The Academic Views On Narrative Deconstructing Narrative

Zheng Lei / Wen

Narrative is an academic term, which can be understood as telling a story or telling a story. The content of a story can be either fictional or fictional. Narration generally refers to the narration of one or a series of real or fictional events in language. Literary narration and historical narration are the most common ones. In recent years, the economic circle has also advocated the use of narrative research methods. Therefore, there is economic narrative, which involves the exchange and dialogue between economics and Humanities.

The narration must take the culture as the background, has the clear value impression. And narrative is the most consistent with the human brain to accept a habit of communication. How to make narrative deeply rooted in the hearts of the people and produce a wide range of lasting influence, we need to study the structure and law of narrative. The victory of Narration: telling stories in the era of mass culture puts forward and answers five core questions of narration, which condenses the author's thinking for nearly half a century. From rumors to personal experiences, grand narration describing the process of civilization, news stories to urban legends of contemporary popular culture, attempts to explain the significance of identifying public narration with real stories in life.

It is an interesting point of view that narration originates from rumor. The author thinks that rumor is actually a story passed on from person to person. This view is similar to Schiller's economic narrative. The transmission of narrative is like the spread of virus, and oral transmission may have the most similar mechanism of virus diffusion.

Aristotle has a brilliant summary of narrative: narrative needs "awareness" (that is, those things we are familiar with), but also needs "reversal" (that is, a change of fate). The economic narrative is similar, which must contain a balance, transition, a new equilibrium and outcome. How to tell this story well, we must simplify it, leave the familiar plot, stimulate people's emotion, and remove irrelevant details and the feeling of vacillation. A good narrative, especially literary narrative, should include two levels: the story itself and the story in the story. The latter implies all the contents about interpersonal relationship and literary politics, which is a kind of rumor transformed into literature, thus obtaining better communication power.

No matter literature, history or economic narration, it is not a simple event or a pile of events, which is often misunderstood. A narrative must carry meaning, among which belief or values are common, and the narrator's purpose is to spread these ideas through the description of events. Therefore, narrative will inevitably arouse the ideological resonance of some groups, and how to maximize this effect is determined by the method. The structure of narration contains truth, hope and fear, which is used to arouse people's empathy and empathy and achieve the purpose of interpretation, education and even entertainment. The main characteristics of literary narration are suspense, organization, tone, emotion and viewpoint. Narration can be used as a way to discuss complex social problems.

Narrative is not far away from each of us. People often say that "Renshi" is a story that everyone arranges for himself to help people create and maintain the integrity of a certain personality image. The significance of human existence, everyone's understanding and expectation of life are also integrated into his personal narrative. We want others to understand how we become ourselves, and we want the value of this story to be recognized. Some personal stories have been widely spread, which has brought great reputation to these people, but the bad news of the collapse of "Renshi" is also mentioned from time to time.

There are different views on narrative in academic circles. History is the most suitable narrative method, because historical events themselves constitute a chronological order, but in recent years, "quantitative history" has emerged. Historians use statistical methods to analyze a large number of historical data for quantitative research, and draw rules from it. However, economists began to reflect on the limitations of mathematical models and econometric methods. Nobel laureates Robert Schiller and Vernon Smith proposed narrative economics and human economics respectively, in order to improve people's query on mainstream economics. Behavioral economics is still not completely divorced from the paradigm of rationality and utility maximization, and ignores cultural factors. Schiller analyzes market volatility with narrative, which is inevitably based on culture, and provides a methodology to understand economic events at the emotional and knowledge level. Smith advocates returning to the classical tradition of Adam Smith, completely abandoning rationality and utility These neoclassical concepts reconstruct the economic narrative system with the characteristics of self-respect, self-discipline, justice and good deeds.

If narrative only talks about facts as props to support its theory, it is very difficult to be popular. It must also have a clear emotional and ethical framework. The reason why narrative wins lies in its insight and in some ways its dominance over our collective imagination. Of course, when using narrative as a tool, we must not stop looking at all kinds of narratives critically, considering that they will be misled.

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