Sameness and difference in narrative modes and narrative sense making: The case of Ramsey Campbell’s “The Scar”

Abstract

The article discusses basic questions of narrative studies and definitions of narrative from a historical and conceptual perspective in order to map the terrain between different narratologies. The focus is placed on the question of how fiction interacts with other realms of our lives or, more specifically, how reading fiction both involves and affects our everyday meaning making operations. British horror writer Ramsey Campbell’s (b. 1946) short story “The Scar” (1967) will be used as a test case to show how both narrative modes of representation and the reader’s narrative sense making operations may travel between art and the everyday, from fiction to life and back. We argue that the cognitively inspired narrative studies need to pair up with linguistically oriented narratology to gain the necessary semiotic sensitivity to the forms and modes of narrative sense making. Narratology, in turn, needs to explore in detail what it is in the narrative form that enables it to function as a tool for reaching out and making sense of the unfamiliar. In our view, reading fictional narratives such as “The Scar” can help in learning and adopting linguistic resources and story patterns from fiction to our everyday sense making efforts.

Using parsed and annotated corpora to analyze parliamentarians' talk in Finland

“…Narrative studies is a multi-and interdisciplinary field without shared understanding on how to define narrative. Three basic approaches include the cognitive, which defines narrative as a tool to make sense of the world, the rhetoric, which sees narrative as an intentional act of persuasion, and the semiotic, which emphasizes narrative as an articulation of some story content (see Hatavara & Toikkanen, 2019). Most definitions of narrative recognize at least two components in any narrative: story events and their organization into a narrative (Rimmon-T A B L E 2 Isms most commonly appearing close to other isms in the Finnish parliament, 1980-2018…”