Meta-Narrative

Meta-narrative can be understood in two ways: (1) as a narrative about narrative or (2) as a narrative above narrative. Both understandings are discussed in this entry.

A narrative is a story that describes a particular sequence of events in the context of particular characters. The content and structure of narratives are deliberately (although sometimes unconsciously) selected to support a particular point of view and to encourage a particular interpretation or understanding. The analysis of narrative—that is, the narratives constructed in the course of thinking about narrative—creates meta-narratives. Thus, for example, when Robert McNamara reconsidered the Vietnam War in his book Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy, he created a meta-narrative about the Vietnam War. When Errol Morse made the film Fog of War about McNamara's book, he created a further meta-narrative on both the war and McNamara's views of it. Similarly, researchers who use narrative analysis to study family caregiving or teaching may construct meta-narratives in the course of their analyses.

Postmodern thinkers have identified meta-narratives that function not only as explanations but also as mechanisms of social control. These meta-narratives, which may include classic texts (e.g., the Bible or The Little Red Book of Mao Zedong), archetypal accounts (e.g., stories of scientific discovery or “rags to riches” biographies), or grand, cultural epics (e.g., The Ring of the Niebelungen or Gilgamesh) form the basis for the totality of a society's beliefs. Meta-narratives, according to postmodern thought, function in society as universal and absolute truth. Jean-François Lyotard, who developed the concept of grand or master narratives, asserted that the most pervasive of all stories was the emancipation narrative, which asserted that the whole of history makes sense and furthermore is a history of progress toward some greater good. Postmodernists reject meta-narratives and, in particular, the notion of any universal, overriding, decontextualized truth, positing that such [Page 509]beliefs should be replaced by more local, contextual, and limited accounts of society and the world.

Lyotard's concept of the emancipation narrative can be seen in the view of normal science described by Thomas Kuhn as a paradigm, and some scholars equate meta-narratives with paradigms. As such, meta-narratives provide an organizing framework for knowledge and, through this mechanism, distinguish between knowledge that is legitimate and knowledge that is unjustified. People may also organize their experiences according to a meta-narrative. For example, the meta-narrative of psychoanalysis structures an individual's childhood memories differently from the meta-narrative of symbolic interactionism.