Peter Brooks

Bio: Peter Brooks is an academic researcher from Yale University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Plot (narrative). The author has an hindex of 20, co-authored 57 publications receiving 5238 citations.

Reading for the plot : design and intention in narrative

Abstract: Preface 1. Reading for the Plot 2. Narrative Desire 3. The Novel and the Guillotine, or Fathers and Sons in Le Rouge et le noir 4. Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative 5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations 6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative 7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference 9. An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot Notes

The melodramatic imagination : Balzac, Henry James, melodrama, and the mode of excess

Abstract: In this lucid and fascinating book, Peter Brooks argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the nineteenth century, he moves on to Balzac and Henry James to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using the rhetoric and excess of melodrama - in particular its secularized conflicts of good and evil, salvation and damnation. The Melodramatic Imagination has become a classic work for understanding theater, fiction, and film.

Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis

Abstract: Narrative inquiry refers to a subset of qualitative research designs in which stories are used to describe human action. The term narrative has been employed by qualitative researchers with a variety of meanings. In the context of narrative inquiry, narrative refers to a discourse form in which events and happenings are configured into a temporal unity by means of a plot. Bruner (1985) designates two types of cognition: paradigmatic, which operates by recognizing elements as members of a category; and narrative, which operates by combining elements into an emplotted story. Narrative inquiries divide into two distinct groups based on Bruner's types of cognition. Paradigmatic‐type narrative inquiry gathers stories for its data and uses paradigmatic analytic procedures to produce taxonomies and categories out of the common elements across the database. Narrative‐type narrative inquiry gathers events and happenings as its data and uses narrative analytic procedures to produce explanatory stories.

Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust

Abstract: The effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence, called narrative medicine, is proposed as a model for humane and effective medical practice. Adopting methods such as close reading of literature and reflective writing allows narrative medicine to examine and illuminate 4 of medicine's central narrative situations: physician and patient, physician and self, physician and colleagues, and physicians and society. With narrative competence, physicians can reach and join their patients in illness, recognize their own personal journeys through medicine, acknowledge kinship with and duties toward other health care professionals, and inaugurate consequential discourse with the public about health care. By bridging the divides that separate physicians from patients, themselves, colleagues, and society, narrative medicine offers fresh opportunities for respectful, empathic, and nourishing medical care.

Ethnography through thick and thin

Abstract: AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Anthropology on the Move3Pt. 1An Evolving Proposal for Multi-Sited Research311Imagining the Whole: Ethnography's Contemporary Efforts to Situate Itself (1989)332Requirements for Ethnographies of Late-Twentieth-Century Modernity Worldwide (1991)573Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography (1995)794The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scene of Anthropological Fieldwork (1997)105Pt. 2Traces in Parallel Ethnographic Projects1335Power on the Extreme Periphery: The Perspective of Tongan Elites in the Modern World System (1980)1356The Problem of the Unseen World of Wealth for the Rich: Toward an Ethnography of Complex Connections (1989)1527On Eccentricity (1995)161Pt. 3The Changing Conditions of Professional Culture in the Production of Ethnography1798On Ideologies of Reflexivity in Contemporary Efforts to Remake the Human Sciences (1994)1819Critical Cultural Studies as One Power/Knowledge Like, Among, and in Engagement with Others (1997)20310Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin (1997)231Index255

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Abstract: What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now revised and expanded in its third edition, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes one new chapter. The glossary and bibliography have been expanded, and new sections explore unnatural narrative, retrograde narrative, reader-resistant narratives, intermedial narrative, narrativity, and multiple interpretation. With its lucid exposition of concepts, and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy*:

Abstract: From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances whether individual or collective can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies...