Narrative Questions Research Articles

Lovesick in the Time of Smallpox: Romancing the State of Nature in Toni Morrison's <em>A Mercy</em>

Lovesick in the Time of Smallpox: Romancing the State of Nature in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy Sandy Alexandre (bio) [Florens] assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything. Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008) Thus in the beginning all the World was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known. Find out something that hath the Use and Value of Money amongst his Neighbours, you shall see the same Man will begin presently to enlarge his Possessions. John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) If in the beginning the whole world was America, Locke understood that in the late seventeenth century a great part of it still remained in the circumstances he defined as the state of nature. Herman Lebovics, “The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government” (1986)1 While many of Toni Morrison’s novels could be characterized as quest narratives, none—besides perhaps Song of Solomon (1977)—seems to follow the conventions of the archetypal quest narrative as closely as her ninth novel, A Mercy (2009), in which the main protagonist, Florens, goes on a treacherous journey filled with various obstacles and dangers while in search of something she is certain will ultimately prove salvific; encounters an unexpected yet helpful Samaritan along the way; and finally finds that much-sought-after thing. In this case, that something is actually [End Page 223] someone: the freed black medicine man/blacksmith who has the means to cure her mistress, Rebekka, of smallpox and Florens of her lovesickness. Although the blacksmith is a person, I construe him as a thing for three reasons: The first reason is that Florens’s abandonment issues around her mother are partly responsible for producing his desirableness and her desire to possess him—that is, his thingness. Explaining Jacques Lacan’s notion of the psychological phenomenon das Ding, Peter Schwenger writes, “[D]as Ding is not merely a part of another as physical object; it is a Thing in one’s psyche that has come into being with an object’s loss. Das Ding, then, is both the lost object and the psychic dynamics formed around its absence.”2 Throughout the novel, it is clear that Florens sees the blacksmith as someone who can fill the void her mother left when she, at least from Florens’s callow point of view, gave her up so summarily and inexplicably to a stranger when she was only a little girl.3 The blacksmith is the “savior” she seeks for the good of her mistress’s health, but, more importantly, for the good of her own self-esteem and happiness.4 As a consequence, the second reason why I figure the blacksmith as less a person than a thing is that, for all of his importance to Florens, he is never granted the power of narration. We don’t get access to his own subjectivity, because of Florens’s obsession with him. The third reason is that, by conceiving the blacksmith as a thing quested after, he becomes situated in an array of things considered desirable and ostensibly possessable by an enslaved person (Florens, in this case). Thus, in placing him within this set of an enslaved person’s desirables, I hope to understand what it means for an enslaved person to want a lover—of all things!—before (and, more importantly, more than) she wants freedom. In other words, if one might characterize the main thrust of the slave narrative (albeit reductively) as a quest, fundamentally, for freedom, then what might we imagine and summarize the enslaved person’s quest to be for before the advent, popularity, and political motive of the slave narrative? What does an enslaved person’s desire for something other than freedom tell us about human desire, the enslaved, freedom, and American slavery prior to its being made peculiar to black people? To adapt Frederick Douglass’s famous chiasmus about how he was made a slave and then became a man, in this essay you shall see how a budding slave was made into a...

Men without Women by Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen

author with whom he greatly identifies; he remembers a woman he met in a different city whose address is the only tangible thing he knows about her anymore; he reflects on the attic room he stayed in during his university days in which he read passionate poetry. Bae’s greatest strength as a writer lies in her ability to take what at first appear to be disjointed images and scenes and weave them together into one beautiful story. The attic room, the poetry, the woman on the platform he longs to kiss are all connected in her character’s mind with a meditation on time and space: “When was it that he had last kissed a woman so ardently, his lips as passionate as when they pronounced poetry? In that city or this, at the house of his acquaintance or on the platform in the north station, while waiting for the train.” The entire collection is as riveting and poetic as the title story: an author recalls several visits to her mentor; a young man is reconnected with a former lover while struggling with questions about his sexuality ; a playwright experiments with how to portray time on the stage. These stories are a great place to start for those looking to get a taste of Bae’s innovative style. For those already familiar with her previous novels, it is exciting to once again encounter more of the author’s intriguing and thought-provoking prose. Melissa Beck Woodstock Academy, Connecticut Haruki Murakami. Men without Women. Trans. Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen. New York. Knopf. 2017. 227 pages. Men without Women comprises seven short stories, four of which have appeared in other publications. All display elements of Haruki Murakami’s fiction that readers have come to expect: magical realism, the Beatles, cats and jazz, and abrupt endings without easy resolution. We come to realize this last element is entirely appropriate precisely because there is no pat answer, no comfortable place, no way to tie up loose ends for the protagonists of these tales who, as the title notes, are missing an important woman. The parameters of this lack differ, of course, and the degree to which we can sympathize will likewise vary, but the emotional complications of that lack are something most readers will understand and appreciate at a visceral level, even if the tale seems beyond comfortable comprehension. Three of the stories are particularly effective. “Samsa in Love” is a playful reversal of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Here, Gregor the cockroach wakes up to find he is human, and his first interaction is with a hunchbacked woman who is convinced he is slow and only interested in her for kinky sex. Like Gregor, we know nothing but the realities of the moment. “Scheherazade” is the most unsettling work in the collection. Here, Murakami is at his best, probing the seemingly unfathomable reasons for connection while asking of the reader a degree of indulgence and understanding of what it means to be needy and the lengths one might go to satisfy those desires. Finally, “Kino” raises far more narrative questions than it answers before sinking almost languidly into a surrealistic pool of self-questioning that also appears to offer an answer only to pull it away at the last moment. This instability powerfully conveys the force of the protagonist’s loss. Despite the generally engaging nature of these seven vignettes, however, it was with some disappointment that I put the book down, for I could not help feeling that Murakami had been unable to go beyond his previous work. The specific contexts are new, and a different problem is the focus, but the stories feel overly familiar, as if we have read them before. Die-hard Murakami fans will welcome them, and readers new to Murakami will discover Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès Island of Point Nemo Trans. Hannah Chute Open Letter In Island of Point Nemo, Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès constructs a novel of grand adventure that weaves together two narratives: one that takes readers on a murder-mystery romp across the globe and another situated in an absurd e-reader factory. Translated from the French, the novel’s...

Preface: The Spaces Between

Preface: The Spaces Between María Delgado It is impossible to consider Argentine theatre without folding in some discussion of film. Any discussion of 21st century Argentine cinema similarly touches theatrical motifs and prisms. It’s not simply about actors—like María Villar, Pilar Gamboa, Esteban Lamothe, Julian Tello, and Esteban Bigliardi, among many others—whose performative ethos has been shaped by both. Dramatists like Walter Jakob and Santiago Loza also work in film, as an actor and director, respectively. These kinds of crossovers are just the tip of the fertile exchange that characterises Buenos Aires’ creative arts culture. The essays featured in this collection point to wider currents and exchanges. Romina Paula and Lola Arias work as performers, writers, and directors across both stage and screen cultures. Alejo Moguillansky works as a writer, director, and editor in cinema, but theatre spills into his films through plotting, performance, and intertextuality, disrupting their surface realism in playful, impish ways. The boundaries between these art forms, as the spatial configurations of Buenos Aires indicate, are hugely porous. Part of this has to do with the city’s lithe and improvisational theatre culture. Productions shift from venue to venue. A production may “take a break” when actors are filming, or play one or two days a week or play late in the evening—it’s not unusual to be heading to a performance at 11:30 p.m. Buenos Aires lives and breathes theatre—from the proscenium arch venues of central Corrientes to the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires’ (CTBA) cluster of theaters to the plethora of fringe theatres that can be found in the Abasto. For a decade the Abasto was home both to Buenos Aires’ independent film festival, the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine (BAFICI), and the city’s alternative theaters, and BAFICI’s origins can be linked to Buenos Aires’s biennial international theatre festival, the Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires (FIBA). [End Page 3] Both alternative theatre and the New Argentine cinema are built on a culture of thrift, of making do and improvising with the means you have at your disposal. All the works discussed in this volume are lean and focused—nothing superfluous, nothing wasted—and they are often marked by an approach to artistic creation that may be branded around the writer/director but is effectively realised in the rehearsal room or on location through group creation. Minefield (2016) and El loro y el cisne (2013) both show this process at work. This strategy also spills over into the multifarious roles that the artists featured in this collection occupy: directors work as producers or editors on the films of their contemporaries; actors direct and directors act; and groups of actors—ensembles of sorts—feature across the works of Romina Paula and Matías Piñeiro. The essays in this collection handle a range of productions (across both film and theatre) that articulate the intersections between history, memory, and fiction that have been so prevalent in Argentina’s creative arts over the past decade. The stages are varied. In La forma exacta de las islas (2012), the Falkland Islands/Malvinas are the theater for a quest narrative where the road movie and travelogue meld together. Lola Arias’s Minefield also returns to the Falklands/Malvinas, only the islands are here a space of memory and recollection, a place that is conjured through props and photographs, newspaper cuttings and pop songs. Communities are created through performance—whether it’s the Argentine and British veterans in Minefield or the family forged through film in Moguillansky’s El loro y el cisne. Community—what it means, how to forge, and sustain it—is key to the works covered in the volume. Community, of course, was central to the oldest documented theatrical cultures of Western Europe. Theatre’s origins lie at the interface of democracy and performance. A way for a community to debate the key issues of the time—issues of governance, ethics, and responsibility, of history, memory, and representation. As with the ancient Greek theatre of Dionysus, the stages discussed in this issue offer the space to debate the foundations on which post-dictatorship Argentina has been...

Gestational Diabetes Testing, Narrative, and Medical Distrust.

In this article, we investigate the role of scientific and patient narratives on perceptions of the medical debate around gestational diabetes (GDM) testing. Among medical scientists, we show that the narrative surrounding GDM testing affirms that future research and data will lead to medical consensus. We call this narrative trajectory the "deferred quest." For patients, however, diagnosis and their subsequent discovery that biomedicine does not speak in one voice ruptures their trust in medical authority. This new distrust creates space for patients to develop a Frankian quest narrative where they become the protagonist in their story. Additionally, across these different narratives, we observe how character is constructed and employed to negotiate trust. We conclude that healthcare providers should assess the narrative trajectory adopted by patients after diagnosis. Also, we suggest that providers acknowledge the lack of medical consensus to their patients. This veracity would foster women's sense of trust in their provider as well as allow women to be active interlocutors in a debate that ultimately plays out in their deliberation about their body, pregnancy, and risk.

Strategisches Erzählen und Strategiewechsel im Umfeld neutestamentlicher Erzähltexte. Das lukanische Gleichnis vom barmherzigen Samariter als Anschauungsbeispiel

Modern biblical scholarship (of the post-war era) has shown that the narrative traditions that underlie the canonical gospels are very adaptive as they have been tailored to suit different communicative situations. In this context Luke’s The Good Samaritan represents an object case for study. Luke has clearly revised and strategically reworked the parable by inserting it into a narrative frame that features a dialogue between Jesus and a Jewish teacher of the law. While the parable (inserted narrative) questions Jewish resentments and prejudices against the Samaritans through confronting the Jewish scholar with the exemplary behaviour of the foreigner, the frame narrative serves to warn Christian recipients against being too hasty in looking down on Jewish authorities. This corresponds to Luke’s oeuvre as a whole (gospel and book of acts), which is characterized by a remarkably nuanced and realistic representation of the Jewish authorities of his time.

“All for Love, and Nothing for Reward,”: Psyche from Spenser to Lacan, and the Loss of Critical Values

As a generation of Lacanian critics convert what Spenser does into a science of the formations of subjectivity and psycholinguistic desire, they miss Spenser's project of providing a unique account of human psychology in his encyclopedic work. Both Lacan and Spenser have detailed accounts of the operations of the human soul or psyche and the stages the subject passes through in each. As the essay contrasts these divergent models, a number of illuminating distinctions emerge. While in Lacan the self remains positioned in a single arena where the irreconcilable demands of subjectivity and intersubjectivity oppose one another perpetually, in Spenser the conditions of subjectivity are always perilous for the self, cut off from the nutriments of community and nature. Despite grand claims Lacanians have made on his behalf, Lacan's account of human nature cannot enter the heroic struggles of Spenser's second stage and so never fully engages the dynamics of Spenser's quest narrative. The story Lacan tells of the psyche is always the one that ends in a tragic thwarting. Whether we like Spenser's picture or not, it is clearly not the one espoused by Lacan. In the end, a comparative critical reading of Spenser helps correct an interpretive overeagerness by Lacanian critics, a cast of mind that is perhaps psychologically significant in itself. Spenser's cautionary tales about the pitfalls of subjectivity and its proper correctives outside the self contrast finally with a style of reading that mirrors the critics' own narcissistic obsessions more than they are willing to admit.

Laughter against laughter: interrupting racial and gendered stereotypes in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese

Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese urges us to rethink the culturally hegemonic images and narratives that outline notions of Asian American masculinity. These narratives, many of which are rooted in shame, are unfastened, restructured and reconstituted through laughter. Interrogating the landscape of existing racial and gendered discourses, Yang’s graphic narrative questions who we laugh at, why we laugh and how laughter can serve as a social corrective to reimagine the ways in which we think about race and masculinity.

A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making.

Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-known themes which stem from old, even ‘archetypical’ stories, have been criticized for making too little room for agency and decision-making in their approach. This paper aims to contribute to a reflection on how lay ethics can acquire more practical relevance. It will use resources in narrative ethics to suggest that in order to be relevant for action, facilitators of lay ethics interventions need to invite participants to engage in a narrative quest. As part of a quest, lay ethicists should be asked to (1) reflect on a specific question or choice, (2) use diverse (imaginative) input which is informative about the heterogeneity of viewpoints that are defended in society and (3) argue for their standpoints.

Describing the Archive: Preservation of Space, Time and Discontinuity in Photographic Sequences

The important relationship between the material arrangement of the archive and its accompanying catalogue is discussed and rationalised from a position inside the institution, from where I argue that an understanding of physical and contextual relationships between interconnecting units is critical to the spatiotemporal understanding of the archived image. The archive catalogue list is determined by the original order of the archive material and is subsequently central to the maintenance of order, functioning as ‘detector’ and ‘effector’ (Hood and Margetts 2007). There is a consideration of the comparatively new concept of original order from its development in the late 1880s publication known as the ‘Dutch Manual’. This manual for archivists emphasised recordkeeping without anticipating specific future use, a methodology that still persists today. The diachronic nature of archival ordering systems, dependant as it is on collection and use by original owners, is examined alongside important questions of narrativity and storytelling in photographic collections.

On Being a Homeless Work of Fiction

In this piece the author takes a journey into the meaning of quests through the philosophical terrain of existential phenomenology and authenticity. Unlike quest narratives in literature and popular culture, our life narratives are not yet finished, but ongoing. Comparing the idea of existential homelessness with its undeniable and constant change to that of autoethnographic writing, he examines narrative and memory and how current life events change our understandings of past narratives and our sense of identity. Our life narratives are made up of fragmented thoughts and ideas, the stories others told before we were born—and will tell about us after we are gone.

