Analyzing Social Narratives

Shaul R. Shenhav, Shaul Shenhav

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415537414
• eBook ISBN: 9781136268366
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Interpreting human stories, whether those told by individuals, groups, organizations, nations, or even civilizations, opens a wide scope of research options for understanding how people construct, shape, and reshape their perceptions, identities, and beliefs. Such narrative research is a rapidly growing field in the social sciences, as well as in the societally oriented humanities, such as cultural studies. This methodologically framed book offers conceptual directions for the study of social narrative, guiding readers through the means of narrative research and raising important ethical and value-related dilemmas.

Shenhav details three classic elements of narrative—text, story, and narration—familiar concepts to those in literary studies. To the classic trilolgy of terms, this book also adds multiplicity, a crucial element for applying narrative analysis to the social sciences as it rests on the understanding that social narratives seek reproduction and self-multiplicity in order to become "social" and influential. The aim of this book is to create an easy, clear, and welcoming introduction to narratology as a mode of analysis, especially designed for students of the social sciences to provide the basics of a narratological approach, and to help make research and writing in this tradition more systematic.

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1 STORY, TEXT, NARRATION, AND MULTIPLICITY IN SOCIAL NARRATIVES

DOI: 10.4324/9780203109083-2

On September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war against Germany. The same day King George VI delivered his first wartime address—a truly remarkable speech, which is featured in the historical drama film The King’s Speech.¹

“In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history”—the king commenced this historic address—“I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself” (George VI 1939a). From then onward the speech tells a story—that of a nation that finds itself at war for the second time in some two decades: “For the second time in the lives of most of us we are at war.” The king proceeds to describe Britain’s attempts to find “a peaceful way out of the differences” with the enemy. At this point the speech accomplishes something that only stories can: it evokes the experience of the past together with the possibilities for the future, all in one breath, in a continuum of events. Within it, the desirable future—“with God’s help, we shall prevail”—can be told by the speaker and imagined as reality by the audience.

This and other unique qualities of narratives make it obvious why, from time immemorial, narratives have drawn the attention of philosophers, thinkers, and scholars. According to Barthes (1975 [1966]), not only does narrative “start with the very history of mankind,” but “there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories” (237). The important role narratives play in society is at the core of Plato’s concern about the potential danger stories and myths pose to his Republic; narrative plots constitute part of Aristotle’s Poetics; and narratives are also discussed by Roman rhetorician Quintilian in his famous twelve-volume textbook Institutio Oratoria. It should not come as a surprise, then, that in his historic speech, King George decided to tell the story of Britain and its people.

This chapter lays the conceptual foundation for the book. It discusses the concept of narrative, emphasizing the importance of the story-text-narration (Rimmon-Kenan 2002 [1983]) triplet and the idea of multiplicity for the study of narratives in the social domain. The discussion also includes a definition of the concept of social narrative. In the next chapters, following a discussion of the four elements of narrative analysis, namely, story, text, narration, and multiplicity, I will return to King George’s address. Apart from its undeniable rhetorical excellence, this piece can serve as a salient example for demonstrating some of the theoretical and methodological issues presented and elaborated in the subsequent chapters.

Narrative Research in the Social Sciences

According to the Global Language Monitor’s Top Words of 2010, “the narrative” was the third most popular word in their global survey of the English language. It was concluded from the analysis that “‘the narrative’ has recently been gaining traction in the political arena” (Global Language Monitor 2010). Awareness of the uses of narrative both in academia and in daily life is on the rise among scholars in the social sciences and the humanities (Franzosi 1998, 2004).

The concept of narrative has made inroads into various fields and disciplines, stimulating what is often termed “the narrative turn” (Czarniawska 2010, Herman 2009: 23). In fact, narrative research in the social sciences is growing so rapidly (for an extensive review see Clandinin and Rosiek 2007) that, as Frank (2010) put it, “no one will ever read everything that has been written about stories and storytelling” (17).

By and large, in today’s social sciences, the narrative mode is considered to be not only a basic form of communication, but also, as noted by Fischer (2003), a “mode of thought” that “furnishes communication with the particular details out of which social meaning is constructed” (179). Moreover, argues Fischer, “it is through storytelling that people access social positions in their communities, understand the goals and values of different social groups, and internalize social conventions” (Fischer 2003: 179). By virtue of their sense-making function (Fisher 1985), narratives in the social arena have a strong impact on people’s perceptions of social reality both as individuals and as groups (e.g., Patterson and Monroe 1998, Shanahan, Jones, and McBeth 2011). Polletta et al. (2011), for example, claim that “stories told by groups, communities, and nations [have] created bonds of belonging and identity” (112–13); Hajer (1995) sees narratives as “discursive cement” that keeps a discourse-coalition together (65); and Carr asserts that a community “exists by virtue of a story which is articulated and accepted, which typically concerns the group’s origins and its destiny, and which interprets what is happening now in the light of these two temporal poles” (Carr 1986: 128).

Fischer (2003) regards narrative as a “cognitive scheme” that imposes “coherent interpretation on the whirl of events and actions that surrounds us” (163). Narratives, he asserts, place “social phenomena in the larger patterns that attribute social and political meaning to them” (179). As mentioned in the Introduction, this quality of the narrative form resides in the concept of narrative identity, developed by Ricoeur (1991) (see also Hammack and Pilecki 2012, McAdams 2001, Singer 2004, Somers and Gibson 1994). Narrative, according to this notion, “provides the practical means” by which persons “can understand themselves as living through time, [as] a human subject with a past, present, and future, made whole by the coherence of the narrative plot with a beginning, middle, and end” (Elliott 2005: 125). In a similar vein, Polkinghorne (1988) sees narrative as “the primary scheme by means of which human beings give meaning to their experience of temporality and personal actions” (Polkinghorne 1988: 11, see also Czarniawska 2004, Zilber 2009).

