Narratology: “… in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers …”
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
20-9-2018 11:00 AM
Description
Under the postmodern pen, narratology’s quest for the best schema to characterize how the said and its saying effectuate meaning is marked up and annotated, effectively revealing margins full of question marks. Postmodernism’s study of narrative is a questioning of the presence of the past’s future; it indicates our experience of a problem of meaning. Always too early and too late to call it a crisis of meaning: to sight what is today uniquely felt in this perilous terrain, we trace haunted suspicions of meaning mapped by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, quivering into harmony, asking how the past figures the future for us here and now. Lyotard declared postmodernism is no pastime scrounging finality’s garbageheaps for leftovers to re-costume superheroes; instead, it necessitates our recognition that historical narrativizing obscures how what remains to be phrased exceeds our present capacities. My presentation will sketch a postmodern narratology on the nature and formation of meaning (the creation of history), its determination of the now and future, and our consequent duties.
Recommended Citation
Walton, Melanie, "Narratology: “… in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers …”" (2018). Humanities Symposium. 22.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2018/2018/22
Narratology: “… in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers …”
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Under the postmodern pen, narratology’s quest for the best schema to characterize how the said and its saying effectuate meaning is marked up and annotated, effectively revealing margins full of question marks. Postmodernism’s study of narrative is a questioning of the presence of the past’s future; it indicates our experience of a problem of meaning. Always too early and too late to call it a crisis of meaning: to sight what is today uniquely felt in this perilous terrain, we trace haunted suspicions of meaning mapped by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, quivering into harmony, asking how the past figures the future for us here and now. Lyotard declared postmodernism is no pastime scrounging finality’s garbageheaps for leftovers to re-costume superheroes; instead, it necessitates our recognition that historical narrativizing obscures how what remains to be phrased exceeds our present capacities. My presentation will sketch a postmodern narratology on the nature and formation of meaning (the creation of history), its determination of the now and future, and our consequent duties.
Comments
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts and Sciences