Story Of Conversion Research Articles

Taking Account of the Hostile Native: Plausible Deniability and the Production of Conventional History in the Iran-Contra Hearings

This paper examines the video record of a segment of Oliver North s testimony before joint Congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra Affair during the summer of 1987 and analyzes the constitutive relationship between the testimony and an emergent “master narrative” being assembled by committee investigators from a mass of documents and prior testimonies. The details of North's testimony display the witness's biographical relations to events in the past as well as his moral entitlements to speak about those events in the present circumstance. In contrast, the committees' conventional historical account is written in an anonymous voice as a chronology of objective events, validated testimony, and certified documents. The paper argues that analytic differences between conversational stories and conventional histories are used systematically in the generation of testimony. The paper first describes some of the discursive methods the interrogator uses to assimilate the witness's stories to a conventional historical account and then goes on to discuss how the witness is able to resist the movement from biography to history by embedding his stories within a set of local entitlements that resist translation into a generalized narrative.

My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual

In My Century great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in midst of terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes artistic, sexual, and political experimentation-in which Wat was a major participant-that followed end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open door to destruction Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in Soviet prison system, of night when sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of the devil in history. It was then, Wat writes, that I began to be a believer.

Early talk about the past: the origins of conversational stories of personal experience.

ABSTRACTThis paper explores children's early talk about specific distant past events and its development into conversational stories of personal experience, with special focus on its evaluative function. The data consist of longitudinal home observations of five working-class children and their mothers from ages 2; 0 to 2; 6. Results indicate that during this period the children talked primarily about negative past events, especially events of physical harm; the rate of talk about specific past events doubled; temporally-ordered sequences increased dramatically; and the children became better able to accomplish such talk independently. In addition, one of the most striking findings is the extent to which these 2–year-olds were able to communicate their attitude toward the past event, with speech about the past containing five times more evaluative devices than other speech. These results suggest that (1) by age 2; 6 stories of personal experience emerged in incipient form, and (2) the roots of this genre lie not only in cognitive skills and social interactional support but in the emotional significance of the depicted event.

Telling the American Story: A Structural and Cultural Analysis of Conversational Story Telling

This book explores the complexity of story text. Its thesis is that one can elicit the world view of a people from a close structural analysis of their narrative discourse. It is the first methodological explanation of how stories can be used as a source of cultural data and an illustration of how to do a rhetorically close analysis of a story text. A theory of narrative structure is presented which leads to a conversationally based definition of what can properly be called a story.

Telling the American story: A structural and cultural analysis of conversational story telling By Livia Polanyi (review)

Telling the American story: A structural and cultural analysis of conversational story telling By Livia Polanyi (review)

Conversion stories and their popularization in Japan’s new religions

Conversion stories and their popularization in Japan’s new religions

Point-driven understanding: Pragmatic and cognitive dimensions of literary reading

Listeners generally attempt to understand oral conversational stories by figuring out what the narrator is ‘getting at’; their understanding is point-driven in this sense. Analogously, a form of reading in which readers expect to be able to impute motives to authors may also be called point-driven; it is a mode that seems especially useful for reading so-called ‘literary’ texts. Point-driven reading is conceptually distinguishable from story-driven and information-driven types. We argue that each type is asociated with a number of cognitive strategies, with point-driven reading, specifically, characterized by coherence, narrative surface, and transactional strategies. Using a modern short story, we illustrate how point-driven readings might be differentiated from other kinds. An advantage of this conceptualization is that it enables one to generate empirically testable hypotheses about literary reading; we suggest a number of such hypotheses and methods of testing them.

From Sermon to Parable: Four Conversion Stories by Flannery O'Connor

TN a I958 letter, Flannery O'Connor discussed major theme of L her writing: It seems to me that all good stories are about conversion, about a character's changing. . . . action of grace changes a . . . All my stories are about action of grace on a character.' Like many of O'Connor's statements about her writing, this one is useful if it is properly qualified. Most of O'Connor's stories, of course, are about sin and redemption, but not all of them actually depict the action of grace on a character. In seven stories, for instance, O'Connor clears way for a character's redemption but stops short of delineating it. stories freeze protagonists in their moment of spiritual truth and do not reveal whether they will in fact accept salvation proffered.2 These open-ended stories are best described by what O'Connor said of one of them, The Enduring Chill: It's not so much a story of as of self-knowledge, which I suppose has to be first step in conversion (HB, p. 299). stories which leave question of salvation unanswered include some of O'Connor's best, such as Good Country People and The Lame Shall Enter First, but in writing them author was able to avoid task of realistically describing effects of conversion. O'Connor was well aware of aesthetic problems inherent in depicting grace in fiction. She stated in The Church and Fiction Writer, Part of complexity of problem for Catholic fiction writer will be presence of grace as it appears in

