Narrative and narrativity: A narratological reconceptualization and its applicability to the visual arts

Abstract Among the many reorientations which the past century has brought about in the field of knowledge we have also witnessed what has been called the 'narrativist turn'.2 This turn is evident in the increased attention that narratives and their characteristic quality, narrativity, have met with over the past few decades in a surprisingly large number of cultural practices. The table of contents of a volume edited by Cristopher Nash, Narrative in Culture,3 lists, for instance, economics, law, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature — and this is only a selection of the discourses that have been associated with narrativity. In addition, one may mention autobiography (for obvious reasons), historiography,4 'natural history' including geology and biology (an example of which is the series of booklets The Story Behind the Scenery devoted to explaining the geological, biological and cultural backgrounds of US National Parks and Monuments) and, moreover, the so-called 'natural narratives' of oral everyday onversation,5 film6 and even architecture7 and music8. There are in fact so many fields in which narrative is said to play a role that Michael Toolan's sweeping statement, '[n] arratives are everywhere',9 hardly sounds like an exaggeration. This is also true of art history. Here 'narrative' is a current concept, too, as can, for instance, be seen in the writings of Ernst Gombrich, for whom there has been a 'constant interaction between narrative intent' and illusionist 'pictorial realism' since the classical 'Greek revolution',10 or of Svetlana Alpers, who takes it for granted that post-classical Western painting was predominantly narrative from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.11