrative, structural vs. process orientations to research, approaches that celebrate experience vs. those that textually deconstruct experience, and accounts that center on singularity of self-narratives vs. incoherent multiplicity. Finally, we open discussion on a relational constructionist account of narrative, with an eye toward reconciling these disparate orientations. Inquiry into narrative has swept across the humanities and social sciences, adding rich dimension to an enormous range of topics. Although the vastness and variation in narrative studies militate against a systematic summary, one does begin to sense that narrative work has reached maturity. There is presently an enormous wealth of conceptually, experientially, empirically, and pragmatically illuminating research. More importantly, we begin to find critical deliberation on the nature and significance of narrative in human affairs. In effective, narrative study is becoming reflective about its own undertakings. It is in this context that we wish to focus on several significant tensions emerging in narrative study to date, tensions with far reaching implications both for narrative studies and for related professional practices. In particular, we will focus on four interrelated tensions that currently invite intellectual polarization and the balkanization of what has largely Requests for further information should be directed to: Kenneth J. Gergen,

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...

Theory Matters: The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today, Ed. M. Middeke & C. Reinfandt, pp. 265-279., 2016

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.

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...