The Reluctant Narrator: A survey of narrative practices across media opens at Museu Coleção Berardo Though modernist critics berated narration, the end of the 20th century witnessed an explosion of interest in narrative practices. Often referred to as “the narrative turn,” this new field of inquiry originated in French structuralism’s general approach to language, and more explicitly from Tzvetan Todorov’s passion for what he termed “a science of narrative,” la narratologie, premised on the notion that life is inherently storied, or—as French philosopher Jacques Rancière put it—that the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. Postmodernism itself was described as a narrative impulse, in which a rekindled interest in the fictive, the chronicle, and the anecdotal upstaged the symbolic unity of high modernism. As Susan Buck-Morss noted, however, modernism and postmodernism are not historical moments, but political positions: two poles of a recurring movement, expressing the contradictions inherent to the industrial mode of production in the identity and non-identity between social function and aesthetic form. Rather than opposing a myriad of micro-narratives to the grand narrative of modernism, The Reluctant Narrator maps the migration of narrative modes across several media, bringing together works that intertwine personal biography with collective history, or that deal with stories that have fallen through the crevices of history. The exhibition’s title refers to the literary trope of the unreliable narrator, a compromised or otherwise deluded storyteller. This figure is juxtaposed against what is known as the aporia of narration—the stories which most need telling are the ones that can never be told—in order to point out that narrative doesn’t merely mean continuity in change or change in continuity but is, instead, a constant negotiation between partial truths, able to sustain an agonistic unity and to express the irreducibility of the social. e-flux/announcements/museu-colecao-berardo-presents-the-reluctant-narrator/
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 15:00:01 +0000
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