Booth: narratives

Een site (op basis van een cursus) rond het werk van Booth.

Wayne Clayson Booth (1921 - 2005) is one of the most consistently interesting, but also one of the most consistently underestimated, critics of the latter 20th C. A rhetor and rhetorician, a philosopher, pluralist, literary critic, editor, and English professor, his driving theme was the rhetorical resources that encourage, obstruct, or refine agreement: and, therefore, belief, knowledge, and action.
In this site we overview a range of his books, engage his issues, and seek agreement about the value of his critical pluralism, not only for understanding texts, but also for understanding each other.

Literary Study and the Social Order

by Stephen L. Tanner

Literary study used to be a repertoire of often compatible approaches (formalistic, biographical, psychological, philological, archetypal, moral, etc.). These approaches shared the fundamental assumption that authors are human beings capable, within broad linguistic possibilities, of describing and interpreting in meaningful ways to others the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual range of human experience. Movements in literary theory now come congealed with exclusionary ideological and anti-metaphysical woridviews that call into question human nature, agency, and communication. Before we continue the interminable but ever necessary debate regarding the relation of literary study--as literary study--to the social order, we need to confront more deliberately the full implications of postmodern literary-intellectual opinion for the social and moral order.

Turner: culture as performance

Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance

Graham St John (ed.) New York : Berghahn (Release date, April 2008)

Upon the 25th anniversary of his passing, this collection features contributions reflecting the wide application of Victor Turner's thought to cultural performance in the early 21st Century. From anthropology, sociology and religious studies to performance, cultural and media studies, Turner has had a prodigious interdisciplinary impact. The collection of 17 essays demonstrates that, in the face of challenges from poststructuralism and postcolonial studies, Turnerian ideas remain compelling with international scholars located in a range of disciplines illustrating how these ideas have been reanimated, renovated, and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance and experience.

Contributions to this collection are grouped in four thematic sections: 'Performing Culture' covering new ritual, drama, media and reflexivity; 'Rites of Passage and Popular Culture' on popular 'transition' rites and popular investment in the ideas of Turner; 'Pilgrimage and Communitas' with contributions covering contemporary manifestations; and, 'Edith Turner' on her role in the Turnerian project.

Volume contributors address themes ranging from dark communitas and techno tribalism to liminal sports and the mediatisation of social dramas, from backpacking, shopping and protest pilgrimage to what Barbara Babcock calls the "gynesis" of Victor Turner's work. Applying, critiquing and reworking Turner's cultural processualism, with attention to such diverse themes as performing "sorry business" within the context of settler and indigenous Australian reconciliation, improvised ritual-theatre within a tertiary education context, pilgrimage to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, and recognition of the critical role of Edith Turner in the development of the Turnerian perspective, this collection demonstrates the broad and evolving appeal of the Turnerian project.

Every story... and cinema

Andrew Field in Culture Wars
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In this world (in our world) the whole of human history, every story, every epic tragedy, every personal anecdote has been appropriated by cinema. Anything that was once truthful has been borrowed and structured and given its own manipulatively emotive soundtrack. Even the most brutal, the most astoundingly awful genocides and holocausts have been appropriated and turned into a familiar narrative arc. Anything that once might have meant something to us has been taken from us and rendered meaningless by imposing on it a story we (fundamentally) already know.

Cultural Wars

Welcome to Culture Wars

'Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it was a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secret of the universe.'
Lex Luthor, Superman

In this spirit, Culture Wars welcomes unsolicited reviews of anything from books to exhibitions.

Conference Wales

The Narrative Practitioner: Developing Excellence in Research Education and Practice 23-25th June 2008

The Narrative Practitioner Conference will be held in the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education Wrexham North Wales in the UK.

· Narrative links

• Anthropology Narratives
• Business Narratives
• Clinical Narratives
• Healing Narratives
• Narrative Ethics
• Narrative Intelligence (paper)
• Narrative Mediation
• Narrative Medicine
• Narrativeworks
• Pedagogical Narratives
• Performance Narratives
• Phoebe’s field

Call for Papers

Call for Papers: PHILOSOPHY AS LITERATURE
A Special Issue of “The European Legacy”

“The European Legacy,” published by Routledge, is the official journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10848770.asp
The issue will feature a conversation on the relationship philosophy-literature with This special issue is scheduled for late 2009.

