grand narrative

is a metanarrative whose those totalizing account of the world offers to explain everything, reducing all history to a single trajectory: the progressive emergence of rational values, for instance; or, alternatively, ‘development’ towards the global market.

The book that brought Lyotard to international - and controversial - attention was The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1.979, tr. 1984), which defined the postmodern as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’. Lyotard’s metanarratives, or ‘grand narratives’, are those totalizing accounts of the world that offer to explain everything, including ‘little narratives’, the familiar stories that represent our own culture to us. Little narratives - individual records, fictions, histories of particular moments - identify heroes and villains, and name the knowledges worth possessing. They represent inscriptions of shared meanings and values. At the same time, the values inscribed in these little narratives are often incommensurable with one another, demonstrating that culture is not homogeneous or uniform. Grand narratives, by contrast, reduce the little narratives to their own terms. Indeed, they reduce all history to a single trajectory: the progressive emergence of rational values, for instance; or, alternatively, ‘development’ towards the global market. The inevitable triumph of the working class was just such a metanarrative, and The Postmodern Condition has not been popular with Marxists.

is a comprehensive, totalizing story, which accounts for everything and reduces all little stories to its terms.

metanarrative (or grand narrative): a comprehensive, totalizing story, which accounts for everything and reduces all little stories to its terms.

grand narrative, n.Definitions

grand narrative