The Story Behind Any Story: Evolution, Historicity, and Narrative Mapping

"The Story Behind Any Story: Evolution, Historicity and Narrative Mapping" is the title of my chapter in the collective volume Emerging Vectors of Narratology (vol. 57 of the Narratologia series), edited by Per Krogh Hansen, John Pier, Philippe Roussin, and Wolf Schmid (Berlín y Boston: de Gruyter, 2017). The volume appears in print and online, and each of the chapters can be bought separately. This is my chapter's web page:



An abstract of the chapter, from the preface to the volume:

Another scientifically inspired approach to narrative is explored by José Ángel García Landa. Arguing that literary and cultural phenomena are best understood within a consilient disciplinary framework, García Landa associates this perspective with "big history", the broad context of the evolution of societies and of life generally. In a discussion of the philosophical works of Herbert Spencer, he finds in nineteenth-century evolutionary theory a historiographical and narratological perspective which is close to present-day research on natural and ecological contextualization of human societies. The concept of "narrative anchoring" is introduced so as to provide temporal schemas with large-scale interpretive contexts (e.g., the Christian myth from the Creation to the Apocalypse) and that of "narrative mapping" as a framework to account for the historical situatedness of narrative modes.

There book will be presented by the editors at the 5th ENN conference in Prague (Sept. 2017).

Consiliencia, evolución, y anclaje narrativo

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