Abstract Narrative thinking has a very important role in our ordinary everyday lives?in our thinking about fiction, about the historical past, about how things might have been, and about our own past and our plans for the future. In this paper, which is part of a larger project, I will be focusing on just one kind of narrative thinking: the kind that we sometimes engage in when we think about, evaluate, and respond emotionally to, our own past lives from a (...) perspective that is external to the remembered events. Being able to do this is an essential part of what it is to have a narrative sense of self. Sometimes, I will suggest, we fail to have such responses?we are not able to think and feel as we should about an episode in our lives. On such occasions, there is a gap in our narrative sense of self?a gap which opens up especially where the past is in some sense tragic or traumatic. The desire to close this gap is what I will call a desire for emotional closure. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt tree thinking, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

Scientists generally record their laboratory activities and experimental results in notebooks, from which they construct scientific papers. The Johns Hopkins physiologist William Henry Howell kept a laboratory notebook from 1913 to 1914, in which he recorded experiments on the blood clotting factor prothrombin. In 1914 he published a paper using this notebook, to justify his theory of prothrombin activation. Howell's paper is reconstructed, in terms of its narrative and argument elements, from the laboratory activities and experimental results recorded in the (...) notebook. This reconstruction reveals an intimate connection between the two texts and the process by which Howell constructed a scientific paper. The generation of scientific knowledge by Howell is then evaluated, especially in terms of theory formation and justification. (shrink)

This article argues that narrativity has the potential to be a key hermeneutical concept in ecumenical theology. Instead of pursuing a complex elaboration of the notion, it will seek to explore various aspects of narrativity. The thesis will be explicated in three major steps, consecutively discussing culture as the general setting of narrativity, explicating narrativity as a concept that can helpfully address some of the major issues in ecumenical theology and proposing transformation as the ultimate horizon of the faith and (...) practice of the Christian koinonia. (shrink)

This paper offers a brand storytelling, that is a narratological account of Covid-19 pandemic’s emergence phase. By adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ deploying media story-world is identified with a process of narrative spacing. Subsequently, the brand’s personality is analyzed as a narrative place brand. The narrative model that is put forward aims at outlining the main episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality as process and structural components (actors, settings, actions, relationships). A series of deep or ontological (...) metaphors are singled out as the core DNA of this place brand, by applying metaphorical modeling to the tropical articulation of Covid-19’s narrative. The virus’ kernel is identified with terror, as a menacing force that wipes out existing regimes of signification due to its uncertain motives, origins and operational mode. In this context, familiar urban spaces, cultural practices and intersubjective communications are redefined, repurposed and reprogrammed. This process is called terrorealization, as the desertification and metaphorical sublation of all prior territorial significations. This study contributes to the narrative sub-stream of place branding by approaching a globally relevant sociocultural phenomenon from a brand storytelling perspective. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt “tree thinking”, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

The ArgumentUsing a pernicious Foucaultian reading of Weber's rationalization theories, I endeavor in this essay to illuminate academic acts as kept in the Brandenburg-Prussian state archive in Berlin, with some comparison to others, chiefly those in the Bavarian state archive in Munich. The essay concerns the microtechniques of marking, collecting and keeping records, and the form and content of archives of academic acts – interesting for the reason that paperwork circumscribes the state ministry's ability to recollect academic acts and hence (...) its power and knowledge over academics. I consider mostly acts relating to the early modern “Arts and Philosophy Faculty,” which corresponds more or less to the present-day “Division of Arts, Letters and Sciences.” The transformation, traced from the Baroque to the Romantic era, is understood as a process of “ministerial-market rationalization” of German academia: I try to show how central German ministries, as reflected in archival acts, altered the academic persona to suit themselves and the market, and how professorial appointments were rationalized accordingly. (shrink)

