A Theory of Narrative in Culture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4820104 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Luc Herman (0000-0001-6013-2900, KU Leuven), Bart Vervaeck |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 605-634 |
| Publication date | 2017-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/03335372-4184265 |
| OpenAlex | W2793338138 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 46 |
This essay aims to clarify how literary and nonliterary narratives function in society and culture. To reach this broad goal, it first presents a general framework inspired by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the American New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt. The framework centers on the notions of circulation and negotiation. Stories circulate from one field to another, thereby transporting and transforming narrative templates that belong to these fields. Stories negotiate these templates and in so doing invite readers to activate and negotiate their own narrative habitus. The second part of the essay compares the proposed theory of narrative in culture to existing narrative theories about circulation and negotiation and to the traditional model of narrative as a form of communication, which it tries to overcome. Finally, the essay offers a detailed analysis of The Lump of Coal (2008) by Lemony Snicket. The analysis shows that stories can be interpreted as ways of circulating and negotiating narrative templates on three levels. First, the plot of the text itself can be read as a circulation of elements taken from various domains mentioned in the story (especially art, nutrition, economy, and religion). Second, there is circulation and negotiation between the text and the paratext (including the blurb and the illustrations on the dust jacket), and third, the text negotiates and circulates contextual elements, more specifically templates, such as generic patterns, ethnic stereotypes, and commonsense morality
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Historicism · Literature · Morality · Narrative · Narrative criticism · Narrative inquiry · Narrative network · Negotiation · Social science · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies
Literary negotiations of grief experiences
Audio description and the spectrum of materiality
Fictions multiverselles et narratologie culturelle
Moral complexity in multiperspective video games
Real readers reading Wasco’s ‘City’
A Rational Continuum
Form and negotiation in fictions of memory
Migration and interactive narrative in video games
The Dialogic Imagination
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
How We Became Posthuman
Basic Elements of Narrative
Letting Stories Breathe
Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
Distinction
Shakespearean Negotiations
Distinction
Challenging Canada
Gérard Genette Paratexts
Origins of Human Communication
Essay on Exoticism
The Logic of Practice
Labov and Waletzky Thirty Years On
A model of narrative circulation
Text Is Not Communication
Irony's Edge
Kultur als Prozess
The Postmodern Condition
The Narrative Construction of Reality
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,33 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |