NARRATIVEAlasdair McIntyre: “Man is in his

actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.”

Roland Barthes: “narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative . . . narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself”

Terry Pratchett: “Stories, great, flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling. Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer, stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service of only the story itself. Servant girls have to marry the prince. That’s what life is all about. You can’t fight a Happy Ending.”

Two aspects of narrative

A narrative is „a verbal (?) act consisting of someone telling someone that something happened”

STORY (TALE) – TELLING/SHOWING ‘what’ – ‘how’

Properties of narrative Story/tale: 1. plot

2. character 3. setting

Telling/showing:4. point of view 5. voice (narrator)

Eg. Film: editing, soundtrack, speed, colour or b/w

adaptations

Plot“There was an old man And he had a calfAnd that’s halfHe took him out of the stall And put him on the wallAnd that’s all”

action vs. plotAction: events one after another (annals)Plot: arrangement Aristotle: plot (mythos) is action (praxis) arranged

artistically

Causality Teleology (telos)

Peter Brooks: “Plot is the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a

story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning.”

French for ‘plot’: intrigue

THE STUDY OF NARRATIVE (Structuralist) Narratology(Vladimir Propp; Tzvetan Todorov; Roland

Barthes; Gérard Genette) Narratives are translatable (bw

languages, bw different media) aim: universal, timeless structureRoland Barthes: “a narrative is a long

sentence just as every constative sentence is in a way the rough outline of a short narrative”

deep structure - surface structure

Snow White~Sleeping Beauty~Little Red Riding Hood

Vladimir Propp (Russian ethnographist) Russian folktales 7 character types or Roles (hero, enemy,

helper, etc.) and 32 plot elements or Functions (doing

damage, questing, setting up a prohibition, e tc.)

ProppIndividual tales: variations and

combinations of functions, roles (eg ‘doing damage’: kidnapping, stealing, magic spell, killing)

→ grammar of all possible tales

Western filmsHero – society – villain – helper

What about more complex narratives?

The Function of StorytellingWhy do we need stories? The cultural significance of stories

1. Narrative (as) knowledgeAristotle: “We need stories because we have

not lived enough”

Sanskrit gna: “know” and “narrate” - myths

Narrative in myth, history and natural history (the origin of death, the neck of the giraffe)

2. narrative as consolation

Paul Ricoeur: “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organised after the manner of a narrative.”

Frank Kermode: “our deep need for intelligible ends... We project ourselves … past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.”

“consoling plot”

The shape, form of stories, plotting plotting: form-making (ART)

Fredric Jameson: “...plot persuades us in a concrete fashion that human action, human life is somehow a complete, interlocking whole, a single, forward, meaningful substance.”

3. Narrative as identityTengelyi László: „The time we live in is

woven through by stories. Our place in the world – even before we are conscious indeed, perhaps before we are born – is staked out by family narratives. Then we add our ... story to the stories we inherit.”

Narrative and identityCreating and maintaining selfhood; continuity

Trauma → gaps in self-stories(‘I can’t make it into a story’)

Individual – collective identity (national)

Ambiguity of self-stories: honesty and fraudulence, clarification and self-mythologisation

3. Narrative as act(ion)Old English spell (enchantment) ‘story’

Telling a story: an actthe point of the story: why? To whom?

Biblical parables psychoanalysis: understanding,

healingconfession: absolution courts of law, testimonies: judgement

Narrative as actionLa Fontaine’s tale about Athens

(the swallow, the egg and the eel)

Arabian Nights: Scheherezade and Prince Shahryar

(narrative as a means of survival)

narrative as seduction, spell (Shakespeare’s Othello: Othello ‘seducing’

Desdemona)