EN :

Narrative construction has an important and under-explored role to play in examining questions of power and privilege in P-12 classrooms or higher education courses in education and the humanities. In this paper, the authors utilize pedagogical deconstruction and reconstitution of stories about childhood play, examining how young people embody cultural narratives of power through their play. Through narrative construction, the authors envision utopian moments of resistant play, in which youth question old scenarios and imagine more equitable and examined possibilities for play. Counter-narrative writing strategies include recombining events from the historical record, contemporary news accounts, or popular culture; playing with time; and adopting various points of view.

EN :

In the lived practices of narrative inquiry, we honour our relational ontological commitments and responsibilities as narrative inquirers. In this paper, we link these ontological commitments with our practice, which is often tension-filled because the knowledge landscape on which we live as researchers is shaped by paradigmatic rather than narrative knowledge. It is easy to get swept into thinking paradigmatically and to sustain ourselves as narrative inquirers amidst knowledge landscapes that cast narrative inquirers as not knowing when seen from within dominant plotlines. We see that not to fall into these dominant plotlines requires wakefulness to shaping places where we can practice thinking narratively.

EN :

This paper presents a narrative analysis of emerging adults’ perceptions of the impact of parental depression on themselves as they reflected back on their lives in their natal home. Archived interview narratives were analyzed from sixteen respondents from a preventive intervention study of depression in families. The perceptions of parental depression and the perceived impact of parental depression were found to fall into five perspectives: resistance (no impact), negativity (being disadvantaged), ambivalent perspectives (disadvantaged but also sensitized), acceptance (reconciling with loss), and, compassion (sensitivity and caregiving). The findings from the narratives indicated that the perceived impacts of parental depression spanned a spectrum of responses, not all of which were negative. Emerging adults with their own history of depression reported a more resistant or negative perceived impact of parental depression, and more boys than girls narrated perceived negative impacts of parental depression on the self. These perspectives on parental depression derived from the narratives offer clinicians and family therapists a means of understanding the impact of depression on emerging adults’ sense of self. Implications of language usage, such as tense and coherence, are also discussed.

EN :

This paper introduces a methodological approach that was utilized when the textual material and life tree drawings of young adults with cancer were analyzed as an interwoven ensemble. In order to take the visuals seriously, the article focuses on visual narrative analysis in order to give a clear description of how the drawings were analyzed as narratives. New insights are gained when the analysis process is introduced step by step as a genuine combination of narrative textual and visual analysis. Finally, the drawings reveal new layers of experiences in a form of metaphors that reflect support, self, body, and time.

EN :

This article examines narratives of “trouble” from elderly second- and third- generation German American residents of Illinois. During the First and Second World Wars, many German American communities experienced targeted anti- German sentiment combined with government-sponsored efforts to eradicate the German language in schools, churches, and public spaces (Luebke, 1974; Tolzmann, 2001). Elderly narrators who tell stories about this time do so at considerable narrative risk, revealing both troubling memories and troubled tellings in the process. Troubled stories are difficult narrative terrain for these community members, and while they help complicate over-generalized portraits of German American assimilation, they present painful and often buried portraits of the past best forgotten in the minds of many. Despite their taboo nature, these stories of anti-German sentiment offer an important corollary to anti-immigrant feeling in the present day, especially in Midwestern regions that are experiencing heavy migration from newer immigrant communities.

FR :

