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Qualitative methods have become increasingly popular among researchers in the professions: social work, nursing, education, business, computer science, and occupational therapy. And while many comprehensive textbooks (in sociology, anthropology and psychology) describe the standard techniques and philosophical assumptions, when the audience is broadened to include practitioners, it is often assumed that practitioners are the consumers of research, not the producers. This book uses qualitative methods to engage practitioners as knowledge producers. In particular, theory-to-practice gaps are described as indispensable conditions for conducting research that matters in worlds of practice. Practitioners are encouraged to lead research by conducting engaged scholarship, which promotes collaboration between practitioners and researchers to address practice-related problems in real world settings. Whereas reductionist methods assume that practice unfolds in closed systems, where variables can be manipulated and controlled or used to predict, the argument developed in this work, using critical realist philosophy, supports the idea that practice takes place in complex open systems. This, in turn, requires a specific practice-to-research vocabulary: brute and institutional facts, contingency and necessity, essentialism, and the phenomenological practice gap. Engaged scholarship and critical realist assumptions are applied to three case studies that combine research questions with data collection techniques and analytic strategies. Thematic, grounded theory, and narrative research techniques are illustrated, including original quick-start instructions for using ATLAS.ti computer software. Institutional ethnography is described, and a case study is used to illustrate the influence of policy implementation on clinical practice.

Stories of illness and healing are often arresting in their power, illuminating practices and experiences that might otherwise remain obscure. What can be learned through a comparative look at the range of narrative theories and styles of narrative analysis used by anthropologists to make sense of their ethnographic data? Do divergent strategies yield different understandings of the illness experience and healing practices? Does a focus on narrative detract from or conceal other, more fruitful avenues for exploration? Through the analysis of stories drawn from a variety of ethnographic contexts, the contributors to this book address such questions. The book unites medical anthropology and narrative analysis to illuminate how personal narrative shapes the architecture of illness and the life course it yields.

While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.

From Dr. Moreau's Beast People to David Cronenberg's Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem's robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler's human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, this book examines modern and postmodern stories of corporeal transformation through interlocking frames of posthumanism, narratology, and second-order systems theory. New media generate new metamorphs. New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines. But beyond the vogue for the cyborg and the cybernetic mash-up of the organic and the mechanical, this book develops neocybernetic systems theories illuminating alternative narratives that elicit autopoietic and symbiotic visions of the posthuman. Systems theory also transforms our modes of narrative cognition. Regarding narrative in the light of the autopoietic systems it brings into play, neocybernetics brings narrative theory into constructive relation with the systemic operations of observation, communication, and paradox. The book draws on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, Cary Wolfe, Mieke Bal, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Lynn Margulis to read narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems. Tracing the posthuman intuitions of both pre- and post-cybernetic metamorphs, it demonstrates the viability of second-order systems theories for narrative theory, media theory, cultural science studies, and literary criticism.

This book presents a narratological analysis of the Kaiserchronik, or chronicle of the emperors, an account of the Roman and Holy Roman emperors from the foundation of Rome to the run-up to the Second Crusade that was remarkably popular in medieval Germany. Previous research has concentrated on the structure and sources of the work and emphasized its role as a Christian narrative of history, but this study shows that the Kaiserchronik does not simply illustrate a didactic religious message: it also provides an example of how techniques of story-telling in the vernacular were developed and explored in twelfth-century Germany. Four aspects of narrative are described (time and space, motivation, perspective, and narrative strands), each of which is examined with reference to the story of a particular emperor (Constantine the Great, Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and Henry IV). Rather than dogmatically imposing a single analytical framework on the Kaiserchronik, the book takes account of the fact that modern theory cannot always be applied directly to works from premodern periods: it draws critically on, and where necessary refines, a variety of approaches, including those of Gérard Genette, Boris Uspensky, and Eberhard Lämmert. Throughout the book, the narrative techniques described are contextualized by means of comparisons with other texts in both Middle High German and Latin, so that the place of the Kaiserchronik as a literary narrative in the twelfth century becomes clear.

This book provides analysis of how human biology, as well as human culture, determines the ways films are made and experienced. This new approach is called “bioculturalism.” The book shows how important formats, such as films for children, romantic films, pornography, fantasy films, horror films, and sad melodramas, appeal to an array of different emotions that have been ingrained in the human embodied brain by the evolutionary process. The book also discusses how these biological dispositions are molded by culture. It explains why certain themes and emotions fascinate viewers all over the globe at all times, and how different cultures invest their own values and tastes in the universal themes.The book further uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explain central features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience, the PECMA flow model, which explains how the flow of information and emotions in the embodied brain provides a series of aesthetic experiences. The combination of film theory, cognitive psychology, neurology, and evolutionary theory provides explanations for why narrative forms are appealing and how and why art films use different mental mechanisms than those that support mainstream narrative films, as well as how film evokes images of inner, spiritual life and feelings of realism.Embodied Visions provides a new synthesis in film and media studies and aesthetics that combines cultural history with the long history of the evolution of our embodied brains.

