Innovative Narrative Research Articles

The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, 1764–1834: Slavery, Disease, and Colonial Modernity. Emily Senior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xii+284.

<i>The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, 1764–1834: Slavery, Disease, and Colonial Modernity</i>. Emily Senior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xii+284.

Narrative story stem methodologies

AbstractWe review three decades of literature across multiple disciplines that demonstrate the efficacy ofnarrative story stem methodologies(NSSM) to elicit responses that are projective of mental processes and to reveal what would otherwise be too complex or sensitive to communicate. The review synthesizes evidence for the extensive and diverse utility of NSSM. To accomplish this, we provide theoretical framing and historical background, describe assessment methods, resulting data and analytic approaches, and chart the empirical work of the past decade that relates story stem narratives to a range of developmental outcomes, and meaning-making processes. This synthesis of cross-disciplinary research provides the first comprehensive review of a truly innovative narrative methodology and includes work across periods of development, representing research that has primarily focused on children with increasing emphasis on adolescents and adults.

Post-communist Interpretation of History in the Albanian Literature in Kosovo

This article focuses on stylistic choices in the novel Im atë donte Adolfin (My father loved Adolph) by the Albanian author in Kosovo Mehmet Kraja (2005) as a strategy to generate a post-communist perspective of interpreting history. By blending first-person narration as confidentiality and third-person narration as conventionality (Barthes, 1978), the possessive construction ‘my father’ in this literary text serves both as referential label and deictic, generating dual focalization (Phelan, 2005). The heterodiegetic narrator is positioned simultaneously as a neutral eye witnessing narrator and as a signal of subjectivity. Even in cases of intradiegetic role the narrator remains detached interweaving his voice with the voice of the character. The synchronized overt and distant narratorial stances in this novel correspond with the demonstration of historical discourse as both subjective and factual narration. The relationship between fiction and truth has been widely treated in the post-modern intellectual thought, and as Borg (2010) points out in his study on Beckett and Joyce, the radical narrative innovations are “examples of a peculiarly modernist engagement with the nature of factual and fictional truth” (p. 179), suggesting that in modern literary texts “every event exists factually and fictionally at the same time” (p. 187). As a resonance to Borg’s analysis of modernist literature, in Kraja’s novel the knowledge about history consists of both factual and imaginative elements, bringing “the moment of truth in all its potential” (p. 191).

Nursing associate apprenticeship – a descriptive case study narrative of impact, innovation and quality improvement

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to explore how one higher education institution (HEI) has embraced the apprenticeship agenda and is successfully providing an apprenticeship programme for nursing associates (NA) a new profession within health and social care in the United Kingdom.Design/methodology/approachThis is a descriptive case study narrative about one programme from one HEI, selected for its relevance for the subject area of apprenticeships. This descriptive approach allows the provision of apprenticeships within HEI to be explored in depth by one institution.FindingsThis case study identifies the considerable value of apprenticeships within HEI for the students, the employers and the HEI. It also identifies that there are challenges within this. These findings will be of interest to those entering into the apprenticeship arena, especially within healthcare, and may inform an academic discourse in this area.Research limitations/implicationsIt is acknowledged that this case study does not seek to compare apprenticeships with other programmes. However, there is value in providing an academic narrative around the challenges of this provision which will be informative for others developing higher apprenticeships in the United Kingdom or similar delivery of apprenticeship models internationally.Practical implicationsThere is value in providing an academic narrative around the challenges of this provision which will be informative for others developing higher apprenticeships in the UK or similar delivery of apprenticeship models internationallySocial implicationsThese findings will be of interest to those entering into the apprenticeship arena, especially within healthcare, and will inform the academic discourse in this area.Originality/valueThis is original work and provides a new body of knowledge to the inform HEIs engaging with the relatively new context of higher and degree apprenticeships, as well as the new role within healthcare of the nursing associate.

