In search of lost selves: Aidan Higgins' Scenes from a Receding Past

This essay makes the case for a fresh evaluation of Aidan Higgins' long-neglected autobiographical novel Scenes from a Receding Past. It argues that it is most fruitfully understood as a contribution to the phenomenology of personal identity and that many of its formal idiosyncrasies, especially its deviations from the standard formula for Künstlerroman, are a direct result of its preoccupation with general concepts of selfhood rather than a concern with society, or with the artist's role. I trace the genealogy of Higgins' innovative and unique form of realism in this work, and in the novel to which it forms a prequel, Balcony of Europe, to his attempts to escape the influence of James Joyce; and using the work of, amongst others, Paul Ricoeur, demonstrate how his fiction contributes to a new understanding of the relations between narrative, memory, imagination, and consciousness.     

On Liberty in Talebof's Thought

This article represents Talebof?'s thought on the modern idea of liberty defined in terms of selfishness, selflessness, and selfhood. First, a brief background is set forth in an attempt to show some of the influences on Talebof by others of the Iranian intelligentsia and European philosophers. Having set the stage, his philosophy is represented systematically, as against chronologically. This approach helps to reveal a shortcoming in Talebof?'s philosophy regarding the modern idea of liberty. The shortcoming is evident: Talebof defined liberty in terms of selfishness and selflessness, but then did not dig deep enough to methodically examine selfhood as a more fundamental basis for liberty. The article argues that this shortcoming was caused by a number of factors, including philosophical poverty coupled with natural tendency for reification, and anxiously pragmatic ethos caused by lawlessness under the Qajars and exposure to the hegemonic West. In short, this paper defines the modern idea of liberty, describes Talebof?'s understanding of it, and explains the obstacles that prevented Talebof from setting out a more comprehensive examination of the modern idea of liberty.     

Preaching Religion, Family and Memory in Nineteenth-Century England

This article explores the religious selfhood of an exemplary Bible Christian woman, Mary Thorne (1807–1883). Founded in 1815 as a splinter group of Wesleyan Methodism, the Bible Christian denomination invoked an epistemology which stressed the correlation between religious and familial obligations. A close study of Mary Thorne's private writings suggests the tensions which existed within this ideal at the level of everyday life. Her writings open a window on a religious woman's negotiation of her public identity alongside her experiences of marriage, sexuality and motherhood. They show the impact of age, life cycle and memory in the process of self-imagining and commemoration. Critically, they also show how dependent Thorne's self-realisation and presentation were on material signs of her identity. In understanding the varying constructions of Mary Thorne's religious selfhood, I argue we might more fully understand the material cultures that underpinned evangelical religion and domesticity in nineteenth-century Britain.     

Consumption and the ‘Social Self’ in Medieval Southern England

Over the last 30 years we have become increasingly aware of the commercialising nature of the medieval English economy. However, these insights have had little impact on narratives of consumption, which persist in seeing it as a characteristic of modernity. Here it is argued that we must move away from seeing an early modern consumer revolution and instead think about consumption in medieval society, particularly to examine the implications of commercialisation for identity and selfhood. A framework is developed, building upon David G. Shaw’s use of the ‘social self’ and the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to explore how the increasing variability, and wider range, of objects impacted upon the negotiation of selfhood in the 13th–15th centuries.     

Structural boundaries that effect the representation of gender and disability in works of fiction from the United States and United Kingdom

Abstract

Discussions of intellectual disability are found in medical journals, published biographies, and disability research. However, outside the realm of medicine or personal reminiscence intellectual disability struggles for spaces of social, historical, cultural and imaginative representation. This article addresses these struggles for space and specifically focuses on the imagined space of narrative fiction. Being imagined spaces they should easily be able to accommodate people with disability, and yet, very few characters with intellectual disability are represented or more importantly have agency in narrative fiction. Drawing on work from feminist geographies and literary geographies this article addresses the limiting narrative structures that have been used against fictional characters who have a disability and ways authors may move beyond these limitations. Reconciling feminist geographies and literary geographies allows new critical spatial knowledge around disability to emerge. It is not enough to write characters with disabilities into narrative fiction if the structures surrounding them remain limiting and prejudiced. This article discusses the three main limiting structures in narrative fiction: character representation, narrative voice and genre. Looking at narrative fiction through feminist and literary geographies reveals how these limiting structures function as power hierarchies, and importantly, shows how these imposed structures can be subverted and changed.     

Narrative policy images: Intersecting narrative & attention in presidential stories about the environment

Drawing on ideas about how narratives focus attention, this paper develops a “narrative policy image” using the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Narrative Policy Framework explanations of the policy process. The concept of a narrative policy image is applied to test partisan expectations about presidential environmental policy stories in State of the Union Addresses over 73 years. This research finds that Democratic stories focus on problems like climate change and victims and Republican stories emphasize solutions like new programs and upholding the status quo. These trends point to potential story types and suggest a narrative policy image, including both narrative components and valence, may be a useful concept for understanding narrative attention in macropolitics.     

On the Sexagenary Cycle of the Tibetans

This study examines Zuozhuan narrative accounts that conclude with evaluations ascribed to the “Gentleman” (junzi 君子). The Zuozhuan is one of the earliest extant Chinese works of narrative history, and in the past many scholars assumed that narrative accounts formed its core, dismissing subjective evaluations of those accounts, such as the Gentleman's comments, as secondary, later additions. This study demonstrates that narrative account plus Gentleman judgment function together as a unit, contending that these units were likely introduced into the Zuozhuan as such. It further proposes that the perception that the Gentleman's concluding comments were later, independent additions was likely influenced by the practice of capping narrative accounts with quotations borrowed from other sources, and furthermore, suggests that this perception may have led compilers on occasion to insert material between the narrative accounts and the Gentleman's evaluations of them.     

Conservation Narratives in Costa Rica: Conflict and Co‐existence

This article examines narratives about nature conservation in Costa Rica, specifically those related to wildlife and biodiversity, and their evolution with the growth of tourism and bioprospecting industries. It outlines a traditional conservation narrative and two streams of an emerging counter‐narrative, and discusses problems and prospects for each in contemporary Costa Rica. The use of narrative and counter‐narrative follows Roe (1991, 1995), Fairhead and Leach (1995), and Leach and Mearns (1996). The article focuses particularly on the ways in which the narratives are increasingly drawing on, informing, and sometimes conflicting with one another; it is based on the author’s research undertaken in various protected areas in Costa Rica since 1994 and on research published by others.     

Gender in the frame: photography and the performance of the nation narrative in early twentieth-century Ireland

This article considers the role of visualising in the formation of the nation narrative. It foregrounds the significance of gender performance in early twentieth-century Irish cultural nationalism. Prior to the consolidation of a hegemonic narrative of state, spaces existed for the exploration of a range of possible projections of identity. This study focuses on one of those possibilities, namely a series of costume photographs where gender is literally performed. A contextual reading of these photographs is offered in order to situate them within the formation of the nation narrative. The gender of the nation is enacted through performativity, which through its repetition comes to be seen as natural. The photographs under consideration here undermine that process of naturalisation by revealing a more complex and contradictory history of the relationship between gender and nation. The omission of this more complex representation in the Irish narrative, it is argued, reveals how monopoly of narrative is integral to both hegemonic control in the visual field and how we understand the nation.     

