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This chapter deals with some of the matters that arise under the ‘problem of proof’. The issue considered is how it is possible to establish true or at least acceptable accounts of past events. It argues that a certain conception of coherence is essential to the process of proving what was done or what happened, namely ‘narrative coherence’.

Explores the ways in which religious experience and other kinds of peak experience lend a narrative coherence to the whole of life and thus become resources for self‐making. Included among the experiences investigated are an Eastern experience of cosmic consciousness and a Christian fundamentalist experience of salvation.

This chapter describes the structural features of conflict narratives, including emplotment, causality, character roles, voice, and moral themes, drawing on a host of narrative theorists, including (White, 1987; Ricoeur, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c; Bakhtin, 1982; Epston & M. White, 1990; Mattingly, 1998; Nelson, 2001).The application of narrative theory, toward the emergence of a definition of “conflict narrative” moves past the use of “narrative” for current analysis of specific conflicts, such as Rotberg (2006) which treats narrative as a “carrier” for identity, perceptions, and relational history; rather, conflict narrative is a “living” meaning structure that constitutes, rather than reflects, history, subjectivity, institutions, and discourse itself. Both the structure and the dynamical processes of conflict narratives are explored, using the conflict over the forest concessions in the Mirador Basin of Guatemala as a context for exploring these processes.

This chapter examines some problems in using a child’s perspective and voice, especially in describing the Third Reich. Three major technical problems involved in writing a child narrative are pointed out: the potential unreliablity of the witness, narrative coherence, and achieving the register appropriate to the child. Further, since a child is still acquiring linguistic skills, writers are thus faced with the paradox of a verbally incompetent child ‘writing’ a narrative. However, the explosion of interest in the child’s perspective in post-war German literature suggests that this figure answers deeply felt needs on the part of writers dealing with the Third Reich. In this chapter, this interest in presenting the psychological reality of the child’s limited knowledge and linguistic ability and its compatibility with presenting the full complexities of the Third Reich is discussed through a variety of texts and the solutions they offer to this problem.

This chapter examines some formal features of Battlestar Galactica and Lost that resonate with the series’ central themes, and which metaphorize the creation and reception of TV-III serials. It argues that the very same advanced technologies that allow contemporary writers the opportunity to create shows with such novelistic ambitions also undermine the narrative coherence of these elaborate, plot-heavy epics. Like Twin Peaks and The X-Files, Battlestar and Lost are ultimately failures according to their own narrative terms, failures from which tomorrow’s TV serialists have important lessons to learn.

There are two different ways in which responsibility may be ascribed to an agent for the same event. One way focuses on the responsibility for some action at the time of its occurrence, and the other on responsibility for an action at a time subsequent to the action. The former are referred to as ascriptions of synchronic responsibility, and the latter as diachronic responsibility. This chapter examines different accounts of the right relationship between diachronic and synchronic responsibility by focusing on BP’s responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It is suggested that studies of self-narrative development in corporations could reveal stages of corporate cultural maturity according to the extent of illusion, delusion, falsehood, and fabrication in the self-narratives that shape corporate cultures and are relevant to diachronic responsibility.

This chapter shows how past disruptions and identities, self-consciousness about them, and concerns about public image give meaning and narrative coherence to Memphis as a distinctive southern place and shape place identity. Symbols of past disruptions and conflicts, installed in public spaces to shape collective identity at particular times, represent decades of investment and conscious design to reposition Memphis as a place of regional, national, and international significance. These symbols, representing “memories” of disruptions and conflicts, are embedded in race, class, and gender relations. Consequently, they exemplify “the quintessential sociological issues of power, stratification and contestation.” Once “memories” become objects of commemoration and collective identity, they operate by a logic and force of their own.