Whose Narrative is it Anyway? Narratives of Social Innovation in Rural Areas – A Comparative Analysis of Community‐Led Initiatives in Scotland and Spain

AbstractSocial innovation is a process in which local communities build social and cultural capital to address challenges and social needs. The diffusion of social innovation requires compelling narratives that encourage people to join them. Using qualitative techniques and a multiple case study methodology, this article examines the content of narratives of social innovation in rural areas and how actors construct, spread and change them. We propose a narrative analytical framework comprising four key components: problematisation; solutions and goals; actors; and plot, which we apply to three initiatives in Scotland and Spain. Our findings suggest that marginalisation, the natural environment and community activation are central themes in the content of narratives. In addition, we explain how policies and public actors can support social innovation as well as how collective leadership of social innovations can reduce imbalances in power relations, and contribute to a consistent evolution of narratives over time, enhancing the sustainability of social innovation projects overall.

The Sensemaking Process of Academic Inclusion Experience: A Semiotic Research Based upon the Innovative Narrative Methodology of “upside-down-world”

Authors discuss the topic of inclusion process in academic education from a semiotic and dynamic perspective. Inclusive experience in educational and academic context is constructed through the personalization of the processes of sensemaking within a wider cultural and shared social context. Authors have implemented an innovative tool for a qualitative research about sensemaking processes. They create the upside down world narrative methodology, namely, a double task of narrating one’s own experience in two times, asking participants to turn upside down their narration. Such a device allows grasping the inherent and constitutive ambivalence of each psychological process of sensemaking. Results of semiotic narrative analysis show that inclusion appears narratively articulated on two broadly generalized domains of sense as follows: the relationship with others and the training path.

Mentalizing the university experience: an exploratory study on the relationship between university students' reflective functioning, psychological well-being and academic performance

In a Clinical Health Psychology perspective, which focuses on the promotion and maintenance of mental and physical health of the individuals, mentalization (operationalized as reflective functioning; RF) may be conceived as a psycho-social competence associated with psychological well-being and good outcome treatment. In the university contexts, some studies demonstrated that the students' academic achievements may be related, on one hand, to RF improvements, on the other, to psychological well-being. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies exploring RF in relationship with both academic achievement and psychological well-being regarding university students. This study aims at assessing the effectiveness, in terms of RF, psychological well-being and academic performance, of ten counselling groups addressed to 63 underachieving university students lagging behind in their studies. The counselling adopted an innovative narrative methodology, the Narrative Mediation Path (NMP), which aims to improve mentalization and psychological well-being in order to produce an impact on the students' academic performance. The Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (RFQ), the Psychological General Well-Being Index (PGWBI), and the Academic Performance Inventory (API) were administered at the beginning and at the end of the counselling. Results showed an overall improvement of students in genuine mentalization, especially of the hypomentalizing dimension of RF, an increase of the psychological well-being index and its sub-dimensions (except for the General Health dimension) and an improvement of the academic performance. This study highlighted the effectiveness of the NMP methodology for students' success and suggests the utility of planning clinical psychology interventions aimed at enhancing mentalization in the university contexts.

Narrative interactions: How project-based firms respond to Government narratives of innovation

The purpose of this article is to explore the ways project-based firms respond to Government narratives of innovation. We focus on the narratives of innovation articulated by Government as part of industrial policy and the responses thereto by senior managers in project-based firms. Our research setting is a major project-based sector: UK construction. 45 narrative interviews were conducted in addition to the content analysis of the Government reports on construction innovation. We find that project-based firms respond to the Government narrative for the need for innovation to improve performance by developing and enhancing their innovative capabilities and generating their own narratives of innovation. The model developed shows how narrative interaction between the Government and project-based firm levels impact on meaning-making of innovation by (re)articulating collective identities, and shaping innovation strategies.

A história da Nação Brasileira de José Oiticica (1910)

O artigo tem como objetivo analisar alguns aspectos da proposição de escrita da história do Brasil de José Rodrigues Leite Oiticica (1882-1957) intitulada “Como se deve escrever a história do Brasil”. Ela foi publicada em 1910, na Revista Americana, como uma réplica ao conhecido texto homônimo de Karl Von Martius (1794-1868), premiado pelo IHGB na década de 1840. Tendo em vista a inserção desta proposição em uma conjuntura de crítica a tradição historiográfica romântica corrente no fim do século XIX, pretende-se focar nas inovações conceituais e narrativas sugeridas por José Oiticica, considerando a maneira que elas contribuem para a construção de um olhar sinóptico sobre a história da nação brasileira. Argumenta-se que a demanda por se reescrever a história do Brasil sob novas bases teóricas se apresenta como uma questão de política do tempo na medida em que esta “renovação” pode ser compreendida como um esforço de oferecer elementos, a partir de outro repertório político-intelectual, para se solucionar o problema do “atraso nacional”.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night Cons and Pros of the Narrative Method and Technique

