Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

it's all about the narrative

I've been thinking a lot about narrativity this semester because of my course in historical geography, for which many of the readings were based on narrative methods. (I'm pretty sure I had some interest in this last year, too, but I can't remember what the context was - the memory seminar?)

Then, this past week, we got into a debate about the validity of narrativity as a geographical method. William Cronon, a historian, wrote a very geographical book about Chicago that was popularly and critically well-received, thereby annoying radical geographers whose work hasn't gotten the same purchase. They crabbed about his book in their journal of radical geography, and Cronon's rejoinder stressed his post-modernist belief in the value of narrative.

So imagine my delight when William Safire's column in today's NYT took up the history of narrativity. Some things about it I'd like to read someday:

Roland Barthes, 1966, some sort of essay which contains the sentence "Numberless are the world's narratives": the birth of narratology.

1966, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, _The Nature of Narrative_.

Then there is a journal called _Narrative_ of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Is it a coincidence that the object of biography in A.S. Byatt's book _The Biographer's Tale_ is called Scholes Destry-Scholes? Sure, it'a a play on "scholar" - but does it have a relationship to this study of narrative?

Posted by otto0114 at December 5, 2004 12:32 PM