The Black People and Whence They Came. A Zulu View

The author reflects on the origins and customs of African peoples in Natal, and on their history. He reproduces the text of Bishop Colenso's history and provides a critical review of his perspectives. Abantu Abamnyama (The Black People) was the first book written in Zulu, by a Zulu author. It was written shortly after the turn of the century, and previously published in 1922. The author was one of Bishop Colenso's first converts, and his story of conversion, which he gives in his Prologue, is a rare cameo of the first Bishop of Natal. Fuze's original work was translated several years ago by the late Mr Harry Lugg, a linguist, and was edited by Professor Trevor Cope. The book provides source material for students of Zulu history and South African affairs, while to the general reader it offers an insight into the attitudes of a black man who lived in two worlds at once.

The Conversion Story in Nicholas Trevet's

The Conversion Story in Nicholas Trevet's

The Nature of Meaning of Stories in Conversation

Although everyday stories told in the course of ongoing conversations are as open to multiple readings as many literary texts, the participants in the conversational storytelling situation must assign a meaning to a given telling of a story in order to facilitate the absorption of the story into the state of general talk which normally obtains. In the present paper, work done by the American linguistic school of narrative analysis (as begun by Labov and Waletzky and further developed by the author of this paper) is brought together with insights into conversational storytelling from ethno-methodological conversation analysts (Sacks, Jefferson, etc.) The meaning of a given telling of a story is shown to derive from both the structure of the story as told and the process of interpretation which goes on in the conversation after the telling. Special attention is paid to the «next story» which can follow the telling of a «first story» in a conversation. It is argued that the next story is crucially constrained by the first story, while the first story is assigned its meaning partially from the topic of the following one. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol6/iss1/5 THE NATURE OF MEANING OF STORIES IN CONVERSATION LIVIA POLANYI University of Amsterdam Although the texts of stories told in the course of everyday conversation are as open to variant readings and multiple interpretations as many literary texts, the participants in the conversational storytelling situation orient themselves towards assigning a meaning to a given telling of a story. This process of definitivization is necessary so that the talk following the story can proceed smoothly, with the excursion into the storyworld sufficiently understood so that at least some of those actively engaged in the talk can integrate the point of the story into the conversation. Without such a possibility of integration, the story would function as an obstacle to further talk, since no one would know what it was about well enough to deal with it. Think for a moment, if you will, of the situation which sometimes occurs when someone tells an inappropriate joke. That joke, that chunk of talk, hangs in the air unresponded to, until somehow, awkwardly, socially noticeably, the talk resumes on the «other side» of the faux pas. In order to avoid the tension and discomfort which result from such a misfire in communication, storytellers and story recipients allow their behavior to be regulated, in so far as possible, by a set of constraints which requires the assignment of meaning to possibly ambiguous texts, while simultaneously facilitating the interpretive process. As we shall see, the «meaning» of any given telling of a story in a conversation is socially determined: a story is «about» what it is taken to be about, for that telling as revealed by both the internal structure of the story as told and the talk which follows the telling. Should someone «re-tell» the «same» story in another conversa51 1 Polanyi: The Nature of Meaning of Stories in Conversation Published by New Prairie Press 52 STCL., Vol. 6, Numbers 1&2 (Fall, 1981Spring, 1982) tion, then that telling would be assigned a meaning which might or might not be identical to the interpretation the story was given the first time around. A story told in a conversation is thus not a fixed semantic entity, but is an open text which is «closed» or «fixed» each time it is told by the way it is told and received. Clearly, however, a storyteller and the story recipients are not at liberty to assign random interpretations to stories. What a story can be taken to be about is constrained in important ways by the linguistic and conversational conventions which regulate this sort of verbal social behavior. In this paper, I will outline briefly the inter-relationship between the everyday storyteller, his interlocutors, the text which is produced and the constraints arising from the conversational context which shape both the conversational act of storytelling and the stories themselves. Because it is especially illustrative, much of this discussion will center around the special relationship which obtains between a «first story» and a «second story,» since, in his choice of topic or point of his own story, the teller of the second story demonstrates his understanding of what he believes to have been the point of the first story.'

