Friday, November 03, 2006

Definitions of narrative and blog structure

I've been thinking more about why I don't feel as if blogs are like narratives. I think it is because as soon as we move away from minimal definitions of narrative (like Labov's for example) where narrative is two temporally ordered clauses, our sense of what narrativity entails is considerably more complex. Our expectations are of patterns that entail causality, transformation, recognisable schemas. In that case, the chronological ordering of blogs makes them like a minimal narrative, but the content can be (seemingly) randomly ordered, not transformed into the discourse of 'story' yet. In fact, my lovely friend Amy entitled her blog 'A Random Seried of Near Escapes', which puts it much more eloquently than I am doing here, and encapsulates the seeming lack of order that the everyday life chronicled in personal blogs entails. So why should blogs end up in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory? Clearly, I've got some more reading and thinking to do about the narrative dimensions of blogging possibilities.

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