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Narratives and Culture: The Role of Stories in Self-Creation

The postmodern condition is characterized not only by suspicion of meta-narratives, but by a depreciation of all narratives. Before WWII, Walter Benjamin noted that information was displacing stories.¹ Since then narratives have steadily lost status and, more recently, have even been attacked.² There is now a crisis of narrative in novels, while in film, narrative is being subordinated to images.³ Literary theorists have reinforced this crisis by "deconstructing" discourses to undermine their cognitive claims.⁴ More significantly, history has been in a crisis for some time,⁵ with both historians and philosophers questioning the relation between narrative coherence and life as it...