Affiliation:
1. Institute for English Philology , The Free University of Berlin , Habelschwerdter Allee 45 , 14195 Berlin , Germany
Abstract
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.
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
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