Letting Stories Breathe

A Socio-Narratology

Arthur W. Frank

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780226004839
  9780226260136
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226260143
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. But they do not merely entertain, inform, or distress us—they show us what counts as right or wrong and teach us who we are and who we can imagine being. Stories connect people, but they can also disconnect, creating boundaries between people and justifying violence. In Letting Stories Breathe, Arthur W. Frank grapples with this fundamental aspect of our lives, offering both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. Along the way he also tells stories: from folktales to research interviews to remembrances.

Frank's unique approach uses literary concepts to ask social scientific questions: how do stories make life good and when do they endanger it? Going beyond theory, he presents a thorough introduction to dialogical narrative analysis, analyzing modes of interpretation, providing specific questions to start analysis, and describing different forms analysis can take. Building on his renowned work exploring the relationship between narrative and illness, Letting Stories Breathe expands Frank's horizons further, offering a compelling perspective on how stories affect human lives.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction: Six Stories about Stories
• 1 The Capacities of Stories
• 2 Stories at Work
• 3 Dialogical Narrative Analysis as a Method of Questioning
• 4 Dialogical Interpretation and Stories’ Particular Truth
• 5 Exemplars of Dialogical Narrative Analyses
• 6 How Stories Can Be Good Companions
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index