Dr. Willis’ lecture, to me, demonstrated the ability of almost anything to be a story in some context. The two main examples she covered were the historical narratives that ‘dark tourists’ absorbed through their tourism, and the story of kindness that New Zealand (and especially the current government) had constructed for itself. Throughout this course, we’ve seen that a research question will inevitably lead to some sort of narrative, even if it doesn’t quite match up with the initial expectations of the researcher. This narrative within the research is what sticks with the audience, whether that be intended for other academics or the general public.
Obviously, narratives as a concept are vague and undefined. They appear in the most overt way in literature and other creative works, like Dr. Willis demonstrated. Research narratives and entertainment narratives bleed into each other and overlap frequently. While the discourses taking place within poetry like the Middle Egyptian Dispute between a man and his Ba, Socratic dialogues, theatrical productions like Focault’s No Exit (as mentioned by Dr. Willis) and more may not strictly be research narratives (given that they don’t come from research at an academic institution), they are all examples of a conceptual narrative surfacing in the form of more standard entertainment — at least within the field of philosophy. Philosophy’s abstract nature may make it more suited to this creative approach than other fields in arts, such as my own, linguistics.
I’ve spent a good part of the year now trying to reconcile research in linguistics with this narrative-driven approach of other arts disciplines. I can see in my mind how a story could form for sociolinguistic research, but I fail to see how the grammar of a language could be made engaging in its own right. The reference grammars and grammatical sketches I’ve read all begin with the linguist describing the locale the language they are studying is from, giving historical context where necessary, and then moving to the speakers they took their data from (which is problematic in its own right, given that those speakers aren’t often credited for their contributions throughout the work) then getting straight into the features of the language, I find those features interesting, which is why I read reference grammars in the first place, but someone who isn’t educated in linguistics may not. Is there a way to keep the dry grammatical details intact while also being engaging and telling a story about the language? I suppose I will have to find out.
