Showing papers on "Narratology published in 2002"

Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response

Abstract: Psychonarratology is an approach to the empirical study of literary response and the processing of narrative. It draws on the empirical methodology of cognitive psychology and discourse processing as well as the theoretical insights and conceptual analysis of literary studies, particularly narratology. The present work provides a conceptual and empirical basis for this interdisciplinary approach that is accessible to researchers from either disciplinary background. An integrative review is presented of the classic problems in narratology: the status of the narrator, events and plot, characters and characterization, speech and thought, and focalization. For each area, Bortolussi and Dixon critique the state of the art in narratology and literary studies, discuss relevant work in cognitive psychology, and provide a new analytical framework based on the insight that readers treat the narrator as a conversational participant. Empirical evidence is presented on each problem, much of it previously unpublished.

Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories

Abstract: * traditional taxonomies of feminist theory (e.g. socialist thought) * theoretical subdivisions (e.g. ecofeminism and feminist spirituality) * discipline-specific issues (e.g. philosophy and anthropology) * the conceptual apparatus of gender theory (eg biologism) * methodologies (e.g. deconstruction and narrative theory) * intersections (e.g. with racial theory, queer theory) * political issues (e.g. citizenship, reproductive rights)

Brill's Companion to Herodotus

Abstract: Herodotus' Histories can be read in many ways. Their literary qualities, never in dispute, can be more fully appreciated in the light of recent developments in the study of pragmatics, narratology, and orality. Their intellectual status has been radically reassessed: no longer regarded as naive and 'archaic', the Histories are now seen as very much a product of the intellectual climate of their own day - not only subject to contemporary literary, religious, moral and social influences, but actively contributing to the great debates of their time. Their reliability as historical and ethnographic accounts, a matter of controversy even in antiquity, is being debated with renewed vigour and increasing sophistication. This Companion offers an up-to-date and in-depth overview of all these current approaches to Herodotus' remarkable work.

Chronicling an Academic Depression

Abstract: This autoethnographic story chronicles the author's recent struggle with major depression. Grounded in narrative theory, utilizing the methodology of emotional introspection, and written as a layered account, this personal narrative explores mental illness within the context of the academy. The story considers a variety of issues including identity and the social construction of self, medical discourse and the canonical story of depression, academic research and the tenure process, and the interrelationships between personal and professional experience.

What's the plot? Applying narrative theory to research in psychology

Abstract: Narrative theory is of increasing interest to psychologists. This paper provides some theoretical background from a range of disciplines. The idea of narrative as a mode of thought and as a root metaphor in psychology is introduced, and the notion of narrative identity is outlined. The application of narrative theory to research in psychology is illustrated by reference to three research projects. One project sought autobiographical narratives from women on the theme of infertility and assessed them according to aspects of narrative theory, the second drew on the canonical romantic narrative to explain common findings in relation to adolescents' use of condoms, and the third identified both autobiographical and canonical narratives in interviews with teenage mothers. It is suggested that narrative theory is invaluable to psychologists who want both to retain the complexity of the individual lives they study and to investigate multiple interactions among individuals and cultures. Versions of the last secti...

Connecting Narrative and Social Representation Theory in Health Research

Abstract: According to narrative theory, human beings are natural story-tellers, and investigating the character of the stories people tell can help us better understand not only the particular events described but also the character of the story-teller and of the social context within which the stories are constructed. Much of the research on the character of narratives has focussed on their internal structure and has not sufficiently considered their social nature. There has been limited attempt to connect narrative with social representation theory. This article explores further the theoretical connections between narratives and social representations in health research. It is argued that, through the telling of narratives, a community is engaged in the process of creating a social representation while at the same time drawing upon a broader collective representation. The article begins by reviewing some of the common origins of the two approaches and then moves to consider a number of empirical studies of popular views of health and illness that illustrate the interconnections between the two approaches. It concludes that narratives are intimately involved in the organization of social representations

