Narrative Inquiry & ResearchPart One

Michael A. Peters & Tina (A.C.) BesleyUniversity of Illinois

Presentation at the Auckland University of Technology

Orientations• Who someone is or was can only be said if we

know his or her story, that is his or her biography.  --Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958.  • [M]an is in his actions and practice, as well as in

his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” --Alastair MacIntyre, 1981, p. 216.

The Scope and Significance of Narrative (1)

• narrative is a fundamental way of organizing human experience and a tool for constructing models of reality (Herman);

• narrative allows human beings to come to terms with the temporality of their existence (Ricoeur);

• narrative is a particular mode of thinking, the mode that relates to the concrete and particular as opposed to the abstract and general (Bruner);

• narrative creates and transmits cultural traditions, and builds the values and beliefs that define cultural identities;

• narrative is a vehicle of dominant ideologies and an instrument of power (Foucault);

 

The Scope and Significance of Narrative (2)

• narrative is an instrument of self-creation; • narrative is a repository of practical knowledge,

especially in oral cultures; • narrative is a mold in which we shape and

preserve memories; • narrative, in its fictional form, widens our mental

universe beyond the actual and the familiar and provides a playfield for thought experiments (Schaeffer);

• narrative is an inexhaustible and varied source of education and entertainment;

• narrative is a mirror in which we discover what it means to be human

The Argument• This presentation provides a brief introduction to an

understanding of the literary history of the narrative form and its adoption as the model for understanding (verstehen) and the philosophical basis for the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences)

• Narrative as hermeneutics began with Dilthey and included some of the most innovative thinkers of the late twentieth century including Ricoeur, Foucault and Hayden White.

• It is argued that following the discursive turn, narrative and narratology (the study of narrative) provide a model for a new critical language in education.

• It is also argued that ‘resistance’ (‘counter-narratives’) often first registers in a form of poetics that expresses the emotions and feelings associated with exploitation and other forms of oppression.

Structure of Presentation

Part One – Literary Narrative1. The narrative turn2. conceptualizing narrative; 3. narratology; 4. narrative genres; 5. the poetics of early narrative forms 6. theory of narrativePart Two – Historical Narrative7. the role of narrative and narratology in the human

sciences; 8. the crisis of narratives in the postmodern condition

(Lyotard)9. the notion of narrative identities and the ‘narrated nation’ 10. narrative and the narrative turn as a potential ‘new critical

language’ for education.

Education & pedagogy as narrative

• Education and pedagogy are fundamentally narratively-centered activities

• The forms of narrative inquiry provides a suitable model for analyzing and understanding the relation of education to themes of power, ideology and identity.

• Narrative provides a means for the conduct of qualitative inquiry

The Narrative Turn• Literary narrative theory – Ricoeur• Narrative psychology - Polkinghorne, Bruner• Narrative and psychoanalysis• Narrative therapy• Narratives and socio-linguistic analysis (conversation) –

Labov• Interview analysis - Mishler • Personal narratives – Pratt• Sociological studies of auto/biography – Stanley• Narrative as metaphor – Lakov• Narratives as ‘lived’ and ‘told’ – Mink• W.J.T. Mitchell’s On Narrative (1981)• Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1984, 1985, 1988)• Narrative identity as life story – ‘storied lives’, ontological

narratives, inner narratives• Launch of Narrative Inquiry (Journal of Narrative and Life

History)

Conceptualizing Narrative

• Narrative as a discourse – a series of statements that describe or analyze a set of causally-related events concerning human beings

• Narrative as a speech act – understood as a rhetorical device or act for telling someone something

• Narrative as a cognitive schema – for organizing word uttered or written

Narratology• Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928) and Russian formalists• Jacobson’s structuralism and Claude Levi-Strauss’ adoption of the method of

structural linguistic analysis in anthropology• French term narratologie coined by Tzvetan Todorov in 1969 to view this

body of work retrospectively• distinction between "story," a sequence of actions or events conceived as

independent of their manifestation in discourse, and "discourse," the discursive presentation or narration of events (Culler)

• Fabula/sujet, histoire/disours, histoire/récit, story/plot: distinction between what is narrated and how it is narrated

• The fabula of a text is the raw order in which events occurred, while sujet is defined as the way in which these events are depicted and reshaped in their emplotment

• thematic narratology (semiotic formalization of the sequences of the actions told) - Propp, Bremond, Greimas, Dundes, et al.

• modal narratology (examines the manner of their telling, stressing voice, point of view,transformation of the chronological order, rhythm and frequency) - Genette, Prince, et al.

Branches of Narratology• Today's narratological branches include (among others):• a psychoanalytic narratology (Brooks 1984)• a historiographic narratology (Cohn 1999)• a possible worlds narratology (Ryan 1991; 1998; Ronen 1994; Gutenberg

2000)• a legal narratology (Brooks and Gewirtz, eds. 1996)• a feminist narratology (Warhol 1989; Lanser 1992; Mezei, ed. 1996)• a gender studies narratology (Nünning and Nünning eds 2004)• a cognitive narratology (Perry 1979, Sternberg 1993 [1978], Jahn 1997)• a 'natural narratology' (Fludernik 1996)• a postmodernist narratology (McHale 1987, 1992; Currie 1998)• a rhetorical narratology (Phelan 1996, Kearns 1999)• a cultural studies narratology (Nünning 2000)• a transgeneric narratology (Nünning and Nünning, eds. 2002, Hühn 2004)• a political narratolgy (Bal, ed, 2004)• and a psychonarratology (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003 [psychometric

empirical approach]).

