Macintyre: A Narrative Analysis

2229 Words9 Pages

The word narrative translates as a spoken or written account of connected events; a story. The flow of reality and in the case of this essay the word narrative reflects the process of creativity or fiction as Ricoeur refers to it. This process of narrative forms an integral part in the creative process. This process makes use of imagination and memory to form a new fictional word or architecture.
To understand the meaning of narrative the words of Macintyre (1984: 211) describes the function of narrative as a whole; "we dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative…". The body learns by conditioning it, learning the …show more content…

Ricoeur (1979: 125) argues that “…thought does not like what is new and does its best to reduce the new to the old”. Narrative is thus used to deduce the new to the old or what we know. This story that has been lived that forms the narrative of the past transforms the present to what is known and to something basic so that humankind can make sense of what is happening. In essence the lived narrative of humankind forms memories.
Pallasmaa, (2011; 118) uses the words of Bachelard; “Our house is our corner of the world…it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word… it is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos “to from an understanding that the memory of our childhood house forms the basic understanding of the house in architectural design. The designer makes use of memory narrative of his past to design what is new. As humankind deduces what is new to the old to make sense of it the designer of space also uses the old to transform the new into understandable space, narrative becomes the means of this process.
Human consciousness is an embodied consciousness; the world is structured around a sensory and corporeal center. “I am my body”, Merleau-Ponty (1964:12) claims, “I am what is around me”, argues Stevens(1990: 86), and “I am the space, where I am” , establishes the poet Arnaud(Bachelard 1996: 137). Finally, “I am my world”, concludes Wittgenstein. (1972: 68)
2 | P a g …show more content…

The story begins with four acts that explore the relationships between these characters. Act I introduces the characters illustrating the moment the Princess and the Cowherd fall in love. As time passes the happy couple begins to neglect their duties. The Emperor being a stern ruler who does not tolerate idleness decided to punish the lovers, separating them by a deep and swift lake unassailable by any man. In the final act the Princess’s flying friends the magpies form a feathery bridge across the lake allowing the Princess and Cowherd to renew their pledge of eternal

Open Document