Narratives in the social domain can situate contemporary events in a broad temporal context of social experiences and involve the individual in a story of collective agency, invoking such emotionally loaded constructs as “our military unit,” “the nation,” or “our state.” Thus, narratives enfold present social events in a time frame that extends beyond their temporal boundaries, giving the audience a sense of continuity and familiarity with episodes and occurrences that they personally could never have experienced (Shenhav 2009). From the researcher’s position “[n]arratives can be indicative not only of the experiences that people have, but also of the means of interpreting those experiences that are available to them in a given culture” (Patterson and Monroe 1998: 330).

Strategies to Define the Concept of Narrative

The trajectory traversed by the notion of narrative is typical for an academic concept that gains a foothold in various disciplines (e.g., Franzosi 2010, Hyvärinen 2006) and is then appropriated in nonacademic arenas, such as the media, advertising, speechwriting, and medicine. Over the years, the interest in narratives has led to the development of many methodological approaches, anchored in different definitions and resulting in widely diverging understandings of the field’s key concepts (Bamberg 2006). Scholars of various disciplines have used the concept of narrative to mean different things, making the study of narrative rather confusing. Even the widely—and routinely—used expression “narrative approach” may have become rather vague: does the term “narrative” designate the object of investigation, or does it encompass the methodological or epistemological assumptions we bring to our investigations? While the latter undoubtedly have an important part in narrative analysis, I frame my preliminary definition of narrative by identifying the features that qualify a discourse as narrative.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the definition of this concept is that, while narratives themselves can be overwhelmingly complicated and rich, the actual definition of narrative can—and, in my opinion, should—be fairly technical, simple, and straightforward. Accordingly, I begin my exposition by appealing to a long tradition of scholars who defined a narrative as, first and foremost, a “thing”—an object or an artifact. However, opinions regarding the sufficient conditions for narrativity diverge based on methodological, analytical and, to some extent, normative considerations. In defining narrative, researchers in various disciplines differ not only as to the actual denotation of the term, but also in the strategies they employ. Later, I mention a number of such approaches, with a focus on a minimalist definitional strategy, which in my opinion is preferable, at least for the social sciences (Shenhav 2005b, see also discussion in Rimmon-Kenan 2006).

Let us go back to the question of what makes a certain “thing” a narrative, and conversely, why other “things” are not narratives. While one can find references to narratives as “any spoken or written presentation” (Polkinghorne 1988: 13, note however that Polkinghorne himself does not use this definition), a good starting point for defining narrative is by pointing out a premise shared, in one way or another, by most definitions—namely, that a narrative is essentially a representation of a course of events. Why is the course of events so important? Probably because this is the way we, as human beings, conceive of time. The representation of temporality, then, is a feature that makes it possible, even at this early point of analysis, to differentiate narratives from other forms of expression or thought. For example, laws, regulations, most poems, charts, and equations usually do not represent a course of events arranged in a time line, and therefore do not qualify as narratives.

Taking a minimalist strategy for defining narrative taps what narratives are, but not what they do or what we want them to do. Minimalist definitions are based on the work of narratologists from different backgrounds, who articulated the basic characteristics of narratives. For example, literary theorist Gérard Genette appeals to the conception of narrative as essentially “[a] succession of events, real or fictitious” (Genette 1980 [1972]: 25, Rimmon-Kenan 2002 [1983]).² Similarly, in their introduction to the book Discourse Analysis, Jaworski and Coupland conceive of narratives as “discursive accounts of factual or fictitious events which take, or have taken or will take place at a particular time…” (Jaworski and Coupland 1999: 29–30). Linguist William Labov also asserts that it is a temporal sequence that distinguishes narrative from other forms of discourse. He defines a minimal-ist narrative “as a sequence of two clauses which are temporally ordered: that is, a change in their order will result in a change in the temporal sequence of the original semantic interpretation” (Labov 1972: 360). It is important to note that the inclusion of additional elements in the definition of narrative limits the scope of what one considers a narrative. My considerations in using a minimalist definition of narrative are substantive in nature, namely, to avoid adding elements to a basic structural definition, as will be explained in what follows. In fact, in delimiting a set of texts that qualify as narrative according to this approach, I am being a maximalist.

While the minimalist strategy of defining narrative highlights the idea of sequence or succession of events (Abbott 2008 [2002], Franzosi 2010, Rimmon-Kenan 2002 [1983]), some scholars adduce additional ordering criteria, as reviewed next.

Causality. A common additional criterion to define narrative is causality. History philosopher Louis Mink, for example, claims that a narrative “presumably in all cases contains a chronicle but ad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Being a Story-Listener
• 1 Story, Text, Narration, and Multiplicity in Social Narratives
• 2 Story: Stories and Characters in Social Narratives
• 3 Text: The Texts of Social Narratives
• 4 Narration: The Power of Narrators
• 5 Multiplicity: The Proliferation of Social Narratives
• 6 Normative Perspectives in the Study of Social Narratives
• 7 Analyzing Social Narratives
• References
• Index