Ideology, narrative analysis, and popular culture

TLDR: Cawelti and Wright as mentioned in this paper argue that a new conception of the ideological, if it is to draw on the findings of the study of myth, psychoanalysis and structural anthropology, must take as its privileged object of investigation narrative itself, now considered as a "form of reasoning" about experience and society.

Abstract: By showing that the formal analysis of mass culture has come of age, two recent books suggest that a new way of raising the old questions about the relationship of culture to society is possible Indeed, they make important, if unequal, contributions to the methodology of narrative analysis in general, at the same time that they suggest that a rigorous investigation of cultural forms of the internal dynamics of superstructures as such may prove a good deal more crucial to the student of social history, particularly in the area of periodization, than has often been thought Both Will Wright's Sixguns and Society and John G Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance~ offer materials for a new theory of ideology-surely the key link or mediatory concept in any attempt to link cultural objects with social phenomena They demonstrate that a new conception of the ideological, if it is to draw on the findings of the study of myth, of psychoanalysis and of structural anthropology, must take as its privileged object of investigation narrative itself, now considered as a "form of reasoning" about experience and society (Wright, 200) of equal dignity to the various types of conceptual thought in service in daily life