New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative

Abstract: List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Preface By Timothy Druckrey Foreword An Age of Narrative Chaos? Structural Overview: Cinema, Art and the Reinvention of Narrative PART 1 ORIENTATIONS: HISTORY AND THEORY Definitions Sean Cubitt Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines: Why Narrative is Marginal to Multimedia and Networked Communication, and Why Marginality is More Vital than Universality Paul Willemen Reflections on Digital Imagery: Of Mice and Men Origins Soke Dinkla The Art of Narrative--Towards the Floating Work of Art Peter Weibel Narrated Theory: Multiple Projection and Multiple Narration (Past and Future) Annika Blunck Towards Meaningful Spaces Lev Manovich Computerisation and Film LanguageConvergence Andrea Zapp net.drama:// myth/mimesis/mind_mapping/ Alex Butterworth and John Wyver Interactive or Inhabited TV:Broadcasting for the 21st Century Chris Hales New ParadigmsNew Movies Interactive Film and New Narrative Interfaces Beyond Narrative? Ken Feingold The Interactive Art Gambit Jon Dovey Notes Toward a Hypertextual Narrative Theory Martin Rieser The Poetics of Interactivity: The Uncertainty Principle Eku Wand Interactive Storytelling: The Renaissance of Narration Grahame Weinbren Mastery (Sonic C'est Moi) PART 2 EXPLORATIONS: A NEW PRACTICE Restructuring Time Jill Scott Crossing and Collapsing Time: Re-constructing (Her) Historical and Ideological Film Narratives on a Transformed Stage Toni Dove The Space Between: Telepresence, Re-animation and the Re-casting of the Invisible Redefining Space George Legrady Intersecting the Virtual and the Real: Space in Interactive Media Installations Malcolm Le Grice Dream Time and Digital Media: Computers, Cinema and the Transformation of Authorship Bill Seaman Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Explorations of Digital Video in VirtualSpace Beyond the Screen Luc Courchesne The Construction of Experience: Turning Spectators into Visitors Jeffrey Shaw Movies after Film: The Digitally Expanded Cinema Merel Mirage Emotions Encoded The Personalised Interface Zoe Beloff An Erzatz of Life: The Dream Life of Technology Michael Buckley The Good Cook: A Vertical Axis versus a Horizontal Axis in Interactive Narrative Construction Graham Harwood Mongrel's National Heritage: Reporting the Experience

Applications of narrative theory and therapy to the practice of family medicine.

Abstract: This article presents narrative theory and therapy as an approach with significant potential for providing family physicians with additional tools to assist them in dealing with difficult clinician-patient encounters. We first define narrative therapy, then briefly describe its theoretical assumptions in relation to psychosocial concepts already familiar to family physicians. Important aspects of narrative therapy are examined, including the unique role of questioning in the narrative process; understanding and helping patients change their problem-saturated stories; renaming and externalizing the patient problem; and the use of rituals, documents, and audience in recognizing and reinforcing patient change. The article concludes with thoughts about how narrative approaches can contribute to more-healing doctor-patient relationships.

The Construction of Fictional Minds

Abstract: In his introduction to a recently published volume of essays, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, David Herman explains what is meant by the term "postclassical narratology." He states, "Recently we have witnessed a small but unmistakable explosion of activity in the field of narrative studies; signs of this minor narratological renaissance include the publication of a spate of articles, spe cial issues, and books that rethink and recontextualize classical models for narrato logical research" (1). He also notes that "Postclassical narratology ... is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and research hypotheses; the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself" (2-3). Such "recent research has highlighted aspects of narrative discourse that classical narratology ei ther failed or chose not to explore"(2). This is a response to that stirring call for papers. I suggest that the topic of fic tional minds is an area of study that would benefit from a postclassical perspective, because classical narratology has neglected the whole minds of fictional characters in action. At first sight, this may seem to be an implausible claim. What about the study of free indirect discourse? Interior monologue? Focalization? Reflectoriza tion? Characterization? Actants? My answer is that these concepts do not add up to a complete and coherent study of all aspects of the minds of characters in novels. Put another way, several of the devices that are used in the constructions of fictional minds by narrators and readers, such as the role of thought report in describing emo tions and the role of behavior descriptions in conveying motivation and intention, have yet to be defamiliarized. As Hegel remarks, "What is 'familiarly known' is not properly known, just for the reason that it is 'familiar' " (92). Manfred Jahn refers, in a different context, to "a number of interesting cognitive mechanisms that have

Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture

Abstract: In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of 'real' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair's conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.

The unsaid in the psychotherapy narrative: Voicing the unvoiced

Abstract: In research interviews, psychotherapy clients, from different therapeutic approaches, identified silent moments entailing processes that facilitated their therapeutic progress. A grounded theory method was used to analyse these interviews resulting in three categories of productive pauses: emotional, expressive and reflective pauses. This study examines these categories in relation to their narrative context, and, more broadly, to narrative theory. It highlights what remains unsaid in the psychotherapy narrative, describes these silent processes that transform narration into a therapeutic experience and reframes the therapeutic narrative as a method for structuring introspective silences.

Defense and Challenge: Reflections on the Relation between Story and Discourse

Abstract: The structuralist distinction between story and discourse, that is, between what is told and how it is told, is regarded as "an indispensable premise of narratology" (Culler 171). Many narratologists have found this distinction helpful in theoretical discussions as well as in practical analyses, but its very existence, let alone its ab- solute status, has been challenged by various critics from different angles. This essay will first offer a consideration of some deconstructive attempts to subvert the distinc- tion, then will present a challenge of its own. Of the five areas of discourse (order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice (Genette, Narrative Discourse)), the distinc- tion is quite clear in the first three, but tends to be blurred in the latter two, especially in terms of (1) narrated speech; (2) character's perception when used as the "angle of vision" by the narrator; and (3) certain homodiegetic narration. The aim of this essay, however, is not only to help clarify the relation between story and discourse, but also to shed fresh light on the nature of fictional narratives through that clarification. A CONSIDERATION OF DECONSTRUCTIVE CHALLENGES I'll first consider two deconstructive attempts to subvert the distinction in ques- tion, made respectively by Jonathan Culler and Patrick O'Neill. Both of them see story and discourse as an absolute binary in which we have to choose one term as privileged. Their efforts, then, in characteristic deconstructive fashion, are to identify the allegedly-existing privilege (story over discourse) and then argue for a reversal.

Where the Bodies are Buried: Cartesian Dispositions in Narrative Theories of Character

Abstract: What does the recent explosion of work on the body have to offer narrative the ory? And what does narrative theory have to offer work on the body? These two questions frame the following essay. Such questions presume that the intersection of the two areas of inquiry has not been mapped out, and indeed, this is the case. As Daniel Punday has recently observed, "Despite its signal importance to so many schools of contemporary criticism, the human body has largely failed to garner a sig nificant place in narratology" (227). On the other hand, though much work on the body addresses the body's representation in written discourse, very little if any of it operates from a specifically narratological frame of reference. Nowhere is this theo retical gap more pronounced than in theories of character formation, which through out the twentieth century have focused on action, interiority, and consciousness. Narratology's neglect of the body when analyzing character can in part be traced to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's influential Laoco?n (1766). Lessing's famous dictum "[Succession of time is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter" inaugurated a distinction between the two media that has been taken as ax iomatic in twentieth-century narrative theory (91). What has been equally influential,

Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel

Abstract: Peters' groundbreaking study focuses on women as narrators in six British novels to show that the strategic use of women's narratives was intrinsic to the formation of the Western novel as a literary form and in fact has come to define what we now understand as "novelistic" even in non-canonical works The book makes an original contribution to the scholarship of the history of British fiction by breaking away from the widely held critical position that women's narratives were outside and against the history of the genre In her analysis of dual-voiced works from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Peters shows that women's metafictional discourse within the novel did not emerge as a late-twentieth-century reaction to the canon but has been present from the novel's beginnings She also introduces a new level of academic discourse to feminist narratology as an approach to literary works by focusing attention on the dynamics of structure at the level of text, separate from the fiction Peters' selection of novels by both male and female authors is a distinguishing feature of the book; the result is a rich and original description of how gender and genre interact in the discourse of these six familiar texts: Moll Flanders, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Mrs Dalloway, and The Rainbow By positing a new and earlier chronology for the discourse termed "postmodern," Peters has revised the history of the British novel

Tragic Narrative: A Narratological Study of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus

Abstract: This study of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus demonstrates the applicability of narrative models to drama. It presents a major contribution not only to Sophoclean criticism but to dramatic criticism as a whole. For the first time, the methods of contemporary narrative theory are thoroughly applied to the text of a single major play. Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus is presented as a uniquely rich text, which deftly uses the figure and history of the blind Oedipus to explore and thematize some of the basic narratological concerns of Greek tragedy: the relation between the narrow here-and-now of visible stage action and the many off-stage worlds that have to be mediated into it through narrative, including the past, the future, other dramatizations of the myth, and the world of the fifth-century audience.

The conspiracy in The Comfort of Strangers: narration in the novel and the film

Abstract: Since stories increasingly take on pictorial and mixed-medial forms, narratology needs to investigate to what extent narrative devices exceed the boundaries of a specific medium. One way to examine this issue is to focus on film adaptations of narratologically complex novels or stories. This article presents a detailed comparison of the narration in McEwan’s (1982) [1981] The Comfort of Strangers and Schrader’s (1990) film based on a scenario by Harold Pinter. It is shown how the novel creates deliberate confusion (via free indirect speech and thought) about the agency responsible for the conveyance of crucial information, and how the film finds non-verbal means to achieve the same effect.

A semiotic approach to narrative manipulation

Abstract: In the design of multimedia communication artifacts few, if any, tools support the early stage of a creative process: the heuristic project. In this work we give a proof of concept of an application addressed to a specific kind of heuristic project: given the logical sequence of episodes of a narrative, the fabula, the goal is to obtain different plots expressed in multi-modal language. The case study is provided by the task of transposing a written synopsis to the multi-modal language of a movie. We adopted the semiotic theory of Greimas to analyze the narrative and reveal its deep structure. The application enables users to interact with this structure in order to simulate and anticipate the effects of meaning resulting from their manipulation.

