Metanarrative
A metanarrative (also meta-narrative and grand narrative; French: métarécit or grand récit) is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea.[1][2][3]
Etymology[edit]
"Meta" is Greek for "beyond"; "narrative" is a story that is characterized by its telling (it is communicated somehow).[4]
Although first used earlier in the 20th century, the term was brought into prominence by Jean-François Lyotard in 1979, with his claim that the postmodern was characterised precisely by a mistrust of the "grand narratives" (Progress, Enlightenment, Emancipation, Marxism) that had formed an essential part of modernity.[5]
Narratology and communication[edit]
According to John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, a metanarrative "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience"[14] – a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within conceptual models that assemble the "little stories" into a whole. Postmodern narratives will often deliberately disturb the formulaic expectations such cultural codes provide,[15] pointing thereby to a possible revision of the social code.[16]
In communication and strategic communication, a master narrative (or metanarrative) is a "transhistorical narrative that is deeply embedded in a particular culture".[17] 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".[17]
The Consortium for Strategic Communication also maintains a website on master narratives.[18]
Others have related metanarratives to masterplots, "recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life."[19]
Criticism of Lyotard's thesis[edit]
J. W. Bertens and D. Fokkema argued that, in so far as one of Lyotard's targets was science, he was mistaken in thinking that science relies upon a grand narrative for social and epistemic validation, rather than on the accumulation of many lesser narrative successes.[20]
Lyotard himself also criticised his own thesis as "simply the worst of all my books."