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Like novelists, historians or columnists, philosophers, too, are writers. They make sophisticated use of language, and employ – whether deliberately or not – specific rhetorical and stylistic devices, as well as certain repertoires of metaphors, images and symbols. As writers, philosophers also have to adjust their writing to specific audiences, tailor it to serve specific purposes, and strategically choose one genre over another, with all its rules, protocols, and constraints. In short, it is crucial for philosophers – if they are to persuade readers – to advance their ideas following certain aesthetic rules, rhetorical procedures and strategies of persuasion. This has led some authors to speak of “the literariness of philosophical texts” (Berel Lang) as something indistinguishable from the philosophical substance and relevance of those texts.

Deadline for submissions: January 1, 2009
Length: 6000 words.

Instructions

Law-Literature

European Network for Law and Literature

The European Network for Law and Literature Scholarship has been founded as a vehicle for increasing communication and cooperation between individuals working on related topics within Europe. Founded by a judge and law professor working in the Netherlands and a literary scholar in Germany, this network aims to embrace the variety of disciplines and languages its participants work in as potential sources of scholarly richness and innovation. It is our belief that work on Law and Literature in Europe can develop a profile that more clearly reflects and articulates the cultural identities and legal backgrounds of its participants.

Draaisma over literatuur

De hinderlijke weerstand van feiten - door Douwe Draaisma

Lezing over de rol van literatuur...

"Wat bewonderd moet worden in Ian McEwan, niet alleen in zijn lezing vanmiddag, maar ook op andere plaatsen in zijn werk, is dat hij de verhouding tussen die twee werelden van feit en fictie onderzoekt op andere mogelijkheden dan die van een wederzijdse uitsluiting".

Bruner Burke

Kenneth Burke on narratives (and Burke):

Well-formed stories, [Kenneth] Burke proposed, are composed of a pentad of an Actor, an Action, a Goal, a Scene, and an Instrument?plus Trouble. Trouble consists of an imbalance between any of the five elements of the pentad: an Action toward a Goal is inappropriate in a particular Scene . . . an Actor does not fit the Scene . . . or there is a dual Scene . . . or a confusion of Goals. - /Jerome Bruner/ p. 50

zie verder op de site

Real Life

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Is ‘The Wire’ Our Best Ethnographic Text on the U.S. Today?

Who needs real life? My boyfriend and I have been working our way through the first four seasons of the U.S. television show The Wire, and I have concluded that it may be the best ethnography we have of contemporary American society. Who needs ‘real life’ when fiction, a TV show no less, does a better job of representing US culture(s) than many social science texts?

Conference GURT

GURT2008 | Telling Stories

Telling Stories:
Building bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society and Culture.

Narratives have been studied in many different disciplines: linguistics, literary theory, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, folklore, anthropology, sociology and history.

The primary focus of GURT 2008 is the linguistic study of narrative, especially as it has developed within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

As our theme suggests, however, studying the language of narrative can take us far afield to other concerns: the construction of self and identity; the differences among spoken, written and computer-mediated discourse; the role that small and big (e.g. life) stories play in everyday social interactions; the contribution of narrative to social status, roles and meanings within institutional settings as varied as therapeutic and medical encounters, education, politics, media, marketing and public relations.

Thus GURT 2008 will be a forum for building interconnections among language, narrative and social life.

Imaginative Literature & Social Change

I M A G I N A T I V E
LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Imaginative writing can be both literary and political simultaneously, and inevitably is, to varying degrees. In its own way, fiction can accomplish something similar to what Noam Chomsky and many other progressive workers try to accomplish through nonfiction: the creation of works that clarify and better the world socially, politically, culturally....

Fiction can be used to address what Chomsky calls "Orwell's Problem": How is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to "instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?" In other words, how is it that people are persuaded to act willingly and willfully against their own best interests and against values - regarding themselves and others - they otherwise hold dear? Fiction can debunk harmful propaganda and taboos; it can help energize, motivate, inspire and all the while maintain a vital literary quality by staying focused in part on fiction's core strengths, the plumbing of the depths of the human condition through character -- psychology, personality, motivation, mindset..

