The Paradox of Testimony and First-Person Plural Narration in Jensen's We, the Drowned

Dwivedi, Divya; Nielsen, Henrik Skov

doi:10.7771/1481-4374.2388

Cited by 2 publications

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“…What might be opened up, revealed or foreclosed in telling a recovery story in the first-person plural? Could narratological analysis of ''we-narration'' (Richardson 2006;Bekhta 2017), particularly with respect to testimonies of shared traumatic experience (Dwivedi and Nielsen 2013), offer promising avenues for exploring the storytelling made possible by collective voices? This might this, in turn, connect with recent work in geography and anthropology on ''relational'' models of recovery (Price-Robertson, Obradovic, and Morgan 2017; Price-Robertson, Manderson, and Duff 2017) attuned to notions of affective atmosphere (Duff 2016).…”

Section: Conclusion: a Call For Alternative Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre

Woods

Hart²,

Spandler

2019

Cult Med Psychiatry

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Recovery is now widely acknowledged as the dominant approach to the management of mental distress and illness in government, third-sector and some peer-support contexts across the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the Anglophone Global North. Although narrative has long been recognised in practice and in policy as a key ''technology of recovery,'' there has been little critical investigation of how recovery narratives are constituted and mobilised, and with what consequences. This paper offers an interdisciplinary, critical medical humanities analysis of the politics and possibilities of Recovery Narrative, drawing literary theoretical concepts of genre and philosophical approaches to the narrative self into conversation with the critiques of recovery advanced by survivor-researchers, sociologists and mad studies scholars. Our focus is not on the specific stories of individuals, but on the form, function and effects of Recovery Narrative as a highly circumscribed kind of storytelling. We identify the assumptions, lacunae and areas of tension which compel a more critical approach to the way this genre is operationalised in and beyond mental health services, and conclude by reflecting on the possibilities offered by other communicative formats, spaces and practices.

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Section: Conclusion: a Call For Alternative Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre

Woods

Hart²,

Spandler

2019

Cult Med Psychiatry

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Wenarration in Chang-rae Lee’sOn such a full seaand Julie Otsuka’sThe Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?

Munos

2018

Frontiers of Narrative Studies

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This essay looks at two recent Asian American texts written in the first-person plural – namely Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic (2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea (2014). Its main goal is to show that the ambiguities and tensions here generated by we narration prove particularly apt when it comes to calling into question essentialist views concerning the anatomy of community-building. But my contention is that these two we texts are particularly interesting at a theoretical level, too, in that they help us challenge the orthodoxies of traditional narrative theory – among which Gérard Genette’s all-too-rigid distinction between the homo- and heterodiegetic levels in a text, or the generalized assumption, which has been notably challenged by Mieke Bal, that every act of story-telling is necessarily indebted to ‘a’ narrator, and a narrator of anthropomorphic standards at that.

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The Paradox of Testimony and First-Person Plural Narration in Jensen's We, the Drowned

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre

The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre

Wenarration in Chang-rae Lee’sOn such a full seaand Julie Otsuka’sThe Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?

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