lawyer as storyteller
Narrative Jurisprudence "While a law student's education may have taught them something about the state of the law, and its application to specific legal problems, I assumed that they had learned far less about lawyering and how it might affect a person's life. Learning to think like a lawyer--whatever that turns out to mean--is not the same as working as a lawyer and living a lawyer's life. Lawyering is the only professional calling that is adversarial in nature. It is adversarial in that lawyers find themselves pitted not only against each other, each side zealously representing a client, but lawyers often find themselves pitted against themselves in that the position of their client (which they are paid to represent) might not be their own. The result, for any person of substance, is an ongoing conflict between the lawyer with an independent intellectual (and a regard for the truth) and his role as advocate (for clients who may not share his intellectual concerns, nor his regard for the truth). Basically, law school doesn't help students recognize, explore, or deal with this problem of immersing oneself in an adversarial existence and being in conflict with one's self." [William Domnarski, Law and Literature, 27 Legal Stud. F. 109, 110 (2003)] "We (those who subscribe to American law as a set of practices) need cases; we thrive on facts. With facts, we make stories, and we worry about the application of rules to the stories we make." [Kim Lane Sheppele, Narrative Resistance and the Struggle for Stories, 20 Legal Stud. F. 83 (1996)] "Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent." [Benedict Carey, "This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It," New York Times, May 22, 2007 (on-line text)]
Stories and Legal Education "American law places stories squarely at the center of debate. Our tradition of legal education through the case method emphasizes the law produced in courts more than the law produced in legislatures. For those immersed in the three-year acculturation process of a contemporary law school, the focus clearly falls on appellate decisions. In these mini-treatises, judges follow the convention of rationalizing decisions by presenting the facts and law so as to make their choices appear inevitable. But students quickly learn that judicial decisions are, in fact, infinitely malleable. If reading dissenting opinions that re-characterize the facts or reinterpret the law doesn't convince a student, then Socratic badgering surely will. For a student educated in the case method, it is not cynical to conclude that judges tell stories to justify their decisions--this storytelling process is merely intuitive. Legal education teaches students that storytelling skills are the stock-in-trade of the legal profession. Legal arguments are created, much like a simple fable, from the stock elements of facts and law." [Mark A. Clawson, Telling Stories: Romance and Dissonance in Progressive Legal Narratives, 22 Legal Stud. F. 353, 357 (1998)]
Stories and Their Telling "For the caveman, the world was a strange and unexpected place. Storytelling around campfires enabled the village to pool information about the baffling problems that faced the village, why the wolves were attacking or why the crops failed, or why the weather was so harsh or dry or wet, and so on. As we began to master these things over the last few couple of thousand years, we started to feel as though we understood what was going on. Now once again, the world is becoming turbulent and things are, once again, looking unexpected. Hence we feel the urge to sit around a conceptual campfire and swap stories and this very old technology of storytelling resonates with us yet again." [Steve Denning, Why Storytelling at this Particular Time?][The World Gets Interested in Storytelling]
Essays on Story by Ken Sanes
Story Writing by Bill Johnson
Film & Story/Narrative Thinking About Stories "Stories abound in all professions. Story principles have been found in the work of a wide range of professionals, including attorneys, historians, biographers, educators, psychiatrists, and journalists. Thus, story should not be seen as exclusively fictional but instead should merely be contrasted to other ways of assembling and understanding data." [Peter Orton, Thinking About Stories [website; no longer available]
Life Stories and Telling Our Lives
"The past several decades have seen an explosion of interest in narrative, with this multifaceted object of inquiry becoming a central concern in a wide range of disciplinary fields and research contexts." [Routledge Encyclopedia Of Narrative Theory] "In the past decade there has been a dramatic surge of interest in the concept of 'narrative.' Narrative has not only provided literary criticism, philosophical ethics, law, theology, and biblical studies with new tools for argument and interpretation, it has also provoked a radical rethinking of modern presuppositions about the nature of these areas of inquiry." [H. Jefferson Powell, Transparency, Opacity, and Openness in Narrative, 40 J. Legal Educ. 161 (1990)] "[A] small revolution with potentially large consequences is occurring in our contemporary knowledge culture. . . . [A] protean reframing of the narrative concept is seeping and/or being appropriated into the central epistemological frameworks of a spectrum of other disciplines--including medicine, social psychology, anthropology, gender studies, law, biology, and physics." [Margaret R. Somers & Gloria D. Gibson, Reclaiming the Epistemological "Other": Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity--in--Craig Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity][on-line text] "Narrative is no doubt one of the great academic travellers of the last forty years. As such, there is nothing exceptional or sensational in this mobility: narrative simply belongs to the same group of travellers as �culture,' �discourse,' �gender,' and many others. Epistemic ruptures obviously encourage such fast transformations of the scholarly vocabulary. Many of these overlapping re-evaluations have been categorized under the more or less hyperbolic title, �turn,' be it linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, constructivist, or narrative." [Matti Hyv�rinen, An Introduction to Narrative Travels] On the "turn to narrative" in the disciplines, see: Anthropology Art "The argument can be made that all visual material has a story behind it regardless of its lack of descriptive subject matter . . . ." [Christina Vassallo, A Story Being Told] Artificial Intelligence Composition "Composition instruction draws from narrative theory, which distinguishes between the story (the what) and the discourse (the how), and composition theory, which further addresses process, as prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. The composing process and the terms narrator and audience are key elements in both." [Stella Thompson, Writing Theory Versus Narrative Theory in College Writing] Education "The applications for narrative in an academic context are as varied as the stories themselves. Narrative enquiry gives permission to learners to tap into the tacit knowledge embedded in their experience as well as to learn from each other in the process. It also serves as a springboard