ABSTRACT
It would be an oversimplification to see social narratives only as a means of collective communication in which a group of speakers transfers a message to a group of listeners—like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, speaking to the audience. The proliferation of social narratives cannot be explained solely through the prism of a closed communication system comprised of the speaker-text-audience triad, which may work, for example, for literary texts. Rather, social narratives form a web of communicational events that may occur in different circumstances, take many forms, and involve various actors. The social domain can be seen as an arena for iteration of a communicative situation in which stories, or sometimes versions or parts thereof, are repeatedly told and retold (Kroeber 1992: 9, see also van Hulst 2013, Linde 2009: 74–5, Nelson 2003). This state of affairs presents a challenge to the idea of communication as a single, one-time event involving a speaker and an audience. Instead, we are faced with a dispersion of many communication events in which stories are retold time and again, thereby becoming social entities. This means that “multiplicity” lies at the heart of social narratives as a fourth key element. The term refers to the process of repetition and variation through which narratives are reproduced at the societal sphere. It corresponds with the idea that social narratives are embraced by a group and also tell, in one way or another, something about that group (see Chapter 1).
