Narrative as a Cognitive and Social Tool: A Literature Review
Keywords:
Narrative, narratology, identityAbstract
This article presents a literature review on narrative, exploring its conceptualization, functions, and applications across diverse contexts. Through an analysis of literature published in Spanish and English over the past ten years, this review synthesizes findings from major narrative theories, ranging from classical narratology to post-structuralist and cognitive approaches. The main findings reveal that narrative fulfills key social, psychological, and epistemological functions, acting as a cornerstone for community cohesion, the construction of personal identity, and the organization of knowledge. Additionally, the article discusses the evolution of narrative in digital and transmedia environments, highlighting its adaptability and ongoing relevance in contemporary communication. The study concludes that narrative is a dynamic field that requires greater theoretical integration and deeper exploration of its manifestations in the digital era, with this review serving as a roadmap for future research.
Downloads
References
Alber, J. (2025). Gender and Cognitive Narratology. In The Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer and Trans* Narrative Studies (pp. 221-238). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Anderson, C., & Kirkpatrick, S. (2016). Narrative interviewing. International journal of clinical pharmacy, 38(3), 631-634.
Arias Cardona, A. M., & Alvarado Salgado, S. V. (2015). Investigación narrativa: apuesta metodológica para la construcción social de conocimientos científicos. CES psicología, 8(2), 171-181.
Babelyuk, O., Koliasa, O., Matsevko-Bekerska, L., Matuzkova, O., & Pavlenko, N. (2021). The Interaction of Possible Worlds through the Prism of Cognitive Narratology. Arab World English Journal, 12(2), 364-376.
Bethel, A., & Rogers, M. (2019). Choosing the right databases and search techniques. Systematic searching: Practical ideas for improving search results, 73-94.
Bouizegarene, N., Ramstead, M. J., Constant, A., Friston, K. J., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2024). Narrative as active inference: An integrative account of cognitive and social functions in adaptation. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1345480.
Bramer, W. M., Rethlefsen, M. L., Kleijnen, J., & Franco, O. H. (2017). Optimal database combinations for literature searches in systematic reviews: a prospective exploratory study. Systematic reviews, 6(1), 245.
Chang, C. (2019). Narrative advertisements and narrative processing. In Advertising theory (pp. 275-292). Routledge.
Clandinin, D. J. (2019). Narrative and story in teacher education. In Journeys in narrative inquiry (pp. 91-102). Routledge.
Coste, D. (2017). Narrative theory. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.
Dailey, S. L., & Browning, L. (2014). Retelling stories in organizations: Understanding the functions of narrative repetition. Academy of management review, 39(1), 22-43.
De Fina, A. (2021). Doing narrative analysis from a narratives-as-practices perspective. Narrative Inquiry, 31(1), 49-71.
Estupiñán Mojica, J., & González Gutiérrez, O. (2015). Narrativa conversacional, relatos de vida y tramas humanos. Ediciones USTA.
Fleming, K. (2020). Post-structuralist approaches to language contact. In The Routledge handbook of Pidgin and Creole languages (pp. 490-503). Routledge.
Fludernik, M., & Ryan, M. L. (2019). Factual narrative: An introduction. Narrative factuality: A handbook, 6, 1.
Fowler, S. A., & Jewell, S. T. (2022). Database Searching. Piecing Together Systematic Reviews and Other Evidence Systheses, 93-110.
Glozer, S., Caruana, R., & Hibbert, S. A. (2019). The never-ending story: Discursive legitimation in social media dialogue. Organization Studies, 40(5), 625-650.
Green, J. L. (2019). Why scream about sound in space? The functions of audience discourse about unrealistic science in narrative fiction. Public understanding of science, 28(3), 305-319.
Greenhalgh, T., Raftery, J., Hanney, S., & Glover, M. (2016). Research impact: a narrative review. BMC medicine, 14(1), 78.
Herman, L., & Vervaeck, B. (2019). Handbook of narrative analysis. U of Nebraska Press.
Hinck, R. S., Cooley, S. C., & Kluver, R. (2019). Global media and strategic narratives of contested democracy. New York, NY: Routledge.
Josselson, R., & Hammack, P. L. (2021). Essentials of narrative analysis. American Psychological Association.
Leone, M. (2022). Post-Structuralist Semiotics: A Reading. In Bloomsbury Semiotics: A Major Reference Work in Four Volumes (Vol. 1, pp. 109-128). Bloomsbury.
Magliano, J. P., Higgs, K., & Clinton, J. (2019). Sources of complexity in narrative comprehension across media. Narrative complexity: Cognition, embodiment, evolution, 149-173.
Malik, M. A., Abbas, F., & Jawad, M. (2020). Narrative, Narrator and Narration: A structuralist and psycho-narrative reading of “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Husseini. Elementary Education Online, 19(4), 3746-3755.
Moss-Wellington, W. (2019). Narrative Humanism: Kindness and Complexity in Fiction and Film. Edinburgh University Press.
Ntinda, K. (2018). Narrative research. In Handbook of research methods in health social sciences (pp. 1-13). Springer, Singapore.
Ogata, T. (2019). Toward a post-narratology or the narratology of narrative generation. In Post-narratology through computational and cognitive approaches (pp. 85-142). IGI Global Scientific Publishing.
Piper, A., So, R. J., & Bamman, D. (2021, November). Narrative theory for computational narrative understanding. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 298-311).
Punday, D. (2019). Playing at Narratology: Digital Media as Narrative Theory. The Ohio State University Press.
Quintero Mejía, M. (2018). Usos de las narrativas, epistemologías y metodologías: aportes para la investigación. Doctorado Interinstitucional en Educación. Énfasis. Uri: http://hdl.handle.net/11349/38173
Ripamonti, P. (2017). Investigar a través de narrativas. Metodologías en contexto: intervenciones en perspectiva feminista, poscolonial, latinoamericana, 83-103.
Sharp, N. L., Bye, R. A., & Cusick, A. (2019). Narrative analysis. In Handbook of research methods in health social sciences (pp. 861-880). Springer, Singapore.
Smith, B. (2016). Narrative analysis. Analysing qualitative data in psychology, 2(202-221).
Vercauteren, G. (2021). Insights from mental model theory and cognitive narratology as a tool for content selection in audio description. Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 4(3), 6-24.
Wilde, L. R. (2019). Recontextualizing characters. Media convergence and pre-/meta-narrative character circulation. IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, 15(1), 3-21.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Revista Vanguardia Interdisciplinaria
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
