Against Narrative ("A Boring Story")
TL;DR: The celebrated ubiquity of narrative in culture is both a fecund premise and, I claim, the bane of narrative theory as mentioned in this paper, which is not necessarily the most promising stance in a collection devoted to narrative as a way of thinking.
Abstract: The celebrated ubiquity of narrative in culture is both a fecund premise and, I claim, the bane of narrative theory today. While not outright against narrative, nor against theorizing about narratives, in this paper I nonetheless aim to remain fairly sceptical towards broad, overly eager uses of the notion: not necessarily the most promising stance in a collection devoted to narrative \"as a way of thinking.\" No less ominously, my paper comes with the subtitle \"A Boring Story\" though this is also the title of the story by Chekhov (\"Skuchnaia istoriia,\" 1889) that I shall use to boost my argument, once we are done with theory. Everybody knows the lure of broad notions. One well remembers such early, once eye-opening statements as those by Roland Barthes (1975: 235): \"Like life itself, narrative is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural.\"1 Or by Hayden White (1987: 1): \"To raise the question of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture, and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself.\" Hence, obviously, the
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: This article argued that narrative is a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, and fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific.
Abstract: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that
1,640 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2009
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a survey of approaches to constructing a storyworld from context of Narration to Narrative as a type of text, with a focus on the role of stories in science.
Abstract: List of Illustrations. The Elements. Preface . The Scope and Aims of This Book. Storytelling Media and Modes of Narration. Acknowledgments . 1. Getting Started: A Thumbnail Sketch of the Approach Developed in This Book. Toward a Working Definition of Narrative. Profiles of Narrative. Narrative: Basic Elements. 2. Background and Context: Framing the Approach. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Narrative Theory. Major Trends in Recent Scholarship on Narrative. 3. Back to the Elements: Narrative Occasions . Situating Stories. Sociolinguistic Approaches. Positioning Theory. The Narrative Communication Model. Conclusion. 4. Temporality, Particularity, and Narrative: An Excursion into the Theory of Text Types. From Contexts of Narration to Narrative as a Type of Text. Text Types and Categorization Processes. Narrative as a Text-Type Category: Descriptions vs. Stories vs. Explanations. Summing up: Text Types, Communicative Competence, and the Role of Stories in Science. 5. The Third Element: Or, How to Build a Storyworld . Narratives as Blueprints for Worldmaking. Narrative Ways of Worldmaking. Narrative Worlds: A Survey of Approaches. Configuring Narrative Worlds: The WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN Dimensions of Storyworlds. Worlds Disrupted: Narrativity and Noncanonical Events. 6. The Nexus of Narrative and Mind . The Consciousness Factor. Consciousness Across Narrative Genres. Experiencing Minds: What It's Like, Qualia, Raw Feels. Storied Minds: Narrative Foundations of Consciousness?. Appendix . Reproduction of Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927). Transcript of a Story Told during Face-to-Face Interaction: UFO or the Devil. Pages from Daniel's Clowes's Graphic Novel Ghost World (1997). Screenshots from Terry Zwigoff's Film Version of Ghost World (2001). Glossary . References. Index
511 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that ‘Against Narrativity’ can and should stimulate robust debate within the medical humanities regarding the limits of narrative, and a range of possibilities for venturing ‘beyond narrative’ are discussed.
Abstract: This paper aims to (re)ignite debate about the role of narrative in the medical humanities. It begins with a critical review of the ways in which narrative has been mobilised by humanities and social science scholars to understand the experience of health and illness. I highlight seven dangers or blind spots in the dominant medical humanities approach to narrative, including the frequently unexamined assumption that all human beings are “naturally narrative.” I then explore this assumption further through an analysis of philosopher Galen Strawson’s influential article “Against Narrativity.” Strawson rejects the descriptive claim that “human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative” and the normative claim that “a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood.” His work has been taken up across a range of disciplines but its implications in the context of health and illness have not yet been sufficiently discussed. This article argues that “Against Narrativity” can and should stimulate robust debate within the medical humanities regarding the limits of narrative, and concludes by discussing a range of possibilities for venturing “beyond narrative.”
156 citations
TL;DR: Iversen et al. as mentioned in this paper presented a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison and the editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age and Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses.
