Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a "true" knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind's interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, "there to be observed." This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the working out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world "as it is." There have always been dissidents who

The Narrative Construction of Reality

Introduction PART ONE: SITUATING THE DISCOVERY OF GROUNDED THEORY Situating the Discovery of Grounded Theory within the Tradition of Qualitative Methods Situating Grounded Theory within Its Philosophical, Sociological and Personal Contexts PART TWO: THE GROUNDED THEORY RESEARCH APPROACH Distinguishing Characteristics of Grounded Theories Grounded Theory's Research Operations Evolution of Grounded Theory's Research Operations PART THREE: THE GROUNDED THEORY APPROACH IN MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES Grounded Theory in Studies of Management and Organization Writing Grounded Theory

Grounded Theory in Management Research

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.

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

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.

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continuing up to the present, Imagining the Balkans covers the Balkan's most formative years. From the down fall of the Ottoman Empire, through the turbulent nationalist years of the nineteenth century, up to World War I, the idea of the Balkans was fiercely, often violently, contested. In the wake of WWI, the beginnings of a tradition, largely enforced by academics, emerged stigmatizing the Balkans. Since then, the region has suffered from the neglect, abuse, and scant regard of both western Europe and the world. The result has been in many direct ways to compound the Balkan's poverty, internal violence, and lack of national self-image. A startling history of ideas, Imagining the Balkans provides a much needed exploration into a region too long neglected.

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Imagining the Balkans

At the heart of this unnecessarily convoluted study of reading is a sensible description of how readers arrive at an understanding of novels, constructing the world implied by a text and "assembling" its meaning. Reading is presented as a purely intellectual, ideational affair. Not a word is said of the emotional component of a reader's response. For Iser fiction is a mode of communication. A novel is "a system of perspectives designed to transmit the individuality of the author's vision" (p. 35), and the reader participates "both in the production and the comprehension of the work's intention" (p. 23). The author's vision is a vision of the social and cultural norms of his time, which he may either "shore up" and affirm, or break down by making us experience their deficiencies. Iser is at his best in explicating the "time flow" of reading, the "wandering viewpoint" which the reader must adopt in the "continual interplay between modified expectations and transformed memories" (p. 111). What we experience while reading is a shifting sequence of points of view—the narrator's, the implied reader's, a particular character's—and a sequence of events that either confirm or disconfirm these points of view. We build up "images" of the characters and events, and of what they seem to mean, and then must correct them as new information is provided. Thus our initial image of Fielding's Squire Allworthy as "the perfect man" must be modified when Captain Blifil dupes him, and modified again when he sees through the appearances of Tom's behavior to his benevolent motives. What makes reading an active, constructive process is the fact that the text does not provide all the necessary links between points of view and the train of events. What it provides instead are "blanks," apparent inconsistencies that the reader must fill in or explain. To do so, driven as we are by the search for consistency, is both to construct the meanings and experience them. As we discover, for example, the deficiencies of the various points of view in Tom Jones, each of which represents a particular eighteenth-century view of human nature, we simultaneously construct one of the central meanings of the novel: that there is a "gulf between the rigid confines of principle and the endless fluidity of human experience" (p. 77). The significance of this meaning is whatever it reveals to the reader about himself: "The reader should see himself reflected in the characters, and so should come to a better

The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response

Iser examines what happens during the reading process, and how it is basic to the development of a theory of aesthetic response, setting in motion a chain of events that depends both on the text and the exercise of certain human faculties.

The act of reading : a theory of aesthetic response

Like no other art form, the novel confronts its readers with circumstances arising from their own environment of social and historical norms and stimulates them to assess and criticize their surroundings. By analyzing major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray to Joyce and Beckett, renowned critic Wolfgang Iser here provides a framework for a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses. Iser's focus is on the theme of discovery, whereby the reader is given the chance to recognize the deficiencies of his own existence and the suggested solutions to counterbalance them. The content and form of this discovery is the calculated response of the reader -- the implied reader. In discovering the expectations and presuppositions that underlie all his perceptions, the reader learns to "read" himself as he does the text.

The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett

SHE PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY of art lays full stress on the idea that, in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text Thus Roman Ingarden confronts the structure of the literary text with the ways in which it can be konkretisiert (realized)' The text as such offers different "schematised views"' through which the subject matter of the work can come to light, but the actual bringing to light is an action of Konkretisation If this is so, then the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader From this polarity it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader-though this in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence, and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader

The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach

Like no other art form, the novel confronts its readers with circumstances arising from their own environment of social and historical norms and stimulates them to assess and criticize their surroundings. By analyzing major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray to Joyce and Beckett, renowned critic Wolfgang Iser here provides a framework for a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses. Iser's focus is on the theme of discovery, whereby the reader is given the chance to recognize the deficiencies of his own existence and the suggested solutions to counterbalance them. The content and form of this discovery is the calculated response of the reader -- the implied reader. In discovering the expectations and presuppositions that underlie all his perceptions, the reader learns to \"read\" himself as he does the text.

Wolfgang Iser

Papers

The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response

The act of reading : a theory of aesthetic response

The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett

The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach

The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett