Events
John McKendy Annual Lecture on Narrative
Arthur Frank
“The Limits, Dangers, and Absolute Indispensability of Stories”
Date: Oct 23, 2013
Time: 7:00 PM-9:30 PM
Location: Kinsella Auditorium – McCain Hall, Fredericton
Stories are indispensable because they offer us imaginative conceptions of who we can be, and they teach us how actions are related to consequences. As Northrop Frye wrote, “Kings would have no motivation to act like kings if poets did not provide the imaginative conception of kingship.” Stories provide the imaginative conceptions that motivate us to act as we do.
Yet stories are also profoundly limiting: our imaginations of cause and effect can be distorted, and the sense of self we derive from stories can not only limit who we can be, it can also be dangerous to others. The problem is to develop a form of practical wisdom that can guide us in choosing which stories we let into our lives and how we allow those stories to affect us.
Arthur Frank is Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary, where he has taught since 1975.
Trained as a medical sociologist (Ph.D., Yale, 1975), he is the author of a memoir of critical illness, At the will of the body (1991; new edition 2002); a study of first-person illness narratives, The wounded storyteller (1995; expanded edition, 2013); a book on care as dialogue, The renewal of generosity: Illness, medicine and how to live (2004); and most recently, a book on how stories affect our lives, Letting stories breathe: A socio-narratology (2010).
Dr. Frank has been visiting professor at the University of Sydney, Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, and the University of Toronto, and a visiting fellow in bioethics at the University of Otago, New Zealand. For many years he was book review editor of the journal Health: an interdisciplinary journal and among other editorial board appointments, he is a contributing editor to Literature and Medicine.
Dr. Frank is an elected Fellow of The Hastings Center and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was the 2008 recipient of the Abbyann Lynch Medal for Bioethics, awarded by the Royal Society.
Master Class on Narrative with Arthur Frank
Date: Oct 24-25, 2013
Time: 8:30 AM-4:30 PM
Location: Holy Cross Conference Room, St Thomas University, Fredericton
In my book, Letting Stories Breathe I propose what can be called a phenomenology of storytelling. That is, I argue that people’s structures of awareness–the terms in which they attend to the world–develop through hearing and telling stories. Stories are less reports of how the world is than they are a means of making the world available to consciousness, and making consciousness intersubjective.
The “Practicing” chapter provides the closest I can come to a research method of narrative analysis. What’s crucial for me is that any method reflect the phenomenology of storytelling.
I hope we will engage in dialogue abut the claims I’m making for the place of storytelling in making the world social, and also my sense of the crucial place of judgment in narrative research.
The core questions to be addressed are what people do with stories, and complementary to that, what stories do with people. We’ll discuss what stories have particular capacities to do as one form of speech; that is, what telling a story can bring about that other ways of speaking cannot effect. We’ll talk about what makes research worth calling “narrative”, as opposed to other forms of research.
My greatest interest, however, is talking about what I call “narrative phronesis”, adapting Aristotle’s term. In research, narrative phronesis means the capacity to select the right story from some data and situate that story in an argument. In living our lives, narrative phronesis means deciding which stories we can trust and which stories we want to retell ourselves to guide us. Part of what I mean by “dialogical narrative analysis” is this back-and-forth between doing good research and endeavouring to live a good life–a topic I believe is underdeveloped in most social scientific discussions.
Arthur Frank is Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary, where he has taught since 1975.
Trained as a medical sociologist (Ph.D., Yale, 1975), he is the author of a memoir of critical illness, At the Will of the Body (1991; new edition 2002); a study of first-person illness narratives, The Wounded Storyteller (1995; expanded edition, 2013); a book on care as dialogue, The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine and How to Live (2004); and most recently, a book on how stories affect our lives, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-narratology (2010).
Dr. Frank has been visiting professor at the University of Sydney, Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, and the University of Toronto, and a visiting fellow in bioethics at the University of Otago, New Zealand. For many years he was book review editor of the journal Health: an interdisciplinary journal and among other editorial board appointments, he is a contributing editor to Literature and Medicine.
Dr. Frank is an elected Fellow of The Hastings Center and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was the 2008 recipient of the Abbyann Lynch Medal for Bioethics, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada.