Narrative – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A narrative or story is any report of connected events, actual or imaginary, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, or still or moving images.[1]

Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic and/or formal categories: non-fiction (e.g. definitively including creative non-fiction, biography, journalism, and historiography); fictionalization of historical events (e.g. anecdote, myth, legend, and historical fiction); and fiction proper (e.g. literature in prose and sometimes poetry, such as short stories, novels, and narrative poems and songs, as well as imaginary narratives as portrayed in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances). Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television and video, radio, gameplay, unstructured recreation, and performance in general, as well as some painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and other visual arts (though several modern art movements refuse the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual), as long as a sequence of events is presented. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", which is derived from the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".[2]

Oral storytelling is perhaps the earliest method for sharing narratives. During most people's childhoods, narratives are used to guide them on proper behavior, cultural history, formation of a communal identity, and values, as especially studied in anthropology today among traditional indigenous peoples.[3] Narratives also act as "living" entities through cultural stories, as they are passed on from generation to generation. Because the narrative storytelling is often left without explicit meanings, children act as participants in the storytelling process by delving deeper into the open-ended story and making their own interpretations.[4]

The word "story" may be used as a synonym for "narrative" as well as for "plot," the collective events within any given narrative. Narratives may also be nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by an unreliable narrator (a character) typically found in noir fiction genre. An important part of narration is the narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate the narrative through a process narration (see also "Narrative Aesthetics" below).

Along with exposition, argumentation, and description, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator communicates directly to the reader.

Owen Flanagan of Duke University, a leading consciousness researcher, writes that "Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers."[5] Stories are an important aspect of culture. Many works of art and most works of literature tell stories; indeed, most of the humanities involve stories.[citation needed]

Stories are of ancient origin, existing in ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, Chinese and Indian cultures and their myths. Stories are also a ubiquitous component of human communication, used as parables and examples to illustrate points. Storytelling was probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment. As noted by Owen Flanagan, narrative may also refer to psychological processes in self-identity, memory and meaning-making.

Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs; and semantics, the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and non-verbal elements, and creating a discourse with different modalities and forms.

In On Realism in Art Roman Jakobson argues that literature exists as a separate entity. He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are the same, except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work of Vladimir Propp, who analysed the plots used in traditional folk-tales and identified 31 distinct functional components.[6] This trend (or these trends) continued in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lvi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. It leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important epistemological questions

In literary theoretic approach, narrative is being narrowly defined as fiction-writing mode in which the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. Until the late 19th century, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author.

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Narrative - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia