The 9/11 master narrative draws inspiration from Christian doctrine where sinners are cast into hell and the pious brought into the kingdom of God. The 9/11 master narrative, which forms the direct backdrop to the book the Reluctant Fundamentalist, seeks to establish the the legitimacy of the war on terror. President Bush also created a master narrative of his own, which I’ll refer to due to lack of a better name as the 9/11 master narrative. Meta-narratives do not have to be as lofty as to give meaning to history/life but can also be simpler ones that deal with morals and ethics. Marx believed that the meaning of history and existence was so that human society would eventually advance to a stage where everyone had class consciousness and were no longer divided into social classes. Karl Marx explained History through the division of it into 5 phases from Primitive Communism all the way to Communism. In communication and strategic communication, a master narrative (or metanarrative) is a “transhistorical narrative that is deeply embedded in a particular culture.” A master narrative is therefore a particular type of narrative, which is defined as a “coherent system of interrelated and sequentially organized stories that share a common rhetorical desire to resolve a conflict by establishing audience expectations according to the known trajectories of its literary and rhetorical form.A master narrative is the idea that events should be interpreted through a linear fashion in order to give an overarching meaning to existence. In the case of Christianity, the school Nativity play is a good example of this. Metanarratives are not usually told outright, but are reinforced by other more specific narratives told within the culture. Examples of these stories are nationalisms, religion, and science, to name a few. In postmodern philosophy, a metanarrative is an untold story that unifies and totalizes the world, and justifies a culture’s power structures. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other “little stories” within totalizing schemes. According to John Stephens it “is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience.” The prefix meta- means “beyond” and is here used to mean “about”, and narrative is a story constructed in a sequential fashion. In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative (from metagrand narrative) is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. As masterplots, by their nature, recur in many different narrative versions, it is an obvious mistake to employ the often misused term ‘master narrative’ for this concept.” (Abbot, 16, 42-6, 47-8, 49-50, 54, 57, 59, 88, 119, 120, 132, 148-52, 158, 160) Masterplots can also exert an influence on the way we take in new information, causing us to overread or underread narratives in an often unconscious effort to bring them into conformity with a materplot. “Recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life. a classic text or other archetypal story, which provides a schematic world view upon which an individual’s experiences and perceptions may be ordered. one which alludes to other narratives, or refers to itself and to its own artifice. Any narrative which is concerned with the idea of storytelling, spec.
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