Essay On Experiential Narrative

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What is an experiential narrative? “A narrative of personal experience is a report of a sequence of events that have entered into the biography of the speaker by a sequence of clauses that correspond to the order of the original events“ (Labov, 1997)
The word narrative comes from the Latin narrare that is, telling a story. Narrative of personal experience is “the fundamental human capacity to transfer experience from one person to another through oral narrative” (Labov 1997).
Experiential narratives are recounts of different personal experiences an individual makes in the world. People throughout history have found it useful or meaningful to communicate these experiences to the others. The ability of embodying experiences into a narrative …show more content…

The telling of stories seems to characterize the interpersonal interaction in time, in different cultures and between people of all ages, even children.
The ability of talking about what happened to an individual yesterday, the day before or the year before, is intrinsic in the human kind.
Because of their nature, cognitive, cultural, social, and psychological, narratives have drawn the attention of sociologist, anthropologists, historians and linguists since the beginning of scholarship. Aristotle was one of the first scholars defining the structure of a narrative: “A beginning [of a narrative] is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end, that which is naturally after something else, either as its necessary or usual consequent and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and also another after it”. Furthermore, Aristotle concludes, "a well-constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just described. Again: to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude" (Aristotle, Poetics c. 335

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