Narrative Genres• There are countless forms of narrative in the world. First of all,

there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man's stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances: narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epic history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds [...]. (Barthes 1975 [1966]: 237

Diagram of Narrative Genres

The Poetics of Early Narrative Forms

• The narrative form is perhaps the earliest genre to capture human experience, recorded orally and in written form as the Homeric epics, Orphic Hymns, lyrical Greek poetry and, later, fables and ballads which were fictional and poetical accounts of mythical and sometimes historical events and heroes.

The Epic Narrative• The epic as a narrative genre of

poetry that retells in a continuous narrative the life and works of a heroic or mythological person, is the basis of the Western canon in the form of the Iliad, Odyssey (with elements reaching back to 1500BC) and Nibelungenlied (a Middle High German epic poem written in the early 13th century and based on the legends of Siegfried and of the Burgundian kings).

The Epic• These epics constitute a narrativizing of

experience, often read or performed musically, distinguished by its scale and style, and dealing with events and persons deemed to be historically real.

• Before Herodotus’ histories the epic served as a form of recorded historical experience and reconstruction for the tribe.

• The transmission, learning and performance of the epic (sometimes over several days) formed the basis of tribal ‘education’ that depicted the typical epic hero cycle that constituted a predictable cycle of events.

Significance of Narrative Poetry

• Narrative poetry as epic and allegory, poeticized heroes and events, and became the memory of an essential temporal experience--an original reconstruction of events and persons.

• Both the Iliad and Odyssey had elements of tragedy that prefigured the great Greek dramas or staged narratives such as Sophocles’ Oedipus that typify the golden age of Greek drama. The Greek tragedy was characterized by an absence of a narrator and signaled experimentation with multiple voices which are all equally authoritative.

• http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/1i/5_beaton.pdf

Oral Tradition• Complexity of oral tradition – Walter Ong, Albert Lord, Ruth

Finnegan, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jack Goody• Orality and literacy• Most native traditions distinguished between three oral

genres: narrative, song, and ritual drama. In all these genres the oral tradition was informed by a central belief that human beings should strive for harmony with the universe.

• Oral narratives tended to be divided into “true” and “fictional” categories. True narratives often served a kind of Biblical function, a collection of central texts that defined communal values and from which other narratives branched off. The core story was the origin tale, a narrative that explained the creation of the world and the tribe

• South Pacific Oral Traditions http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/list/12#12

Māori Oral Traditions• Māori oral traditions consisted of the narratives, songs,

sayings, and genealogies handed down over generations• Narratives, songs and sayings are a source of lore and

ancestral belonging• Māori composed composed, memorized, and performed

laments, love poems, war chants, and prayers anddeveloped a mythology to explain and record their own past and the legends of their gods and tribal heroes.

• The supreme importance of the oral tradition against the European book

• In practice the oral mode rules and European literacy can function insidiously as a culturally regressive force by compelling those who speak eloquently to substitute a mode in which they are less fluent.

• Te Reo o Te Taitokerau

Genealogies & Waiata

• After telling of the voyage to Aotearoa and the definitive acts that occurred subsequently, the traditions of each iwi trace through the

genealogies the famous ancestors who founded descent groups, defended their lands against outsiders, avenged defeats, and made politically significant marriages that ensured their people's wellbeing--or, in some cases, stubbornly chose for themselves the person they would marry. These narratives relating to more recent events can generally be described as legends rather than myths, in that they contain much that is historically accurate.

• ‘In waiata our forebears spoke their hearts - in grief and celebration. For many hundreds of years this great oral tradition of song flourished in Aotearoa. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in time of rapid change, Maori scholars recorded for the future the words of thousands of waiata.’--Margaret Orbell

Diversity of oral tradition• Māori poetry  • haka  • karakia  • kawa • whakatauki - proverbs• waiata - songs • whaikorero  • legends  • mythology   • folklore 

Evolution of Narrative• The narrative poem in the form of epic and

folk ballad (dating from the 12th century; and later, the literary ballad of the 18th century), were early forms of the mythological, historical and folk tale, prefiguring the rise of the novel and other short prose forms, particularly, fairy tales, fables, biographies and autobiographies, short stories, fantasy, legend, mystery, travelogues, and science fiction.

The Rise of the Novel• The period 1200-1750 saw the rise of the novel

and marked the beginning of a new form of fictional narrative described by the word in English, Spanish (novela) and Italian (novella).

• It was predated by the romantic fiction (romans) that developed in 12th century France and consisted in a series of adventures, such as the Arthurian legends, before what we know as the ‘novelistic’ work of Baccacio, Chaucer, Machiavelli, and Cervantes.

