Strategic Narrative New Perspectives on the Power of Personal and Cultural Stories

by Patterson, Wendy; Bromley, Roger; Davis, Joseph E.; Edley, Nigel; Frank, Arthur W.; Freeman, Mark; Juen, Barbara; Riessman, Catherine Kohler; McLeod, John; Morrish, Liz; Venn, Couze

• ISBN13: 9780739103708
• ISBN10: 0739103709
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-10
• Publisher: LEXINGTON BOOKS

Summary

The contributors to this exciting new collection, edited by Wendy Patterson, address the real and far-reaching affects of narrative in everyday life. Positing the power and intentionality of narrative--in short its strategic uses--the essays reveal how we use our ways of telling to reclaim, evaluate, and draw meaning from our experiences in an increasingly complex world. The contributors take up themes of narrative as resistance, the ethical dimension of narrative, the importance of narrative in the imaginary social worlds of children, the role of narrative in the construction of masculinity, the uses of narrative in therapy, and the significance of imaginary stories in personal narratives of traumatic experience. Strategic Narrative brings together diverse perspectives from a range of disciplines and takes the reader into compelling discussions of this often simplified and confoundingly theorized form of discourse.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
The Burden of Truth: Psychoanalytic Poiesis and Narrative Understanding	p. 9
Narrative Identity, Subject Formation, and the Transfiguration of Subjects	p. 29
Forms and Functions of Narratives in Conflictive Interactions between Caregivers and Infants	p. 51
Narrative Imaginings: The Liminal Zone in Narratives of Trauma	p. 71
Lists, Stories, and Dreams: Strategic Invitation to Relationship in Psychotherapy Narrative	p. 89
Social Movements and Strategic Narratives: Creating the Sexual Abuse Survivor Account	p. 107
The Loner, the Walk, and the Beast Within: Narrative Fragments in the Construction of Masculinity	p. 127
Telling Tales: Outing the Honorable Gentleman	p. 147
The Extrospection of Suffering: Strategies of First-Person Illness Narratives	p. 165
The Dangerous Pronoun: Narratives of Self and Community in Recent Political Cinema	p. 179
Doing Justice: Positioning the Interpreter in Narrative Work	p. 193
Bibliography	p. 215
Index	p. 233
About the Contributors	p. 241
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