The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Narrative

Narrative: A story or a telling of a story, or an account of a situation or event. Narratives may be fictional or nonfictional and may be oral, written, or visual. Some critics use the term even more generally; for instance, in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), narratologist Hayden White called narrative “a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted.”

EXAMPLES: A novel and a biography of a novelist are prose narratives, as are newspaper accounts and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s case histories. Examples of verse narratives include ballads and epics. Voices from the Third Reich: An Oral History (1989), by Johannes Steinhoff, Peter Pechel, and Dennis Showalter, is based on interviews with more than 150 Germans who lived under the Third Reich, including members of the Nazi party, military officers and soldiers, factory workers, concentration-camp survivors, and members of the resistance. Amazwi Abesifazane (“Voices of Women”), a South African project inaugurated in 2000 to recover and archive the stories of indigenous women from the apartheid era, encourages women to tell their stories visually, through the production of embroidered, appliquéd, and beaded “memory cloths” that cathartically detail an episode from “a day I will never forget.”