Most critics tackle Fitzgerald's works thematically, whereas what distinguishes his fictional narratives is his magnificent style, suggestive language and innovative narrative methods and techniques. This is quite evident in The Great Gatsby and other pieces like The Last Tycoon, "The Mountain as Big as the Ritz", the autobiographical piece The Crack Up, etc. Tender is the Night is among these masterpieces which is our major concern in this paper. Yet still, this novel witnessed some controversial issues in its narrative technique and method. The study of the narrative method and technique in Tender is the Night has no less significance in the literary world than it has in The Great Gatsby. In fact, Fitzgerald mounted his artistic maturity and craftsmanship in this novel despite all the controversial issues that surrounded the novel's first publication. The present study sheds light on the cons and pros of the narrative technique and method in both versions of Tender is the Night with necessary reference to the development of the events in the novel.&#x0D;

Innovation Openness and Business Models of Shared Machine Shops in Budapest

Shared machine shops are designed for providing space for education, learning practices, however it is also being questioned if they are accessible and for whom, depending on their location, communication practices and the entry-point in knowledge. Nonetheless the narrative of innovation and creativeness being attached to these spaces, the shades, openness or even absence of innovation is of a scholarly quest. Moreover, their function of enabling designers-entrepreneurs with infrastructure, collaborative practices and expertise is at the forefront. This paper looks at the composition of hybrid business models behind the activity of a set of shared machine shops: a fablab, a makerspace, a hackerspace, and printer-vendor company and how it may be linked to the education and innovation practices performed by the members and visitors. In search for if and how they represent dots of change on the landscape of design, this paper examines the facilities and opportunities for young designers, students, and makers to engage with digital technologies in Budapest, in a context where public schools and universities lack the access to fablabs and maker laboratories.

Narrative Approach to Goals of Care Discussions: Assessing the Use of the 3-Act Model in the Clinical Setting

ContextThe 3-Act Model is an innovative narrative approach to goals of care (GOC) discussions centered on patients' unique stories. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of the 3-Act Model training in enhancing trainees' skills objectively in role-plays with standardized patients. This study moves beyond the classroom to the clinical setting to assess whether learners preferred this approach, believed it to be clinically effective, and demonstrated proficiency objectively. ObjectiveOur primary objective was to describe internal medicine interns' preferred approach to leading GOC discussions and their view of its efficacy, before vs. after training. Our secondary objective was to assess the proficiency of interns in leading GOC discussions with hospitalized patients. MethodsWe sent online surveys to a cohort of 22 interns both before (pretest) and mid-year after (posttest) training in the 3-Act Model. In addition, trainers objectively assessed GOC discussions led by a subset of trainees in the inpatient setting using a previously described rubric congruent with the 3-Act Model. ResultsIn the posttest survey, many more interns reported using a narrative approach to GOC discussions most often (pretest, 1 of 22 [5%] vs. posttest, 16 of 18 [89%]). The percentage of interns reporting their preferred approach worked “very well” or “extremely well” increased from pretest to posttest (32%–89%, P = 0.002). Trainers assessed 13 completed GOC discussions led by 4 trainees (18% of original cohort) in the hospital setting and found all 13 to be proficient. ConclusionThe vast majority of interns reported preferential use and effectiveness of the 3-Act Model several months after training, and trainers found a subset to be proficient in GOC discussions with hospitalized patients. This study contributes evidence that training in the 3-Act Model positively impacted intern behavior in the clinical setting.

The Hybridity of Inclusive Innovation Narratives Between Theory and Practice: A Framing Analysis

Inclusive innovation remains an under-conceptualised and ambiguous concept despite garnering political and academic interest in recent decades. This paper explores the narratives of inclusive innovation that exist in literature and how these are framed in practice, using a case study of the Kenyan agricultural sector. Findings indicate that while there is significant similarity between the theoretical and empirical framing of the concept, there are also stark differences. In addition, different actors such as the state, development agencies, the private sector or universities do not fully ascribe to any of the existing theoretical narratives on inclusive innovation. Instead, they frame it based on their own contexts, mandate and interests using concepts borrowed from existing theoretical narratives. This indicates that instead of a grand theory of inclusive innovation that applies universally, there are several ways of enacting inclusive innovation. This also limits the transferability of a one-size-fits-all model of inclusive innovation.

