CourseCompendium

Narrative

RELATED TERMS:

Narrative storytelling

The reasons for adopting narrative, one of the three key nodes of the tripartite model guiding the design of narrative environments, the other two being people and environment, can be quickly grasped from Terry Eagleton’s review of Brian Boyd’s On the origin of stories: evolution, cognition, fiction. Eagleton outlines the perceived advantages of narrative storytelling, as suggested by Boyd. They include, for example:

• Making people more skilled in social situations;
• Speeding people’s capacity to process information;
• Allowing people to test alternative scenarios;
• Enabling people to think beyond the here and now (the present; the concrete);
• Consolidating and communicating social norms; and
• Providing models of co-operation.

Narrative storytelling, as a form of art, can enact a richly-patterned cognitive play that serves to:

• stimulate a flexible mind;
• modify key perceptual, cognitive and expressive systems;
• improve our attunement to one another;
• foster sociability within the group;
• develop habits of imaginative exploration;
• raise confidence, by enabling us to reshape the world on our own terms;
• offer general principles and social information, guiding behaviour and improving decision-making;
• increase our range of behavioural options;
• acquaint us with risks and opportunities; and
• supply the emotional resources needed to cope with inevitable setbacks.

Boyd adduces all these advantages in support of his evolutionary theory of narrative (as art) which he calls ‘evocriticism’. However, Eagleton points out that none of these functions of art or narrative, as listed above, is much illuminated by being re-described in evolutionary terms. There is no need, Eagleton maintains, to appeal to Darwin in order “to claim that art can refine our senses or yield us a sharper sense of other minds.” (Eagleton, 2009). Nevertheless, there remains a need to understand art and narrative in terms that are less “doggedly utilitarian” than Boyd’s approach.

Bruner and narrative thinking

In an educational context, Jerome Bruner defines and defends the existence of two modes of thinking:

• paradigmatic or logical-scientific thinking; and
• narrative thinking.

These two modes operate with different means, ends and legitimacy criteria.

The narrative mode, as Monteagudo explains, taking his summary from Bruner (1985, 1987, 1991):

• is based on common knowledge and stories;
• it is interested in the vicissitudes of human actions,
• it develops practical and situated knowledge; and
• it has a temporal structure and it emphasizes the agentivity of social actors .

References

Bruner, J. (1985). Narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought. In J. Bruner (2006). In Search of Pedagogy. The Selected Works of Jerome Bruner. New York: Routledge, vol. 2, pp. 116-128.

Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. In J. Bruner (2006). In Search of Pedagogy. The Selected Works of Jerome Bruner. New York: Routledge, vol. 2, pp. 129-140.

Bruner, J. (1991). The Narrative construal of reality. In J. Bruner (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 130-149.

Eagleton, T. (2009). Darwin won’t help. London Review of Books, 31 (18), pp.20, 22.

Monteagudo, J. G. (2011) Jerome Bruner and the challenges of the narrative turn, Narrative Inquiry, 21(2), pp. 295–302. doi: 10.1075/ni.21.2.07gon