Narrative Tactics Research Articles

The stories of social entrepreneurs

Purpose– The purpose of this study is to focus on how narratives are used to acquire social venture resources. Social entrepreneurship is a phenomenon of increasing significance. A key challenge for social ventures is resource acquisition. However, how social entrepreneurs gather the resources necessary to grow their organizations is not clear.Design/methodology/approach– This topic is examined using a multi-study, inductive, theory-building design based on 121 interviews, observation and archival data. In Study 1, 75 entrepreneurs, investors and ancillary participants were interviewed in the social enterprise sector. In Study 2, case studies of eight technology-focused social ventures were constructed.Findings– The result of this study is a framework explaining how differences in entrepreneurs’ narrative tactics and characteristics are associated with differences in their resource acquisition success. Specifically, from Study 1, this paper develops a typology of social enterprise narratives, identifies three narrative-types (personal, social-good and business) and shows that they possess unique elements. Evidence from Study 2 suggests that the three narrative-types serve as the building blocks for communication with external stakeholders.Originality/value– These findings contribute to three studies that formed the basis of the study – social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial resource acquisition and organizational narrative theory – and have implications for work on competing organizational logics. They also produce several practical implications for social entrepreneurs.

“He's not dead—I know he isn't”

“He's not dead—I know he isn't”

Two Narrative Tactics Against Discourse of Mainstream Ideology: Rejection and Representation/Deconstruction

Two Narrative Tactics Against Discourse of Mainstream Ideology: Rejection and Representation/Deconstruction

Narrative and Theory: Formalism's Recurrent Return

This article critically examines the re-entrenchment of formalism in European international legal thought. It does so by looking at how such a theory (and ideas more generally) may come to seem natural and persuasive within the discipline. Narrative analysis may be used as a critical method to look at how theories persuade, how they are 'sold' and how they produce certain mentalities. Formalism generally (and specifically, source formalism) is broken down as part method, part aesthetics, and part ideology (Section I). The theory is also critiqued for its concern with coherence and determinacy, its own imminent intellectual necessity, and with disciplinary progress. These narrative tactics are exposed as geared towards establishing theoretical dominance within the discipline (and in relation to other theories) (Section II). Specific variants of formalism also tend to eschew any analysis of the multitude of historical conditions and struggles from and for which it emerged. The contemporary European stance emerges against a background of anxiety over disciplinary autonomy and theories that have become dominant in US legal thought. It is a theory of resistance that often slips into essentializing the discipline (Section III). Finally, a specific thesis for formalism in the sources of international law is critiqued as one that cannot work on its own intellectual and theoretical terms. Source formalism (as argued through a Hartian positivist thesis and Wittgenstein) cannot fulfill the relative determinacy it seeks, nor (and more importantly) is such a determinacy required for the legitimacy and normativity of international law. This theory of formalism, whilst operating through ideas that are easily accepted in legal circles, is one that can only sustain itself through intellectual vagueness and contradictions. Five such 'intellectual arrests' are worked through (Section IV). Despite its popularity, there is no necessity for such a theory in contemporary legal thought. Whilst this article is a critique of a specific variant of formalism, it is also a demonstration of how certain dominant theories can constrain and shape our imagination in a multitude of ways. The ploys of marketing an idea remain, after all, predominantly liberal.

Pluralism and cultural imperialism in the network films Babel and Lantana

The multinational film Babel (2006) and the Australian film Lantana (2001) dwell on controversies surrounding international and multicultural relationships. They belong to a genre termed network cinema, which focuses on social problems and responds to the paradigm of network society. Babel and Lantana aim to represent cultural pluralism, yet their narrative politics compromise this aim. Although they seek to decolonize the marginalized and give equal voice to broad cross sections of society, these two films rely on narrative tactics which colonize, stereotype and essentialize cultural others. This paper argues that the ways in which the two texts reterritorialize multicultural and gendered relationships undermine their thematic concern with the need for cross cultural understanding and trust. In many ways these narrative tactics align with those popular in Hollywood films, which challenges the notion that world cinema consists of oppositional film industries. Nevertheless, the production and distribution of these two films reveal concretely asymmetrical power relationships. These findings suggest that the common notion of a clear divide between Hollywood and national art cinemas (implicit in the term “world cinema”) requires revision.