Literature and Social Studies

Keokuk's Daily Gate City Online > News

KHS adds new courses, aligns social studies with literature
By Diane Vance/Gate City Staff Writer

Published: Monday, February 25, 2008 2:44 PM CST
Keokuk High School will offer some new courses next year, is dropping a few others, and aligning literature and social studies classes to correspond better with the subject matter taught.
KHS Principal Dave Keane outlined some of the changes to the school board at the last meeting on Feb. 11.
“Next year, social studies and literature will be blocked as co-requisites,” he said.

Freshmen will take civics and Literature Composition I which covers concepts such as tolerance and age appropriate stories such as Romeo and Juliet; sophomores will study American history and Literature/Composition II; students will have world literature the same year as world geography.
“We ask students to do research projects in both literature class and social studies,” Keane said. “Sometimes, students do two mediocre projects. Now, we'll require one research project spanning the two classes and graded by both teachers. We will demand a higher level of performance.”
KHS will drop special ed classes, MDT, MDE, BD, LD and the Multi-Categorical Resource Program.

Human(ities)

Put the ‘human’ back in the humanities sp!ked review of books

Romantic individualism and political correctness have robbed university humanities departments of their ‘love of man’, that ‘amusing, tragic, contradictory creature who yearns to be the master of his fate and transform the world’.
by Alex Standish

Up on the Meaning of Life, is about the relative death of the humanities in American higher education. He investigates why humanities courses no longer aim to provide young people with insights into the meaning of life. Kronman argues that both he and his colleagues don’t think that the courses themselves have changed, nor do they think that the readings have become irrelevant in our globalised Information Age, as some might argue. He notes that professors at Yale will, in private, acknowledge that the humanities programme continues to provide young people with a perspective on the human condition, but publicly the humanities in America no longer plays its traditional role of pursuing life’s meaning. Hence, those teaching in liberal arts and humanities ‘claim not to possess any special wisdom about the meaning of life that might be communicated to their students in a disciplined way’, suggests Kronman.

Nation Narrative

National narratives in Inter Asia CS

The politics of national atonement and narrations of war

Hideko Mitsui

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1 March 2008 , pages 47 - 61

Abstract

In March 2007, Japan's 'national atonement project' for survivors of military sexual slavery was officially concluded. The atonement project that was implemented by a Japanese government-established non-governmental organization - the Asian Women's Fund - has distributed its fund to a number of survivors in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands since its inception in 1995. Over the years, intense politicization around the project has made it extremely difficult for most observers to assess whether the project was successful or not. Several prominent scholars in Japan and South Korea have called for a more compassionate and positive assessment of the project's good intentions, while feminist activists continue to critique the project's negative interventions in the process of redress and reconciliation in Asia. This essay is an attempt to open up a space to rethink the felicitousness of the atonement project by focusing on the ways in which the project told its own story of war, violence, and gender. By juxtaposing stories told by Filipina survivors of the 'comfort women' system with one that has been told by the atonement project implemented by the Asian Women's Fund, it seeks to find a way to reassess whether the project acknowledged the survivors' claims for justice and compensation.

Conference: Cult

Call for submissions for _The Cult of Difficulty: Critical Approaches to the Comics of Chris Ware_, edited by Dave Ball, Dickinson College, and Martha Kuhlman, Bryant University.

_The Cult of Difficulty_ is a proposed collection of essays on the work of Chicago-based contemporary graphic novelist/comic book artist/cartoonist Chris Ware. Author of _Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth_ (2000, winner of the 2001 Guardian First Book Award), _Quimby the Mouse_ (2003), and _The Acme Novelty Library_ (2005), Ware has quickly emerged as one of the central figures in contemporary comics. We are currently seeking abstracts for 20- to 25-page articles that analyze Ware’s work, with particular interest in multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to his oeuvre. A university press has already expressed interest in this collection, and we are hoping to build upon the MLA panel on Ware’s comics this past December. Essays that address the following questions are especially encouraged, but other topics are also welcome:

-- How do Ware’s texts raise questions about representations of race, gender, class, and disability?-- How has Ware’s work as an editor, anthologist, and collector shaped the landscape of contemporary comics and informed his own corpus?
-- In what ways are questions of narrative and temporality engaged and complicated in Ware's texts? What insights do narratological and semiotic approaches offer to a reading of Ware’s comics?
-- How does Ware's work intersect with advertising culture, web sites, media, and packaging?
-- What is Ware's relationship to the literary canon (both in terms of graphic and conventional literature) and how does he re-imagine our relationship to the idea of literariness?

