Introduction: Narrative Knowing, Living, Telling

Recent theories of narrative have highlighted the radically different functions and roles that narrative can perform —as a particular form and structure of discourse; as a form of knowing the social world; as a perspective and frame of action; as a form of human identity; and as a mode of human interaction. These perspectives shape the kinds of inquiry in the numerous disciplines in which narrative is practiced nowadays, but often with completely different agenda and emphases within different disciplinary fields. While literary scholars, for example, have demonstrated substantial interest in narrative as a way of knowing, this perspective has been largely absent from recent work in the social sciences —one exception is Jerome Bruner's path-breaking contributions.

The purpose of this special issue is to look for common ground between the agenda of narrative studies in postclassical narratology, socio-linguistics, and the social sciences. Almost ten years ago, David Herman (1999) suggested such an interdisciplinary program in his article "Toward a Socionarratology: New Ways of Analyzing Natural-Language Narratives." Herman's suggestion, which he further elaborated in Story Logic (2002) and continues in this issue, has not yet engendered major rapport between the disciplinary fields, a state of affairs this issue proposes to change, as much as it is possible in one publication. There is, indeed, a number of theoretical discussions that seem to offer new bases for broader scholarly exchange across the disciplines. One such theme —discussed in this issue by Herman and many others —is what philosophers of mind call "folk psychology," the everyday assumption that other human beings have desires, beliefs, and reasons for their actions to be reckoned with. As Bruner (1990), Herman (in this issue), and Daniel Hutto (2007, 2008) have argued, the form of "folk psychological" knowledge is not so much conceptual as narrative. "Sometimes," Hutto says, others "violate norms (or appear to do so) in ways that we can only make sense of by understanding them in a wider context. . . . Any account that has as its subject matter the reason why a person acted on a particular occasion" can be called "a folk psychological narrative" (2007: 45). Hutto's Narrative Practice Hypothesis maintains that this intuitive, narrative capacity to account for reasons is received in early childhood by listening to stories about action in context.

About forty years ago, in an undeniably enthusiastic passage on narrative and life, Barbara Hardy (1968) suggested that most human activities —from knowing, through planning, to emotion —are attached to narrative processing. In the 1960s this idea was rather odd from the perspective of structuralist narratology, and for social scientists there was then no such issue as "narrative" at all. It was the philosopher of history, Louis Mink, who took critical issue with Hardy's essay, and came to the famous conclusion: "So it seems truer to say that narrative qualities are transferred from art to life" (60), implying that narrative qualities are not present in everyday cognition, emotion, and action the way Hardy suggested. Mink defends the important and legitimate point that history and the world do not consist of neat and finished narratives, but he possibly also misreads Hardy's argument when he says, "Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends" (60). Hardy was not saying that life as such is a narrative. It is somewhat ironic that in making this distinction Mink should adopt, albeit negatively, a classical, Aristotelian point about beginning, middle, and end —applied famously to the art of tragedy.

The purpose of the articles in this collection is not necessarily to challenge the now almost classical and oft repeated thesis "Stories are not lived but told" but to argue that narrative resources indeed seem to be used by people intuitively every day in order to understand human interaction; they thus become a necessary part of the general cultural stock. Narrative indeed imitates life, but occasionally life imitates narrative, as Jerome Bruner has put it (1987: 13). From the perspective of human interaction, authors such as David Herman, Alan Palmer (2004), and Lisa Zunshine (2006), among many others who...