![]() ![]() The Consortium for Strategic Communication also maintains a website on master narratives. A master narrative is therefore a particular type of narrative, which is defined as a "coherent system of interrelated and sequentially organized stories that share a common rhetorical desire to resolve a conflict by establishing audience expectations according to the known trajectories of its literary and rhetorical form". In communication and strategic communication, a master narrative (or metanarrative) is a "transhistorical narrative that is deeply embedded in a particular culture". Postmodern narratives will often deliberately disturb the formulaic expectations such cultural codes provide, pointing thereby to a possible revision of the social code. They argue for the existence of a "multiplicity of theoretical standpoints" rather than for grand, all-encompassing theories.Īccording to John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, a metanarrative "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience" – a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within conceptual models that assemble the "little stories" into a whole. Postmodernists attempt to replace metanarratives by focusing on specific local contexts as well as on the diversity of human experience. Borrowing from the works of Wittgenstein and his theory of the "models of discourse", Lyotard constructs his vision of a progressive politics, grounded in the cohabitation of a whole range of diverse and always locally legitimated language-games. Lyotard proposed that metanarratives should give way to petits récits, or more modest and "localized" narratives, which can ''throw off" the grand narrative by bringing into focus the singular event. ![]() Replacing grand, universal narratives with small, local narratives His critics point out the awkward fact that meta-narratives clearly continue to play a major role in the current postmodern world. states that it is unclear whether Lyotard is describing a global condition of skepticism towards metanarratives in postmodernity, or prescribing such skepticism. First, attempts to construct grand theories tend to unduly dismiss the naturally existing chaos and disorder of the universe, the power of the individual event. Lyotard and other poststructuralist thinkers (like Foucault) view this as a broadly positive development for a number of reasons. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. ![]()
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