Narrative: State of the art (review)

In Merlin Donald's (1991) view, narrative is the 'natural product' of language. By this I take him to mean that when language emerged among Homo sapiens it served primarily to represent narratives of events that could not be easily communicated by the mimetic means of action and gesture. Why would narrating loom urgently as a goad to the evolution (biological and/or cultural) of language? Ochs and Capps (2001:60) suggest an answer in their list of motivations for narrative: 'Human beings narrate to remember, instill cultural knowledge, grapple with a problem, rethink the status quo, soothe, empathize, inspire, speculate, justify a position, dispute, tattle, evaluate one's own and others' identities, shame, tease, laud, and entertain, among other ends'. Narratives serving these varied purposes require resources of complex grammars, especially for expressing temporal and causal relations, keeping separate tags on ongoing processes and actions in events, and invoking a multiplicity of linguistic markers of tense and aspect (see Ricoeur 1988).

These two aspects of narrative—roughly, function and structure—are the focus of Narrative:State of the art, edited by Michael Bamberg, also the editor of the journal Narrative Inquiry. Interest in narrative has grown dramatically from its earliest appearances as a scholarly construct in the social sciences (e.g. Labov & Waletsky 1967, Chafe 1980, Mitchell 1981, Peterson & McCabe 1983, Bruner 1986) to the present time. A 'turn to narrative' in the humanities and social science research has been evidenced by the abundance of narrative research that has taken place over the past twenty years or so and by the number of different journals concerned with narrative that have appeared. Reflecting on this 'turn', Bamberg as editor of Narrative Inquiry asked a number of active researchers on narrative to write a short essay on what had contributed to the appeal of narrative scholarship, what had been accomplished, and what the future direction of the enterprise might be. The contributors to the volume, all highly respected in their specific fields, have each been studying how narratives serving a diversity of functions are situated in everyday conversational contexts, how they are constructed to meet social and cultural norms, and how they serve personal as well as social needs.

Alexandra Georgakopoulou sums up the results of the inquiry over recent decades:

. . . narrative remains an elusive, contested and indeterminate concept, variously used as an epistemology, a methodological perspective, an antidote to positivist research, a communication mode, a supra-genre, a text-type. More generally, as a way of making sense of the world, at times equated with experience, time, history and life itself; more modestly, as a specific kind of discourse with conventionalized textual features.

(145)

Rather than concluding that the result is a confusing jumble of concepts, it might be suggested that narrative is similar to the language of which it is composed, serving many diverse uses and presenting many diverse aspects and components for examination and analysis.

The book is inevitably more modest than the 'state of the art' of its title proclaims. The authors of its short chapters have contributed thoughtful and persuasive essays from diverse perspectives. Its shortcomings as a work, however, must be noted: it is a hardcover reprint by the publisher of a special issue of Narrative Inquiry (16.1, 2006, also titled Narrative: State of the art). Unfortunately, the publisher neglected to include an index for the hardcover volume; moreover, although abstracts for each article are retained, professional identities are omitted for more than half of the authors. Given the breadth of both geography and discipline represented among the contributors, this is unfortunate, but I can report that the majority of the authors are North American, with solid representations from the UK and from Germany; psychologists predominate among the twenty-six contributors, followed by sociologists, with a few scholars of literature, linguistics, communication and other social sciences, and applied fields.

In his introduction, Bamberg identifies two main strands of research revealed in the varying chapters, namely, how narrative represents aspects of life and the...