Although narrative inquiry has a long intellectual history both in and out of education, it is increasingly used in studies of educational experience. One theory in educational research holds that humans are storytelling organisms who, individually and socially, lead storied lives. Thus, the study of narrative is the study of the ways humans experience the world. This general concept is refined into the view that education and educational research is the construction and reconstruction of personal and social stories; learners, teachers, and researchers are storytellers and characters in their own and other's stories. In this paper we briefly survey forms of narrative inquiry in educational studies and outline certain criteria, methods, and writing forms, which we describe in terms of beginning the story, living the story, and selecting stories to construct and reconstruct narrative plots. Certain risks, dangers, and abuses possible in narrative studies are discussed. We conclude by describing a two-part r...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1176100.pdf

Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry

This essay proposes a conception of genre based on conventionalized social motives which are found in recurrent situation‐types. The thesis is that genre must be conceived in terms of rhetorical action rather than substance or form.

Genre as social action

In this revised second edition, Deirdre McCloskey demonstrates how economic discourse employs metaphor, authority, symmetry and other rhetorical means of persuasion. ""The Rhetoric of Economics"" shows economists to be human persuaders and poets of the marketplace, even in their most technical and mathematical moods. It is further enhanced by three new chapters and two new bibliographies.

The Rhetoric of Economics

Television has conditioned us to tolerate visually entertaining material measured out in spoonfuls of time, to the detriment of rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs. In this eloquent, persuasive book, Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. Before we hand over politics, education, religion, and journalism to the show business demands of the television age, we must recognize the ways in which the media shape our lives and the ways we can, in turn, shape them to serve out highest goals.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

This essay proposes a theory of human communication based on a conception of persons as homo narrans. It compares and contrasts this view with the traditional rational perspective on symbolic interaction. The viability of the narrative paradigm and its attendant notions of reason and rationality are demonstrated through an extended analysis of key aspects of the current nuclear war controversy and a brief application to The Epic of Gilgamesh. The narrative paradigm synthesizes two strands in rhetorical theory: the argumentative, persuasive theme and the literary, aesthetic theme.

Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument

Agon and Logos: Revolution and Revelation

This volume brings together Northrop Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, a body of work produced over almost sixty years Including Frye's incisive book, TS Eliot, as well as his discussions of writers such as James Joyce, WB Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and George Orwell, the volume also contains a recently discovered review of CG Jung's book on the synchronicity principle and a previously unpublished introduction to a twentieth-century literature anthology Frye's insightful commentaries demonstrate definitively that he was as astute a critic of the literature of his own time as he was of the literature of earlier periods Glen Robert Gill's substantial introduction delineates the development of Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, puts it in historical and cultural context, and relates it to his overarching theory of literature This volume in Frye's Collected Works is indispensible not only for readers of Frye's work but for all scholars and students of twentieth-century literature

Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature

N drama, characterization depends on function: what a character is follows from what he has to do in the play. Dramatic function in its turn depends on the structure of the play: the character has certain things to do because the play has such and such a shape. Given a sufficiently powerful sense of structure, the characters will be essentially speaking dramatic functions, as they are in Jonson's comedy of humours. The structure of the play in its turn depends on the category of the play: if it is a comedy, its structure will require a comic resolution and a prevailing comic mood. These sound like simple principles, but it is extraordinary how undeveloped they are in Shakespearian criticism. They have been neglected for a historical approach, which, however useful in itself, is not based squarely on the conventions of the dramatic genre. Of all forms of literary expression, the drama is the least dependent on its historical context. No doubt many in Shakespeare's audience did addle their brains with the theory of monarchy or Reformation theology or the chain of being or the four humours when they were not being better educated by Shakespeare. But theatrical audiences, as such, hardly change at all from one millennium to another. In the earliest extant European comedy, The Acharnians of Aristophanes, we meet the miles gloriosus or swaggering soldier who is still going strong in Shaw's Arms and the Man and Chaplin's Great Dictator. We meet the comic parasite who in the Denis of O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock appears practically unchanged in twenty-five centuries. TV audiences are still laughing at the same kind of jokes that were declared to be worn out in the opening dialogue of The Frogs. It will therefore not do to explain, say, the rejection of Falstaff in historical terms only, and merely say that the original audience were much more aware than we of the importance of getting France conquered by a strong leader. (One may observe in passing that if any member of Shakespeare's audience did not know that sixty years of unbroken disaster followed the career of Henry V, his ignorance was certainly no fault of Shakespeare's.) We know very little about the contemporary reception of Shakespeare's plays, but one of the things we do know is that Falstaff was exactly the same kind of popular favorite then that he is now, and for exactly the same reasons. It is similarly not surprising that Elizabethan audiences could still be amused by Plautus and Terence, or by adaptations of them which differ very little from their models. The central approach to Shakespeare, therefore, can only lie through a study of dramatic structure, both in the individual play and in the broader structural principles which underlie the categories of tragedy and comedy.

Characterization in Shakespearian Comedy

Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship

Eradicating once and for all the unfounded notion that Frye was not a political writer, this eleventh volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye gathers together all of Northrop Frye's writings on politics, culture, the arts, history, literature, mass media, and music. Written between 1934 and 1986, these collected works illustrate the extent of Frye's engagement with the unfolding events of twentieth-century political life, from the Great Depression to the Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney era. The centrepiece of the volume, Frye's learned and wide-ranging contribution to the Canadian confederation celebrations, The Modern Century (1967), is accompanied by pieces that reflect Frye's observations on such diverse political events as the Oxford 'King and Country' debate and the Vietnam war, revealing Frye the literary theorist as Frye the political entity. Jan Gorak's extensive introduction and annotations serve to historicize Frye and situate him and his work in the historical and critical context of twentieth-century Canada and North America. Frye's work is discussed in relation to that of T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Raymond Williams, Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, E.J. Pratt, A.J. M. Smith, F.A. Underhill, J.S. Woodsworth, George Grant, and especially Oswald Spengler. Erudite and enlightening, Frye's comments on politics are as relevant today as they were when he wrote them, and this volume will be a valuable reference for understanding the essential Frye.

Northrop Frye

Papers

Agon and Logos: Revolution and Revelation

Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature

Characterization in Shakespearian Comedy

Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship

Northrop Frye on Modern Culture