The Definition of a Narrative?
In the sciences and engineering, one mostly experiences crisp, hard boundaries as to the ways in which these professionals collectively agree to describe various physical, chemical, biological, electrical, mechanical, and structural phenomena. This in no way says that these definition do not change and evolve, but it indicates a more fact-centered approach.
However, in the humanities, all things, including definitions, are up for discussion and debate. One person’s treasure is another person’s rubbish. A fact for a person subscribing to one school of philosophy might be deemed nonsense or fantasy to a person subscribing to another school. The very nature of what a scholar chooses to study can cause great variation in attempting to find a definition for terms that are used in day to day scholarly discourse among professionals.
Ask three poets to define a poem, and you could draw blank stares as a result of your blasphemous inquiry. The next moment, you could draw six different answers from the same three poets. You might also find yourself surrounded by qualifiers such as “it depends…” Not entirely satisfying for someone desirous of a quick fix, but it remains important to be open to the rich and imprecise nature and human variation that is the humanities.
Recently, I went hunting for an authoritative definition of narrative. I first turned to an expert in the field. I next turned to the Oxford English Dictionary, and I found one of its offspring, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Needless to say, each of these sources define the word NARRATIVE a wee bit differently — if they opted to offer a definition at all.
The Oxford English Dictionary offers six different definitions, but the one I choose to select for my circumstance here is
“2. a. An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story, an account.” (1)
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms offers a long definition of which I reference key elements:
“narrative[na-ra-tiv], a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator … consist[s of] a set of events (the story) recounted in a process of narration (or discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (the plot).”
I also perused several other authoritative references. For personal use while engaging in conversations around narrative and its relatives, I define it simply as a story. Outside of those engaged in the complex and evolving semantics, nuances, and details of deep scholarly interchange, it seems to me that this offers a simple basis for discussing the vast amount of stories and the incredible ways in which these stories are told — a shared language provides the basis for richer dialog.
Hence, I offer these thoughts to our on-going discussion and exploration.
(1) “narrative, n.” OED Online. June 2003. Oxford University Press. 03 Sep. 2007 <http://dictionary.oed.com>.
(2) “narrative” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Christopher Baldick. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Vanderbilt University. 3 Sep. 2007 http://www.oxfordreference.com
Just define narrative when you use it. If everyone did this (without using either “story” or “narrative” in the definition), then at least we could essay the affordances and constraints of various definitions.