Will they, won’t they? Dream sequences and virtual consummation in the series Moonlighting

The 1980s series Moonlighting was one of the first dramedies on the small screen; it took its cue from venerable genres like the screwball comedy or the hard-boiled novel (particularly The Thin Man) and translated them to television’s changing structures and aesthetics, participating in what has been termed the second Golden Age of television. However, the Nick and Norah Charles of Moonlighting, David and Maddie, were not married: on the contrary, the series was largely fuelled by the tension between the two leads, who were constantly sparring but were seemingly drawn to one another. Though this romantic tension has long been a staple of the silver screen, translating it into weekly episodes was more complicated—like its sitcom counterpart Cheers, also airing at the time, the writers struggled to maintain the central tension without creating undue frustration for the viewer. Moonlighting chose a particularly novel solution: the dream sequence. While David and Maddie continued to spar in “real/reel” life, the series offered regular dream sequences where they consummated their relationship either as themselves or as others. These dream sequences allowed for aesthetic and narrative innovation while maintaining thematic continuity: David and Maddie appear in dance sequences, in film noir, in The Taming of the Shrew, where they become the couple that the series keeps postponing. More than consummation, then, the series offers the performance of that consummation, voluntarily coded in different genres and styles, to the extent that the brief period where the two characters were a couple within the diegesis was met with general disappointment from fans and creators alike. This article explores the way that the series plays with genre, style, and viewer expectations in these different dream sequences.

Through a Glass Darkly: A Discussion of “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative”

I reflect on Jade McGleughlin’s meditation on “The Analyst’s Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative,” (this issue) with appreciation for her focus on the non-symbolizable in psychoanalysis and for her interdisciplinary integrations. I resonate with her observations of paradoxes in Bionian Field theory, am moved by her innovative clinical narrative and value her reflections on Agnes Martin’s work. I question her equation of sovereignty with subjectivity, query the implication that to surveil is to foreclose, ask for clarification on her construal of psychoanalytic transformation, and muse on the risk of misrepresentation as we venture away from the representable. I take up McGleughlin’s invitation to dialogue in the hope that such conversation will contribute to expanded inquiry into the multiple pathways toward psychoanalytic generativity.

From the Black Atlantic to Black-Scholes

Rather than being unprecedented, contemporary technologies are the most sophisticated instances of a long-standing dream: if space could be more comprehensively captured and coded, it could be more intensively capitalized. Two moments within this lineage are explored: maritime insurance of slave ships in the eighteenth century, and the Black-Scholes model of option pricing from the twentieth century. Maritime insurance rendered the unknown space of the ocean knowable and therefore profitable. By collecting information at Lloyds, merchants developed a map of threat within the Atlantic, and by writing a 10 percent buffer into slave-ship contracts they internalized contingency. This codification of risk pressured captains and established a logic for the violence enacted on the ship’s human “cargo.” The Black-Scholes formula of option pricing sought to codify the ocean of risk represented by the financial market. The formula mapped stock movements into a knowable stochastic equation. Traders could quantify and hedge against the unpredictable, rendering the stock market a space of riskless profit. However, the 2008 financial crash demonstrated the limits of spatial calculation. Taken together, these two moments demonstrate the historical continuity of a core imperative to exhaustively capitalize space. This historicization also foregrounds the racialized inequalities coded within these informatic logics. Against the bright innovation narratives of technology, this article stresses a longer and darker lineage based on inequality and dispossession.

Ser madre en la ficción televisiva: una comparativa entre series españolas y estadounidenses

Resumen. El presente trabajo analiza la representación de la maternidad en las series de ficción televisiva, con el fin de aportar una reflexión acerca de cómo se configuran las narrativas que dan significado a la mujer y sus roles dentro de las series. Para ello, se ha trabajado sobre una metodología mixta, que conjuga datos cuantitativos con cualitativos, analizando un total de seis series de ficción­ —tres españolas y tres estadounidenses— que se integran en dos géneros fronterizos: el drama y el dramedy. Los resultados apuntan que, a pesar de que la ficción televisiva incorpora nuevas narrativas que introducen temas relevantes para las mujeres en la actualidad, la representación de la maternidad continúa reflejándose desde una perspectiva tradicional y patriarcal, aunque se observa cierta innovación, alejada de los roles tradicionales, a la hora de representar la maternidad en las series estadounidenses.

