ABSTRACT
This chapter defines the complex origins of the current concept of narrative and suggests how this complexity can account for the instability of narrative as a descriptive genre. It is to document the recent genesis and complex origins of our modern concept of narrative. The storynarrative contrast can help isolate significant or problematic disparities between description and phenomena. Narrative is sometimes of dialogue, and vice versa. The classical literary dialogue form has interlocutors tell stories. Ethnographers now speculate that one function of reported or narrated speech and dialogue was to model verbal behavior. Contemporary studies of oral discourse, narrative, and conversation tend to label preliterate orality as preponderantly epic-narrative, and to examine contemporary orality within a literate society as conversational. Based on Milman Parrys conjecture that the Homeric epics were oral compositions and not composed in writing as had long been believed, Lords work defined parallels in the form and composition of Balkan and Homeric oral epics.