Abstract: where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author of a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison and the editor/co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age and Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Alber has written articles that were published or are forthcoming in international journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Short Story Criticism, Storyworlds, and Style, and he has contributed to the Routledge Enyclopedia of Narrative Theory, the Handbook of Narratology, and the online dictionary Literary Encyclopedia. Stefan Iversen received his PhD in 2008 from the Scandinavian Department at Aarhus University where he is a postdoctoral scholar working on a project on Danish narratives from concentration camps. Iversen is the organizer of the Intensive Programme in Narratology (www.ipin.dk). He is co-editing Moderne Litteraturteori (a series of anthologies on modern literary theory) and has written articles and books on narrative theory, on trauma narratives, and on the Scandinavian fin de siecle. Henrik Skov Nielsen is Associate Professor and Director of Studies at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark. In the first half of 2010 he is a visiting scholar at Project Narrative at The Ohio State University. He is the editor of a series of anthologies on literary theory and is currently working on a narratological research project on the relation between authors and narrators. Brian Richardson is Professor at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Unnatural Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative and Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, which was awarded the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies in 2006. He has edited two anthologies, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames and Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices, and has published essays on many aspects of narrative theory. He is currently working on unnatural and antimimetic narratives.
139 citations
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: The Travelling Concept of Narrative (TCN) as mentioned in this paper has become a contested concept over the last thirty years in response to what is often called the "narrative turn" in social sciences (Bruner 1991; Kreiswirth 1992; 2000; 2005; Brockmeier & Harre 2001; Currie 1998; Richardson 2000).
Abstract: 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 social sciences (Bruner 1991; Kreiswirth 1992; 2000; 2005; Brockmeier & Harre 2001; Currie 1998; Richardson 2000).2 The concept has successfully travelled to psychology, education, social sciences, political thought and policy analysis, health research, law, theology and cognitive science. “Now, narrative is everywhere”, as Richardson (2000, 168) observes, and, to quote Phelan (2005b, 210), we already have good reasons to be alert for “narrative imperialism”. The original call for papers of the symposium, The Travelling Concept of Narrative, reflects the direction of this journey: “Over the last three decades, the concept of narrative has successfully travelled from literature into several new disciplines such as social sciences, law, psychology, theology and health studies” (italics mine). In this article, my primary purpose is to show that this interpretation is too straightforward regarding the narrative turn in social sciences. Secondly, a generally shared conviction – and a conviction I have shared until lately – is that the narrative turn has created a thoroughly interdisciplinary field of theory and research. Building on my answer to the first issue, I argue that there are at least two, relatively separate discussions on narrative theory and analysis. I will tentatively
70 citations
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TL;DR: For instance, the study of mind has focused principally on how man achieves a "true" knowledge of the world as discussed by the authors, that is, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is assumed to be immutable and, as it were, there to be observed.
Abstract: Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a "true" knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind's interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, "there to be observed." This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the working out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world "as it is." There have always been dissidents who
4,105 citations
TL;DR: Cutler as mentioned in this paper presents a Translator's Preface Preface and Preface for English-to-Arabic Translating Translators (TSPT) with a preface by Jonathan Cutler.
Abstract: Foreword by Jonathan Cutler Translator's Preface PrefaceIntroduction 1. Order 2. Duration 3. Frequency 4. Mood 5. VoiceAfterword Bibliography Index
1,852 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: This article argued that narrative is a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, and fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific.
Abstract: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that
1,640 citations
"Against Narrative ("A Boring Story"..." refers background in this paper
...28 Pekka Tammi the propensity, in historiographical writing, "to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary" (White 1987: 24)....
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1,290 citations
"Against Narrative ("A Boring Story"..." refers background in this paper
...28 Pekka Tammi the propensity, in historiographical writing, "to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary" (White 1987: 24)....
[...]
TL;DR: In the literature, there is a variety of genres, each of which branches out into a wide variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man's stories as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: of all, there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man's stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds: narrative remains largely unconcerned with good or bad literature. Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural. Are we to infer from such universality that narrative is insignificant? Is it so common that we can say nothing about it, except for a modest description of a few highly particularized species, as literary history sometimes does? Indeed how are we to control such variety, how are we to justify our right to distinguish or recognize them? How can we tell the novel from the short story, the tale from the myth, suspense drama from tragedy (it has been done a thousand times) without reference to a common model? Any critical attempt to describe even the most specific, the most historically oriented narrative form implies such a model. It is, therefore, understandable that thinkers as early as Aristotle should have concerned themselves with the study of narrative forms, and not have abandoned all ambition to talk about them, giving
1,260 citations