The Chronicle of Higher Education recently posted a fascinating interview with two-time Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles, the biographer of Jesse James, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and George Armstrong Custer. The entire interview is well worth reading, but here are some excerpts especially helpful to lawyers and legal acdemics:
Why narrative history?
Stiles: Narrative begins with the intent to make the reader want to keep reading. That requires plot. In The Art of Fiction, David Lodge defines plot as raising questions in the mind of the reader and delaying the answers.
Academic writing usually lays out the questions and the answers at the outset, then proceeds to demonstrate. Again, that’s fine for its purpose. But it strands a reader alone, without the happy company of mystery and suspense, the crew who sail every plot forward.
Narrative generally centers on characters. Scholarship is concerned with the conditions of humans; literature is concerned with the human condition. Serious nonfiction narrative can be concerned with both, but it’s hard to pull off without individuals who have intentions, carry out actions, and face consequences.
There are other aspects of writing narrative, and of incorporating argument and interpretation, but we always begin with plot and character.
As to why, it’s that narrative is inherently part of the historical enterprise, thanks to the element of time. It’s one reason why many academic historians turn out to be very good writers. By centering on human beings, narrative adds a quality of understanding — a glimpse of the human condition, that central concern of literature. And history has always been considered a branch of literature. There’s no Pulitzer Prize for sociology, after all.
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