Narrative

This note is about the roles of story and narrative in creative projects, research, social/cultural imaginations about the future, political action, etc...

Related:

  • ecocriticism
  • Biosemiotics
  • scenario as a foresight or future studies method, cf. Futuring (aka scenario planning, scenario thinking, scenario analysis, scenario prediction and the scenario method), related to systems thinking
  • storytelling in design (some argue that design is narrative)
  • Nature Writing
  • Personas
  • Representation

Overview

Herman, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

More-than-Human Narrative

Herman, David, ed. Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Herman, David, ed. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

McCormack, Brian. ‘Narrative, Meaning, and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies’. Humanimalia 11, no. 1 (2019): 64–88. https://doi.org/10/gm7d5d.

Van Patter, Lauren, Turnbull, Jonathon, and Dodsworth, Jennifer. ‘“More-than-Human Collaborations” for Hacking the Anthropocene’. Feral Feminisms, no. 10 (2021): 85–102.

McEwan, Cheryl. ‘Multispecies Storytelling in Botanical Worlds: The Creative Agencies of Plants in Contested Ecologies’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022, 25148486221110756. https://doi.org/10/gqkg3p.

Van Dooren, Thom, and Deborah Bird Rose. ‘Storied‐Places in a Multispecies City’. Humanimalia 3, no. 2 (2012): 1–27. https://doi.org/10/gmz5vg.

Narrative and the Environment

James, Erin, and Eric Morel, eds. Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020.

Mossner, Alexa Weik von. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017.

In Law

Hilson, Chris. ‘The Role of Narrative in Environmental Law: The Nature of Tales and Tales of Nature’. Journal of Environmental Law 34, no. 1 (2022): 1–24. https://doi.org/10/grtdts.

Fiction

There are some interesting examples of actual fiction there...

Feder, Helena. Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.

McHugh, Susan, Robert McKay, and John Miller, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Heise, Ursula. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.


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