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!

The Pragmatics of Narrative: Part I

Narrative Evolution