The Riches of Narrative Per Se

Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2015

2012

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 this essay I refine and extend a defense of literary cognitivism (the view that works of literary fiction may serve as sources of knowledge (and not merely belief) in a way that depends crucially on their being fictional) that I and others have provided in earlier publications. Crucial to that defense is a development of Aristotle's idea of successful dramas as unfolding with " internal necessity " , in light of which I distinguish those forms of narration that show, rather than merely state, that something is so. Literary fiction also often takes the form of a thought experiment, and I distinguish among three aims of such experiment: to make claims (didactic), to exhort to action (directive) and to stimulate inquiry (interrogative). In developing this approach I defend a view of the author of a literary fiction as being in conversation with her readers, and to that end draw upon a Stalnaker-inspired notion of conversation as driven by an evolving common ground shared among interlocutors.

Robert Kawashima, Gilles Philippe, and Thelma Sowley, eds., Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature presented to Ann Banfield, 2008

Sylvie Patron, ed., Optional Narrator Theories: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, "Frontiers of Narrative", 2021

This article falls within the sphere of the history of linguistic theories, as it is understood by the so-called “French school”: closely related to epistemology, more than to pure historiography. It also belongs to a discipline or field of research which does not yet exist in literary disciplines as a whole: the history and epistemology of literary theories. The two disciplines share a common condition, which is that recent theories often fall victim to being overlooked in the same way as old theories do, an oversight which is not necessarily linked to their falsification or inclusion within a more general theory. In this article, narrator theories (the theory of the existence of a fictional narrator in all fictional narratives or pan-narrator theory, and optional-narrator theory or theories) will be placed within the wider framework of the history of literary theories and of the complex relationship it entertains with linguistics. The first section will offer a brief chronology of the question of the narrator and narrative enunciation in the modern era. This will be discussed in more detail in the subsequent sections. The aim is to pull back the veil on a certain number of received ideas, for example the idea that narrative theory acquired scientific status (under the name of narratology) with the recognition of the existence of a fictional narrator in all fictional narratives. We will show on the contrary the confusions and errors that narratologists commit when they present the concept of the narrator or related and associated concepts. We will also note the general presentism of narrative theory. The fact, for example, that a coherent theory of narration (of the narrator and narrative enunciation) was already available in 1804 is of hardly any importance to classical and current narratologists, no more than to current proponents of optional-narrator theories.

2017

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