Narratives that Shape our World
What this module asks
This module explores how narratives transmit, challenge and reshape cultural values. You study how stories circulate, who they privilege, and what they make seem natural or inevitable. Key concepts include master narratives, counter-narratives, ideology, intertextuality, power, silence, and reception.
Concepts to master
- Master narrative: a dominant story a culture tells about itself, often presented as common sense.
- Counter-narrative: a text that resists, complicates or rewrites that dominant story.
- Ideology: embedded assumptions about gender, race, class, nation or history that a narrative naturalises.
- Intertextuality: how texts echo, revise or answer earlier texts, including through allusion and pastiche.
- Silence and absence: what a narrative omits or marginalises is as meaningful as what it includes.
- Reception: how different audiences, across time and place, may read the same narrative differently.
Traps in questions
Prompts often say "how does the text challenge or reinforce" a narrative, so a one-sided answer loses marks. Another trap is collapsing the narrator's views with the composer's; an unreliable narrator can voice an ideology the text critiques. Students also overgeneralise about "society" without evidence from the text, or treat context as background biography rather than as a force shaping meaning.
Rule of thumb
Ask three questions of any narrative: Whose story is centred? Whose is silenced? What does the text want me to accept as true? Then test whether the text endorses or interrogates that position.
Worked example
If a novel presents a heroic national founding story through an unreliable narrator, argue that the text both uses and destabilises the master narrative: the narrator's confident tone is undercut by contradictory details, so readers are positioned to question the myth rather than simply absorb it.
Practice habit
Map a text's narrative against a dominant cultural story, listing points of alignment and friction with quotations for each.