for dialogue about the deeper issues of their professional discipline that may not be easily illuminated through other methods." [Alternative Modes of Teaching and Learning: Storytelling] Epistemology "People love to tell stories. When something scary, or funny, or out of the ordinary happens, we cannot wait to tell others about it. If it was really funny etc. we tell the story repeatedly, embellishing as we see fit, shortening or lengthening as the circumstances prescribe. When people are bad storytellers we tend not to pay as close attention to their stories; our minds drift, and we hope for a swift conclusion. We tend not to remember those stories as well as the ones that were carefully constructed and skillfully delivered. Storytelling is one of our primary forms of communication with other people. What I will argue in this paper is that reading, telling, and hearing well-constructed narratives are not just an idle pastime that we have created for entertainment purposes or even as a mere means of communication. Rather, I want to argue that there are epistemological benefits to reading, hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives." [Worth, Knowing Through Storytelling] Ethnography Film Studies History "Narrative history is the practice of writing history in a story-based form." [Narrative History -- Wikipedia] "He thought the future of narrative would be made, as the history of narrative had been made, by historians, thinking of themselves as writers, learning from writers, and writing, taking the same care as poets and novelists with their words and designs, perhaps also taking some of the same risks. . . . It would always be made by writers who trusted, and who could figure out how to fall into, and lose themselves in, stories." --James Goodman, For the Love of Stories, 26 (1) Reviews in American History 255, 268 (1998) Journalism
Linguistics "In most sociolinguistic studies of the speech community, narratives of personal experience play a prominent role." ~ William Labov, Ordinary Events
Literature "If a literary text does something to its readers, it also simultaneously tells us something about them. Thus literature turns into a divining rod, locating our dispositions, desires, inclinations, and eventually our overall makeup. The question arises as to why we may need this particular medium . . ." [Wolfgang Iser, The Significance of Fictionalizing] Management & Organization Studies
Mathematics "At first glance (and maybe the second one too), narrative and mathematics don't seem to be natural companions, but recent years have made the juxtaposition much more common." [John Allen Paulos, Math in Narratives]
Medicine
Mythology "Myths are stories, but not just any stories. They are stories of special symbolic significance. Myths are prototypical stories, concretising the really fundamental themes of human existence; involving archetypal characters and situations; expressing the really basic curiosities, hopes, fears, desires, conflicts, choices and patterns of resolution. Myths are paradigmatic stories, ie, stories that are told and retold as shedding light on other stories, as linking past and present, as bringing the unknown into relation with known. Myths are resonating narratives, embodying the distilled essence of human experience; giving symbolic answers to the most basic human questions, questions of origin and destiny; offering stylised solutions to the most basic human decisions; staking out the choices to be made at life's cross-roads. Myths are normative narratives, setting out a society's history, legitimating its institutions, codes and values and envisioning its future development. Myths are synthesising stories, capturing the zeitgeist of a time and place, bringing to a focus what forces are at work, highlighting its problems, and crystallising its values." [Helena Sheehan, Story, Myth, Dream and Drama] Narratology Philosophy "So, the first day of class we begin by asking them questions such as 'What is a narrative or story?' What are the basic elements of a story?" 'How would you apply the notion of a narrative or story to you?' We spend quite a bit of time talking about the story of our institution. We ask older students to tell particular stories they find especially interesting, maddening, or perplexing. At the end of the class period, the students have competently practiced philosophy as a narrative activity." [Anne-Marie Bowery, Questions As a Pedagogical Tool: A Narrative Approach to Philosophy]
Poetry Narrative and Persona in the Poetry of Robert Frost Political Science "[P]olitics is essentially a contest for meaning . . . telling a story is an elemental political act . . . ." [The Political Use of Racial Narratives -- comment on Ricard A. Pride's The Political Use of Racial Narratives] Psychology "The study of stories people tell about their lives is no longer a promising new direction for the future of personality psychology. Instead, persolnal narratives and the life story have arrived.. In the first decade of the 21st century, narrative approaches to personality have moved to the center of the discipline." [Dan P. McAdams, "Personal Narratives and the Life Story," in John Robins (eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research 242-262 (New York: Wilford Press, 3rd ed., 2008)(on-line text)]
Psychotherapy "[T]he client's narrative becomes the core of each therapy session. When a client tells a personal story, he or she gives special significance to certain events, which illuminates personal meanings. The therapist works collaboratively with the client to analyze the content and organization of these stories. As stories are told and retold over time, changes in the client's concerns, problems, and goals, which forms the basis for the therapeutic process." [from the cover, Hubert J.M. Hermans & Els Hermans-Jansen, Self-Narratives: The Construction of Meaning in Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1995)]
Research Methodology "Narrative inquiry is the process of gathering information for the purpose of research through storytelling." [Narrative Inquiry -- Conducting Observational Research, Colorado State University]
Sociology ""The narrative turn in human inquiry has reached the social sciences and has created a situation I refer to as narrative's moment. This moment is a set of conditions and possibilities through which a genuine narrative sociology might be developed. Such a sociology would encompass the sociology of narratives, or the study of narratives from the standpoint of sociology's domain interests, and it would more inclusively and reflexively include sociology's narratives, viewing sociologists as narrators and thereby inquiring into what they do to and with their's and other peoples narratives." [David R. Maines, Narratives Moment and Sociology's Phenomena: Toward a Narrative Sociology, 34 (1) Sociological Quarterly 17 (1993)]
Theology "Practically every theological discipline has seen some proposal for the use of narrative as a means for rethinking the nature, method, and tasks of that discipline." [George Stroup, Theology of Narrative or Narrative Theology?: A Response to Why Narrative?]
Academic Journals Storytelling Encyclopedias
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Narrative and Story Resources 
