Article ID: CBB867181599

What are narratives good for? (2016)

unapi

Narratives may be easy to come by, but not everything is worth narrating. What merits a narrative? Here, I follow the lead of narratologists and literary theorists, and focus on one particular proposal concerning the elements of a story that make it narrative-worthy. These elements correspond to features of the natural world addressed by the historical sciences, where narratives figure so prominently. What matters is contingency. Narratives are especially good for representing contingency and accounting for contingent outcomes. This will be squared with a common view that narratives leave no room for chance. On the contrary, I will argue, tracing one path through a maze of alternative possibilities, and alluding to those possibilities along the way, is what a narrative does particularly well.

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Authors & Contributors
Dagg, Joachim
Blount, Zachary D.
Carlson, Liane
Agnes Bolinska
Tambolo, Luca
Fratto, Elena
Concepts
Historical method
Contingency (philosophy)
Storytelling
Chance
Evolution
Science and literature
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, late
Early modern
21st century
Modern
20th century, early
Places
Italy
France
Great Britain
United States
Russia
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