Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics

by Nelson,Hilde Lindemann

• ISBN13: 9780415919104
• ISBN10: 041591910X
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1997-10-03
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Narratives have always played a prominent role in both bioethics and medicine; the fields have attracted much storytelling, ranging from great literature to humbler stories of sickness and personal histories. And all bioethicists work with cases--from court cases that shape policy matters to case studies that chronicle sickness. But how useful are these various narratives for sorting out moral matters? What kind of ethical work can stories do--and what are the limits to this work? The new essays inStories and Their Limitsoffer insightful reflections on the relationship between narratives and ethics.

Table of Contents

Hilde Lindemann Nelson

Introduction: How to do Things With Stories

Telling The Patient's Story

What Do We Mean by "Narrative Ethics?"

Who Gets to Tell the Story? Narrative in Postmodern Bioethics

Enacting Illness Stories: When, What, and Why

Autobiography, Biography, and Narrative Ethics

Nice Story, But So What? Narratice and Justification in Ethics

Reading Narratives of Illness

The Ethical Dimensions of Literature: Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

Film and Narratives in Bioethics: Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru

Perplexed about Narrative Ethics

Bioethics' Consensus on Method: Who Could Ask fo Anything More?

Literary Criticism in the Clinic

Medical Ethics and the Epiphanic Dimension of Narrative

What to Expect from an Ethics Case (and What It Expects from You)

Narrative Competence

Toward a Bioethics for the Twenty-First Century: A Ricoeurian Poststructuralist Narrative Hermeneutic Approach to Informed Consent

Narratives Invoked

Aphorisms, Maxims, and Old Saws: Narrative Rationality and the Negotiation of Clinical Choice

The Moral of the Story

Medical Humanities: Pyramids and Rhomboids in the Rationalist World of Medicine

Narrative(s) Versus Norm(s): A Misplaced Debate in Bioethics

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