Tracing the Line of Europa: Migration,Genealogy, and the Power of Holy Origins in Ancient Greek Narrative Knowledge and Cultural Memory

This essay explores the place of the mythical heroine Europa in the narrative knowledge and cultural memory of ancient Greece and modern Europe. Early Greek sources make reference to several women named Europa, only one of whom is Agenor's (or Phoenix's) daughter abducted by Zeus who made her the member of a divine lineage. However, during the fifth-century BCE, the diverse “Europa” figures came to be identified with the Phoenician princess; and the foundations were laid for the abduction story to take on its modern notion as founding myth of Europe. This elevation to founding myth can, in part, be attributed to Europa's membership in a family of eponymous founders. From the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods, Europa's kin gradually grew as various myths were integrated with each other—myths, which shaped identities by creating memory through storytelling. Mythical family bonds came to be seen as biological facts and served both to consolidate local identities and to affirm a Panhellenic identity in times when inner and outer boundaries had to be negotiated as a consequence of migration, colonization, or warfare. The high degree of migration and the dense genealogical network in the narratives of Europa's kin allowed many different groups to lay claim to this narrative knowledge and in doing so, created new myths and cults, interpretations and evaluations of a family well-established in the Greek mind on account of its holy origins. Thus foundation myths surrounding Europa helped to define cultural and ethnic space shaped by migration and the dialectics of unity and plurality. As such, these myths remain relevant to Europe today.     

Narrative Inquiry: Theory and Practice

This article offers an overview of the method of narrative inquiry and explores competing trends in the use of the approach. It not only examines the theories relating to the method but also offers practical guidance on using narrative inquiry, including an exploration of what might count as a narrative and ways of analysing narrative data. The final section of the article presents two different examples of how narrative inquiry has been used. The first example is the use of narrative inquiry as a reflective learning process for students in an undergraduate curriculum. The second example is a narrative inquiry into staff experiences of role change in problem-based learning. Suggestions are also made as to how narrative inquiry might be adapted for use in geography in higher education.     

Anatomy of the national myth: archetypes and narrative in the study of nationalism

This paper argues that recognising types of underlying narrative form which repeatedly occur across cases is critical to the study of nationalism. It proposes a method borrowed from the literary theory of Northrop Frye – archetypal criticism – for identifying the four basic forms of emotional architecture that characterise the myths of particular nations: tragic, romantic, comic and satiric. The study of nationalism has long acknowledged the importance of narrative in political behaviour. But consideration of how distinct types of narratives affect specific emotions is missing. The ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences, which has responded to instrumentalist scepticism, has thus far focused on the cognitive functions of narrative. That is, how narrative influences the acquisition and interpretation of information and how stories are used to construct or reinforce a collective understanding of events. The undertheorised dimension of narrative in nationalism relates to the emotional structures embedded within narrative. This is where this paper makes its contribution.     

Nicosia and its municipal administration during the very early years of British rule in Cyprus

Abstract

In recent years, the trauma concept has been applied to fiction in several literary studies. This article discusses the narrative mediation of traumatic experiences in selected Civil War novels, using narratological tools and focusing on the complex relationship between trauma, memory and narration. The authors use innovative narrative and representational strategies, such as a disrupted chronological order or intertextual references, to illustrate the paradoxical character of remembering and narrating trauma. These works highlight diverse aspects of the Greek Civil War, depart from conventional narrative modes and share common characteristics with so-called 'trauma fiction'.     

Monkfish Mysteries. A Narrative Analysis of Place-making and Knowledge Production among North Norwegian Fishermen

Abstract

In this article, major focus is on creative production of knowledge needed to outsmart the monkfish at deep seafloor locations. This production is examined through narrative analysis. Narratives link individual human actions, events and experiences into interrelated aspects of an understandable composite. This is a cumulative process that shows some of the complexity and contextuality of everyday meaning-making. One recurrent question is, how do fish think? How fishermen construct narratives about the behavior of marine animals and their preferred underwater habitats is presented and analyzed. Some narratives are contested but all the same influence human–animal interaction. Narrative work further establishes and confirms common ideas, informed by marine biological science, fishermen's experiences, creative imagination and hopes. These narratives address topics also related to overfishing and resilience.     

