The Position of the Narrative in Contemporary Society

What is narrative? To judge from the plethora of definitions, the lexical disparity and conflicting assumptions of the essays gathered here, one might conclude that the gods themselves disagree, that the literati do not share a clear conception of narrative. Such a judgment would be correct. For despite prescient efforts by our editor, there has not emerged a focused vision of narrative among those who are creating a new literary history. This is no accident. The fact is that narrative no longer provides an adequate voice for the postmodern world. Narratives, of course, are still being written, but they are elaborations of an outworn paradigm. Such conventional literature catches only those fish that are already dead. Result: a proliferation of new uses of the term narrative to apply to wholly new literary forms, a satirization or reification of the apodictic properties of narration. What is the social situation in which old forms of narrative have

Aesthetics · Art · Economics · Literature · Narrative · Position (finance) · Sociology · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis

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  Open Access•Barbara Czarniawska•Organization•1997

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• Narration or Science? Collapsing the Division in Organization Studies

  Open Access•Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges•Organization•1995

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