Making Sense of Narrativity

What does narrativity actually mean? The essence of narrativity lies in its ability to convey human experience through the telling of stories. In research, political rhetoric and everyday speech the concept of narrative has been used in a variety of ways, often ambiguously. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the concepts related to narrativity, not only from an educational point of view, but starting from a broader framework with implications for society, politics and media. Drawing from a wide range of structuralist-narratological, epistemological and philosophical-anthropological views, we introduce the following six ways of understanding narrativity as: (1) an existential dimension, (2) an epistemological dimension, (3) a data dimension, (4) a methodological dimension, (5) a research report dimension, and (6) a practice dimension. These dimensions cannot be divided into exclusive categories. However, for analytical purposes we address each dimension in turn. We then move on to clarify the concepts related to narrativity by examining the central concepts of story, narrative and narrative discourse and their related concepts from a narratological point of view.