Abstract
Man/woman has been described as the meaning-generating, story-telling animal (‘homo narrans’). In developing narratives, we continuously (and communally) attempt to make sense of life: to turn the contingent into some common coherent form, apt to bring order into the indiscrete flow of events and to (meaningfully) explain to us the ‘world.’ This has been addressed under the concept of ‘tellability.’ Tellability seems to transform something that can be told into something that is worth telling – that has some hermeneutical or cognitive or even only phatic value in that it invites us to understand (again and again) what (and why it) ‘happened.’ The article traces this process of creating community through telling first diatopically, by exploring forms and practices of narrating in different contexts and cultures, and then diachronically, by focusing on what makes a story a ‘good’ story in different periods of time. Drawing on pragmatic and functionalist theories of language and literature, it attempts to show that the idea of a story that is ‘worth it’ – or, as for that, ‘relatable’ – is largely dependent precisely upon the story’s ‘relation’ to its users and, by extension, to its embedding culture as well as to its point in time.
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©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Tellabilities – Diatopic/Diachronic: Where and When a Story Is Worth Telling and Where and When It Is Not
- Paradox in the Woods: The Twin Destiny of Elves and Men in the Forests of Beleriand
- History, Time, and Lived Experience in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997)
- Cooking and Eating Your Own Stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
- Alice Munro and ‘Alternate Realities’
- Book Reviews
- Coleridge and Communication
- Fake Identity? The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture
- Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition
- Books Received
- Table of Contents Vol. 65 (2017)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Tellabilities – Diatopic/Diachronic: Where and When a Story Is Worth Telling and Where and When It Is Not
- Paradox in the Woods: The Twin Destiny of Elves and Men in the Forests of Beleriand
- History, Time, and Lived Experience in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997)
- Cooking and Eating Your Own Stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
- Alice Munro and ‘Alternate Realities’
- Book Reviews
- Coleridge and Communication
- Fake Identity? The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture
- Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition
- Books Received
- Table of Contents Vol. 65 (2017)