Understanding Narratives and Narrative Understanding

Autor: Ismay Barwell
Rok vydání: 2009
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 67:49-59
ISSN: 1540-6245
0021-8529
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6245.2008.01334.x
Popis: Understanding narratives requires an appreciation of the distinct understanding that narratives supply of the events they are about. Storytelling might not be present in all cultures and at all times, but it is widespread. Stories are told in conversations, in myths, in dances, in movies, in criminal trials, in local and international news programs, in sports commentaries, in sermons, and in lectures in philosophy, anthropology, and biology. They are told as anecdotes, as jokes, as evidence, as histories, and as biographies and autobiographies. The ubiquity of stories and storytelling suggests that storytelling fulfills important social functions. Two of these are basic. In telling stories about what happened, both how it happened and how it is significant are explained. Storytelling fulfills more than these two epistemological functions, but they are essential. Every story fulfills them to some degree, and narratives fulfill them to a high degree. They do this because they have conclusions. In "Narrative Explanation" David Velleman begins as I do from the premise that narratives involve a distinctive understanding of the events they are about. The key to this understanding lies in the nature of storytelling and stories. Velleman claims that "what makes a story" is a "particular way of organizing events into an intelligible whole."1 He says, "The distinctiveness of narrative understanding is inseparable from its form" because there is "some explanatory force peculiar to the narrative form itself."2 His conception of narrative form is traditional.3 A narrative has a tripartite structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which is a conclusion. I agree that there is an intimate connection between the distinctiveness of narrative understand
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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