Considering counter-narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense

Abstract

Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews (eds.), Considering counter-narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. x, 381. HB $126.00.Growing out of two special issues of the journal Narrative Inquiry, this volume assembles six chapters that “contemplate the meaning of counter-narratives and their relationship to master or dominant narratives” (p. x). The book also contains six clusters of commentaries written in response to each of the focal chapters, along with rejoinders by the six “primary” authors. As the editors point out in their introduction to the book, the format of dialogue and contestation is meant to synergize with the main subject of the volume, since the concept “counter-narrative” is itself “a positional category, in tension with another category” (x). By and large, the organization of the volume is effective and makes for stimulating reading; occasionally, however, commentators treat the chapter to which they are ostensibly responding less as an opportunity for dialogue than as a platform for showcasing their own explanatory frameworks or descriptive nomenclatures (see, e.g., the commentary by Jaan Valsiner, 245–76). More generally, the range of issues explored by the 29 different contributors to the volume – the range of contexts in which the authors and commentators show narrative and narrative analysis to be pertinent concerns – suggests the extent to which the “narrative turn” has taken hold in fields such as social psychology, gender studies, sociolinguistics, public health, and the other domains of research represented in the book. But by the same token, the volume raises the question of whether the contributors share a sense of what narrative is and how it functions – that is, whether they are in fact investigating a common object (or set of common objects: narrative, master narrative, counter-narrative), or rather operating with more or less distinct conceptions of stories and methodologies for studying them.