This book argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers—politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others—contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. This contention often worked by claiming that the Soviet system perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction made visible by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the refrain from which the title is taken: “It was no accident, Comrade,” which encapsulates a popular American understanding of Marxism). No Accident, Comrade explains how the association of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War culture, and then uses this opposition as a starting point for a discussion of the period’s literature. I show how writers innovated strategies for dealing with and incorporating chance, which allowed them to theorize the ever-changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict. Indeed, by emphasizing the Cold War’s narrative quality—that is, by viewing it as a rhetorical field—this book likewise argues that pressure was put on fictional narratives in general, and that if we attune ourselves to the uses of chance in such material, we can understand how the Cold War encouraged new relationships between aesthetics and politics.

Drawing on narrative theory, this book defines conflict as a narrative process, examines the politics of narrative violence in conflicts, and offers a critical narrative theory, not only for a new definition of conflict, but also as an ethics for both conflict analysis and conflict intervention. Exemplary case analyses include some of the critical conflicts in world today, such as the Middle East, environmental conflicts, and the immigration wars in the US. The first section of the book entitled The Pragmatics of Narrative in Conflict Processes opens with a discussion of the complexities of narrating violence and pain, laying the groundwork for why these narratives matter. Subsequent chapters in this section define conflict narratives in terms of their structural features and process dynamics; this description lays the foundation for mapping the escalation of conflict narratives, as well as their transformation. The second section, entitled Critical Narrative Theory: A Lens for the Analysis of Conflicts, addresses the politics of conflict narratives. “Critical narrative theory” is offered as a framework for assessing the power dynamics of conflict narratives. Using Nelson’s (2002) notion of “damaged identities,” Foucault (2001, 2008) concept of “natality” and Lyotard’s (1989) concept of the “differend,” witnessing is defined as a narrative aesthetic practice that generate “humanizing” narratives. This section ends with a discussion of a new theory of conflict, arising from critical narrative theory. The third section, entitled Aesthetics as an Ethics of Conflict Resolution Practice examines the implications of a critical narrative theory of conflict for the practice of conflict resolution. First, the ethics derived from critical narrative theory are explored and the implications for negotiation, dialogue, deliberation, and problem-solving workshops are explored. Finally, this section will summarize conflict resolution in terms of an aesthetic for practice that calls for and supports the emergence of transformation of radicalized narratives into “better-formed” narratives. In the context of ongoing or historical violence, people tell stories about what happened, who did what to whom and why. And all too often, speaking of violence reproduces the social fractures and delegitimizes, again, those that struggle against their own marginalization. This speaking of violence deepens conflict and all too often perpetuates cycles of violence. Alternatively, sometimes people do not speak of the violence and it is erased, buried with the bodies that bear it witness, and reducing the capacity of the public to address issues emerging in the aftermath of violence and repression. However, it is also possible to speak of violence in a manner that acknowledges suffering without reproducing the social divisions and fractures. The consequences of speaking about violence depend on the narratives that are told. We both are, and we become, the stories we tell. This book takes the notion of “narrative” as foundational to conflict analysis and resolution. Different from other conflict theories that rely on account of attitudes or perceptions, in the heads of individuals, this narrative perspective presumes that meaning, structured and organized as narrative processes, is the location for both analysis of conflict, as well as intervention. But since meaning is political, in that not all stories can be told or the way they are told delegitimizes / erases Others, critical narrative theory offers a normative approach to narrative assessment and intervention, a way of evaluating narrative and designing “better-formed” stories. These stories are “better” in that they are generative of sustainable relations, they create legitimacy for all parties, and in so doing, function aesthetically and ethically to support the emergence of new histories, and new futures. Indeed, critical narrative theory offers a new lens for enabling people to speak of violence in ways that undermine the intractability of conflict.

Stories of the Law deals with the question of the relationship between law and narrative in the Mishna, the early century rabbinic legal text. It argues that despite the limited number of stories in the Mishnah, “narrative” and “narrativity” are central categories not only regarding the Mishnna’s characteristics as a literary document but also for understanding the legal theory that underlies the Mishnah. Through the close reading of numerous mishnaic stories, the author demonstrates that stories are crucial to the Mishnah’s efforts to construct the rabbis as the sole legitimate source of legal authority in Judaism. At the same time, these stories consistently critique the notion of rabbinic authority, ultimately presenting a complex and nuanced portrayal of the rabbis as religious leaders. In addition to its contributions to the study of rabbinic literature, the book presents new theoretical frameworks both understanding the relationship between law and narrative and for describing and evaluating narrative discourse as it interacts with other form of language and expression, a central issue in narrative theory.

This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.

This book rethinks narrative and media through systems theory. Reconceiving interrelations among subjects, media, significations, and the social, this study demonstrates second-order systems theory’s potential to provide fresh insights into the familiar topics of media studies and narrative theory. This book offers a synthesis of the neocybernetic theories of cognition formulated by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, incubated by cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and cultivated in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. From this foundation, it interrogates media theory and narrative theory through a critique of information theory in favor of autopoietic conceptions of cognition. Clarke’s purview includes examinations of novels (Mrs. Dalloway and Mind of My Mind), movies (Avatar, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and even Aramis, Bruno Latour’s idiosyncratic meditation on a failed plan for an automated subway.

This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.