Narrative Swerves: Grand Narratives and the Disciplines

Abstract

Beer explores the legacies of Jean-François Lyotard's proclamation of the death of 'grand narratives', including the gendered dimension of their fall-out in a 'domestication' or everydayness despised because it is perceived to hold no possibilities for invention and newness. Beer does not, however, seek to reinvent 'domestication', but rather to explore the possibilities of the 'narrative swerve': a model of narrative as flexible rather than totalizing. Its possibilities emerge in the philosopher Richard Rorty's account of 'irony' (which he genders as a female trope) and, more powerfully, in the 'trickster' figure of folk-tale which takes on new resonances in postmodern feminisms and in contemporary literature. Rorty's ironist ultimately controls language and meaning through her characteristic device of quotation marks, containing words while disclaiming responsibility for them. A more enabling site for the trickster (conceived by Beer as an enabling feminist thought-tool and not as an identity for women to assume) and for the narrative swerve might, paradoxically, be found in scientific studies, which are, and despite their declared ideals of coherence and testability, fascinated with the relations of deviation and rule. Thus we find spaces-between and across the 'two cultures' as well as other cultural borderlines - for productive knowledge-testing and knowledge-making which are neither held fast by 'grand narratives' nor wholly abandoned in and to their dereliction.