Narrative Interest as Cultural Negotiation

Abstract

Why are people attracted to stories? What makes narrative texts appealing? These questions continue to divide narrative theorists and lead to fundamental dis- cussions in which all parties keep searching for universals, be it of the text, its recep- tion, or a mixture of both. A recent example of such a controversy can be found in Meir Sternberg's (Universals I and Universals II) rejection of Marie-Laure Ryan's (1991) views on tellability, a term first proposed by William Labov (1972) to describe narrative interest. Ryan locates this interest mainly in (pre)textual elements such as themes and plots, whereas Sternberg emphasizes that universals of narrative interest (suspense, curiosity, surprise) are grounded in the reader's processing of the text. Our goal in this article is to advance the debate by broadening the scope of the discussion. For us, the interest of narrative text can take such a variety of shapes that the only way to theorize it properly is to cast the net as widely as possible. We will do so by locating narrative interest in what can be described metaphorically as the cultural negotiation characterizing any kind of confrontation between reader and (narrative) text. The novelty of our proposal is meant to reside in the specific de- scription of this negotiation, which combines the impact of the (narrative) text with the activity and the cultural embeddedness of the reader. While Sternberg's position on narrative interest is much more sophisticated as a theory of reading, we believe Ryan's must not be entirely discarded. Indeed, her de- scriptions of narrative interest reflect the experience of actual readers. If they find a novel interesting, they attribute this appeal to the book itself and not to their own