“Quasi-narrative”: towards the prospects of a literary studies’ concept in political science

he article aims to understand the prospects for using the concept of quasi-narrative in the methodology of political science. The starting point of the author’s reflections is a discussion about the specifics of political narrative caused by the competition between essentialist and relativist approaches to its interpretation. Noting the role of the concept of “narrativity index” developed in the tradition of the Narrative Policy Framework, the author raises the question of the need to understand the role of quasi-narratives in political discourse. “Quasi-narrative” is an umbrella concept for all types of unusual narrativity that somehow do not fit into standard definitions (concepts) of narrative. The article notes that the conceptualization of unnatural narratives actualizes the question of the boundaries of storytelling as such. The author agrees that one of the essential features of the standard narrative is the representation of events in time, as well as the presence of a significant connection between them. Quasi-narrative plays on the borderline of the so-understood narrative, but remaining in its orbit, it differs from pseudo-narrative, which only imitates the narrative’s main distinguishing features. Based on the works of well-known narratologists (Brian Richardson, Gerald Prince, Robin Warhol, etc.), the author provides an overview of the main types of quasi-narrative discourse, including the unnarrated, the nonnarrated, the denarrated, the antinarrative, and the unnarratable in several of its varieties as well as the categorical pair of the undernarrated and the overnarrated. The article formulates several considerations and hypotheses regarding the methodological potential of quasi–narrative categorical grid in such research fields of political science as the explication of implicit power (ideological) attitudes and strategies in discourse, cognitive–emotional games with media audiences, discursive games with censorship, the construction and deconstruction of political identities, and the potential of quasi–narratives in predicting socio-political crises.

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