narrative

narrative
A basic way human beings have of apprehending the world and giving it a coherence, and most social science has recently been touched by what has been called the ‘narrative’ or ‘interpretive turn’. A new discipline—narratology—has slowly emerged which takes as its central task the analysis of stories and narratives. There are a wide range of theories of narrative: Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson in A Reader's Guide to Literary Theory (3rd edn., 1993) for instance suggest thirteen: dialogical, hermeneutic, critical, neo-Aristotelian, psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstructive, reader-response, Marxist, formalist, semiotic, structuralist, and post-structuralist theories. Combining several strands of thought, narratives are usually seen to be composed of several key elements.

‘Story’ is the most basic element—and usually implies as Gary Kenyon and William Randall aptly put it in their book Restorying our Lives...

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