Boxing Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner, Race, and Popular Front Boxing Narratives

One powerful and productive trend in recent Faulkner scholarship has been to situate No Count within the popular culture of the 1930s and early 1940s, examining his appropriation of its themes and narrative tactics. John T. Matthews has demonstrated, for example, how Faulkner both used and challenged Hollywood formulas in his script writing, and how he exported his experiences as a screenwriter to his fiction, as in the story Artist at Home. (1) Read under this light, novels like Sanctuary (1931) and Intruder in the Dust (1948) clearly borrow from the popular genres of detective novels and noir film, unsurprising in light of Faulkner's time in Hollywood and his friendship with detective novelist Dashiell Hammett. Such scholarship so far has not recognized Faulkner's use of yet another highly popular trend--the boxing narrative. While Faulkner never wrote a boxing story nor prominently featured boxers in his fiction, much of his best known work deftly and subtly borrows from the boxing narratives well known to naturalist writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to Popular Front writers of the 1930s. Exploring the connections between Faulkner's fiction and Popular Front boxing narratives sheds light on the 1930s and 40s as a time of cultural confusion, when Americans were losing faith in established institutions yet remaining apprehensive of sweeping societal change, valorizing certain mythologized figures while also seeking new ones. gangster, the detective, even the comic book superhero--all these types emerged as pop culture icons during the 1930s, and aspects of each character could be found within the boxing narrative. Faulkner's engagement with boxing tales one more mark of his canny understanding of the cultural currents of his time. In particular, this essay will discuss how Faulkner's work in the 1930s and early 1940s engaged Popular Front boxing narratives in ways that acknowledge the need for social change while remaining skeptical of the limits and results of such change. I want to begin by discussing the popular and artistic understanding of the boxing ring--a world that offered individual success and valorized masculinity, while also offering the danger of corruption and savagery. This essay will discuss how Faulkner's major works leading up to World War II dovetail with the cultural narrative beginning with Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion, and culminating with the second African American champ, Joe Louis. Both Faulkner's work and the stories of two black champions engage and illuminate national fears and struggles with racism at home and fascism abroad. I will trace the influence of boxing narratives through several key passages in Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Bear and The Fire and the Hearth from Go Down, Moses (1940). In doing so, I will demonstrate an ambivalent narrative trajectory in Faulkner's novels that cautiously explores the potential for progressive race relations. While both Faulkner and the nation made great strides during these years, Faulkner's work ultimately exposes the remaining imaginative barriers to racial progress. Cultural and literary critics find the boxing ring a rich arena for social signification. As Gerald Early characterizes it, boxing is a remarkable metaphor for the philosophical and social condition of men (and, sometimes, women) in modern mass society (xiv). Within the prize ring, one can establish independence, individuality, and most importantly a clear triumph over another individual. prizefight offers the hope of fame and fortune earned with nothing but one's own hands. Of particular cultural interest are the boxing narratives of American Naturalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and American Popular Front writers of the 1930s and 1940s. (2) Naturalist writers drew on the figure of the Great White Hope to bolster waning faith in modern masculinity and white racial superiority. …

Reversing the Narrative from Violence to Peace: Some Thoughts from an Archaeologist

Archaeologists with ambitions to be relevant, ethical, and useful can decide to confront difficult, deeply embedded current problems. We archaeologists have the power of narrative. Narratives are what drive us; they are what we teach each other. They reinforce what we believe, repeat, cite, and fund—both within the discipline and in the stories we return to the public sphere. In Life and Death Matters, Barbara Rose Johnston raises the crucial question: “Can we build environmentally sound and socially just solutions to our problems in ways that minimize or prevent the incidence of violent conflict?” How will archaeologists employ narrative tactics to respond?

