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In Telling Stories, more than a dozen longitudinal writing researchers look beyond conventional project findings to story their work and, in doing so, offer otherwise unavailable glimpses into the logics and logistics of long-range studies of writing. The result is a volume that centers interrelations among people, places, and politics across two decades of praxis and an array of educational sites: two-year colleges, a senior military college, an adult literacy center, a small liberal arts college, and both public and private four-year universities. Contributors share direct knowledge of longitudinal writing research, citing project data (e.g., interview transcripts, research notes, and journals), descriptions drawn from memory, and extended personal reflections. The resulting stories, tempered by the research and scholarship of others, convey a sense of longitudinal research as a lived activity as well as a prominent and consequential approach to inquiry. Yet Telling Stories is not a how-to guide, nor is it written for longitudinal researchers alone. Instead, this volume addresses issues about writing research that are germane to all who conduct or count on it. Such topics include building and sustaining good interpersonal research relations, ethically negotiating the institutional power dynamics that undergird writing research, effectively using knowledge from longitudinal studies to advocate for writers and writing educators, and improving both conceptual and concrete resources for long-range research in writing studies.
The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical areas concerned. Another important feature is that it deals not only with exclusive practitioners of the genre (Mansfield, Munro), but also with well-known novelists (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carey, Rushdie), so that stimulating comparisons are suggested between shorter and longer works by the same authors. In addition, the volume is of interest for the study of aspects of orality (dialect, dance rhythms, circularity and trickster figure for instance) and of the more or less conflictual relationships between the individual (character or implied author) and the community. Furthermore, the marginalized status of women emerges as another major theme, both as regards the past for white women settlers, or the present for urbanized characters, primarily in Africa and India. The reader will also have the rare pleasure of discovering Janice Kulik Keefer's “Fox,” her version of what she calls in her commentary “displaced autobiography’” or “creative non-fiction.” Lastly, an extensive bibliography on the postcolonial short story opens up further possibilities for research.
Telling Stories overturns traditional definitions of narrative by arguing that any story, whether a Bette Davis film, a jeans ad, a Jane Austen novel of a 'Cathy' comic, must be related to larger cultural networks. The authors show how meanings and subjectivity do not exist in isolation, but are manufactured by the narratives our culture reads and watches every day. They call for a critical practice that, through the fracturing of texts, can alter the grounds of knowledge and interpretation. This timely study will interest critics of narrative and culture, as well as students wanting to extend post-Saussurean theories to poopular and canonical cultures, and to the dynamics of story-telling itself.
Steven Spalding has a secret: an anarchic, wise-cracking alter-ego named Eric Dombey. As Eric, Steven can be the man he longs to be; sharp, rude, funny and clever. But when he starts losing control, when the boundaries between reality and fiction start to blur – there are alarming (and hilarious) consequences. Wild, wacky, thoughtful, disturbing and very, very funny, this book will make you think twice. And laugh your head off. What the critics said: “When alter-ego Eric lets loose it is laugh-a-minute stuff. Concise, witty and very funny.” "Witty, irreverent, satirical, outrageous." "An absolutely splendid and entertaining book.” "Cunningly plotted ... fiendishly twisted." “Very entertaining. A clever and unpredictable novel.” “Stiletto-sharp. An accomplished debut.” “Deceptively casual, casually deceitful. Satirical, eccentric, compassionate, Telling Stories is a delight.” “A rambunctious, punning read.” “Carefully constructed, consistently comical.” WINNER OF THE REED / NORTH & SOUTH FICTION AWARD Buy Telling Stories today, because you could do with a laugh.
An introverted woman is overwhelmed by all the people living inside her when she comes to see psychotherapist, Dr. Freyn, for help. As she slips into a chair in her therapist’s office week after week, she does not know who she is anymore. When her weekly sessions hit an impasse, Dr. Freyn encourages her to release her internal companions so they may tell their own stories. As Dr. Freyn shows her pictures--a different one each week--and asks her to tell a story based on the pictures, the patient leads the therapist through a maze of interconnected relationships, madness, suicide, growth, and synthesis as she achieves a deeper connection with herself. As her characters spin a web of narratives that span the latter half of the twentieth century, the boundaries between fantasy and reality, truth and lies, and sanity and madness become blurred as the past and future attempt to reinvent each other. Telling Stories is the tale of one woman’s confrontation with her fragmented self and her journey to self-understanding through the stories of the internal characters who haunt her.
The contributions in this volume are all related to one of Ulrich Broich's main fields of research and teaching, the way stories are told in the various literary genres. The papers range from Chaucer to 20th-century literature; they discuss poems, prologues, plays and novels, French philosophers and English sermons, the Anglo-Boer War and totalitarianism.
ÿThe aim of this book is to share a relatively loose collection of studies using digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool in Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). The book takes an informed social justice approach to teaching and learning, at the heart of which is the exploration of DST as a practice of voice and agency. Voice and agency are important in excavating and recovering subjugated identities, and moving the concerns of those occupying subaltern spaces to the mainstream of teaching and learning. Yet this discursive shift is not without inherent challenges. Multi-modal technologies are reflective of wider inequities in the so-called technological divide. Whilst this is a book about higher education, there are important lessons for schooling. On the one hand, the book is a powerful demonstration of the potential of DST for enhancing learning in schools, particularly in schools serving the poor and marginalised. On the other hand, improving teaching and learning in higher education, through the creative use of technology, is essential to overcome the learning challenges of those entering tertiary level institutions.
The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like memory, perception, and metalinguistic awareness. Telling Stories in Two Languages contributes to the general upsurge in linguistically related studies of bilingual children. The book’s particular and unique focus is narrative development in a bilingual and multicultural context. The book is particularly important in an increasingly pluralistic and multicultural United States, where there are large numbers of children from increasingly diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Telling stories is important in the context of language and communication development because it is often by means of this activity that children develop the skill of presenting a series of events both in speech and writing. However, varying concepts of literacy exist in different societies, and literacy has different social and personal implications in different social and cultural contexts. In our schools, teachers are expected to teach what is relevant for students in the dominant cultural framework, but it would benefit those teachers greatly to have an understanding of important differences in, for example, narrative styles of different cultures. Bilingualism or even multilingualism is all around us. Even in the United States, where a single language is clearly predominant, there are hundreds of languages spoken. Speaking more than one language may not be typical, but is so common in modern times that it would be senseless to ignore its many implications. The study of narratives told by children in both English and Japanese that are presented in this book will provide an important point of reference for research aimed at teasing apart the relative contributions of linguistic abilities and cultural conceptions to bilingual children’s narrative development.
Willie Nelson, Joe Ely, Marcia Ball, Tish Hinojosa, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lyle Lovett...the list of popular songwriters from Texas just goes on and on. In this collection of thirty-four interviews with these and other songwriters, Kathleen Hudson pursues the stories behind the songs, letting the singers' own words describe where their songs come from and how the diverse, eclectic cultures, landscapes, and musical traditions of Texas inspire the creative process. Conducted in dance halls, dressing rooms, parking lots, clubs-wherever the musicians could take time to tell their stories-the interviews are refreshingly spontaneous and vivid. Hudson draws out the songwriters on such topics as the sources of their songs, the influence of other musicians on their work, the progress of their careers, and the nature of Texas music. Many common threads emerge from these stories, while the uniqueness of each songwriter becomes equally apparent. To round out the collection, Hudson interviews Larry McMurtry and Darrell Royal for their perspectives as longtime friends and fans of Texas musicians. She also includes a brief biography and discography of each songwriter.
