Narrativized Strategic Choice

In February 2019, Donald Trump announced the United States withdrew from the landmark Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia sparking worldwide concerns over the specter of a new nuclear arms race. The rational-actor and game-theoretic models dominating international relations literature failed to predict or explain this strategic choice. Rationalist, normative, and materialist models of strategic choice saturate the study of international relations. Scholars continue to expose the shortfalls in these approaches in explaining or predicting outcomes of strategic interactions. In this timely study, John P. DeRosa advances a new model of strategic choice through a narrative lens. This narrative turn reframes the logic to emphasize the propositions of motives, perceptions, preferences, and the reflexive interaction of strategic choices. Case studies of American and Russian nuclear arms control treaties from the negotiations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987 to the crisis of the US withdrawal from the INF Treaty in 2019 support building a theory of “narrativized” strategic choice.

This book develops a novel approach to peace and conflict studies, through an original application of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to the post-conflict politics of Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on new readings of the peace agreements and the post-conflict political systems, the book goes beyond accounts that present a static picture of ‘fixed divisions’ in these cases. By exploring how formal electoral politics and the informal political spheres of artistic, cultural, judicial and protest movements already contest the politics of division, the book argues that the post-conflict political systems in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina are in a process of deconstruction. The text adds to the Derridean lexicon by developing the idea of a ‘deconstructive conclusion’, which challenges historical understandings of conflicts at the same time as challenging their consequences in the present. The study provides a critical contribution to peacebuilding and International Relations literature, by demonstrating how Derridean concepts can be utilised to provide fresh understandings of conflict and post-conflict situations, as well as allowing for political interventions to be made into these processes.

Theorizing Narrativity is a collective work by an international array of leading specialists in narrative theory. It provides new perspectives on the nature of narrative, genre theory, narrative semiotics and communication theory. Most contributions center on the specificity of literary fiction, but each chapter investigates a different dimension of narrativity with many issues dealt with in innovative ways (including oral storytelling, the law, video games, causality, intertextuality and the theory of reading). There are chapters by Gerald Prince on narrativehood and narrativity, Meir Sternberg on the narrativity of the law-code, Werner Wolf on chance and Peter Hühn on eventfulness in fiction, Jukka Tyrkkö on kaleidoscope narratives, Marie-Laure Ryan on transfictionality and computer games, Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer as well as Monika Fludernik on the narrativity of drama, Beatriz Penas on (non)standard narrativities, David Rudrum on narrativity and performativity, Michael Toolan on textual guidance, John Pier on causality and retrospection, and José Ángel García Landa on retelling and represented narrations.

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.

Over the past ten years, there has been growing interest in the process of strategic decision-making among both managers and researchers. Strategic decisions are important for five main reasons: They are large-scale, risky and hard to reverse; they are a bridge between deliberate and emerging strategies; they can be a major source of organizational learning; they play an important part in the development of individual managers and they cut accross functions and academic disciplines. Strategic Decisions summarizes the current state of the art in research on strategic decision-making, with chapters prepared by leading strategy researchers. The editors also present implications for current application and proposed directions for future research.

The search for the defining qualities of narrative has produced an expansive range of definitions which, largely unconnected with each other, obscure the notion of “narrativity” rather than clarifying it. The first part of this study remedies this shortcoming by developing a graded macro model of narrativity which serves three aims. Firstly, it provides a structured overview of the field of narrative elements and processes. Secondly, it facilitates the classification of narratological approaches by locating them on different stages of narrativity. Finally, it focuses attention on narrative dynamics as interpretative processes by which readers seek to produce narrative coherence. The second part of this study identifies three different narrative dynamics which characterise Laclos’s "Dangerous Connections," Kafka’s "Castle" and Toussaint’s novels. Wagner bases her analyses of these dynamics not only on the texts themselves but also on the ways in which literary scholars imbue the texts with narrative coherence. This book provides a long overdue systematisation of the jumbled field of theories of narrativity and opens new perspectives on the difficult relationship between narrative theory and interpretation.

In this pathfinding study, Suzanne Fleischman brings together theory and methodology from various quarters to shed important new light on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language. Fleischman sees linguistics as laying the foundation for all narratological study, since it offers insight into how narratives are constructed in their most primary context: everyday speech. She uses a linguistic model designed for "natural" narrative to explicate the organizational structure of "artificial" narrative texts, primarily from the Middle Ages and the postmodern period, whose seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses has long perplexed those who study them. Fleischman develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the wide variety of functions—pragmatic as well as grammatical—that these two categories of grammar are called upon to perform in the linguistic economy of a narration.