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This introductory chapter discusses narrative as a theoretical construct and within the context of anthropology and medicine. It then examines the succeeding chapters and situates them within broader trends. These trends are not limited to medical anthropology or to cultural anthropology, but extend into various disciplines. It examines the centrality of narrative to some forms of therapeutic practice and discusses the definition of the term “story” and the different uses of the narrative form. The chapter also studies some important terms related to the narrative construct and views the narrative as a form of communication, representation, and construction of self.

This chapter examines the Renaissance insistence on the shaping of narrative form to conditions of presentation—the insistence on drama as a performance genre distinct from other literary genres, one reliant on the unities of time and space to defend its illusionism from the spectator's intrusive senses.

This chapter demonstrates how literary theory bears the mark of the ethical debates of the nineteenth century. Through a reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), as well as a discussion of a number of classic narrative theorists, it shows how narrative theory, underwritten by a principle of forward compulsion through the text, reiterates the position of the intuitionist thinkers of the Victorian period. Both novels are examples of what people have come to call the “industrial novel,” or the “social problem novel”: a set of novels that focus on the condition of the working class. There is a strongly felt, if sometimes vague, ethical message in these novels' focus on the human misery inherent in capitalism: a general sense that it is necessary to treat other humans by some other standard than the bottom line. The chapter then considers the philosophical arguments of Bernard Williams—famous for his use of small narratives as philosophical argument—and suggests how narrative form, having subsumed the tenets of intuitionism, itself became an effective argumentative practice.

Chapter Six extends these reflections on selfhood to narrativity, a crucial element of the construction of self. This chapter examines how narrativity was used, interpreted and experienced in the daily lives of the older people with whom this research was conducted. This chapter furthers the analysis of Chapter Four by demonstrating the distinctiveness of narrative styles at times employed by older people in comparison with younger adults. How such narrative activity and style are interpreted and responded to by their interlocutors forms a critical aspect of how oldness comes to be constructed and projected onto the older narrator, endangering the very work of building the self that narration seeks to accomplish.

This chapter reviews published autobiographical accounts that were written by physicians. It studies what these accounts can be revealed when viewed from the reader's perspective. It then investigates the connection between the narrative form and the messages that these accounts convey not only about the personal lives of their narrators, but also about the social world of medicine. The chapter focuses and analyzes two genres of physician tales for analysis, namely the “female physician” story and the “training tale”.

As demonstrated by how one of the authors of this chapter has been able to organize his thoughts, human beings attempt to sort out their experiences through making use of the architecture of the narrative form. Because perhaps of his familiarity toward and expertise on various aspects of narrative psychology, and how this is set in a cognitive perspective, the author had difficulty in writing the essay, since his interest was no longer excited as such a subject matter had already lost its novelty on him. The two authors ended up with conversations regarding their interests and their beliefs on the subjects of constructivism, peace psychology, and human emotion. The narrative of how this chapter was written demonstrates how the authors have come to realize that narrative concepts are essential in dealing with interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts. Thus, this chapter aims to develop a cross-fertilization between the two through discussing narrative principles in individual distress and using these in dealing with conflicts.

This chapter joins recent nineteenth-century legal history scholarship in reconsidering the history, function, and theory of the common law through a long-overdue inquiry into the nature of legal precedent and its narrative forms, the law reports. It shows that these awkward, often unreadable, case law narratives are in fact a product of a long discursive tradition, that their insular and skeletal forms enable the process of precedential reasoning and arguing. Read in their historical, legal, and narrative contexts, the anti-narrative form of the reports reveals how they negotiate the larger socio-political challenges to the legal culture in which they function. Negotiating between the new orthodoxy of positive law and the still powerful common law, precedent reveals the intricacies of nineteenth-century legal pluralism. By negotiating the tension between a concrete case and the abstract rule which is its potential precedent, anti-narrativity enables the communal (if contradictory) nature and goal of precedential reasoning: the creation of a stable common law, dating from “time immemorial.” Anti-narrativity thus constitutes and reveals the (troubled) narrative form of the (troubled) legal doctrine of stare decisis in the Victorian period; it also reconsiders the role of narrative in law.

France’s millennium celebration – l’incroyable pique-nique, marking the line of the Paris meridian – indicated the continuing relevance at the end of the C20th of issues of space, time and their global measurement, much discussed after the French Revolution and again at the end of the C19th. This chapter suggests that –in an increasingly industrialised age, and one more and more rigorously in thrall to exact and exacting temporalities – the demarcations and delineations involved figured as a set of fault-lines throughout C20th imagination, shaping the period’s fiction in particular. It outlines a set of narratological strategies through which their significance can be recognised and their effects on narrative and narrative form appreciated, defining the term ‘chronotype’ to describe historically-specific developments of narrative form.

This chapter examines four aspects of Tarr's narration that are more or less constant in his oeuvre: banality of narrative events; slowness of narration and suspense; static situations and circular narrative form. Manifestations of these four aspects in individual films are also discussed. The basic building block of Tarr films is the banality, or the unexceptional, everyday character, of the events. At his best Tarr can render even the most excessive or exceptional event an everyday banality that has no effect on the characters' way of life. Slowness of narration is a cornerstone of the Tarr style and one of the main ingredients of the circular structure—a structure producing the feeling that the return is inevitable. Circularity of dramatic form characterizes stories in which characters go through a series of events but these events do not get them closer to the solution to their initial problem. Not only does this remain unresolved, but at the end they lose the perspective to resolve it that they may have had at the beginning. At the end of the film they find themselves in a situation that is the same as or worse than before.

This chapter investigates a very common and widespread characteristic of lollard writings: their use of narrative forms, especially but not only drawn from the bible, to give their readers models for holy living. In these narratives they provide their readers with a training in feeling—that is, lollard writers use stories to show their readers how to feel like saints. Yet lollards are usually thought to disapprove of stories—and they do, at least some of the time, avoid narrative. Popular sermons containing entertaining stories were especially associated with the friars; however, lollards criticize this kind of preaching, and what is more, they do not practice it.

Turning from paratextual poetics to actual prose fictions, this chapter discusses how English Restoration writers experimented with narrative form. It shows that various elements of what, in the eighteenth century, will come to define the novel as a new genre were already in use in the late seventeenth century. Taking issues with the supposedly ahistorical nature of narrative theory and its terminology, the chapters shows that many narratological concepts are built on a (high)modernist version of the novel, which, for instance, clearly differentiates between authors and narrators, a distinction only vaguely drawn in the early modern age, when many works were still performed aloud rather than silently read.

This chapter describes the large-scale narrative and musical patterns of serious Hollywood combat films made after Vietnam. Two larger narrative shapes are identified: two-part forms (such as training camp followed by battlefield) and alternating action-reflection forms. Then, the overall shape and content of combat film musical scores are described in a comparative context. Four strategies for the use of music in war films are described: films with very little music of any sort, films which alternate between scored and unscored scenes (Saving Private Ryan), music-laden films with music noticeably present much of the time (Born on the Fourth of July), and films with almost continuous music. The frequently blurry distinctions between sound effects and music, the role of popular music (Full Metal Jacket), the importance of diegetic silence, the ambiguous authorship of some film scores (Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker), and the shifting nature of the soundtrack mix are also considered.

This chapter proposes a critical genealogy of the testimonio form as crystallized through the controversy surrounding I, Rigoberta Menchú. Testimonio emerged in the 1960s as an alternative narrative form that proposed a new mode of social articulation in Latin America for marginalized and oppressed communities in the wake of the success of the Cuban Revolution. Defined explicitly in opposition to the novel, the testimonio form facilitated the direct expression of insurgent and subordinated voices and was heralded as the genre prefiguring a revolutionary age in the Americas. However, current scholarship fails to account for the fact that there are actually two competing theories of testimonio. The chapter critically juxtaposes these competing theories of testimonio and reads them against one other. In light of this analysis, it turns to a critical rereading of I, Rigoberta Menchú that highlights the testimonio genre’s confused and often contradictory formalization as a vehicle for narrating subaltern revolutionary history.

Adam Smith’s mid-eighteenth-century account of sympathy begins with an imagined scene of torture. After the excesses of the French Revolution, such speculative scenarios of political and juridical violence prompt more explicit articulations of sympathy. This chapter identifies an urgent clarification of sympathy’s abstract, imaginative, and potentially transgressive features in the post-Terror philosophical work of Smith’s French translator, Sophie de Grouchy, and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. De Grouchy’s translation highlights the same aspects of Smith’s work—fraternity, abstraction, and physicality—that are fundamental features in novelistic revisions of sympathy. In its figures of the brother on the rack and a natural disaster in the Far East, Smith’s Theory initiates a transformation of visual perception into imaginative perspective that Godwin’s Caleb Williams explores in narrative form.

This chapter explores how Bolaño’s characters experience their selves in time. Typically, the more sympathetic characters are little inclined to fashion selves through storytelling or to live their lives in a narrative mode; they tend to be aimless. There are three reasons for this. One is psychological: in Bolaño’s fiction, the Episodic life, lived with no sense that one’s present self was there in the further past or will be there in the further future, is not intrinsically inferior to the Diachronic life, in which the self is felt to have long-term continuity. There is also a historical reason: many of the stories that Bolaño tells are of Latin American lives uprooted and disoriented by political turmoil. And, finally, he has a marked aesthetic preference for discontinuous, inconclusive, drifting narrative forms.

The Introduction establishes the principle concerns of the book: to map out a more responsible, rigorous, and situated engagement with the music in transnational fiction and theory; to demonstrate the connections between the literary, the musical and the political; and to assess the wide-ranging applications of musical forms in transnational writing. It opens with a critical reading of Julio Cortázar's story “Clone” to illustrate the influence of musical form on contemporary transnational fiction. It then provides a brief overview of the significance of musical concepts in twentieth-century literary criticism, and outlines the problematic status of the voice in both music and literature. The Introduction proceeds to evaluate recent developments in the field of word-music studies, noting that scholars have only recently attended to the music of postcolonial and non-Anglophone literatures and have largely neglected the political and ethical implications of musical form. Finally, it assesses the fundamental role that music plays in the work of novelists Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, J. M. Coetzee, and Nancy Huston, calling attention to the specific contexts from which each of these authors writes—postcolonial Algeria, Guadeloupe, South Africa, Canada, Paris, New York, Australia. Working between multiple traditions, languages, and audiences, these writers appropriate musical forms in their efforts to reinvigorate and reinvent the novel.

This chapter considers the problem of literary ignorance using the perspective of the nature of narrative form. It studies the narrative form of Joseph Conrad's short stories, and suggests that a literary agnoiology would be partly able to account for the problem of Conrad's fiction and its relation to his life. The chapter notes that the inability to see – which is, in this sense, nescience – is natural not only to the thematics of Conrad's ‘short’ fiction and to his life, but also to the process of composition, the nature of short-story writing and to Conrad's poetics of the short and long story.