METANARRATIVES

I confess that before last Wednesday’s class and the Killingsworth and Palmer reading, I had never heard the term metanarrative before. The idea of narratives within narratives or stories within stories, however, immediately interested me. I was curious to understand what metanarratives were at work propping up the voices of this course’s reading list. I decided to investigate the term further.

Multiple definitions always help me when approaching a new concept.

Definition #1

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a metanarrative is “Any narrative which is concerned with the idea of storytelling, spec. one which alludes to other narratives, or refers to itself and to its own artifice. Also: a piece of narrative, esp. a classic text or other archetypal story, which provides a schematic world view upon which an individual's experiences and perceptions may be ordered.” The term is first documented as appearing in 1976 in a discussion of film as a rich narrative medium with a “tendency to express an awareness of the storytelling in the story.” The postmodern French philosopher and literary theorist Jean- François Lyotard evolved the concept of metanarratives. He argued that large-scale metanarratives or “grandnarratives” are inadequate in representing and containing all of our stories and experiences. Because of this post-modernity is defined with micronarratives. In “Ecospeak,” Killingsworth and Palmer suggest a similar evolution.

Definition #2

Killingsworth and Palmer claim “Metanarrative is distinguished both from the plain narratives of folk communities and from the denotative discourse of science. Its purpose is hegemonic; its aim to bring other discourses under the control of its broad explanatory power and thereby to influence the use of such discourses in a community that includes smaller communities—such as the Roman Empire, the university as it has developed over the last one hundred years, or the global mass public created by modern communication and transportation technology” (129.) According to Killingsworth and Palmer, “The metanarrative that prevails in American political (and psychological) life is the ideology of progress (which includes aspects of both Enlightenment and human liberation)” (129). According to this master narrative with progress being the ultimate ideal, Ecospeak, environmentalism, and its championing of sustainability and the "rights of nature" is subversive. Killingsworth and Palmer propose the dissolving of this domineering world view and the creation of new micronarrative-fueled metanarratives.

I’m still curious about how metanarratives even come into being.

-Who controls the metanarrative of a society?

-Can it be controlled?

-Does a writer always realize the metanarrative they’re operating under?

-Is it necessary to realize?

-Can a writer ever break out of their inherited cultural metanarrative?

-Can a writer invent their own personal metanarrative?

It seems as though a lot of the writers we’re reading come from similar schematic world views. All of them write in English. All of them come from a Western tradition. All of their narratives were produced in the last 100 years.

-What should we make of this?