{"id":171,"date":"2015-09-08T12:47:19","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T12:47:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leading-edge.iac.gatech.edu\/humanistic-perspectives\/?page_id=171"},"modified":"2015-09-13T20:24:31","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T20:24:31","slug":"on-narrative","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/leading-edge.iac.gatech.edu\/humanistic-perspectives\/on-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"On Narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carol Colatrella<\/em><\/h4>\n
\"Professor<\/a>
Professor Carol Colatrella<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LMC\u2019s tag line \u201chumanistic perspectives on a technological world\u201d offers an expansive promise to inspire students and faculty. As a humanist with interdisciplinary degrees (liberal arts and comparative literature), I have tried to live up to this claim by developing courses at Georgia Tech that encourage students to understand connections between the liberal arts and STEM fields and to develop technical expertise in literary and cultural study. My scholarship and teaching focus on social equity issues illustrated in post-Romantic (i.e., Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/i> and after) narratives that represent scientific and technological concepts. My syllabi include fictions, films, on-line videos, and advertisements, and our class discussions concentrate on figuring out and responding to the social commentary and cultural values embedded in these narrative texts. My literature and film courses have focused on race as a theme in works by African-American and white women writers; issues of authority, transgression, and adaptation in Herman Melville\u2019s fictions; and class conflict in recent British films. Courses in gender studies look at sociological, literary, historical, and medical accounts of femininity and masculinity and consider how gender matters in shaping personal views and public policy. Students develop skills in analyzing narratives and ideologies that they can apply to study and work in a range of academic fields and to their everyday experiences. The approach taken is that of \u201ccultural study of narrative,\u201d which focuses attention on written, visual, and non-verbal discourse.<\/p>\n

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Understanding the dynamics of a fictional world, as one does when one reads a novel or sees a film, and teasing out the logical contradictions of an attempt to persuade, as one does when viewing a print or television advertisement or hearing a political speech, are skills that one uses every day.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

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What is \u201cnarrative\u201d?<\/b><\/p>\n

In the past century there has been an explosion of interest in studying narrative forms and in establishing robust theories of narrative that apply across disciplines, media, and cultures. Porter Abbott (2008) offers a succinct and commonsense definition that privileges plot: \u201cAs soon as we follow a subject with a verb, there is a good chance we are engaged in narrative discourse.\u201d Gerald Prince (2003) acknowledges the mixed rhetorical modes of narrative in his definition: \u201cNarrative is a discourse representing one or more events. Narration is traditionally distinguished from description and from commentary but usually incorporates them within itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

French theorist Roland Barthes\u2019s essay \u201cIntroduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative\u201d initiated interest in applying techniques used to study literary texts to cultural texts in claiming \u201cThe narratives of the world are numberless. . . . Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barthes\u2019s description of narrative is the most expansive and exciting in connecting cultural activities to textual accounts of such experiences and doing so across time, space, and other boundaries. To study narrative is to study human existence, to better understand who we are, but it is also a way of characterizing other forms of existence. For example, fictions such as Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/i> and Black Beauty <\/i>provide accounts of animal consciousness. Science fictions offer opportunities to analyze aliens, monsters, and zombies, characters that may or may not be versions of us.<\/p>\n

There are many reasons to study narrative.<\/b>\u00a0 We think and remember in stories. We learn about how things work and how to make them by means of following and developing procedures, which are causal narratives. We communicate and establish relationships by sharing stories (jokes, anecdotes, visual narratives, histories). We like to hear, read, view, and act out stories and to write narratives.<\/p>\n

The study of narrative encompasses a number of disciplines and related topics, including<\/b><\/p>\n