On death and dying

A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.

Frank Kermode and the Invented World@@@The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

Sick persons and those who care for them become obligatory story-tellers and story-listeners. Hippocrates knew this, Chekhov knew this, Freud knew this, and yet knowledge of the centrality of storytelling was obscured in medicine throughout much of the last century. With the rise of interest in the humanities in general and lit erary studies in particular among medical educators and practitioners, today's medi cine is being fortified by a rigorous understanding of narrative theory, appreciation of narrative practice, and deepening respect for what great literary texts can con tribute to the professional development of physicians and the care of the individual patient (Hawkins and McEntyre; Anderson and MacCurdy). This rise of the power of storytelling in medicine helps me to conceptualize what has been evolving in my own practice of internal medicine and in the emerging field of narrative medicine. You'd think that doctors, nurses, and social workers know of the centrality and privilege of storytelling in their practice. What else do we think we are doing when we ask someone in pain about their situation? Even the junior medical student who says, "What brought you to the clinic today?" and is met with the answer, "The M104 bus" knows that he or she is in search of a story. And yet, there has been an odd diminishment of the status of storytelling in medicine ever since we decided we knew enough about the body by virtue of reducing it to its parts that we did not need to hear out its inhabitant.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20079651

Narrative Medicine: Attention, Representation, Affiliation

Theories of bereavement continue to change and develop. This literature review explores the history of Western bereavement theories, beginning with Freud’s grief work, moving to the stage theories,...

A Literature Review of Western Bereavement Theory: From Decathecting to Continuing Bonds

The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel

A bench on Hampstead Heath, overlooking London. I feel a bit like Rastignac, at the end of Le P?re Goriot, pompously challenging Paris from the height of P?re Lachaise cemetery: "A nous deux maintenant." Even more like the neurologist Oliver Sacks, recounting, toward the end of A Leg to Stand On, his ascent to Parlia ment Hill, one of the highest spots on the Heath, after the abyss into which he had been hurled by a neurological "hole in identity" (186), following a leg operation. To tell a story, it would seem, is to model it on previous stories?a point made before me and to which I shall return later. I am writing in a period of relative remission? thereby probably lending support, almost against my will, to the phoenix metaphor I have stubbornly resisted in Arthur W. Frank's stimulating 1993 essay on illness nar ratives. To this too I shall return later. Illness. It happened in London, in the summer of 1998.1 was spending a month there with my family, planning to stay for two additional months on my own to do re search concerning my current project: the concept of narrative in various disciplines (historiography, psychoanalysis, legal studies). When I came out of the hairdresser's one day, everything seemed alarmingly blurred, objects looked doubled, angles askew, people cut in the middle. Within a short while, I realized that I could no longer read, since lines suddenly collapsed into each other. My eyelids would droop without any warning, and I lost a sense of distance, so that an approaching bus could

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20107270.pdf

The Story of "I": Illness and Narrative Identity

This essay assumes the possibility of establishing a fruitful mutual relationship between narratology and autobiographical illness narratives. Within this relationship, it focuses on several ways in which the latter illuminate, and sometimes problematize, central notions in narratology and narrative theory. The main issues explored are 1) the complex interaction between the collapse of the body and that of the narrative, and its implications for the interplay between order and contingency; 2) the resistance of a disintegrating body to both verbalization and narration, as well as its paradoxical articulation in language and narrative; 3) the potential undermining of the author-reader "contract" by a blunt narration of disturbing physical details; and 4) the ethical and psychological risks involved in texts where flesh-and-blood readers are also (fictional?) characters, and the pain, misunderstandings, and erasures such implicated readers may experience in the reception.

What can narrative theory learn from illness narratives

As the first foray into a larger study of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives through a narratological lens, this essay focuses on a single volume, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (2012). With recourse to classical concepts in narrative theory, the authors compare the formal practices deployed in each history, giving particular attention to questions of narrative voice, temporality – i.e. order, duration and frequency – and addressing questions of narrative agency and character formation in a collective history. They also ask how these accounts imagine possible worlds, giving rise to bifurcations between what happened and what could have happened. Their aim is to show not only how narratology can be used in a politically charged context, but also how that context can unveil gaps and limitations in narratology. They also demonstrate that the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, read through the lens of their form, diverge and converge in ways that are less predictable...

Israeli–Palestinian narratives and the politics of form: reading Side by Side

Place, space, chronotope have again become a focus of interest after having been relegated to the status of background or setting in the heyday of classical narra tology1. In the framework of this resurgence, my paper is an attempt to draw atten tion to a configuration that, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet been discussed. Transposing the ambiguity, though not the literal meaning, of the title of Irigaray's pathbreaking feminist book (This Sex Which Is Not One), I call this configuration "a place which is not one."2 My concern is with a place that is both "not one? i.e. not unique but multiple, and "not one," i.e. not fully a place, in a sense that will emerge from the analysis. Place itself is provisional shorthand for an unorthodox combina tion of the three opening notions. My hypothesis is that "a place which is not one" is a basic structure (dare I say "deep structure"?) that can have different manifestations in different peri ods/genres/texts. I have been led to this hypothesis by my engagement with the re cent novel Snapshots by Israeli author Michal Govrin (2002; English translation 2007), a narrative text that implicitly theorizes the relation between place and space. Snapshots both integrates and problematizes Jewish religious traditions, secular ideals of the early twentieth century settlers in Israel, present-day political views concerning issues of territory, and contemporary West European (mainly French) thinking about location.3 I shall first show how the work of Michel de Certeau sheds light on Govrin's conceptualizations of place. This will be followed by a close analysis of ways in which the novel goes beyond de Certeau and other theorists by its concrete representations of the dual meaning of "a place which is

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Papers

The Story of "I": Illness and Narrative Identity

What can narrative theory learn from illness narratives

Israeli–Palestinian narratives and the politics of form: reading Side by Side

Place, Space, and Michal Govrin's Snapshots

Narratology at the Checkpoint: The Politics and Poetics of Entanglement