Open Narrative Research Articles

Stories from doctors of patients with pain. A qualitative research on the physicians' perspective.

The aim of this study was to explore the physicians' internal representation of the doctor-patient relationship in the dramatic field of the patient with pain. Using an open narrative format, 151 physicians were asked to "Tell us about an episode during your professional experience in which you found yourself in difficulty whilst confronting a patient who was in pain". The narrations were examined in accordance with a clinical-interpretive method. Three "perspectives of observation" were identified, namely: the biological perspective, the professional perspective, and the personal perspective. The biological perspective is about the biological model and the "depersonalization" of pain. In the professional perspective, the narrative concerns the patient as a "person" and the reattribution of the pain to the suffering person. The personal perspective is about the emotional-relational explosion within the meeting between the doctor as human being and the patient as human being. Most of the narrations did not strictly connect to one or another of the perspectives, but each story seemed a journey without peace back and forth among the perspectives. The professional perspective seemed to be the only place in which physicians could "stop", a space not extreme in which they seemed to express the need for education about the management of the professional relationship with the other person.

Past and Present in Victor Hugo Rascon Banda's La Malinche and Marisol Martin del Campo's Amor y conquista

Mexican writers have repeatedly used the life of La Malinche as a vehicle for their reflections on the question of Mexican national identity. This has resulted in a tradition of ahistorical and unduly theological readings of Mexican history which presents La Malinche either as traitor to or symbolical mother of a nation that did not in fact come into being until several centuries after his death. With the help of Michael André Bernstein and Gary Saul Morson's work on closed and open narratives, this article reads two recent works on La Malinche, in order to determine to what extent they reiterate traditional views of La Malinche's role in Mexican history. V'ctor Hugo Rascón Banda's play La Malinche deploys postmodernist techniques of anachronism and pastiche, but nevertheless reinserts La Malinche into the standard master narrative of the Mexican nation. Marisol Martín del Campo's novel Amor y conquista mixes painstaking historical reconstruction with the overt fictionalizing of the past, and succeeds in capturing a sense of uncertainty and openness of the story of La Malinche's life.

How psychiatric patients perceive their families: a two-sided mirror

This study identifies how psychiatric patients perceive their families. We performed qualitative research, using open interview and life story narrative techniques. The data was analyzed using Thematic Analysis methodology, from which we identified two basic categories: Affection and Disaffection. Feelings related to disaffection were more frequent, allowing us to infer that the subjects suffer from difficulties in family relationships. On the other hand, the meaning of the family and the expectations held are variable and specific to each person. The study suggests the need for forms of assistance that take into account the subjective domain, by considering the perception and expectations of the patient regarding his/her family, and then planning an adequate therapeutic strategy.

Cycles of influence: fiction, folktale, theory

In this wide ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson proposes a poetic of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a return to narrative - to storytelling centred on a sequence of events, rather than a spiralling of events as found in modernism - and recent theorists have described narrative as a central insistence of the human mind. By characterizing the folktale as a prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, in opening narrative up to new possibilities. Benson examines the key features of folktales: their emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or consciousness, their emphasis on a self-contained fictional environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a self-confessed fabricator, their oral and communal status, and their ever-changing state, which defies authoritative versions. The arguments presented should not only interest folklorists and scholars of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative literature to feminist theory.

Right at the start: an agenda for research and development in teacher induction

Recent developments in teacher induction in both England and Scotland are bringing long-overdue improvements, but there is a range of issues in need of further exploration if policy is to be developed. Current evaluations have begun to reveal the absence of some important conceptual aspects of induction in the somewhat hasty implementation. Some of these have been well rehearsed in the literature over the years but have generally failed to make any impact hitherto in induction policy. This article picks up and discusses some of the conceptual tensions and weaknesses that have, or are likely to, become practical issues of quality, in both Scottish and English induction policies. These include the use of competence-based descriptions, the non-formal dimension of learning to teach, open narrative and focused approaches to classroom observation and feedback, individualism and a pupil perspective. The array of concepts is organised into a constructive, topical agenda which, it is argued, brings a much-needed formative dimension to research and development in this crucial area of professional learning.

Understanding Octavio Paz

In this comprehensive examination of the work of Octavio Paz - winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature and Mexico's important literary and cultural figure - Jose Quiroga presents an analysis of Paz's writings in light of works by and about him. Combining broad erudition with scholarly attention to detail, Quiroga views Paz's work as an open narrative that explores the relationships between the poet, his readers and his time. This text provides a thorough reading of Octavio Paz's poetry, essays and autobiographical works within their historical, political and aesthetic contexts. Quiroga begins with a broad outline of Paz's life, which he examines in greater detail throughout the following chapters. Scrutinizing Octavio's most important collection of poetry Libertad bajo palabra, Quiroga takes into account the series of revisions to which Paz submitted his poetic works. In readings regarding society and politics, he focuses on The Labyrinth of Solitude, which has grown to include Octavio's last observations on Mexico and the Mexican state. Quiroga also examines Paz's work on aesthetics and poetics, with chapters devoted to poetry and works published before and after the poet's stay in India during the 1960s, and Paz's longer poems written in the 1970s and 1980s.

The myth of global competition and the nature of work

Competition is viewed as an archetype. Global competition is examined as a closed or narrow version of the archetype, part of a language game that justifies the often ruthless strategies of organizations. More open narratives of competition are discussed. The paper examines the response of individuals to archetypes, the implications for work, and reflects on the foundations of the myth of global competition and the implications for modern business strategy.

Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations

JULIA REINHARD LUPTON Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations IN HIS ESSAY “Is THERE A NEo-RACISM?” Etienne Balibar pro- poses that we now live under a new ideology of the nations, a “racism-without- races” that promotes various forms of ethnic cleansing under the alibi of “cultural” identity, purity, or autonomy, a discourse that co-opts and neutralizes the postwar vocabulary of liberal humanism and pluralism. Balibar links this neoracism of the late modem to the protoraczsm of the early modern period: A racism which does not have the pseudo-biological concept of race as its main driving force has always existed, and it has existed at exactly this level of secondary theoretical elaborations. Its prototype is anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism—the form which be- gins to crystallize in the Europe of the Enlightenment, if not indeed from the period in which the Spain of the Reconquisla and the Inquisition gave a statist, nationalistic inflexion to theological anti-J udaism—is already a “culturalist” racism. . . . in many respects the whole of current differentialist racism may be considered, from the formal point of view, as a generalized anti-Semitism. This consideration is particularly important for the interpretation of contemporary Arabaphobia, especially in France, since it carries with it an image of Islam as a “conception of the world” which is incompatible with Europeanness.' Mapping contemporary neo-racism onto the deep structures of anti-Semitism, Balibar derives the anti-Islamic strain in contemporary politics from the long tradition of anti-jewish thought in Western historiography. Following Balibar's diagnosis, I argue here that Shakespeare’s Othello provides a canonical articulation of this protoracism insofar as the play fashions the Muslim in the image of the Jew according to the protocols of Pauline exegesis; in Balibar's terms, Othello stages a “culturalist” rather than biologistic ordering of intergroup relations, a reli- giously grounded discourse barely visible from the vantage point of the modern racial theories that have since displaced it, yet intermittently readable in the strange light of the neoracism that has emerged in recent years. A fundamental religious ambiguity vexes the racialization of Othello through- out the play; although his professed Christianity authorizes Othello’s place in Venice, the play never decisively determines whether he has converted from a pagan religion or from Islam. I argue that the black Gentile of a universal church undergirds Othello’s opening narrative of international romance, but that this di- vine comedy of pagan conversion is continually shadowed by the more troubling possibility of Othello’s entrance into Christianity via its disturbing neighbor, Is- lam. This secondary scenario, which subsumes Islam within what Balibar calls “a REPRESENTATIONS 57 - Winter 1997 © THE REGENTS or THE UNIVERSITY or CALIFORNIA 73

Temptation and Authority: Sapiential Narratives in Q

In 1987 John Kloppenborg suggested that the account of the Temptations of Jesus was added last to the earlier strata of "Q" materials in order to ascribe to them the legitimacy stemming from a "tested" wisdom teacher. The arguments offered to support that view, however, are not entirely persuasive. It is argued here instead that the Temptations of Jesus found in Q/Luke 4:1-13, par. Matt 4:1-11 should be viewed as the opening narrative of the earliest, sapiential stratum of Q. Criticism is also offered of Kloppenborg's arguments concerning the Centurion's Son episode in Q/Luke 7:1-10, par. Matt 8:5-13; this, too, should rather be viewed as a narrative part of that earliest Q material. The parallel supporting the interpretation of the Temptation account and the alternation of paradigmatic narrative scenes with sapiential sayings collections is the Wisdom of Solomon, indicating the continued influence of the wisdom tradition upon early Christianity and its literary forms.

The Ideology of Form in Verga's "La Lupa": Realism, Myth, and the Passion of Control

Verga's La appeared as the second novella in Vita dei campi (1880), six years after the publication of Nedda, the bozzetto siciliano 'which had inaugurated verismo's Sicilian stil novo.' It is true that the novella's natural descriptions are generalized and very brief, betraying the scissors which drew D. H. Lawrence's objections.2 Moreover, the language has been homogenized into the standard forms of the recently unified kingdom, purged of the local expressions of Nedda and even the few remaining sicilianisms of Cavalleria rusticana (the collection's opening narrative). Nonetheless, at its appearance La was regarded as so strikingly realistic to be utterly unlike its predecessors in nineteenthcentury Italian fiction. Indeed, Luigi Capuana, Verga's Sicilian friend and verismo's most active polemicist, claimed to have had personal knowledge of the central character. And he later bestowed upon this story, one of his favorites, the borrowed badge of French Naturalism's programmatic approval: La Lupa si potrebbe dire un semplicefatto diverso. 3

Fasciculi Zizaniorum I

Fasciculi Zizaniorum. has become the bible of ‘Wycliffite’ and early protestant studies. The best known collection of materials relating to John Wyclif and his heresies, and roughly contemporary with what is described, it is the most important single source for the history of John Wyclif. The full title—Fasciculi Zizaniorum magistri Johannis Wycliff cum Tritico—is derived from the description which precedes the opening narrative in the MS. A great deal more is included in the MS. than this title would at first sight suggest. The collection also contains much about the heresies of the Oxford followers of Wyclif, about his leading opponents and the cases of many early Lollards. It also includes the Latin text of the two statutes against Lollards, De Haeretico Comburendo of 1401 and the Leicester Statute of 1414. To these Lollard materials are added the proceedings of the Council of Constance against Wyclif, John Hus and Jerome of Prague, and summaries of condemnation of heresies made by the Church before Wyclif's day, beginning with those condemned at Oxford and Paris in the thirteenth century. The other works are mostly concerned with the age-long controversies over Apostolic Poverty and the Mendicant Orders: a selection from the writings of archbishop Fitzralph of Armagh; the proceedings against the Irish Cistercian, Henry Crump, in 1392; the Protectorium Pauperis of the Carmelite, Richard Maidstone; the Defence of the Carmelite Order written in 1374 by Richard Hornby. The last two works in the MS., a sermon by John Hornby and the well known treatise against Wyclif's Trialogus by the Franciscan, William Woodford, are incomplete.