Cultural Narration

"A valuable collection. . . . The essays in the volume are all fresh, the result of recent work, and the opening chapter by Garro and Mattingly places the current trend in narrative analysis in historical context, explaining its diverse origins (and constructs) in a range of disciplines."—Shirley Lindenbaum, author of Kuru Sorcery "A good place to consult the narrative turn in medical anthropology. Thick with the richness and diversity and stubborn resistance to interpretations of human stories of illness. An anthropological antidote for too narrow a framing of the complex tangle of ways-of-being and ways-of-telling that make medicine a space of indelibly human experiences." —Arthur Kleinman, author of The Illness Narratives

Education is a dance of complexity and struggle. Unfortunately, our educational system is tied to the observable and the verifiable, not the randomness of human beings and their diverse forms of expression. The reality of the contemporary classroom is a context of multifaceted diversity, with each classroom reflecting unique combinations of ideology, culture, and language, played out in numerous forms and permutations of multi-textual discourses.

The collection showcases new research in the field of cultural and historical narratology. Starting from the premise of the ‘semantisation of narrative forms’ (A. Nünning), it explores the cultural situatedness and historical transformations of narrative, with contributors developing new perspectives on key concepts of cultural and historical narratology, such as unreliable narration and multiperspectivity. The volume introduces original approaches to the study of narrative in culture, highlighting its pivotal role for attention, memory, and resilience studies, and for the imagination of crises, the Anthropocene, and the Post-Apocalypse. Addressing both fictional and non-fictional narratives, individual essays analyze the narrative-making and unmaking of Europe, Brexit, and the Postcolonial. Finally, the collection features new research on narrative in media culture, looking at the narrative logic of graphic novels, picture books, and newsmedia.

The collection showcases new research in the field of cultural and historical narratology. Starting from the premise of the ‘semantisation of narrative forms’ (A. Nünning), it explores the cultural situatedness and historical transformations of narrative, with contributors developing new perspectives on key concepts of cultural and historical narratology, such as unreliable narration and multiperspectivity. The volume introduces original approaches to the study of narrative in culture, highlighting its pivotal role for attention, memory, and resilience studies, and for the imagination of crises, the Anthropocene, and the Post-Apocalypse. Addressing both fictional and non-fictional narratives, individual essays analyze the narrative-making and unmaking of Europe, Brexit, and the Postcolonial. Finally, the collection features new research on narrative in media culture, looking at the narrative logic of graphic novels, picture books, and newsmedia.

Transmedia Narratives for Cultural Heritage focuses on theoretical approaches to the analysis and creative practice of developing non-fiction digital transmedia narratives in the rapidly growing cultural heritage sector. This book applies a media-focused transdisciplinary approach to understand the conventions of emerging digital narrative genres. Considering digital media’s impact on narrative creation and reception, the approach, namely remixed transmedia, can aid practitioners in creating strategic non-fiction narratives for cultural heritage. These creations also need to be evaluated and a digital-media focused ‘ludonarrative toolkit’ allows for the critical analysis of the composition and public participation in interactive digital narratives. This toolkit is applied and exemplified in genres including virtual museums, serious games, and interactive documentaries. The book also includes a seven-phase theoretical framework that can assist future creators (and project managers) of non-fiction transmedia ‘mothership’ narratives; and a methodology (based on ‘big data analysis’) for how to invent new cultural heritage narratives through bottom-up remixing that allows for public inclusion. Two transnational case studies on the 11 UNESCO World Heritage Australian Convict Sites and the Irish National Famine Way demonstrate the seven-phase framework’s applicability. As many scholars across disciplines are increasingly creating digital narratives on historical topics for public consumption in various forms, the theoretical foundations and practical project management framework will be useful for scholars and project teams in the domains of transmedia studies, interactive narratives, cultural heritage, media studies, comparative literature, and journalism.

Discourse can no longer be contained within the frameworks of literature and linguistics. It has broken through the barriers between subjects and dominates the way we relate to each other and to the world. Even where we least expect it, `storytelling' is going on, and the implications of this are vast. This is the view universally shared by the writers contributing to this book. Specialists in economics, law, the history and semiotics of science, psychology, politics, philosophy, and literary theory and criticism, they are a uniquely cross-disciplinary group.

The story of arts and cultural policy in the twenty-first century is inherently of global concern no matter how local it seems. At the same time, questions of identity have in many ways become more challenging than before. Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World explores how and why stories and identities sometimes merge and often clash in an arena in which culture and policy may not be able to resolve every difficulty. DeVereaux and Griffin argue that the role of narrative is key to understanding these issues. They offer a wide-ranging history and justification for narrative frameworks as an approach to cultural policy and open up a wider field of discussion about the ways in which cultural politics and cultural identity are being deployed and interpreted in the present, with deep roots in the past. This timely book will be of great interest not just to students of narrative and students of arts and cultural policy, but also to administrators, policy theorists, and cultural management practitioners.

'Religious Narrative, Cognition and Culture' brings together some of the world's leading scholars in the fields of cognitive science and comparative religion. The essays range across diverse fields: the neurological processes and possible genetic foundations of how language emerged; the possible phylogenetic routes in the development of language and culture; the complex interrelations between the ontogenesis and the sociogenesis of cognitive processes; the value of a combination of neurology, narratology and a reworked speech-act approach that focuses on narrative; how the psychology of ritual helps make narrative beliefs possible; religious narratives; emotional communication; the role of gossip as religious narrative; area studies of religious narrative and cognition in the Bible; Indian Epic literature; Australian Aboriginal mythology and ritual; modern religious forms such as New Age, Asatro, astrological narrative and virtual rituals in cyberspace.