Re: Narrating Complexity

Posted by gepr on Dec 20, 2017; 1:18am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Narrating-Complexity-tp7590969p7590975.html

I think "aformal" is too strong a word, assuming you mean "without formality" or without any kind of regularizable structure whatsoever.  Things like archetypes, and typical story structures, as well as tropes and banally formulaic things like romance novels or prime time TV all argue that there ARE formal elements to stories.  We may not be able to define a good story (or story teller), but we know it when we see/hear/read it.  That argues that it's not (completely) aformal.  I'd argue that they're open/unbound in some sense, that stories have some (perhaps formalizable) constraining structure within which they can wiggle quite a bit.

On 12/19/2017 04:44 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> My antipathy towards narrative theory, and the resolution of the partial contradiction above, is that I see narrative theorists as a group of academics that are trying to "formalize" something that is fundamentally aformal.

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