Narratological scholarship has been slow to respond to this challenge. Since the “narrative turn” of the 1990s, the scope of the discipline has expanded rapidly to include legal, historical and medical narratives as well as films and video games. However, these objects are still fundamentally textual, if “text” is understood to refer to any deliberate and structured use of signs. And while several attempts have been made to define the term more precisely, much conceptual work still needs to be done. This MLA special session proposes to explore the concept of “narrative” as a non-textual, i.e. discursive or cultural category, using a variety of theoretical approaches and examples to develop a more precise understanding of the term.
Professor Christian Baier conceptualizes cultural narratives as specific forms of myth: just like traditional myths explain the origin of a people and legitimize their place in the world, these non-textual, discursive constellations constitute collective identities, create communities and influence their beliefs. Expanding upon existing research on myths, cultural narratives and the phenomenon of post-truth (see Baier 2023, 2021, 2017), he combines the insights of contemporary narratological theory with Jean-François Lyotard’s concepts of grand and petit récit and Roland Barthes’ notion of myth to demonstrate how cultural narratives legitimize knowledge within a given community, creating truths and shaping reality in the process. To demonstrate its practicality, the category of “cultural narrative” is then applied to the American MAGA movement as an example of the post-truth phenomenon.
Emile Levesque-Jalbert examines the relationship between narratives and the environment in the context of the recent environmental turn in the humanities, arguing that not only should our understanding of literature be expanded to include literary practices outside the book, but also that our understanding of ecology should be attuned to the deployment of poetic, narrative and symbolic forms into space. To illustrate his argument, Levesque-Jalbert investigates the construction of cultural narratives in the installations and exhibitions of contemporary French writer Camille de Toledo, analyzing the connection of larger cultural and historical contexts like the two World Wars and the 6th mass extinction with Toledo’s personal and familial stories. Fundamentally, he explores how humans shape the spatial environment they inhabit through the entanglements of narratives and material presence.
Professor Anna Navrotskaya develops a functional approach to understanding non-textual narratives which resist being defined either by storytelling and its structure or by discourse and its intend. To illustrate this theoretical approach, she conceptualizes the performing arts – theater, music, dance – as representing a spectrum of relationships with texts and storytelling, from strong dependance (drama) to nearly complete independence (music). Within this spectrum, she focuses on theater as a hybrid communicative form of artistic creation, conceiving of community theater as a discursive constellation contributing to and functioning within a cultural narrative, and analyzing its relation to “neighboring” professional theater. Using this example, Navrotskaya addresses the question if and how cultural narratives can be free of intentionality but rather be generated by a multitude of constellations creating and modifying perception and meaning.
In pursuing these different thematic and methodological approaches – myth and post-truth, ecocriticism and spatiality, discourse analysis and performing arts – the three presentations cover a wide spectrum of aspects related to the category of cultural narrative. Together, they aim to establish a theoretical foundation for the necessary scholarly debate about the elusive “cultural narrative,” and since the special session will end in a 15-minute period of unstructured discussion, this debate can begin right there at the 2024 MLA Convention.