ABSTRACT
Narrative, broadly understood, is language that tells a story. In the more critical parlance of contemporary narrative theory, narratives are 'intentional-communicative artefacts; intentionally fashioned devices of representation that work by manifesting the communicative intentions of their makers'; they can 'intuitively be distinguished from lists, annals, rambling conversational remarks, instruction manuals'. The purpose of such a use of language is 'to put human life, causality, and meaning in relation, to make each of them in some degree intelligible in terms of the other two'. The rethinking of the relationship between narration and argument in the work of Agricola and Ramus went together with a rethinking of the role of figurative language in general in truth-seeking discourse. In a different reaction to the critical assumptions of the structuralist tradition, Michele Le Doeuff's close readings of Descartes's imagistic language detail subtle ways in which metaphor can disrupt the philosophical language supposed to order it.