Please send 500-1000 word abstracts (or completed articles), c.v., and contact information in Word format to warecollection@gmail.com by March 10th. Papers from a diversity of disciplinary orientations and methodological approaches are especially encouraged._____________________________________________

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Style

Style Journal

Style invites submissions that address questions of style, stylistics, and poetics, including research and theory in discourse analysis, literary and nonliterary genres, narrative, figuration, metrics, rhetorical analysis, and the pedagogy of style. Contributions may draw from such fields as literary criticism, critical theory, computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric and writing studies. In addition, Style publishes reviews, review-essays, surveys, interviews, translations, enumerative and annotated bibliographies, and reports on conferences, Web sites, and software. Major articles should be 5,000-9,000 words (count includes endnotes and works cited).

Narrative: The Nice Conference

Volume 26, Number 3

Links

The Narrative Consortium


Michael Bamberg - website

Narrative Inquiry

Narrative Inquiry is devoted to providing a forum for theoretical, empirical, and methodological work on narrative. Articles appearing in Narrative Inquiry draw upon a variety of approaches and methodologies in the study of narrative as a way to give contour to experience and life, conceptualize and preserve memories, or hand down experience, tradition, and values to future generations. Particular emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches to narrative and the analysis of narratives in human interaction, including those practiced by researchers in psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines.

Narratology net

Narratology - projects, debates and resources in narrative theory / Narratologie, Erzähltheorie, Erzählforschung: Projekte, Debatten und Hilfsmittel

narratology.net is now incorporated into the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology (ICN) at Hamburg University.
To visit the ICN website, please click here.
To visit the previous narrnet website, please click here.

Ancient Narrative

ANCIENT NARRATIVE

As the name Ancient Narrative indicates, the areas of interest of the new journal are: Greek, Roman, Jewish novelistic traditions, including novels proper, the "fringe", as well as the fragments; narrative texts of the Byzantine age, early Christian narrative texts - and the reception of these works in modern literature, film and music

Marie-Laure Ryan

Narratology
Some of Marie-Laure Ryan's articles on narrative theory

Jourals

Image and Narrative

Image [&] Narrative is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term. Beside tackling theoretical issues, it is a platform for reviews of real life examples.

Journals

Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (AJCN)

The substantial concerns and contentions of AJCN are as following:

• the "communicative" perception of literariness
• the artistic act of communication is cognized in terms of a polytonal, and at times reciprocal process, occurring simultaneously within the several dissimilar "descriptive levels of recital"
• overall preoccupation with the issue of "the discourse"
• theoretical meditation over the different "poles" of narrative-institutions, which maintain the very chain of transmitting the artistic information from what is called "author" to what is labeled as a "reader.
• the potential aim is to display the inner scheme of mechanical hierarchy, prevailing behind the complex relationship betwixt the entities of "storytelling", "recital", "history", as uniting under the contextual "roof" of the narrative.

Instruction for behaviour

Jelena vorovi, A Gypsy, a Butterfly, and a Gadje: Narrative as Instruction for Behaviour. Folklore, Volume 119, Issue 1 April 2008 , pages 29 - 40

Abstract

Serbian Gypsy narratives have a very important function in Gypsy culture - that of shaping and influencing the behaviour of those to whom the stories are told. This paper analyses two Serbian Gypsy oral narratives that place special emphasis on the kinds of behaviour that are encouraged or discouraged in everyday life, and which have presumably helped Gypsies to survive through the centuries.

Booth

The Company We Keep.



Description

In The Company We Keep, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature.

But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about many kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us as we read? Who am I, during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends?

Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.

Equipment

'Literature as Equipment for Living,'

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, third edition, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London 1973) pp. 293-304.