Minding the Gap: Visual Perception and Cinematic Gap Filling

Abstract: Models of narrative in film narratology and cognitive psychology are problematic since they rely on linguistic models of computation and complex, high-order cognitive operations. But because visual perception and cognition operate differently from language perception and cognition, the existing models are unable to address the effects of visual data on film comprehension. Gap filling, in particular, requires the perceiver to draw on visual and audio memories, ones that are not necessarily computed in propositional, high-order cognitive sequences. A sample analysis of a scene from Dead Poets Society that features a dramatic gap not only exposes the problematics of existing models but also points toward new and more inclusive models of narrative comprehension. These models rely on a variety of mechanisms of memory storage and retrieval, ones that operate simultaneously and, therefore, explain the speed and efficiency of cinematic gap filling. Introduction Imagine a screening of Vertigo stopped once Madeline is found dead by the tower, and the audience is asked "What happened? How did she die? Was she killed?" The audience may find it difficult to answer definitively; different perceivers would provide different scenarios, and they are unlikely to argue about which is true, but instead assume that the film will provide both explanation and closure in due time. Indeed, narratives operate in a curious way: while they tell us stories, we, the perceivers, are rarely willing to commit to plot lines or even to predictions about the progression and conclusion of the story before the text delivery is over. While narratives set-up expectations (which take the form of hypotheses), they often take new and surprising plot directions, ones that require perceivers to rearrange knowledge of plot in significant ways. Importantly, then, perceivers are ready to alter, cancel, or embrace new hypotheses as the text provides them with new information. In other words, the fabula, or the complete story is a product that a perceiver commits to only after the perception of the text is over. (1) And while the narrative as a product is being constructed during the perception, it is constantly in flux, or open to be in flux, until perception is over. Consequently, the conclusive narrative of a text is a post-perception product. Moreover, as a post-perception product, the narrative is constructed from memories reorganized in a causal order so as to yield the most coherent story possible. Thus it is important to understand that story, or fabula, is a product of an array of high-order cognitive activities significantly different from low-order perceptual processes. (2) Empirical research on narrative suggests that narrative structures are a product of high-order mental operations. In a series of related experiments, Gee and Grosjean asked subjects to read and then recount a short narrative. They analyzed spontaneous pause duration between sentences and then matched them with Lehnert's complex analysis of narrative structure into simple plot units. What Gee and Grosjean found was that "as the narrative complexity of a break between two sentences increases, the pause produced by a speaker also increases -- and in a very systematic way" (72). But while Gee and Grosjean were primarily interested in providing empirical evidence of narrative structure, their research reveals another important phenomenon. They found a correlation between story parsing and pauses only when subjects retold a story after reading it to themselves. When they asked subjects to read the story aloud (even in a second reading), the pauses did not equally well match the narrative structure parsing (81). Gee and Grosjean do not explain why spontaneous retelling reflects so much more accurately a story's narrative structure, but in the context of our discussion it is clear; retelling takes into account that a narrative has been fully comprehended and interpreted before it is retold. …

Editing the Self: David Hume's Narrative Theory (1)

Abstract: ACROSS the many genres in which he wrote--epistolary, philosophical, historical, essayistic--David Hume both theorized and experimented with narrative modes of representation. Hume's infrequently discussed autobiographies are particularly significant case studies for examining how his narrative theory and practice are inseparable. (2) In his life writings he lays bare what is only intuitively present in his philosophical works--that autobiography is possible or plausible as a genre for representing a life only because its core narrative forms are based on what one is always doing in everyday life, renarrating oneself. Hume himself proposed that his philosophy be read in conjunction with his life story: he specified to his literary executors that all future editions of his works be prefaced by his deathbed autobiography, My Own Life (1776). (3) This late-life specification revisited gestures he made decades earlier in his first great philosophical work, the 1739-40 A Treatise of Human Nature, in which he recommended that, in order to reconsider how selfhood and its implicit discontinuities can be talked about together without contradiction, we might profitably turn away from philosophical formulations of "the self" and instead look towards a conjunction of everyday and literary narrative practices. Such a reading of Hume is not quite a push towards a fashionable and revisionary Wittgensteinian desire for examining everyday language in philosophical treatises. (4) Although Hume did oppose philosophers' jargon, especially when it came to discussions of selfhood, what is of more critical interest is Hume's rather anti-Wittgensteinian and decidedly anti-pragmatic suggestion that, instead of holding literature up to the standards of life, life--at least eighteenth-century life--could be held up to the standards of literature. Hume sought patterns for his own literary narrative in the endlessly self-revising cognitive processes of the human mind itself, and, in turn, found in written narration a model for explaining everyday mental habits. In calling attention to the reciprocity between prose belles lettres and personal memory, Hume engaged with a larger movement in English literary culture concerned with the possibilities and pitfalls of narrative strategies for recounting personal histories. It is no coincidence that Hume's theories on narrative selfhood were written in the same generation as the novels of Richardson and Fielding. Indeed, a second look at Hume's work offers us a new perspective on narrative realism, so crucial to the development of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel and its tributary discourses in religion and medicine. Hume's writings suggest how and why narrative prose can stand in for a life. The guiding assumptions of Hume's life writings often have little in common with other eighteenth-century philosophical autobiographies. The autobiographical strain inaugurated by Montaigne and continued by works like Rousseau's Confessions purports to be modeled on the standard of painting, long the ideal form of self-illustration. (5) In marked contrast, Hume's autobiography and autobiographical philosophy look and claim to be something much less like painting and much more like the obsessive-compulsive confessional journals of early modem, Protestant diarists. These fervid self-chroniclers wrote and then read their lives, as Hume does in his early autobiographical writings, that they might diagnose their spiritual condition and amend their lives--not simply their accounts--accordingly. In secularizing autobiographical self-diagnosis, Hume also prefigured and provided a theoretical justification for later psychoanalytic practice: his writings explore the idea that if a life is understood to be synonymous with the story of that life, then the story can be analyzed and the resulting analysis be applied to the life to cure it of its shortcomings. By reading this autobiographical Hume in conversation with more recent narrative theorists, we might also attune our contemporary critical vocabulary to the historical development of what we now call narrative theory. …