Borrowed Voices: Conversational Storytelling in Midwifery Healthcare Visits

Midwifery in Ontario, Canada exists at the intersection of mainstream healthcare ideology and an alternative, woman-centred ideology of care. As a result, midwifery interaction is characterized by discursive hybridity. We trace this hybridity in the conversational stories co-narrated by midwives and clients during clinic visits. We show how conversational storytelling performs a complex shifting and blending of rhetorical forms and functions integral to the clinical interaction. Conversational stories conform to the structural requirements of the clinic visit and unfold in different ways and perform different functions at different times. Stories may be told, evaluated, and received as institutionally relevant for both clinical and social purposes. Clinical stories perform relational functions, and stories that appear to be fully social orient to the clinical agenda. Hybridity is accomplished through two forms of linguistic borrowing: the blending of professional-institutional and more casual-conversational modes, and interactional features such as shared narration and recontextualization.

Exercises in Brotherhood: The Recent Austrian Novel

The contemporary Austrian isolation from literature printed in Germany, an isolation which exists as a result of financial and publishing conditions, has not deterred Austrian novelists from employing the German scene, although their chief characters are almost without exception from home ground.' Those writers who were born during the First World War feel a special tie; they grew up to become citizens of the Third Reich and members of the German army. Kurt Ziesel, Franz Tumler, and Fritz Habeck all served in the Wehrmacht. Today they are best-sellers and Habeck the recipient of Vienna's Goethe Prize for 1952. Ziesel, a Tyrolean (b. 1911), is the most controversial of the three, having gone to great pains to deny his past. In 1938 he published Verwandlung der Herzen, the story of a musician's conversion to National Socialism. The change occurs when a Communist group murders the youth's closest friend. The obstinacy with which Ziesel pounds at his theme betrays more than lip service to the regime. The musical work was followed in 1939 by an innocuous and still popular novel on motherhood, Der kleine Gott; then Ziesel did not return to the novel genre until 1951 with Und was bleibt ist der Mensch, the hero of which is an American flier, Lieutenant John Starwick. The lieutenant, after his life has been spared by a gallant German aviator (actually a Viennese), shoots his opponent down. Throughout the rest of the novel he tries to find the widow; his search and the bereaved Frau Reineder's escape from East Prussia are described in alternate chapters. Ziesel intends to say that all men are or should be brothers. His thesis does not convince, since he has given all the virtues to one side.

Mary of Agreda and the Southwest United States

IN 1630 FRAY ALONSO DE BENAVIDES, the former superior of the Franciscan missions in New Mexico, returned to Spain and wrote for Philip IV a report on the activities of the missionaries of his custodia. In this report is found one of the most interesting accounts in the whole history of the missionary Church in America. It is the strange story of the miraculous conversion of the Jumano Indians and of other tribes in the Southwest of the United States by a Spanish nun, Sor María de Jesús de Agreda. In 1622 Fray Alonso de Benavides had come to the missions of New Mexico with a large group of Franciscans. Being their superior, he assigned them to various missions. One of the group, Fray Juan de Salas, he sent to work among the Indians of Isleta near present-day Albuquerque.

Marius Victorinus: A Biographical Note

Marius Victorinus, fourth-century Rome's most distinguished professor of rhetoric, appears immediately as a definite personality to one who looks into his biography. So vividly has Augustine, in the eighth book of the Confessions, told the story of the old rhetor's conversion that he seems real flesh and blood. Yet a feeling of uneasiness soon takes possession of the investigator. The limits of Victorinus's life have not been established even in terms of broad approximation; and it is perhaps of some importance for understanding the character of the man and the times of which he is so pertinent a representative to know, for example, whether his youth and early manhood were passed in the atmosphere of Diocletian's persecutions or of Constantine's tolerant reign. I have tried, therefore, in this study to discover the means of determining at least approximately the date of his birth and of his death.

A Story of Conversion to Roman CatholicismFrom Faith to Faith: An Autobiography of Religious Development. W. E. Orchard

A Story of Conversion to Roman CatholicismFrom Faith to Faith: An Autobiography of Religious Development. W. E. Orchard

THE STORY OF MY CONVERSION

The Muslim WorldVolume 16, Issue 1 p. 79-84 THE STORY OF MY CONVERSION J. Ali Bakhsh, J. Ali Bakhsh Lahore.Search for more papers by this author J. Ali Bakhsh, J. Ali Bakhsh Lahore.Search for more papers by this author First published: January 1926 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-1913.1926.tb00605.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume16, Issue1January 1926Pages 79-84 RelatedInformation