History of Narrative Genres after Foucault

Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault have explored the role played by
epistemological paradigms in shaping and limiting how the world is
understood and what can count as true at different times. Kuhn took the natural
sciences as his subject, while Foucault focused on the social sciences. In this
essay I propose to explore the existence and nature of cultural paradigms
whose truth claims are less stringent than those made in the sciences, and to
examine in particular the close relation between cultural paradigms and
genres, including the significance of transformations within and between
genres.