‘It’s supposed to be 1863, but it’s really not’: inside the representation and communication of heritage at a pioneer village

While much heritage studies research concerns dissonance and the use of history in contemporary spaces, nuances of the narrative construction process have only more recently begun to receive attention. This paper investigates the dynamics of heritage representation, in particular the contests among park staff, which have resulted in tremendous variation in heritage narrative communication at Spring Mill Pioneer Village. Contestation among the site’s administrators and interpretative staff regarding representations of time and place in the village has resulted in inconsistencies in both the material landscape and performative storytelling. As a result, the interpretative staff use a number of narrative tactics when engaging with tourists. While the village is located within a state park and therefore has a clear hierarchical power structure, this case illustrates how dissent manifests in the actual communication of the village’s narrative. Thus, this paper contributes to the ongoing study of spatio-historical context of heritage sites as revealed in the multifaceted construction, contestation and communication of narrative.

Forming an ‘Activism Bubble’ in Tourism: Peace Guiding at Okinawa’s Battle Ruins

Peace activists in Okinawa, Japan, serve as tour guides, or ‘peace guides’, for school excursion tour groups from Japan’s main islands. Their purpose is to encourage the students to learn about the devastating Battle of Okinawa in 1945 and engage in current issues of war and peace. By historically contextualizing the emergence of school excursion and peace guides in Okinawa, and ethnographically portraying the peace guides’ narrative and performative tactics in a natural cave and at a war memorial, the essay demonstrates that the guides attempt to form a spatiotemporal bubble within which the students develop an active learning community with a critical awareness of militarized realities of the past and present.

Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (review)

Reviewed by: Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation April Bullock Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation By Rebecca L. Walkowitz. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) In Cosmopolitan Style, Rebecca Walkowitz’s analysis of modernist literary style and its contribution to new forms of international engagement and new ways of practicing political criticism is creative and refreshing. Drawing on an impressive group of disparate theorists and theoretical debates, Walkowitz persuasively argues for the political importance of literary modernism’s focus on seemingly trivial events, disoriented thought and language, and a refusal to engage directly in transparent struggles for progressive international engagement to the creation of late-twentieth century cosmopolitan literary style. Critical cosmopolitanism is a distinctive type of international engagement that is averse to “heroic tones of appropriation and progress” and wary of “epistemological privilege” that takes for granted “a consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is being seen” (2). Walkowitz breaks new ground with her insistence that this modernist literary style should be treated politically, and that traditional models of modernist exile should be replaced by “more dynamic models of migration, entanglement, and mix-up” (6). Her introduction lays the theoretical groundwork—which is far too complex for the scope of this review—that informs her close readings of the works of six authors in the chapters that follow. Walkowitz moves easily between the philosophical cosmopolitan tradition that begins with Kant, to more recent debates surrounding modernist cosmopolitanism that focus on anticolonialism, multiculturalism, and migration. In the works of James Clifford, Homi K. Bhabha, and Bruce Robbins, Walkowitz finds “new theories of sharing, which value the partial allegiances and unassimilated communities that for many constitute home” (10). This cosmopolitan style can be seen in the works of all of the authors she analyzes leading them to draw attention to the ways in which we might reimagine the relationships between center and periphery and see connections between international cultures as well as the lack of coherence within national culture, specifically twentieth century Britain. In part one of the book, Walkowitz elucidates the repertoire of cosmopolitan modernist narrative styles developed by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad in the early twentieth century. In her readings, narrative tactics of evasion, triviality, and naturalness are developed as means of resisting colonialism, militarism and imperialism. In part two, Walkowitz explores the ways in which late twentieth-century novelists have expanded and built upon the tactics of cosmopolitan modernism to build a modernist cosmopolitanism. Thus Salman Rushdie’s mix-ups, Kazou Ishiguro’s treason, and W.G. Sebald’s vertigo are developed as critical attitudes that “circulate and provoke new conceptions of self and community” (27). Walkowitz skillfully employs contemporary criticism of the authors in her study to show how each of them subverts critical expectations. This is especially apparent in her treatment of Conrad and Ishiguro. Critics in the early twentieth century applauded Conrad for bringing a Polish sensibility to British literature while simultaneously condemning his decision to write in English. What they overlooked was the way in which Conrad’s project was to draw attention to the artificiality of English culture, how social expectations created supposedly natural national identity. Ishiguro’s work exemplifies the double consciousness that Walkowitz argues is central to critical cosmopolitanism. In his stories and novels, Ishiguro promotes the idea that national culture is an achieved fiction, and that styles or cultures that claim to be authentic and true are less trustworthy than those that do not pretend to authenticity or truth. Thus for Ishiguro treason may be more reliable than allegiance to collective identities and values that are constructed to create boundaries between inside and outside, and also within national culture. The chapter on Virginia Woolf counters critics who have argued that Woolf’s fiction failed to engage in purposeful and direct criticism of militarism and fascism, especially in Mrs. Dalloway. Instead, Walkowitz argues that Woolf’s apparent refusal to engage offered an alternative to modes of thought and narrative structures Woolf associated with militarism and fascism. Woolf’s evasions become tactics of engagement, tactics that will provide a rich legacy for the late twentieth century novelists in the second half of the book. Cosmopolitan Style...

