Narrative-making is a basic human behavior which pervades all domains of human experience. In terms of form, narratives can range from the most complex saga to the simplest recount of mundane events. More fundamentally, however, narratives fulfill certain crucial functions in human life: in cognition, information structuring, identity construction and performance, intersubjectivity, and sociocultural ritual. This course examines the construct of ‘narrative’ — what it is, what its structure is, how it is constructed, how it has been theorized — and how its various functions manifest themselves linguistically in discourse.