Les articles contenus dans cette section sont issus des conférences plénières présentées au 7^e.Congrès Narrative Matters, Narrative Knowing/Récit et Savoir, organisé à l’Université Paris Diderot, en partenariat avec The American University of Paris, du 23 au 27 juin 2014. L’article de Jacques Bouveresse, « Y a-t-il une épistémologie de la littérature et peut-il y en avoir une ? » s’inscrit dans le prolongement de La Connaissance de l’écrivain. Sur la littérature, la vérité et la vie. Dans cet ouvrage, publié en 2008, Bouveresse s’interroge dans les termes suivants : « Pourquoi avons-nous besoin de la littérature, en plus de la science et de la philosophie, pour nous aider à résoudre certains de nos problèmes ? Et qu’est-ce qui fait exactement la spécificité de la littérature, considérée comme une voie d’accès, qui ne pourrait être remplacée par aucune autre, à la connaissance et à la vérité ? » (2008 : 29-30). En affirmant que la littérature participe bel et bien, par des moyens qui lui sont propres, à l’entreprise générale de la connaissance, Jacques Bouveresse dénonce à la fois la « phobie de l’extra-textualité », qui met hors circuit le contenu factuel et également le contenu moral de la littérature, et la tendance caractéristique de certains courants postmodernes à ériger la littérature en une sorte de genre suprême, dont la philosophie et la science ne seraient au fond que des espèces. C’est en philosophe qu’il aborde la question du genre de connaissance que peut apporter l’œuvre littéraire, celle de la différence entre la « connaissance pratique » et la connaissance de la science, « théorique, propositionnelle », celle de la différence essentielle à faire entre la connaissance morale des romanciers et le moralisme. Il ne néglige pas pour autant le fait qu’il s’agit d’une connaissance qui ne pourrait pas exprimée autrement que dans la forme précise que lui a donnée l’écrivain, et même qui ne peut devenir réelle que sous cette forme et de cette manière-là. Dans son article, qui convoque un grand nombre d’écrivains et de penseurs (Paul Valéry, Émile Zola, Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil et d’autres), Bouveresse réaffirme que la littérature, et en particulier le roman, transmet une certaine sorte de connaissance : une connaissance qui reste beaucoup plus proche de la connaissance ordinaire, dont elle pourrait même en un certain sens constituer une partie, que d’une forme de connaissance savante de nature théorique et systématique. Il s’interroge également sur la façon dont le genre de connaissance qu’il est possible de tirer d’un roman y est contenu exactement et s’appuie sur une lettre de Léon Tolstoï à propos d’Anna Karénine pour distinguer entre ce qui est exprimé par des mots, ou des propositions, et ce qui ne peut être signifié que d’une autre manière (ou entre ce qui peut se dire et ce qui peut seulement semontrer, dans une terminologie empruntée à Ludwig Wittgenstein). À la fin de son article, il appelle à la constitution d’une théorie littéraire qui serait précisément une théorie de la connaissance littéraire. (Patron et Schiff, 2015)

EN :

The articles in this section draw on the texts of plenary lectures presented at the seventh Narrative MattersConference, Narrative Knowing/Récit et Savoir, organized at the Université Paris Diderot, in partnership with the American University of Paris, from June 23-27, 2014. Donald E. Polkinghorne, from whom the conference borrowed its sub-title (see Polkinghorne, 1988), draws on research in cognitive science in order to try to answer the question of how and why “there does not exist, and never has existed, a people without narratives” (Barthes, 1966). In this article, he calls on embodiment theory, a development in cognitive science, as the source for the universality of narrative thought among humans. Having presented narrative (more precisely narrating) as a type of thinking, Polkinghorne begins by offering a description of thinking as noting relationships among items (e.g., similarity, causality, sequentiality) and as making use of cognitive schemas, of which he provides a detailed typology. Polkinghorne then explores the issue of the embodiment of the subject’s experience of narrating. He accounts for the development of the source-path- goal (SPG) schema on the basis of its kinesthetic origin and shows that the SPG schema is incorporated into narrative thinking as its primary structure. Polkinghorne situates himself in a current paradigm which paves the way for the refounding of the problematic of narrative at the interface of the subject’s embodied cognition on the one side and intersubjectively distributed social cognition on the other. (Patron & Schiff, 2015)

EN :

The articles in this section draw on the texts of plenary lectures presented at the seventh Narrative Matters Conference, Narrative Knowing/Récit et Savoir, organized at the Université Paris Diderot, in partnership with the American University of Paris, from June 23-27, 2014. Philippe Carrard’s article, “History and Narrative: An Overview,” is a sequel to his latest book, Le Passé mis en texte: Poétique de l’historiographie française contemporaine [The Past in Textual Form: A Poetics of Contemporary French Historiography]. In this work, Carrard (2014) sets himself the task of examining, as a scholar of poetics, the writing protocols and conventions used by historians when they finally present the data they have gathered in textual form. One of the major questions of the work concerns to what extent the authors resort to narrative form: does the discourse of the historian always take the form of a narrative and, if not, under what non-narrative forms can it be structured? In the article presented here, Carrard begins by providing an overview of the Anglo-American debate over the cognitive value of narrative in historiography. He opposes this debate, involving mostly analytical philosophers, to the controversies about the relations between narrative and historiography in France, which involve trade historians (starting with the anti-narrativist position of the Annales School). Then he wonders whether literary theory can contribute to these debates. Whereas philosophers and historians raised the question, “Does narrative provide a legitimate kind of knowledge?” literary theorists will simply ask, “Do historians rely on narrative? And if they do, on what kind of narrative?” Answering these questions, of course, includes defining what is meant by “narrative,” something which philosophers and historians, who seem to take the term for granted, often fail to do and which Carrard succeeds in doing, using the works of Gerald Prince, James Phelan, and other theorists of literary narrative. He then shows that a large part of the historians’ production does not fall under narrative, at least not as this term is defined in literary theory, but rather presents itself as what he calls “pictures” (“tableaux”), “analyses,” or “anthropological descriptions.” In his conclusion, he reviews some of the epistemological problems raised by the modes of disposition or arrangement he has described. (Patron & Schiff, 2015)