Jean-Francois Lyotard is a leading French philosopher and literary theorist.  He is noted for his examination of the effect of postmodernity on the human condition.  Grand narrative is a global cultural narrative schema which explains knowledge and experience.  Grand narrative tends to be a sense that history is moving towards some goal that we all understand.  It is akin to a Buddhist point of view where things repeat.  Grand narrative is knowledge in the form of story-telling that sees some kind of interconnection between events related to one another.  Grand narrative is all those conceptions which try to make sense of history in some connected way, rather than just making sense of isolated events in history, concepts like class struggle, socialism and capitalism, productive forces and so on. It is a narrative of ideals.

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