Christine Montalbetti’s Engaging Narrations

BOVARYSME: Affection dont est atteinte l'heroine du roman de Flaubert, Emma Bovary, et qui consiste a construire sa vision du monde a partir de ses lectures de romans. L'invalidite des univers romanesques a servir de modeles au monde reel entraine une serie de desillusions. Par extension, le terme designe une pathlologie de lecture. Cf. Don Quichottisme. (1) Like much of the most intriguing fiction produced in France in recent years, Christine Montalbetti's works defy easy description. Author of four novels and a collection of short stories, all published at the Editions POL, (2) Montalbetti writes books that put a keen consciousness of literary possibility on display, and that test a variety of narrative tactics from different angles of approach. One would be tempted to call her work avant-gardist, if that term were not so embattled these days, and apparently limping toward its dotage. Her writing has an experimental quality to it, yet the term experimentalist which is often used to denote works produced in a radically formalist perspective, does not quite fit, either. Critics often invoke the notion of serious or elite literature in an effort to describe the kind of work that appeals to a learned readership; but those words are weasely ones, I think, and they beg far too many questions. John O'Brien has used the term subversive to characterize the kind of fiction that appeals to him as an editor (Interview), and Montalbetti's works certainly do play out a dynamic of suave subversion with regard to literary tradition. For my part, I prefer to think of Montalbetti's writing as critical fiction, insofar as, whatever else she may be up to in a given text, the gaze that she casts upon fiction itself is critical in nature, one which insistently calls into question fundamental assumptions about literature and its uses. Moreover, through a finely-wrought and closely articulative narrative strategy, Montalbetti encourages her readers to approach her fictions in just the same manner, reading perhaps less for story than for discourse as we reflect upon what narrative can become, today. I am convinced that it is in just this sort of text that contemporary French fiction finds its deepest resources, and where it seeks to renew itself. The key technique in that critical dynamic is the intrusive narration which colors each of Christine Montalbetti's novels and short stories. Allow me to be clear about what I mean (and to point out in passing that my own narration will itself be relatively intrusive). Gerald Prince defines the intrusive narrator succinctly as A (distancing, engaging, ironic or earnest) narrator commenting in his or her own voice on the situations and events presented, their presentation, or its context; a narrator relying on and characterized by commentarial excursuses or intrusions (Dictionary 46-47). Clearly enough, this is a matter of degree rather than one of absolute kind. Gerard Genette argues that any utterance bears some trace of the speaking subject, however minimal, and thus any narrative act testifies to the presence of a narrator (225). Elsewhere in Figures III he remarks, Il peut sembler etrange, a premiere vue, d'attribuer a quelque narrateur que ce soit un autre role que la narration proprement dite, c'est-a-dire le fait de raconter l'histoire, mais nous savons bien en fait que le discours du narrateur, romanesque ou autre, peut assumer d'autres fonctions (261). It is precisely those other functions that interest me in Montalbetti's case, for the narrators that she puts on stage in her fictions are unrepentant causeurs, (3) extremely loquacious figures who condition our reception of the text in crucial ways. Even Wayne Booth, who normally takes a dim, proscriptive view of metadiscursive techniques, is forced to admit that intrusive narration can have important uses: Though garrulity in narrators is as tedious as garrulity in acquaintances, though commenting narrators are, in fact, particularly tempted to be pompous and redundant, at their best they can yield a breadth of experience unlike that provided by any other artistic device (199). …