Narrative and Self-Consciousness: A Basis for Virtue Ethics

Abstract: In his classic work After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre drew attention to the significance of narrative as a twofold factor in relation to the unity of the self. On the one hand, a person does not achieve self-comprehension as a mere continuum of personal experiences, but in terms of a story or narrative of his or her life. On the other hand, no individual can exist without having a relation to some social context or other. Our sense of who and what we are is in part defined by our sense of belonging to, or alienation from, communities into which we have been initiated or within which we currently exist. Our personal identity thus relates also to a collective narrative. For MacIntyre this connection between narrative and the unity of the self can be shown to be conceptual. In the broadest terms, it is only through being identifiable in relation to long or short term narratives concerning intentions and their outcomes that a person’s actions become intelligible. Significantly, MacIntyre takes this further, by arguing that what constitutes the good for a person is that which will allow his or her narrative unity to be best lived-out and brought to completion.2 The nature of the general good will be that which all the best modes of living have in common. The change from a narrative theory of the self to virtue ethics is complex, but it is not one which MacIntyre has much elaborated upon in his subsequent writings. Left as it is, it has an incomplete general dynamic ranging from criteria necessary for the interpretation of action to virtue as a goal of personal life. But, if this strategy is to have real philosophical bite it needs to be developed in at least two further directions. We need to clarify the way in which narrative is conceptually involved at the level of introspective self-knowledge. We also need to show how this involves virtue as a goal in terms of other– regarding, as well as personal activity.

Ludology: From Representation to Simulation

Abstract: Most of the current studies of the creative potential of computer games have been done through tools designed for narrative media (literary theory, narratology, film theory). Several attempts have been made by both academics and designers to create "interactive narratives" that would allow players to experience the qualities of narrative while being able to interact with the environment, characters, and events in the "story." Nevertheless, authors have so far failed to provide a compelling example of "interactive fiction." Brenda Laurel, a long-time advocate of this genre, recently described it as "a hypothetical beast in the mythology of computing, an elusive unicorn we can imagine but have yet to capture." [Laurel 2001]In this paper I argue, following the work of such theorists as Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen, that narrative is not the best paradigm for understanding not only computer games but also cybernetic art and toys, simply because they do not rely on traditional representation but on simulation.By simulation, I mean an alternative form of describing and understanding reality that is based on the modeling of systems. My semiotic approach to simulation is close to the one developed by computer science's simulation theory, but it differs in that its goal is not necessarily predicting behaviors. Rather, I view it as an alternative representational form that opens a new set of rhetorical possibilities that stress system behavior and user experimentation.By comparing the similitude and differences between simulation and representation, I will provide a theoretical framework that will allow us to better comprehend the process behind the interpretation of such cybernetic systems as toys, cyberarts, traditional games, and computer games. My ultimate goal is to contribute to the understanding of the rhetorical characteristics of these simulational media.

