Narrative and narratives: The incoherence of postmodern pluralism
Year: 1988
Type: article
Abstract: Summary Despite the continued prestige of narratology as a field of inquiry, narrative itself in both fictional and factual form, has come to be viewed with increasing suspicion, especially by Postmodernists. The standard analyses of early narrative fiction invariably point out that narrative must be understood as intrinsically ideological, while more recent accounts of both fictional and non‐fictional narrative argue that it is necessarily linked to realism in art and humanism in thought, and therefore open to the limitations of both. By contrast it is argued here that a formal analysis of history such as the one undertaken by Danto, as well as instances of literary modernism such as the work of Robbe‐Grillet, both attest to the fact that the presence of narrative in no way vitiates either their critical or epistemic claims. Instead, the attack mounted by Post‐modernists on narrative must rather be seen as stemming from the incoherence of Post‐modern pluralism.
Source: Journal of Literary Studies
Author: Susan van Zyl
Institution: University of the Witwatersrand
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $388
OpenAlex ID: W2070829820