Narrative Flashcards
Popular media, by silences as much as what they present, shape our imaginative landscape of the past
Tessa Morris-Suzuki,The Past Within Us:Media,Memory,History(London,2005),Chapter1:The Past is Dead
WilliamCronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’,Journal of American History,Vol.78 (1992), pp. 1353 – 1355.
a dilemma for all historians
different stories from same events
yet scholars of environmental history also maintain commitment to narrative
meanings. We do so because narrative is the to find meaning in an overwhelmingly crowded and disordered chronological reality
the rhetorical practice of environmental history commits us to narrative ways of talking about nature that are anything but “natural.” If we fail to reflect on the plots and scenes and tropes that undergird our histories, we run the risk of missing the human artifice that lies at the heart of even the most “natural” of narratives.
What is a narrative?
they describe an action that begins, continues over a well-defined period of time, and finally draws to a definite close, with consequences that become meaningful because of their placement within the narrative
Nature and the universe do not tell stories; we do
Hayden White and the late Louis Mink as well as many of the deconstructionists, argues that narrative is so basic to our cultural beliefs that we automatically impose it on a reality that bears little or no relation to the plots we use in organizing our experience.
historian’s project of recovering past realities and representing them “truly” or even “fairly” is thus a delusion
alternative position, most recently defended by David Carr but originally developed by Martin Heidegger, is that although narrative may not be intrinsic to events in the physical universe, it is fundamental to the way we humans organize our experience
As Carr puts it, “Narrative is not merely a possibly successful way of describing events; its structure inheres in the events themselves.
we need stories to remind ourselves who we are, how we got here, what we want to become. The same is true of societies and individuals: we use our histories to remember ourselves,
to recover the narratives people tell themselves about the meanings of their lives is to learn a great deal about their past actions and about the way they understand those actions
storied reality of human experience
chief protagonists and antagonists of our stories are almost always human
. Human interests and conflicts create values in nature that in turn provide the moral center for our stories.
human struggle over values
because we care about the consequences of actions that narratives - unlike most natural processes -have beginnings, middles, and ends. Stories are intrinsi-cally teleological forms
this commitment to teleology and narrative gives environmental history-all history-its moral center.
Because stories concern the consequences of actions that are potentially valued in quite different ways, whether by agent, narrator, or audience, we can achieve no neu-tral objectivity in writing them
Historical narratives are bounded at every turn by the evidence they can and cannot muster in their own support. Environmental historians embrace a second set of narrative constraints: given our faith that the natural world ultimately
transcends our narrative power, our stories must make ecological sense
Finally, historical narratives are constrained in a third important -way as well.
Historians do not tell stories by themselves. We write as members of communities, and we cannot help but take those communities into account as we do our work
virtues of narrative as our best and most compelling tool for searching out meaning in a conflicted and contradictory world.
When a narrator honestly makes an audience care about what happens in a story, the story expresses the ties between past and present in a way that lends deeper meaning to both
At its best, historical storytelling helps keep us morally engaged with the world by showing us how to care about it and its origins in ways we had not done before.
Narratives remain our chief moral compass in the world