Three experimental tasks—spontaneous telling of a story, reading, and parsing the story—were used to determine whether empirical data reflect the narrative structure of stories and can be predicted by a plot unit analysis of the stories (Lehnert, 1981). It was found that spontaneous pause durations at sentence breaks were highly correlated with the importance of these breaks as predicted theoretically. Only low correlations were obtained, however, when reading pause durations were correlated with the model. As for parsing values, the value (...) of the correlation coefficients depended on whether stories had sufficient superficial linguistic cues to help the subjects in parsing. It was concluded that spontaneous pausing not only reflects the narrative structure of stories, but can be used as a guide to constructing theories of narrative structure as well as for deciding between competing theories. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between Achilles Tatius' novel Leucippe and Cleitophon and the Platonic corpus. I have searched for Platonic allusions of various natures and purposes and grouped them into thematic chapters. I have also compared instances of similar uses of Plato in contemporary authors in order to classify both the individual cases and the place of Achilles Tatius' novel in its literary environment, including the intended readership. In my introduction I have argued that (...) through the combination in his works of philosophy and literary excellence Plato was an extremely important figure to the Greeks of the second sophistic. However, despite the increasingly influential opinion that Greek novel readership was not dissimilar to that of other works, the possibility that the Greek novelists used Plato in a more than cosmetic fashion has been relatively neglected. The uses of Plato on which I have concentrated are the employment of Platonic names as allusions to their namesakes; Platonic narrative technique as the model for the dialogue form and open-endedness of Leucippe and Cleitophon with the integration of this technique into the broader question of the discrepancies between the beginning and the end; the allusion to a particularly famous passage of the Phaedrus in the name of the heroine; the repeated allusions to the Phaedran flow of beauty, their purposes and the light they shed on the characterisation of Cleitophon; and the Phaedran scene-setting, indulged in by many other writers, which Achilles Tatius uses in two significant passages. The conclusions I have reached are that Achilles Tatius uses Plato far more extensively and imaginatively than hitherto realised; that such an intimate engagement can shed light on other issues, such as psychological characterisation and the question of humour; that Achilles Tatius wrote something of an "anti-Platonic" novel; and that his work displays many similarities with other works whose sophistication is less in doubt. (shrink)

The fictionalist paradigm is introduced, and differentiated from other paradigms, using the Lincoln & Guba template. Following an initial overview, the axioms of fictionalism are delineated by reference to standard metaphysical categories: the nature of reality, the relationship between knower and known, the possibility of generalization, the possibility of causal linkages, and the role of values in inquiry. Although a paradigm's ‘basic beliefs’ are arbitrary and can be assumed for any reason, in this paper the fictionalist axioms are supported with (...) philosophical considerations, and the key differences between fictionalism, positivism, and constructivism are briefly explained. Paradigm characteristics are then derived, focusing particularly on the methodological consequences. Towards the end of the paper, various objections and misunderstandings are discussed. (shrink)

The idea of narrative has been widely discussed in the recent health care literature, including nursing, and has been portrayed as a resource for both clinical work and research studies. However, the use of the term 'narrative' is inconsistent, and various assumptions are made about the nature (and functions) of narrative: narrative as a naive account of events; narrative as the source of 'subjective truth'; narrative as intrinsically fictional; and narrative as a mode of explanation. All these assumptions have left (...) their mark on the nursing literature, and all of them (in our view) are misconceived. Here, we argue that a failure to distinguish between 'narrative' and 'story' is partly responsible for these misconceptions, and we offer an analysis that shows why the distinction between them is essential. In doing so, we borrow the concept of 'narrativity' from literary criticism. Narrativity is something that a text has degrees of, and our proposal is that the elements of narrativity can be 'sorted' roughly into a continuum, at the 'high narrativity' end of which we find 'story'. On our account, 'story' is an interweaving of plot and character, whose organization is designed to elicit a certain emotional response from the reader, while 'narrative' refers to the sequence of events and the (claimed) causal connections between them. We suggest that it is important not to confuse the emotional persuasiveness of the 'story' with the objective accuracy of the 'narrative', and to this end we recommend what might be called 'narrative vigilance'. There is nothing intrinsically authentic, or sacrosanct, or emancipatory, or paradigmatic about narrative itself, even though the recent health care literature has had a marked tendency to romanticize it. (shrink)

The word “real” (from the Latin “res” = thing) was coined in the 13th century to signify “having Properties” (Pierce. 1958, p. 358), whereas a “model” refers to an analogical representation, the structure of which should correspond to the structure or properties of that which it represents. For Scudder the mind is a system of models and each mind develops different models. We all have a different reality in mind and so we each live in a slightly different world (Scudder, (...) 1975). Hence the real nature of the model and the model nature of reality are often indistinguishable. A snail, for example, when exposed to four tactile stimuli per second (with a rod on his belly) will be compelled to crawl upon that non-existing coherent spatial surface (Brecher, 1966). For the snail four tactile stimuli per second correspond to, or are isomorphic with, the structure of a spatial surface, but it is impossible for the snail to “know” which of the two structures is real. (shrink)