Origin of English Novel• The origins of the English novel in the period

1600-1740 marked a new stage in narrative reflexivity and encouraged a new set of theorizations by the likes of Georg Lukacs, Gerard Genette, M. M. Bakhtin, and Roland Barthes, among others. The novel as a new literary form begun by Fielding, Richardson and Defoe in eighteenth century England and Furetière, Scarron and Lesage in France, indicated a new realism about life and placed new value on originality, freedom from traditionalism in literature and particularly the epic romance, and individualism (Watt, 1957).

Narrative Innovations• It is during this period (the ‘long

eighteenth century’) that most of the major innovations in narrative technique take shape with fiction, in the early stages, involving the close imitation of true narratives and, at the end, competing with and contributing to the writing of historical narrative.

• The hard and fast distinction between fictional and historical narratives is, therefore, useful as a basis for intellectual discernment and not as a rigid separator.

Narrative Social Science• Early forms of social science qualitative research,

including introspection, took its inspiration historically from literary forms, although it is difficult to separate off historical from fictional narratives. The confession, the memoir, letters, the diary and fictional forms like the novel—along with the portrait and sculptural bust as its visual artistic counterpart—developed a set of rhetorical, authorial and reader conventions that led later to personal histories, to the biography and autobiography, and to life histories, all of which serialized the temporal form of experience as a systematic reflective form of re-search.

Poststructuralist theory of narrative

• ...For the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid, and closest to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts were also revealing something... beneath this whole thematic, through it and even within it, we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.– Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 7th January 1976

Postmodern narrative theory• Rise of postmodern literature (from 1941 – death of Joyce and

Woolf)• Transition literature in Beat Generation, Theater of the Absurd, &

Magical Realism• In direct contrast to the structuralist claim of an independent

signifier superior to the signified, post-structuralism generally views the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united; meaning itself inheres to the play of difference.

• Critique of grand narratives (one history, usually white, male & European) in favor of local narratives

• Fragmentation of self (and corporation) into polyvocal (means many voiced) narration

• Affirmative and skeptical positions• Genealogical discourse (how stories, concepts, paradigms, history

changes over time). • Reject stories of time told in linear sequence. • A focus on how "collective memory" involves forgetting pain and

suffering and recomposing memory to encompass new or previously excluded stories. 

Postmodern Canon• Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale - Dystopian feminist's nightmare: women are

strictly controlled and forced to give up their offspring• J.G. Ballard - Crash - Controversal novel whose characters have a strange obsession

with the "sexuality" of automobile accidents• Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange - A dystopian examination of social

conditioning, free will, and post-industrial alienation• William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch - Classic tale of the ravings of a heroin addict,

which made fitting use of the random "cut-up" technique• Don DeLillo – White Noise - Prophetic tale of humanity's self destructive use of

technologies that pollute our bodies and minds• Phillip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Simulacra focused novel

adapted into the classic movie Blade Runner• Bret Easton Ellis -American Psycho - A look at US culture's desensitization to violence

via a Wall Street professional and cold blooded killer• William Gibson - Neuromancer - THE novel that defined the genre and terms

Cyberspace and Cyberpunk• Joseph Heller - Catch-22 - Satiric World War II classic that has become synonymous

with the paradoxical no-win logic involved in law and government• Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow - A victim of Pavlovian experiments is able to

detect incoming german rockets and their destruction by his arousal• Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five - Satiric novel of a man unstuck in

time, who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden and the numbing effects of war

Experimentation of postmodern narrative

• Simple realism leaves out a good deal, and presupposes countless assumptions about what constitutes the real – especially relation between individual character and action, question the supremacy of the humanist subject leading to reappraisal of ‘modernist’ character

• Authorial experiments – ‘damaged fiction’ introduced impossibilities e.g. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969); multiple endings, multiple realities - The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60

• New questions about the boundary between fiction and reality• coded intertextuality, or dependence on another literary work, e.g.,

Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) answers Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858)

• skeptical deconstruction of historiography e.g., Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor

• Reduced narrative - Endgame (1958); development of minimalism - avoidance of the unneccessary—of “bourgeois” ornament

• Experimentation with sequence and time – narrative incoherence; interruptions of narrative sequence

• surrealism (based often on dream processes) – decentred order in Finnegans Wake (1939) or Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

• Repudiation of structure - fragmentation into small structural units - parts tend to be related less by a larger syntax, or logical sequence, than by collage.

Experimentation• Questioning the logical and metaphorical connections ordering things -

quasi-paranoid vision, often with an apocalyptic-satiric strain, as in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).

• metafiction, or novel that exposes its own fictional illusion in some way such as naive narrator

• Emergence of magic realist or poetic novel - kaleidoscopic variety, real places and historical events are often introduced, but all in a distorted or poetically molded form, e.g., Bulgakov’s The Master & Margarita

• self-begetting novels (poioumena) e.g., Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) – exploring the limits of narrative truth and self-reference

• Emergence of feminist and postcolonial fiction• tolerance of polyvalent interpretation• Often dominated by theory and intent on overturning realist expectations