Pauline Lysaght, Ian Brown, Roslyn Westbrook
Integrating Image and Text: Where one story ends, another begins
ABSTRACT Stories may be read independently through images or text but their power to convey the experiences of others can be much greater when one provides a context for interpreting the other. Photographs and written responses provided by children and young people through their participation in an international project, Voices of Children, attest to the many layers of meaning that can be gained through the intersections of images and text. Playful images that present pictures of an idealised childhood are often at odds with the fear and distress that is conveyed through the written word. On the other hand, the aspirations and ambitions of young people as they write about their hopes for the future stand in contrast to the images that reflect the context in which their lives are lived. Reading across images and text is necessary if we are to gain an understanding of the lives of others.
Karen Crinall
Appealing for help: A reflection on interpellation and intertextuality in the visual narrative of an Australian welfare campaign poster
ABSTRACT: We know the world, our world, through stories (Turner 1988: 68). Stories in childhood, whether verbal or written, are inevitably accompanied by visual language forms. This might be the storyteller’s body or a puppet performing mime and gesture; it may be pictures in storybooks, or the endless hybrid combinations of these in film and the electronic media. Even a single photograph can perform in a narrative way: “A picture of a forest tells implicitly of trees growing from seedlings and shedding leaves; and a picture of a house implies that trees were cut for it and that its roof will soon leak. (Goodman 1981:111)” Within a story–making activity, however, the visual image is not a sole performer; it is a participant in an intertextual web of discursive forms and endless meaning-making exercises. It is a complex, fluid experience (Belova 2006). The aim of this paper is to raise some questions about how narrative processes might operate in and through visual texts designed to communicate social injustice and elicit emotional and moral response, such as social documentary photographs and fundraising campaign posters. Using the example of an Australian Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal poster, the paper reflects on how the engaged viewer might be implicated as both character and author in the resonance between the meta–narratives and personal stories from their own life–world and the meanings arising from the poster’s text. In doing so, concepts of interpellation and intertextuality help explain some of the processes which position and compel viewers to respond, and also how they contribute to identifying meanings which reach beyond commonly received readings.
Phoenix de Carteret
Life is a tapestry: a cautionary metaphor
ABSTRACT: This paper draws from two research projects where the power of dominant discourses to influence storytelling was evident. Drawing on examples from story workshops central to the research, I discuss my use of collective biography to facilitate the re/membering of embodied experiences. While stories give access to the complex nuances of personal experience that give rise to the metaphor ‘life is a tapestry’, healthy subjectivity is often measured by the understanding of the self as coherent and whole. For this reason the metaphor provides a caution – stories are not innocent, naïve representations of lived experience but are shaped to coherence by narratives that may elide transgressive experiences. Dominant socio/cultural discourses and narratives can colonise imagination and memory to effectively silence or sideline the complication of ambiguities and ambivalences.The combination of a collaborative storytelling process and the use of place as a framework facilitated diverse stories. The knots and tangles of disparate experiences sustain the breath of life in narrative representations of the women’s lives. The resulting peripheral view of dominant storylines is a useful, if not a necessary aspect of personal narratives as research data.
Pauline Lysaght
Externalising stories: When research becomes therapy
ABSTRACT: Stories can be expressed in a variety of different ways: they may involve oral or written accounts of experiences or they may exist in visual form. Regardless of the medium, however, the story resides in a space that is external to the teller of the tale and accessible to interpretation by others. According to White (2007), this externalised space can become a productive site for collaboration between a therapist and client, resulting in therapeutic value for the storyteller. Researchers involved in narrative inquiry also negotiate this space as they encourage participants to tell their stories, blurring the boundaries between research and therapy. An awareness of the challenges faced by participants and the ability to respond sensitively and appropriately is necessary as the transition from research to therapy (and back again) occurs.
Lynn V Monrouxe
Negotiating professional identities: dominant and contesting narratives in medical students’ longitudinal audio diaries
ABSTRACT The successful development of a professional identity is paramount to becoming a successful doctor. This study investigates medical students’ professional identity formation over time through the analysis of their narrative accounts of events recorded during their first two years of medical school using longitudinal audio diaries. The data was analysed for underlying narrative plotlines. Six dominant discourses from societal narratives about doctors and medicine were found within the students’ narratives: The Privilege narrative, the Gratitude narrative, the Certainty of Medicine narrative, the Good Doctor narrative, the Healing Doctor narrative, and the Detached Doctor narrative. A further two narrative plotlines were identified as emerging narratives that contest master narratives and which are frequently found in the current culture within a modern medical school: the Informed Servant narrative and the Uncertainty of Medicine narrative. Following an overview of these narrative plotlines identified within medical students’ audio diaries, a single event narrative is presented in full, in order to provide a deeper understanding of how these are played out as medical students try to make sense of the events they experience and of their own development as a doctor.
Jennifer Phillips
Unreliable narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: Interaction between narrative form and thematic content.
ABSTRACT: In this paper I analyse the narrative technique of unreliable narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). Critics have been split about the reliability of Patrick Bateman, the novel’s gruesome narrator-protagonist. Using a new model for the detection of unreliable narration, I show that textual signs indicate that Patrick Bateman can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. This paper reconciles two critical debates: (1) the aforementioned debate surrounding American Psycho, and (2) the debate surrounding the concept of unreliable narration itself. I show that my new model provides a solution to the weaknesses which have been identified in the rhetorical and cognitive models previously used to detect unreliable narration. Specifically, this new model reconciles the problematic reliance on the implied author in the rhetorical model, and the inconsistency of textual signs which is a weakness of the cognitive approach. In conclusion, I demonstrate how the technique of unreliable narration has undergone a paradigm shift towards a greater historical and cultural interaction with historical and cultural contexts. The example of American Psycho will be used to demonstrate the interaction between the narrative form of unreliable narration and thematic content.
Kathleen Tanner
“I’m crying too ... help, what do I do?” – Unexpected encounters experienced by a first time researcher.
ABSTRACT: Being a first time researcher conducting semi-structured conversational interviews for a PhD, I thought I was prepared for any story or discussion that would occur. My participants were adults who have dyslexia and I was asking them to recall their educational experiences, and how they perceive them to have impacted on their life choices. Having already established a relationship with the selected participants in a previous context as their lecturer, nobody had prepared me for the emotional roller coaster I was about to ride during the interview process as an ‘insider’. I have identified five unexpected types of encounters that occurred in the course of the interviews that made me more of an active participant than an observer in their life stories and made me question my role in the research process. These encounters I have identified as (1) The Sad encounter; (2) The Unexpected Proximity encounter; (3) The Language Processing encounter; (4) The Empathetic encounter; and (5) The Boy Scout – Be Prepared Encounter. On reflection and analysis of the interviews these encounters have shaped the responses not only of the participants but also of myself. How has this occurred and how have the encounters influenced and shaped the responses of the participants? More importantly, as the researcher, whose story is really in my head during the interviews? Will my personal interactions and stories influence the final outcome in terms of the representations of their stories?
Current Narratives is published by the School of Journalism and Creative Writing & the Faculty of Education,
University of Wollongong