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Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm offers new insights into communication behavior and directs our attention to democratic processes in the area of rhetorical criticism. Fisher contributes the idea that people’s lived experiences make them capable of analyzing rhetoric. Further, the Narrative Paradigm helps us to see the nature of multiple logics at work in our communication encounters. Thus, the Narrative Paradigm has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of human communication and human nature in general.

The critique of the Narrative Paradigm revolves around five of our evaluative criteria from Chapter 3: scope and testability, utility, logical consistency, and heurism. We will discuss each of these in turn.

Scope and Testability

The critique that the Narrative Paradigm is too broad mainly focuses on Fisher’s claim that all communication is narrative. Researchers object to that claim for two reasons: First, some have questioned the utility of a definition that includes everything. How meaningful is the definition of narrative if it means all communication behavior? Second, some researchers, notably Robert Rowland (1987; 1989), suggest that some forms of communication are not narrative in the way that Fisher maintains. According to Rowland, science fiction and fantasy do not conform to most people’s values. Rather, these genres often challenge existing values. Further, Rowland questions the utility of considering a novel (such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon) and a political pamphlet (such as one produced by the Committee on the Present Danger) both as narratives as Fisher does. Although both tell stories about the repressive character of the Soviet system, they do so in such different ways that Rowland believes it does a disservice to both writings to place them in the same category. Further, it complicates our understanding of the definition of narrative when two such disparate examples can both be labeled as narrative.

The criticism concerning the overly broad scope of the theory leads to another issue. How testable is a theory that is so broad and inclusive? For instance, how are we to discriminate stories from other types of communication if virtually all communication is narrative? The Narrative Paradigm offers little guidance for structuring our studies, making it difficult to prove whether an assertion is incorrect. Is there value in treating a ritual greeting (“Hi, how was your day?”) and an involved narrative explaining one’s desire for a divorce in the same way?

Utility

The Narrative Paradigm has critics who find it less than useful due to what they consider its conservative bias. William Kirkwood (1992) observes that Fisher’s logic of good reasons focuses on prevailing values and fails to account for the ways in which stories can promote social change. In some ways, both Kirkwood and Fisher agree that this observation is more of an extension to the theory than a punishing critique. Fisher (1987) claims that humans are inventive and that we can accept new stories when they appeal to us. In this process we can change our values rather than demand that stories simply confirm our existing values. To a degree, Miles changed his values regarding the importance of voting and involvement in student life as a result of Jorge’s narratives.

Afsheen Nomai and George Dionisopoulos (2002) imply the same critique in their study of how the media advance the narrative of the American Dream. Nomai and Dionisopoulos analyze the story of Joe Cubas, an American sports agent who has brought more than twenty Cuban defectors to the United States to play baseball. They call this the “Cubas Narrative” and argue that the media coverage of Cubas and the ballplayers “illuminates a most benign and inviting myth of American capitalism . . . [while obscuring] the uncomfortable reality that the needs of the capitalist system bifurcate the Cuban refugees into two classes” (p. 109). The Narrative Paradigm may not easily allow access to marginalized or less popular stories in the culture.

Logical Consistency

The Narrative Paradigm has been faulted for failing to be consistent with some of the claims that Fisher makes about it. For instance, Rowland (1987) finds that the narrative approach does not actually provide a more democratic structure compared to the hierarchical system espoused by the rational world paradigm, nor does it completely offer an alternative to that paradigm. Rowland says that Fisher overstates the problem of domination of the public by the elite, or by the expert, in the rational world paradigm. Additionally, Rowland argues that “there is nothing inherent in storytelling that guarantees that the elites will not control a society” (p. 272).

Heurism

Despite criticisms, which primarily urge refinements of the theory, not its abandonment, Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm has contributed a great deal to the study of human communication. For one thing, the idea of people as storytellers has proved captivating and heuristic. Storytelling seems an apt metaphor for understanding how humans use communication to make sense of the world (Barker, Rimler, Moreno, & Kaplan, 2004; Fiese, 2003; Langellier & Peterson, 2004; Roberts, 2004). Fisher has provided a new paradigm for understanding human nature, squarely located in the symbolic realm of communication. Future scholarship will extend the framework of the Narrative Paradigm to remediate its shortcomings and capitalize on its strengths. In constructing the Narrative Paradigm, Fisher has provided a rich framework for such scholarship to take place.








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