Narrative, Language and Creativity: Contemporary Approaches - Arts & Humanities Assignment Help

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Introduction

Narrative is widely held to be a fundamental communication mode for making sense of our lives and our experience. It has therefore captured the interest of many analysts from a variety of standpoints: for example, narrative psychology, sociology, literary stylistics, narratology and sociolinguistics. In all these approaches, the question of what makes our stories creative – that is, dramatic, animated and artful – has been of paramount importance. In literature, what makes a story creative has often served as the basis for evaluative judgements about the quality of an author’s work and for formulating literary canons. In everyday life, telling a ‘good’ story can have important implications for the teller’s role and relations, for example, in their circle of friends or in a job interview. In turn, the assessment of a story as a ‘good’ story is more often than not associated with the presence of creative and dramatic elements in its telling, which will be discussed below.

The answers to what exactly makes a story creative have to be seen in connection with the kinds of story that have been studied and the main assumptions of the different approaches to narrative. For instance, the study of narrative in psychology has been based mainly on the so-called life story, normally elicited in the context of a research interview. The teller, a research participant, relates their life to the researcher, a sympathetic listener, who nonetheless provides the right guidance for the teller to put together their account. On the other hand, literary stories have been researched mainly within the field of narratology, which is specifically interested in creativity relating to narrative structure, themes and conventions. In sociolinguistics and discourse studies, the stories that have monopolised attention are those that occur in a wide variety of everyday conversational contexts, such as friends talking in a café, family dinner time, teacher and students’ talk in classrooms, stories as answers to questions in job interviews, and so on. More recently, the focus on everyday life stories has included stories that occur on social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and indeed stories in conversational contexts that somehow relate to social Chapter 1 Narrative, creativity and performance 17 media: for example, stories that best friends tell one another about something that happened to them on Facebook. In relation to all these different kinds of story and the different traditions in which they are studied, there are certain key themes and preoccupations that run throughout the diverse strands of enquiry.

The aim of this chapter is to tease those out, placing a particular emphasis on insights from sociolinguistic and discourse studies of narrative, which have been significant in the recent turn to more contextual approaches in narrative studies.

In the discussion that follows, the premises of narrative creativity will be anchored to three main areas:

1 The importance in narrative of a point of view through which the events are represented (Section 1.2).

2 The requirement for a story to be unique, remarkable and individual, owned by the person who has experienced its events or the person who is in a position to recount them (Section 1.3). This requirement is in constant tension with the need for a story to have some kind of familiarity, for its events and happenings to be recognisable enough, in order to generate interest and empathy in its audience.

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