Senior Nursing Students' Perceptions of Caring for Patients at the End of Life.

Nursing students often feel unprepared to provide end-of-life care. Studies have examined students' learning outcomes and attitudes regarding end-of-life care, but it is unclear how students perceived their nursing program prepared them in both knowledge and confidence. Such research could help inform curricula revisions. This pilot study used a primarily qualitative approach with narrative questions and quantitative survey questions to a lesser degree. Seventy-one students from three baccalaureate nursing cohorts were participants. Five themes became apparent: Students Have Confidence in Provision of Physical Care, Students Lack Confidence in Provision of Emotional Care, Students Experience Stress and Lack of Knowledge When Caring for Families, Students Have Concern They Will Be Too Emotionally Involved, and Students Feel Personal Experiences Enhance Their Confidence. Student perceptions are important to consider when revising curricula to enhance learning and promote confidence in addressing emotional care at the end of life. [J Nurs Educ. 2016;55(5):279-283.].

A Life in Pictures: Looking for Elizabeth Senior

This essay follows the author’s search for forgotten art historian Elizabeth Senior (1910–41). Using a quest narrative, it traces the process undertaken to piece together the life story of a remarkable young woman, including Internet research, visits to archives and correspondence with family members. Killed at just aged 30 by a bomb during the Blitz in 1941, Senior left a quite substantial body of editorial work and writing. Editress for the inaugural volumes in Allen Lane’s King Penguin series, Senior also wrote multiple reviews for the Burlington Magazine and the British Museum Quarterly, as well as her own art historical books on portraits of Henry VIII and his wives, and on portraits of Christ (co-authored with Ernst Kitzinger). A collaborator and friend to many Jewish émigré art historians, including The Story of Art author Ernst Gombrich, Senior played an important role in facilitating the safe passage of many fleeing the Nazis for England in the 1930s and 1940s. Unmarried at the time of her death, Senior was survived by a 10-week-old baby, whom she had stashed under a table for safety when a bomb landed on her flat.

Ekphrasis and the frame: on paintings in Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky

Theories of ekphrasis—the literary description of an artwork—have traditionally addressed the figurative contest between verbal representation (text) and visual representation (image) that structures the trope. Little attention has been paid to the material, physical aspect of the artwork and especially the solid, touchable picture frame. This article examines the function of the frame-as-object in the context of ekphrasis and nineteenth-century realist narrative. It argues that the physical border of the picture frame operates as a demarcating device in the ekphrastic text, as a door-like liminal space that outlines and maintains the boundaries of representation. Moreover, the picture frame’s material presence facilitates both representation and perception in the nineteenth-century realist text. It renders the artwork described more visible, touchable, real. Three nineteenth-century Russian literary works serve as case studies: Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Portrait (1842),” Lev Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1873–77), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869). By analyzing ekphrastic scenes in which painted figures step out of the picture frame, this article shows how the frame becomes intertwined with questions of representation, aesthetics, and realist narrative.

Creating Relationship Trees With Grieving Clients: An Experiential Approach to Grief Counseling

ABSTRACTThe Relationship Tree is an experiential approach to grief counseling combining narrative theory and art therapy, whereby clients create trees representing memories of their relationships with deceased loved ones. The exercise is designed for grieving clients to facilitate processing the pain associated with their losses. Making the tree in a visual, artistic format and then discussing it with a counselor enhances client insight into bereavement. A series of narrative questions posed by counselors helps clients reinterpret experiences with emphases on growth from the past and hopes for the future. The process fosters acceptance of mixed feelings about losses and creates opportunities for bereaved clients to tell new, more empowering stories about lost relationships and their meanings.

