ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the features identified in Jerome Bruner. These include: particularity, genericness, normativeness, and narrative accrual. It looks at the implications of particularity and attempts to disentangle it from genericness, even though Bruner himself uses the term ‘genre’ indiscriminately under both headings, and without defining it. Motifs and skeletal storylines within which the particularity of a narrative is realized shape our interpretation of events and discourses in other ways. Skeletal storylines come equipped with character types ‘whose motivation and personality are an integral and often fixed element of the masterplot’. Recurrent storylines can have special resonance for particular groups or cultures, with the result that members of these groups will tend to find individual narratives that echo these storylines highly credible. Familiar storylines can be deliberately satirized to communicate social or political messages.