Narrative: A User's Manual

Abstract: Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 352 pp. $39.95 cloth. Beautifully written, meticulously researched, firmly anchored in data drawn from several corpora, and brilliantly insightful from start to finish, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps's Living Narrative is, in the opinion of this reviewer, one of very best books ever published on the subject of conversational storytelling. To be sure, the book will have special appeal for scholars working in such fields as discourse analysis, communication studies, sociolinguistics, and anthropological linguistics. Recent work in narrative theory, however, posits a scale or continuum stretching between stories told in face-to-face interaction and even the most experimental, ludic narratives produced by avant-garde literary authors.1 Accordingly, Ochs and Capps's book is of vital importance to anyone interested in the forms and functions of narrative, literary as well as nonliterary, artistic as well as quotidian. Characterizing narrative as a mode of communication, a resource for cognition, a means of family-, peer-, and institution-based socialization, and an index as well as catalyst of psychosocial development, the authors' approach has broad interdisciplinary relevance. This book is therefore required reading for researchers in every field in which stories are an actual or conceivable object of inquiry, from sociology and rhetoric, to history and gender studies, to philosophy and education. What is more, Ochs and Capps's study constitutes a touch stone-provides a paradigm-for doing scholarly work that is at once carefully nuanced and eminently readable. Accessible to nonexperts, the book nonetheless provides, for specialists in the study of stories, a synoptic survey of previous scholarship, an innovative combination of research methodologies, and a wealth of new insights into narrative. The first part of the book's title exploits a productive grammatical ambiguity, one that sheds light on the authors' holistic approach to narrative analysis. On the one hand, Living Narrative can be parsed as an adjective phrase, in which case Living functions as a modifier denoting the "living" (i.e., face-to-face, everyday, conversational) subtype of storytelling-as opposed to other subtypes that are fixed or written-down. As the authors put it: Living Narrative focuses on ordinary social exchanges in which interlocutors build accounts of life events, rather than on polished narrative performances. The narrators are not renowned storytellers [...] the narrators often are bewildered, surprised, or distressed by some unexpected events and begin recounting so that they may draw conversational partners into discerning the significance of their experiences. [... The narratives told] are shaped and reshaped turn by turn in the course of conversation. (2) Much of the book is devoted to a careful description of the features of such evanescent, living narratives and of the many contexts in which everyday storytelling plays a more or less overt role. On the other hand, however, Living Narrative can also be parsed as a verb phrase, in which case Living functions as a transitive verb with a progressive aspect.2 In turn, Narrative becomes a grammatical object, by analogy with the dream in a phrase like living the dream. In this second gloss, instead of being something that one encounters, now and again, as a variable and intermittent subtype of communicative practice, narrative becomes something that one lives in, through, or by means of, a constant and ineliminable factor in the process by which humans establish and maintain their (social) life. Note that the subtitle of the book-Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling-spans the semantic continuum linking the two grammatical interpretations just outlined. The first chapter presents "A Dimensional Approach to Narrative" (1-58). …

"I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale --!": Historical Sensitivity and Generic Contiguity in the Narrative Theories of William Godwin

Abstract: “Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of ‘reality.’”1 Hayden White’s provocative statement, made almost 25 years ago in his essay “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” is today almost as controversial as then: depending on the respective sides they stand on in the truth-fancy, history-fiction divide, most literary critics (be it in many cases under the modern appellation of “cultural critics”) will applaud White’s observation as both scientifically accurate and liberating, while remarkably many historians are still likely to regard White’s comments as dangerously relativistic if not downright reductionist. And yet, White reminds us in the same essay, what is now often perceived as the opposition of history to fiction is an invention of fairly recent date. Prior to the French Revolution, says White, “historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary art. More specifically, it was regarded as a branch of rhetoric and its ‘fictive’ nature generally recognized.”2

Telling Tales: Narratives Of Classification And Control In The Design Of Taxonomic Software.

Abstract: This paper draws on concepts from the structuralist analysis of narrative to explore aspects of the role of stories in the small group design process. A brief review of relevant narratological concepts is provided. Their application in a preliminary analysis of case study data from a team designing taxonomic software is then reported. It is concluded that narratology, and in particular the notion of focalisation, has useful descriptive potential in this context, and may help to elucidate some difficulties in design communication and documentation. Suggestions for extension of the work are included.