Human Genetics As a Bridging Science

Abstract

The history of the biological sciences since 1900 shows that genetic theory has to act as a unifying principle bringing together various, and sometimes quite different, fields in the analysis of common problems. This historical process can be studied especially well in the development of human genetics – a branch of science that, mainly through hybridisation, first with biochemistry, then with cytogenetics, and recently with molecular biology, developed from an outsider's hobby into one of the most challenging fields of biological and medical research. Concepts and approaches derived from genetic theory are now influencing and, in part, determining the structure of an increasing number of scientific specialities – especially in medicine – leading to important practical applications. Genetic theory and methods might also become increasingly useful for analysis of brain function in relation to behaviour.     

Literary geography: setting and narrative space

This paper explores some of the ways in which analytical strategies developed within narrative theory might be combined with recent developments in literary geography in the study of setting and narrative space. It suggests that despite narrative theory's urge toward categorization and its associated tendency to conceive of space as relatively stable and fixed, the technical vocabulary developed within the discipline has much to offer the literary geographer. The first section of the paper reviews some of the areas of potential collaboration in this cross-disciplinary overlap, while the second section offers three brief case study readings designed to suggest the potential of a combination of the analytical specificity of narrative studies with the imaginative stretch of spatial theory. The case studies look at setting and narrative space as they emerge in relation to narrative voices and multiple audiences in three case study texts: P.K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), J.A. Mitchell's The Last American (1889), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).     

The Narrative Uses of Evidence

When scientific evidence is used in policy controversies, it is always embedded in narrative stories. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is an empirical framework used to study the role of narratives in public policy. While the NPF has considered the relationship between evidence and narratives from different angles, it has not used a consistent approach in examining how evidence is embedded in narratives. This article develops a categorization of narrative uses of evidence. A narrative use of evidence is defined by the different roles that evidence plays in the plot of a narrative depending on which narrative element is addressed by a given piece of evidence. To distinguish different narrative uses of evidence, the article examines how competing coalitions use the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study in Swiss direct‐democratic campaigns on school policy. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of newspaper articles and governmental documents show how evidence may relate to all main narrative elements and may play different roles in the plot of a narrative. The findings demonstrate significant differences in the narrative uses of PISA between coalitions related to the story types and narrative strategies that each coalition uses. Finally, the implications for future NPF research are discussed.     

A third road to the past? Historical scholarship in the age of big data

Is a third passage to the past possible, beyond Elton's and Fogel's two roads of narrative history and scientific/quantitative history? One that would combine narrative history's focus on the event, on individuals and their actions, at a particular time and place, to scientific/quantitative history's emphasis on explicit behavioral models based on social-science theories? That is the question this article addresses. It illustrates a computer-assisted methodology for the study of narrative—quantitative narrative analysis (QNA)—that does just that. Based on the 5 Ws + H of narrative—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—QNA quantifies events without losing the event itself, without losing people behind numbers, diachronic time behind synchronic statistical coefficients. When used in conjunction with dynamic and interactive data visualization tools (and new natural language processing tools), QNA may provide a third unforeseen road to the past.     

The Role of Discourse of Techno-Nationalism and Social Entrepreneurship in the Process of Development of New Technology: A Case Study of Stem Cell Research and Therapy in Iran

This paper discusses the role of social entrepreneurship and the discourse of techno-nationalism in defining national selfhood in contemporary Iran. To examine the issue, this paper develops an in-depth case study of the development of stem cell research, and shows how an alliance between the leaders of the scientific community and Iran's politico-religious authority contributed to building technological capacity in the field of stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The paper also highlights how the preliminary success of stem cell research, along with other knowledge-intensive technologies, has created a shared feeling of national pride and has served as the material base for the contemporary discourse of techno-nationalism. The paper concludes with the notion that the techno-nationalist discourse has the inherent potential to unwittingly help to redefine the dichotomy between Iran and the West in such a way that it becomes less antagonistic, should other factors permit.