Claim
Metanarrative
Overview
In social theory, a metanarrative (also master narrative, or meta-narrative and grand narrative; French: métarécit or grand récit) is an overarching narrative about smaller historical narratives, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea. The term was popularized by the writing of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in 1979. Metanarrative is considered a foundational concept of postmodernism.
Master narrative and synonymous terms like metanarrative are also used in narratology to mean "stories within stories," as coined by literary theorist Gérard Genette.
Examples of master narratives can be found in U.S. high school textbooks according to scholar
Derrick Alridge: "history courses and curricula are dominated by such heroic and celebratory master narratives as those portraying George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as the heroic 'Founding Fathers,' Abraham Lincoln as the 'Great Emancipator,' and Martin Luther King, Jr., as the messianic savior of African Americans."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The other is Compounded; as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaure. So when a man compoundeth the image of his own person, with the image of the actions of an other man; as when a man imagins himselfe a Hercules, or an Alexander, (which happeneth often to them that are much taken with reading of Romants) it is a compound imagination, and properly but a…
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
States what Metanarrative is.
The reason is to be found in poetic art and ancient custom. So those who desired to learn, being led by a certain intellectual pleasure, might the easier seek and find the truth, and that the unlearned might not despise what they are not able to understand. For what is indicated indirectly is stimulating, while what is said clearly is valued more moderately.
Plutarch, Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3
States what Metanarrative is.
What is called the 'pragmatic' writing of history has in modern times frequently sinned in its treatment of great historical characters, and defaced and tarnished the true conception of them by this fallacious separation of the outward from the inward. Not content with telling the unvarnished tale of the great acts which have been wrought by the heroes of the world's history, and with acknowledging that their inward…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Metanarrative is.
Philosophers who discussed Metanarrative
- The Name of the Rose
- Richard Rorty
- Jean Baudrillard
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Alexander Herzen
- Kieran Egan (philosopher)
Related ideas
- Meta (prefix)
- Philosophy
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Language game (philosophy)
- Modernity
- Marxism
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- African Americans
- Postmodernism
- Conceptual model
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Knowledge
- Post-structuralism
- Narrative
- Progressivism
- Skepticism
- Experience
- Thomas Jefferson
- Abraham Lincoln
- Age of Enlightenment
- Social theory
- Universalism
- YouTube
- Michel Foucault
Place in the tradition
Part of French philosophy.