Storytelling (Vol. 2, pp. 832-834)

Entry prepared by Noel Gough for Lisa M. Given (ed.) (2008) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods (New York: Sage)

Subject Area: Arts-based Research, Ties to Term Category: Research techniques, practices, or procedures

Storytelling (Vol. 2, pp. 832-834) The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. These two brief lines from Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, The Speed of Darkness, offer a succinct affirmation of the significance of storytelling for any discipline of the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences. In effect, the socalled “narrative turn” in scholarly inquiry invites researchers to recognize how their particular forms of discourse are ordered as narratives, that is, to think of all discourse as taking the form of a story. Rukeyser reminds us that the worlds we inhabit (perceptual, existential, phenomenal, imagined, virtual, etc.) can for many purposes be understood as being composed of stories. The idea that the universe is made of atoms is just one of those stories. Within the social sciences, the literature of historical inquiry took an explicit narrative turn in the 1970s, with representative works including Louis Mink’s appraisal of history and fiction as modes of comprehension. However, during the same period, historians such as Lawrence Stone referred to the “revival of narrative” as “a new old history,” thereby indicating the durability of storytelling in the historiography of Western societies. Other social scientists who added significant momentum to the narrative turn around this time include Richard Rorty, with his call to see the social sciences as continuous with literature, that is, as genres of storytelling that interpret other people to us, and thus enlarge and deepen our sense of community with them. Donald Polkinghorne’s book, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, and Laurel Richardson’s work on narrative and sociology were similarly generative. Alasdair MacIntyre provides an ethical imperative for disciplined storytelling in his influential study in moral theory, After Virtue: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ … Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things” (1984, p. 216). Some of the most powerful and practical examples of the relationship between ethics and storytelling can be found in the literatures that deal with the place of storytelling and narrative structures in finding meaning in illness. For example, Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics examines the ways in which illness can be the beginning of a journey in which the teller calls others into a transformative narrative relationship: personal ethics become social ethics as the suffering individual brings others into caring relationships, which in turn draw attention to social structures and systems that might support such morally responsible relationships. Some critics of narrative methods argue that sociologists should be story analysts rather than storytellers. For example, Paul Atkinson repudiates the narrative turn in the social sciences and argues that personal narratives, especially illness narratives, misconstrue the essential nature of narrative by substituting a therapeutic for a sociological view of the person. Responding to Atkinson and others, Arthur Bochner defends what he calls “narrative’s virtues” and argues that critics who see narratives of suffering as privileged, romantic, and/or solipsistic cling to an idealized (and certainly contested) theory of social inquiry, a monolithic conception of ethnography, a “masculine” characterization of sociology, and an implicit resistance to the moral, political, existential, and therapeutic goals of deploying narrative methods in seeking deeper understandings of social problems and issues.

Noel Gough: SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Method

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Donna Haraway demonstrates the generativity of the narrative turn for the natural sciences in her critical history of primatology, Primate Visions. She argues that biologists observe the performances of organisms and that their testimonies to their experiences of these performances are the “facts” they transform into “truths” that are attested by their disciplined experience and made meaningful within their traditions of social relationships and organization. Thus, in the production of biological truth-claims, she insists that both biologists and organisms are actors in a storytelling practice. French literary critic Gerard Genette suggests a tripartite framework for analyzing distinctions among literary works that can also be used for distinguishing between various aspects of storytelling: (i) rhetorical moves that create a particular “narrative statement,” (ii) the events and situations that are being described, i.e., the larger “story” that is being told, given that the same events can be told in different ways, and (iii) the “act of narrating.” In the field of educational inquiry, Carola Conle has demonstrated the utility of applying Genette’s schema to the analysis of curriculum discourses-practices. Among other educational researchers who have embraced narrative approaches, Tom Barone’s work on “critical storytelling” follows Rorty in connecting educational inquiry with other storytelling genres, including literary fiction and journalism. Noel Gough See also Critical Discourse Analysis; Discourse; Discourse Analysis; Discursive Practice; Fictional Writing; Narrative Inquiry. Further Readings Atkinson, Paul. (1997). Narrative turn or blind alley? Qualitative Health Research, 7 (3), 325-344. Barone, Tom. (2000). Aesthetics, Politics, and Educational Inquiry: Essays and Examples. New York: Peter Lang. Bochner, Arthur P. (2001). Narrative’s virtues. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(2), 131-157. Conle, Carola. (2003). An anatomy of narrative curricula. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 3-15. Frank, Arthur W. (1995). The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Genette, Gerard. (1980). Narrative Discourse. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Haraway, Donna J. (1989). Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1984). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Mink, Louis O. (1974). History and fiction as modes of comprehension. In Ralph Cohen (Ed.), New Directions in Literary History (pp. 107-124). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Polkinghorne, Donald E. (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press. Richardson, Laurel. (1990). Narrative and sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19(1), 116-135. Rorty, Richard. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Rukeyser, Muriel. (1968). The Speed of Darkness. New York: Random House. Stone, Lawrence. (1979). The revival of narrative: reflections on a new old history. Past and Present, 85, 3-25.