provide, pointing thereby to a possible revision of the social code. 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". The Consortium for Strategic Communication also maintains a website on master narratives. Others have related metanarratives to masterplots, "recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life". Criticism of Lyotard's thesis J. W. Bertens and D. Fokkema argued that, in so far as one of Lyotard's targets was science, he was mistaken in thinking that science relies upon a grand narrative for social and epistemic validation, rather than on the accumulation of many lesser narrative successes. Lyotard himself also criticised his own thesis as "simply the worst of all my books". See also References Sources Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1979], reprint 1997. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Further reading David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Indiana UP, 1986) Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (1988) External links A Postmodern Strategy: Language Games Literary criticism Modernism