The role of innovation narratives in accomplishing organizational ambidexterity

Persistent tensions arising from the exploration–exploitation paradox continuously threaten the accomplishment of organizational ambidexterity. Structural, contextual, and sequential solutions designed to alleviate these tensions dominate the ambidexterity literature. None of these adequately explains how top executives implement tension-alleviating managerial initiatives or how they respond in real time to tension-induced organizational perturbations. In this article, through analysis of top management team speeches at Procter &amp; Gamble over a 15-year period, we show how the construction and communication of four innovation narratives—contextualizing, mutualizing, dramatizing, and focalizing—reduced tensions and enhanced organizational ambidexterity. We demonstrate the importance of top management team reflexivity in devising and communicating performative narratives, illustrate the polyphonic model of narrative strategizing, and present a cyclical model suggesting that the accomplishment of organizational ambidexterity is an ongoing dynamic process.

The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Pen-insular Novel by Nina L. Molinaro

Reviewed by: The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Pen-insular Novel by Nina L. Molinaro Susan Mooney Molinaro, Nina L. The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Pen-insular Novel. Bucknell UP, 2019. 225 pp. Levinas scholars contend with the question of Levinas’s own Platonic resistance to valuing the realm of fictional narratives, along with other art forms; he views fictional narratives as complicating and distorting ethical inquiry. Nina Molinaro, with her admirable knowledge of Levinas’s whole oeuvre, is able to approach this delicate matter by pointing out the affinities between Levinas’s thought and narrative in this book. As Molinaro argues, Levinas’s own writing takes on narrative forms and trades in compelling metaphorical clusters; he himself uses narrative patterns to shape his thought. Throughout his philosophical work, Levinas explores synchrony and diachrony and relates them to the self and the Other. In particular, for Levinas, the self can never know the Other as they are on diachronous tracks, among other reasons: even in apparently synchronous moments of meeting, there is an unreconcilable difference in their beings and relationship because of their different relations to time. In The Art of Time, Molinaro, having already devoted earlier articles to applying Levinas’s thought to examine the work of Spanish women writers, maps these concepts onto some narrative features of a diverse range of novels by Generación X (Gen X) writers in Spain. Then again, The Art of Time’s surprising main contention is that Gen X narrative fiction “engages and discloses synchrony and diachrony because it most closely engages time” (125). The book’s overall structuring claim is that “the uniqueness of these writers, and their generation, lies in their unswerving interrogation of Levinas’s philosophy of ethical alterity, particularly as it manifests in temporality” (57). This is a difficult, and to some degree, unconvincing stretch. First, all narratives engage with time. More pointedly, the ethical implications of synchrony and diachrony and interrogations of alterity at the core of Levinas’s thought can also be observed in Peninsular works well before those of the Gen-Xers. For example, one could think of Ana María Matute and her intricate weaving of past and present (Primera memoria, Los Abel, among many others), Carmen Martín Gaite (Entre visillos), Juan Benet (Volverás a Región), Juan Goytisolo’s work written in exile (especially Juan sin tierra and Don Julián), and Juan Marsé’s Si te dicen que caí, to name just a few; they all interrogate the ethics of alterity, often in a Levinasian sense, and all use narrative in inventive, ethical ways to question the self and shape time to help readers reflect and question Spanish history and contemporary readers’ place in it. Beyond Spain, the Latin American Boom writers tumultuously engaged in time-bending, subject-shifting narratives such as García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad and Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz; these narrative innovations with [End Page 871] temporality develop an ethical inquiry of the postcolonial subject and the Other. In recent years, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño made diachrony and synchrony a specialization. These writers and many others foreground their engagement with history and create narratives that make time intersect, bringing characters face-to-face with complex ethical inquiries. Clearly, this is not a domain unique to Gen X writers. Molinaro’s book examines nine diverse Peninsular novelists generally associated with the Gen X: Gabriela Bustelo, Marta Sanz, José Ángel Mañas, Tino Pertierra, Blanca Riestra, Belén Gopegui, Juana Salabert, Sergi Pàmies, and Luisa Castro. Yet, only the novels by these last four seriously reflect on and interact with the past and display the “art of time” as envisioned through diachrony. This discussion unfortunately only appears late in the book (at the end of chapter four and chapter five in a five-chapter book). In the foundational first part of this monograph, Molinaro creates for the reader an anticipation of historical narrative and ethical introspection. In chapter one, she expertly reviews Levinas’s thought across his major works and his life and how it intersected tragically with WWII and...

Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena

Reviewed by: Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena Rita Sakr Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland, by Carmen Zamorano Llena (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 220 p., hardcover, €75) A broad range of scholarship explores literary representations of the Irish migrant experience across the world and, more recently, the experience of migration to an increasingly multicultural Ireland (Pilar Villar-Argaiz, 2017; Ailbhe McDaid, 2017; Anne Mulhall, 2020, among others). There is an even larger body of criticism on the dynamics of migration, diaspora, and asylum-seeking in British literature (Agnes Woolley, 2014; Matthew Chambers, 2015; Deirdre Osborne, 2016, among others). Given the intertwined histories and geographies of the two islands, constructing a coherently productive methodological [End Page 154] approach to the literatures of migration in the two countries in the same study is both a convincing as well as a challenging intellectual feat, especially from the perspectives of postcolonial theory and globalization studies. Yet Carmen Zamorano Llena's Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland achieves precisely this. Zamorano Llena's monograph focuses on fiction published since the 1990s. While the pairing of Ireland–Britain in the title could suggest a duality of national literatures, the book's significant scholarly contribution is its exploration of a vast network of transnational dimensions, including the contributions of non-migrant writers on this topic. The introduction offers an overview of relevant fields, including comparative literature and world literature, as well as the multifaceted concept of cosmopolitanism. It may not necessarily be clear at the start in what ways and how successfully the study will map "the connection between present fictions of migration and earlier migration literature, as well as postcolonial writing and new forms of cosmopolitan writing, with special attention to their role in redefining national literature and literary traditions." However, the case studies in the six main chapters deliver on the promise, in some instances with astonishing rigor and originality. The succinct discussion of "new cosmopolitan theory" in terms of redefining the interrelationship of postcolonialism and globalization at the start of Chapter 2 is more impressive than the relatively brief close readings of the disruption of nationalist "home" imaginaries in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Foreigners. Chapter 3 cleverly addresses "the democratising effects" of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin as a literary rendering of Ulrich Beck's concept of "inclusive differentiation" in terms of its narration of both the experience of 9/11 as well as of exile. Engaging Global North–Global South relations in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and Gravel Heart, Chapter 4 incisively sets up Achille Mbembe's reconceptualized "Afropolitanism" as a groundwork to discover "new possible worldviews." Chapter 5 takes Jacques Rancière's work, particularly The Politics of Literature (2011), as well as Martha Nussbaum's and Sara Ahmed's writings on emotions, as a starting point to analyze Elif Shafak's Honour as "a fictional narrative that counters the simplifying narratives of the Muslim other." Chapter 6, on Rose Tremain's The Colour and The Gustav Sonata, is a standout in many respects, not least in its ambitious triangulation of Hannah Arendt's thinking on solidarity and "enlarged mentality" with Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and Michael Rothberg's notion of "noeuds de mémoire" in order to engage historical fiction in the context of what it correctly identifies as the fruitful "synergetic combination of migration studies and memory studies." The treatment of transcultural memories, particularly through Rothberg's "multidirectional memory," continues in Chapter 7 as a foundation to examine "the interconnections between Irish Famine diasporic [End Page 155] memory, transatlantic slavery past and Australian convict narratives" in Evelyn Conlon's Not the Same Sky. One of the study's strongest elements is the close analysis of formal techniques in the selected works of fiction. Zamorano Llena deftly addresses the often innovative narrative methods and motifs that approximate the sociohistorical shifts that are engendered and the ethico-political turns that are triggered by the "timespaces" of migration. This ranges from McCann's use of the metaphor of the tightrope walker signifying the migrant's "acrobatic mobility"; Gurnah's spatiotemporal "dialogism...