The Last of the Mohicans ou l'incarnat de la nation

The Last of the Mohicans defines the colour red as an embattled imaginary site for negotiating political and aesthetic claims. While devising narrative tactics which eradicate the “Red Skins” from the national landscape, this “Narrative of 1757” fantasizes in retrospect the advent of an all-white nation that could yet declare the legacy of the colour red as the mark of its indigenous character. Aesthetically, the novel pursues contradictory aims: if the colour red is foregrounded as the sign of the new nation’s vitality, it must nevertheless be subdued, as it conjures up the genocidal violence unleashed by territorial conquest. This study suggests how the romance exposes the myth of a “substantial” colour as an ideological construct supporting the dream of a “natural” nation. It then argues that in scenes of cross-dressing and face painting, Cooper’s text, exploring the use of the colour as cosmetics, also becomes the vehicle of metamorphic shapes which defeat the plot’s monochromatic scheme.

Sisterhood and Rivalry in-between the Shadow and the Sultana: A Problematic of Representation inOmbre sultane

his paper examines narrative tactics in Assia Djebar's Ombre sultane, a novel that primarily involves representation of one woman by another. Isma, who recounts story in her role as narrator, creates herself and her husband's second wife, Hajila, through discourse. In analyzing narration, this study examines intersections of forces of desire and power in quest for representation in this novel. It engages prominent readings of Djebar's text to subsequently return to larger context of representation and its implications within colonial/postcolonial contexts. 1 The suggestions of ironic con- verge with Georg Lukacs's proposal of irony being indicative of the pitiful failure of intention to adapt to a world which is a stranger to ideals, to abandon unreal ideality of soul for sake of achieving mastery over reality (86). While otherness is at very center of analyses accomplished here, this study does not, at outset, posit difference based on class, gen- der, race, or some incommensurable cultural difference. It has to do, ini- tially, with very fundamental necessity of constructing an other in process of creating a text. However, this constructed other is shown to be axiomatic to narrative tactics of narrator, Isma. The process of splitting, proposed by Julia Kristeva, of writer into subject of enun- ciation and subject of utterance, becomes essential to creation of this specific narrative. 2 In particular case of Djebar's text, this doubling process that puts forth narrative occurs twice, as we shall see: first a metamorphosis, to use Kristeva's term, of author into narrator (Isma) and then of Isma-narrator into characters of her story (Isma and Hajila). The narration (beyond signifier / signified relationship) (is)

TEACHER OF 'WEIRD ABUNDANCE': PORTRAITS OF THE PEDAGOGICAL TACTICS OF ANNE SEXTON

This essay reflects upon the pedagogy of Pulitzer prize winning poet, Anne Sexton in the context of post-modern preoccupations with and anxieties about academic taste, the role of the personal in the classroom and education's desire to console unruly bodies with normative prescriptions. After a brief introduction to the ways in which Sexton was positioned as a poet by many of her critics, I perform a series of readings of a final assignment that Sexton developed for her students at Colgate University during the spring term of 1972. The performative features of this assignment invite her students to experiment with varying degrees of dramatic introspection and personae building. These conventions are used to direct her students' attention to her poetry, where they encounter the suffering, violated and often grotesque images of bodies in pain. Drawing on the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, as well as Michel de Certeau's trope of a ‘walk in the city,’ my readings work to thematize some of the pedagogical manoeuvres that Sexton used to negotiate with a classic academic culture based on what de Certeau calls the ‘tactics’ of people who are subordinated, weak and have no space of their own. The narrative tactics that surface in Sexton's teaching materials unsettle the ‘given’ social expectations and anxieties about the psychic, emotional and physical borders that should circumscribe a teacher's body, particularly a female teacher who suffers with addictions, anxieties, and mental illness, for Sexton's body constitutes a dangerous conjunction: teacher + addict; teacher + illness. By reading Sexton's teaching life through cultural texts that refuse to privilege high culture as the locus of political opposition, Sexton's pedagogic documents can be used to cue educators to develop more refined tastes for irony, parody, and the grotesque so that we might re-define the limited tastes that represent ‘rationality’ and emotional reliability in our classrooms.