Narrative and the Human Sciences

Abstract

The relevance of narrative to the history of the human sciences (HHS) is undeniable. It is equally significant, however, that scholars can mean a number of very different things when they write about narrative. As a consequence, the sense of “narrative” in HHS (and beyond) has expanded enormously to the point where it risks becoming a trivial or meaningless term of analysis. This chapter unpacks the various uses of “narrative” that appear in scholarly work, and it relates them to “everyday” notions of narrative as storytelling or as an overarching position on some topic (e.g., the narrative of climate change). The chapter provides a conceptual guide to ways narrative appears on three entangled levels of HHS enquiry: first, in reflections on methodology, both of historical work itself, as well as of the human sciences about which HHS researchers write; second, in theorizations of narrative as it has been disciplined as an object of study in several sciences, notably psychology and narratology; and third, in textual studies of where and how narrative is part of the practice of human-scientific activity, and how those textual forms have changed. The three levels are clearly interlinked: A historian of psychology might write a narrative about the use of narrative forms of therapy in the history of psychology, for instance, and make use of narratological concepts to analyze textual features of resulting case histories. Attention to narrative at each level can shed light on what it means to make knowledge about the human. This chapter argues that HHS work will be most productive when different meanings of narrative are distinguished with greater precision. Undertaking such analysis, finally, reveals the relative sparsity to date of careful textual analysis of what human scientists write.