Installment 1 on Narrative Evolution by Emmett Furey. A series about how narrative has evolved over time, and about how we, as humans, evolved our narrative orientation to the world.

The Semantics Of Narrative Part I

Narrative correlationism holds that our narrative capacity is a side-effect of the development of advanced conscious processing in human beings. In this episode, we consider what may have been our narrative worldview’s evolutionary heritage, by exploring the kinds of problems that consciousness likely emerged to solve. Why is it valuable, from an evolutionary standpoint, that human beings are able to experience the world narratively? And how is consciousness the common denominator between our scientific, philosophical, and historical ideas of what it means to be a human being? Listen to learn more!

The Semantics Of Narrative Part II

In this installment of Narrative Evolution, we finally reveal why the overarching title of these first three parts has been ‘The Semantics of Narrative.’ Semantics is the branch of semiotics that deals with words and their meanings. And since narrative correlationism defines stories as meaningful connections across time, meaning-creation will be one of the chief concerns of this series. What precisely is the process by which our conscious minds create meaning? And how might the semiotic study of language inform the way we look at narrative? Listen to learn more!

The Semantics Of Narrative Part III

In this installment of Narrative Evolution, we explore one of the oldest questions in the history of narratology: Is the artwork that we create a narrative unto itself, or does narrative only exist in the mind of the beholder? Narrative correlationism posits that storytelling, at base, is just a way of transmitting information from one person to another. With that in mind, in our continuing efforts to track our narrative worldview’s evolutionary heritage, we examine why person-to-person information transfer is valuable, from an evolutionary perspective. And if we agree that narrative artwork is just a collection of sensory data, that raises another question: Since human beings have five distinct senses, and there exist disparate art forms that cater to different combinations of all of them, is it really possible to come up with a single definition of narrative that encompasses all of them?

Listen to find answers to these questions, and more!

The Discourse Of Narrative

In this installment of Narrative Evolution, we explore the subjectivity of the human experience, and the idea that subjectivity has its roots in our inherently narrative way of experiencing the world. In this series so far, I’ve suggested that the stories of our life are made up of inescapable links between our past and our present, facilitated by our conscious architecture. In this article we’ll discuss the underpinnings of that idea in the philosophical school of correlationism, stemming from older ideas dating all the way back to Immanuel Kant. What is the correlationist circle? And how does our subjective comportment to the world influence a multiplicity of narrative interpretations of a film like “Blade Runner”?

Listen to find answers to these questions, and more!

Narrative Evolution - The Subjectivity Of Narrative Part I

In this installment of Narrative Evolution, we examine the infamous unicorn dream sequence from “Blade Runner," and how drastically its inclusion or omission can influence the audience’s narrative experience of the film. The question of whether or not the film’s protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a replicant, is a prime example of the inherent subjectivity of our narrative experience, and in this article we explore where the most important sterwards of the “Blade Runner” franchise come down on the 40-year debate. Did the 2017 sequel “Blade Runner 2049” finally answer this age-old question, or did it just provide more flame to the fire of the debate? And who, ultimately, gets the final say on these kinds of narrative questions? Listen to learn more!

The Subjectivity Of Narrative Part II

Our brains have a finite storage capacity, and as such, it is necessary for human beings to have selective memory. We must, in other words, only remember the things that promise to be relevant to us in our future. So our conscious minds are continually evaluating which of our past experiences are most important for us to remember in the aggregate. Choosing what parts of our past to include in our own personal history and what parts to leave out, then, is one of our brain’s most important functions. It is for this reason that Wilhelm Dilthey, in the early days of the 20th century, wrote that human beings are possessed of a “historical consciousness.” And in the same way that historians determine the syntax of history, narrative storytellers determine the syntax of the art that they create, by deciding what elements to include in the discourse and the way they want to present them.

What do histories and narrative art have in common? And how do our artists, in crafting their work, stand in for our conscious faculty of attention? Listen to find out.

The Syntactics of Narrative

Wilhelm Dilthey says that “individuals are not distinguished qualitatively but by means of the relative emphasis of particular moments.” In this installment of Narrative Evolution, we explore how our narrative worldview shapes who we are as people - our own personal characters - and what that can tell us about crafting characters in fiction. Our personal identities, it turns out, are structured like stories. Narrative, after all, is the way that we experience the world, so it must also be the way that we experience ourselves. Narrative art, generally, attempts to put its audience in the mind of its characters, and it does this primarily by portraying the conscious experience of those characters.

How precisely do narrative artists put their audience inside the minds of their characters? And what do films like “Memento” teach us about telling stories from the perspective of the characters inside it? Listen to find out.

The Character of Narrative

The true value of our brain’s ever-evolving bank of knowledge is that it enables us to predict the future by forging stories, meaningful connections across time. And understanding the process by which our brains predict the future can help us as artists lean into or subvert our audiences’ narratological expectations in regards to the art that we create. So far in this series, we’ve explored the semantics and syntactics of narrative, and now in this latest installment of Narrative Evolution we’ve come to pragmatics. The pragmatics of narrative can be characterized as the contextual elements, aside from the story itself, that impact an audience’s experience of a piece of narrative art.

How does the concept of diegesis come into play in narrative design? And how does our understanding of genres impact our experience of narrative art? Listen for these answers and more!

Narrative Evolution

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