From Disinterestedness to Engagement - OpenArchive@CBS

meaning was grasped or “taken up” by a hearer and what determined that uptake’
(Bruner, 1990:63) which would then allow us to establish a set of axiomatic properties
required for a narrative to perform its functions, in the sense of being received with the
same content as it was issued with by its sender.
The relational view of narratives, on the other hand, embeds the narrative in its context on
which it is dependent to acquire its meaning. Bruner (1990:63) 24 describes this context as
‘felicity conditions’ which are
rules not only about the propositional content of an utterance but about
required contextual preconditions, about sincerity in the transaction, and
about essential conditions defining the nature of the speech act. (ibid.)
This points to context as a prerequisite both for understanding a narrative, and to further
qualify narratives, Bruner (1990:77) points to four elements:
1) ‘agentivity – action directed toward goals controlled by agents’
2) ‘that a sequential order be established and maintained – that events and states be
“linearized” in a standard way’
3) ‘a sensitivity to what is canonical and what violates canonicality in human
interaction’
4) ‘something approximating a narrator’s perspective: it cannot, in the jargon of
narratology, be “voiceless”’
Bruner suggests the use of the Burkean pentad to qualify the dramaturgical elements of a
narrative. According to this, ‘well-formed stories […] are composed of a pentad of an
Actor, an Action, a Goal, a Scene, and an Instrument – plus Trouble’ (1990:50) 25 . But, as
Bruner also points out (1990:150), this account may have an ethnocentric bias, it ‘may […]
be too “homeostatic” to be universal.’ (ibid.). In his note (ibid.), Bruner suggests further
discussion of the issue, and I see this as an opening towards revising the discrepancy
24 Bruner (2002:34) uses narrative and story interchangeably without any apparent semantic difference.
25 The referred elements are Bruner’s adaptations of Burke’s equivalent elements: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency
and Purpose (Burke, 1969:xv).
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