Story
This note discusses the ideas of story and narrative as ways to make sense of the world and communal lives.
Key Challenges
- Humans need better, more just, more inclusive, more hopeful stories
- Other beings have stories too (is this only limited to animals with brains and societies: what is a story?)
- At least some animals can experience stories because they have memories, experience traumas and can form intra- and interspecies relationships.
If nonhuman beings can have selves, subjectivity, intentionality, memory, emotions, including trauma, learning, language, which many animals have and not only humans, etc. do they also have narratives, or are narratives important?
Relevant Concepts
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A better narrative by humans for humans about nonhumans
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A narrative by nonhumans for nonhumans or humans
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A shared, distributed narrative co-told by many
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Storyworlds
James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
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“Storyworlds” are (human) mental models of context and environment within which characters function.
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Describes what happens in narrative.
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Captures the organization of both space and time.
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Sees the experience of narrative (not only by humans and not only through reading) as a process that encourages those visitors into storyworlds to compare them to other possible worlds.
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Econarratology, animal autobiography, ecology of selves
Plumwood, Val. “Nature in the Active Voice.” Australian Humanities Review 2010, no. 46 (2009): 111–28.
- sound as voice
- movement as action
- adaptation as intelligence and dialogue
- co-incidence and chaos as the creativity of matter.
Focus on intentionality and the use of intentional vocabulary. Nature as the domain of agency.
Sibierska, Marta. “Storytelling Without Telling: The Non-Linguistic Nature of Narratives from Evolutionary and Narratological Perspectives.” Language & Communication, The multimodal origins of linguistic communication, 54 (2017): 47–55. https://doi.org/10/f96rhs.
- Storytelling is not limited to language.
- A set of minimum criteria for a narrative act.
- This can occur with non-verbal, pictorial/gestural semiotic resources.
- Storytelling can have a multimodal character.
For Turing, intelligence is a process or behaviour-based phenomenon. If it looks like intelligence, it is intelligence. One can use this approach to think about other concepts. But narrative?
Definitions
What is a story or a narrative?
Sibierska
- a story is a conceptual arrangement of events
- a narrative is the material product of transmitting a story to somebody else, and
- storytelling is the process of composing narratives, i.e. translating the conceptual into the material via a given medium.
Literature
Herman, David. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Ideas
Science freed us to write more poetically about nonhumans
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