This paper aims to (re)ignite debate about the role of narrative in the medical humanities. It begins with a critical review of the ways in which narrative has been mobilised by humanities and social science scholars to understand the experience of health and illness. I highlight seven dangers or blind spots in the dominant medical humanities approach to narrative, including the frequently unexamined assumption that all human beings are “naturally narrative.” I then explore this assumption further through an analysis of philosopher Galen Strawson’s influential article “Against Narrativity.” Strawson rejects the descriptive claim that “human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative” and the normative claim that “a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood.” His work has been taken up across a range of disciplines but its implications in the context of health and illness have not yet been sufficiently discussed. This article argues that “Against Narrativity” can and should stimulate robust debate within the medical humanities regarding the limits of narrative, and concludes by discussing a range of possibilities for venturing “beyond narrative.”

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The limits of narrative: provocations for the medical humanities

We are spending more and more of our lives online. Meanwhile, the combination of constant connectivity and ubiquitous computing is folding the material world itself into an expansive ‘Internet of things’. As a result the line between life online and life off-line has become blurred in an existential equivalence of the digital and the analog. In this networked ecosystem, the old Web 1.0 notion of an anonymous digital persona that is separate from off-line, analog self-identity is no longer applicable. A new paradigm for conceptualizing the dialectic of digital–analog self-identity is needed. To that end, I argue that in our age of networked connectivity, self-identity is being fashioned according to the aesthetics of transmedia production. I conclude that the transmedia paradigm, taken as a model for interpreting self-identity in the liminal space between the virtual and the real, reveals a transmediated self constituted as a browsable story-world that is integrated, dispersed, episodic, and interactive.

The transmediated self Life between the digital and the analog

Theorists of narrative have been divided into those who conceive of narrative primarily as a cognitive instrument for imposing meaningful order onto the real and those who consider it to be primarily an ontological category that characterizes the human way of being in the world, that is, something constitutive of human existence. These can be called respectively the epistemological and ontological position on the significance of narrative for human existence. Galen Strawson, in turn, has made an influential distinction between descriptive and normative positions on the narrativity of experience. In this essay, I suggest that even though these conceptual differentiations are helpful to a certain extent, such binary terms may also prevent us from paying adequate attention to complex interconnections between the ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimension of the relation between narrative and human existence. I argue that the question of the significance of narrative for human existence can be formulated with an emphasis on any of these philosophical dimensions but that the answers involve implicit assumptions concerning all three dimensions. In the debate on narrative and human existence, particularly undertheorized has been the role of tacit ontological assumptions concerning what is counted as real. In disentangling the debate, I argue that both experience and narrative are phenomena constituted by interpretative activity; while it is important not to conflate experience and narrative, it can be meaningfully said that narrative interpretations of experiences have a constitutive role in our existence. By looking at how certain novelists have dealt with this problematic, the essay also suggests how to tie the theoretical study of narrative more intimately to the study of the philosophical underpinnings of narrative forms in literary history.

Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics

The starting point of the study was that a good teaching requires a teacher to be aware of the sources of his or her pedagogical decisions; that is, personal values, beliefs and understandings. From this perspective, teacher’s professional development refers to a process of extending teacher’s self-knowledge. The aim of this study was to promote student teachers’ professional development with the help of identity work. Identity work refers reflecting both personal and professional experiences. Identity work consists of self-reflection on student teacher’s life experiences (self-identity), and video diary-based reflection on student teachers’ classroom practice (professional identity). The research questions of the study were 1) how is identity work manifested by the participants? and 2) what is the potential of identity work in promoting student teachers’ professional development? The research data was collected from four student teachers in academic year 2007–2008; the research group had 24 meeting during the research process. Student teachers belong to multimode teacher education programme, where students work as ordinary teachers in their schools during their university studies. The data collection was conducted by using two methods: participants’ narratives on the basis of autobiographical writings and video diaries on student teachers’ lessons. Narrative research data was analysed by employing qualitative methods and strategies as they were needed in the research. The research results revealed the four different ways of working with identities, each of them revealing different aspects of and approaches to identity work. The results also showed that identity work has the potential to promote professional development. As the research progressed, there were visible changes in the participants’ reflection. However, despite encouraging results, some issues should be critically questioned. Although reflection sounds attractive and fruitful as a tool for promoting professional development, there are also difficulties and obstacles. On the basis of the results, a proposal for promoting student teachers’ professional development is

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Working with identities - promoting student teachers' professional development

What is narrative identity? In an article I published in this journal two years ago, I defined it as "the notion that what we are is a story of some kind." Before investigating its social and somatic sources, I added that I regarded this idea as "counterintuitive and even extravagant." James Phelan liked my characterization of narrative identity enough to quote it twice in an article of his own in Narrative last October. In that "Editor's Column," Phelan praises the British philosopher Galen Strawson for "his overall effort to debunk the narrative identity thesis" as "both effective and salutary" (209). As the lead-in to his commentary on Strawson, Phelan casts me as the apostle of narrative identity, and it would seem to follow, accordingly, that my views have been "debunked" by Strawson. As Phelan concludes, I'd be guilty-along with Oliver Sacks, Jerome Bruner, and others-of "reducing the numerous and complex relations between the self and one's narratives about the self to a single [narrative] model" (210). When I finished reading the "Editor's Column," I didn't recognize myself in Phelan's "Eakin," not surprisingly because Phelan quotes me selectively to suit his own agenda, a protest against what he calls "narrative imperialism," "the impulse by students of narrative to claim..,. more and more power for our object of study and our ways of studying it" (206). So to set the record straight at the outset, permit me to run the entire passage in which Phelan found his cue. In what follows, I reflect on Oliver Sacks's observation that "it might be said that each of us constructs and lives a 'narrative', and that this narrative is us, our identities" (110, emphasis original):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/30219645

Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism: A Response to Galen Strawson and James Phelan

In the December 2004 issue of Ratio, Galen Strawson published an important essay in which he mounted a groundbreaking attack against what has become virtu ally the standard view of how we construe our lives: the narrative identity thesis, which insists that our identity is a function of the story that we construct about our selves. Specifically, he forcefully challenges both the descriptive and normative as pects of the thesis, the judgment, on the one hand, that, in Oliver Sacks's words, "each of us constructs and lives a narrative" (105), and the judgment, on the other, that, as Marya Schechtman puts it, we ought to construct our lives narratively, that, indeed, we must do so to achieve full personhood (119). The overall argument of Strawson's piece divides into two major sections, each of which has two parts: (1) a defense of what he calls an Episodic approach to self-experience, in which the self, considered as self, is a "now" phenomenon disconnected from the past and the future, and an attack against what he calls the prevailing Diachronie approach to self experience, in which the self, considered as a self, is understood to persist in time from the past into the future; and (2) a defense of a non-Narrative form of self-repre sentation and an attack against the dominance of the Narrative form of self-represen tation. The aim of Strawson's case at large is to reconfigure the terms and the conditions of the discussion of the relations obtaining between the self and its repre sentation. In my view, one cannot read this piece without being impressed by its icon oclastic turn, by its temerity in facing down the almost universal endorsement of the narrative identity thesis, and by its unflinching insistence that the Episodic/non Narrative approach to self-representation has equal standing with the Diachronie/ Narrative approach, that in point of fact it just might be, primus inter pares.

James L. Battersby

Papers

Narrativity, Self, and Self-Representation