Strawson makes the following proposal towards the end of the paper:
I suspect that more than 95 per cent of all supposedly descriptively substantive theoretical uses of the noun ‘narrative’ (‘story’, ‘tale’) in ethics and psychology can be replaced without any loss by words like ‘explanation’, ‘description’, ‘account’, ‘view’, ‘outlook’, ‘theory’, ‘understanding’, ‘theme’, ‘belief’, ‘concept’, ‘conception’, ‘picture’. Let me make a methodological proposal: whenever anyone uses the word ‘narrative’ or ‘story’, ask whether it can be replaced without semantic loss by one of the words just listed, or by some variant of the generic expression ‘description or account of a temporally extended sequence of events’. If it can be replaced, let it be replaced. Then we’ll be able to see more clearly what’s left. If there’s disagreement about whether something has been lost, the burden of proof will fall on the user of the word ‘narrative’.This was my first stab at mapping the concepts that Shiller and others sweep up under the term ‘narrative’ in the Shiller/AEI post:
- belief, ideology, hypotheses, theory, view
- explanation, description, justification, reason, model
- concept, image, impression, perception, perspective, representation
- analogy, metaphor, motif, trope
- account, chronicle, history, story, tale
Arranging Strawson’s terms under the same five heads gives
- theory, understanding, belief,
- explanation, description, account,
- view, outlook, concept, conception, picture
- (none)
- narrative, story, tale
(The term ‘theme’ doesn’t immediately fit my categories.)
Strawson's proposal amounts to saying that if someone uses a term in category 5 (narrative, etc.) in such a way that it could be replaced without loss of meaning by words in categories 1–3, then that term should not be used. The result is a narrower scope of use for the terms ‘narrative’ or ‘story’.
I would go so far as to say that the same test should be applied to the use of the term ‘myth’.
The striking mismatch between the two lists is that Strawson doesn’t include figures of speech (category 4) in his candidates for terms that should be excluded from the narrative category. Perhaps I was too hasty in thinking that figures of speech are misclassified as myths. However, one can easily find examples, e.g. “the welfare queen trope has made a comeback in our current politics” in the article ‘The Myth of the Welfare Queen’, and GeoffreyBowker saying “I would have him go a little further back, to the steamboat and the railway, where I would locate the origin of many of the tropes discussed” in his review of Vincent Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace.
It may be that the semantics of ‘trope’ are shifting. With a hat tip to the StackExchange discussion, here’s how tvtropes.org knits figures of speech and narrative together:
Merriam-Webster gives a definition of "trope" as a "figure of speech." In storytelling, a trope is just that — a conceptual figure of speech, a storytelling shorthand for a concept that the audience will recognize and understand instantly.
Above all, a trope is a convention. It can be a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character type, a linguistic idiom... you know it when you see it. Tropes are not inherently disruptive to a story; however, when the trope itself becomes intrusive, distracting the viewer rather than serving as shorthand, it has become a cliché.
On This Very Wiki, "trope" has the even more general meaning of a pattern in storytelling, not only within the media works themselves, but also in related aspects such as the behind-the-scenes aspects of creation, the technical features of a medium, and the fan experience. The idea being that storytelling is not just writing, it is the whole process of creating and telling/showing a story.
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