The wounded blogger: analysis of narratives by women with breast cancer.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the representation of the body in seven blogs by Spanish women with breast cancer. Using both texts and images, we analyse how they reproduce modern and postmodern logic to represent the wounded body. Based on Frank's proposals, this article draws the conclusion that the women bloggers mainly reproduce the modern logic (characterised by the restitution narrative and a predictable, disassociated and monadic body), but there are elements which break with this logic (the quest narrative, the body presented as associated, dyadic and full of desire, and the acceptance of contingency). After applying Frank's categories, we suggest that the contemporary way of experiencing illness may question the clarity of the modern/postmodern divide.

Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable by H. Porter Abbott

Reviewed by: Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable by H. Porter Abbott Allan Cameron H. Porter Abbott. Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. x + 178 pp. What is a real mystery, and how might a fictional construction supply us with one? For H. Porter Abbott, “real mysteries” are narrative questions that remain unresolved. Borrowing novelist Tim O’Brien’s observation that the resolution of a mystery is effectively its fatal undoing, Abbott goes in search of stories that preserve their narrative mysteries by thwarting the reader’s quest for knowledge. Traversing a range of texts, from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Samuel Beckett’s high modernism and from the short stories of Alice Munro and J. M. Coetzee to Michael Haneke’s feature film Caché, Abbott asks us to consider not only the aesthetic or hermeneutical implications of unknowability but also the way in which we respond to it as a real experience. Our encounters with unresolved mysteries, argues Abbott, force us to grapple with the “palpable unknown”—to come up against a gap in knowledge but also to feel that gap, even as we are possessed by the desire to close it (3). Certain types of narrative can encourage such experiences, inviting readers to become “immersed in the condition of unknowing.” Real Mysteries pursues the unknowable across a range of contexts, moving from the “cognitive sublime” of unknowable selves and emergent worlds (35) to the “neural sport” of contradictory or multivalent sentences and stories (65) and from “egregious” (112) narrative gaps to “unreadable” fictional minds (124). Do all of these types of unknowability belong together, though? At times, the category of the unknowable seems stretched to the limit. In chapter 4, for example, Abbott gets caught up in the question of whether the multi-path sentence (in which contradictory meanings can coexist without canceling each other out) has a counterpart at the level of narrative. Pointing out the dearth of narrative examples, he inadvertently raises the question of whether the written sentence is the best starting point for such an inquiry. Having set up a narrow categorical band occupied by narratives that are multivalent enough to suggest something more than productive ambiguity yet not so multivalent as to engender “parallel universes,” he then struggles to populate it with examples (99). And would such examples really suggest unknowability or something else altogether? Similarly, the fantastical Gabriel García Márquez story discussed in chapter 2, in which unpredictable events and observations drive the narrative forward, seems like a weak example of unknowability when placed against the narrational aporias of Beckett’s Trilogy or Haneke’s Caché. What holds the book together, however, is the question of whether the various mysteries it outlines can, or should, be rescued and restored to certainty through processes of interpretation and meaning-making. [End Page 362] Indeed, it is on this ground that Abbott makes his strongest contribution, carefully threading his way among existing accounts of unknowability while arguing that we should preserve narrative mysteries from recuperative acts of interpretation (even as he insists on our native desire to solve them). Here, he is at pains to distance himself from poststructuralist notions of the perpetual deferral of meaning through language. “Our knowledge and its means of conveyance are . . . good enough,” he announces (8). Taking a cognitivist approach, he focuses instead on the potential for narratives to offer “intentionally induced states of unknowing” (9). At the same time, he seeks to go beyond cognitivist narratology’s conventional path of inquiry, arguing that the privileging of narrative dynamics has caused scholars to overlook those points at which “narrative halts” (22). Above all, he is interested in the experiential dimension of unknowing. Abbott’s cognitivist approach is built on the assumption that we are hardwired for narrative. On this basis, he grants himself license to leave to one side the historical context of narrative unknowability. That is to say, he chooses not to engage with the question of why narrative gaps, unreadable characters, and incommensurable worlds became such a feature of modern and postmodern narratives during the twentieth century. Accepting Abbott’s approach therefore involves accepting the notion that narrative’s underlying...

Land, botho and identity in Thomas Mofolo's novels

Mofolo’s novel P i t se n g (1910) ( P i t se n g : The search for true love ) is a conversion narrative which deals with the transition of society from tradition to modernity. The author utilises a double quest narrative and a love story to represent major challenges facing the Basotho nation of the colonial epoch. The protagonist Katse is an evangelist who brings literacy and Christianity to the Pitseng valley where his predecessors have failed because of their lack of compassion for rural society. Katse’s success is based on his humanistic approach to the Christian message. He becomes a role model for two young Christians, Alfred Phakoe and Aria Sebaka, who marry through his influence and become members of the future elite of a nascent modern Lesotho. The intention of this article is to demonstrate the link between Lesotho’s social history and the manner in which Mofolo represents the landscape, language, culture, religion and national history in his work to forge a positive image of a na- tion arguing for economic and political autonomy. Mofolo’s writing relies heavily on history and various discourses of the 1880s and the early 1900s to create a historically meaningful text which brings to light the interconnectedness between the real and the fictive.

Nostalgija kao (ne)ozbiljna emocija: igre i igračke kao podobjekt nostalgije u svakodnevnim narativnim praksama o djetinjstvu

This paper analyzes the contemporary context of nostalgia, recollection and narration of childhood events on the basis of field notes collected by means of different methodological techniques. The narrative quest for the past produces interpretations of past events and experiences and opens the space to the feeling of nostalgia, or nostalgic stories. This paper aims to present a small portion of the captured everyday life in which games and toys appear as any other subobject or pseudoobject of nostalgia, but with a distance from one’s own childhood experience. We utilize Donald Braid’s approach which opens the space for observing the transmission of oral personal narratives and the transmission of emotions in and through language.

Midcourse Corrections and Life Satisfaction in a Sample of Mid-Career Doctoral Students

The focus of this study was to examine motivations and reactions in context of a midlife decision to seek a doctoral degree. Participants were 116 non-traditional age, men and women graduate students and recent alumni from one of three geographically distributed and blended delivery model doctoral programs. Demographic information was collected, including career history and goals, age, gender, and ethnicity. The mean and median ages were between 41 and 50. The research questionnaire featured narrative questions regarding “midcourse corrections,” any experienced trauma, and life satisfactions. Autobiographical material was also analyzed thematically, providing further illustrative examples of the midlife experiences in the course of negotiating a doctoral education. Both the narrative responses and autobiographies were analyzed using content analysis (Ryan & Bernard, 2000). Forty-four percent of the sample reported seeking the doctoral degree as part of a career change plan, while 56% sought to achieve an advanced degree in their current fields. Despite a high rate of reported regret, surprise, and even trauma, considerable life satisfaction (91%) was reported as the result of seeking doctoral education in midlife, by definition a “midcourse correction.”

Open narrative questions in PC and smartphones: is the device playing a role?

Most survey questions are closed questions, where respondents have to select an answer from a proposed set of alternatives. However, a lot of surveys also include, at least occasionally, some open questions. Open questions that call for elaborated and developed answers, called “open narrative questions”, are used when the researchers want to go deeper into what the respondents think. This paper compares the answers to open narrative questions when the respondent is participating in a PC survey, in a smartphone-not-optimised survey or in a smartphone-optimised survey. The experiment was carried out in Spain using data collected by the Netquest online access panel. Respondents were assigned randomly to each type of device and survey format, in two successive waves. Because respondents have to type in their answer, we expect differences between devices, linked with the size and the kind of keyboards (i.e. physical versus digital, touch-screen or not). Differences are observed between answers that come from PCs and smartphones for the response time per written character, for the number of total characters and for the use of abbreviations, but not for the non-answer and non-substantive responses. No differences are observed between optimised and not optimised versions for smartphones, except for the response time per character written.