Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Under the sign of “the journeying self,” I offer a sketch of a Christian pilgrimage from narcissism to solidarity and doxology. Developmental psychology can help frame questions about growth in self-awareness from childhood (Fivush) to early adulthood (Habermas). Often this kind of growth is expressed in the language of narrative (Ricoeur), but a “...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Authors may be understood as producing stories from their narrative idiolects. Narrative idiolects are sets of principles that enable the simulation of possible sequences of causally connected events. Such idiolects include prototypes that define classes of stories. These prototypes or proto-stories are complexes of cognitive and affective structur...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Business executives are stock characters in the film narratives of the Coen brothers. In nearly every Coen brothers film we find a business executive of some type, from small business owners to corporate CEOs. These characters are men of wealth and power, typically corrupt, often criminal, and always antagonistic to the endeavors of the story’s pro...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Academic criticism of institutional narcissism in business schools is well established. But little scholarly attention has been devoted to insider critics of business schools. Filling this research gap – from an interdisciplinary narrative perspective – is the aim of this article. It draws attention to one of the many autobiographical narratives th...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
This essay is a sequel to “Narrative theory, 1966–2006: A narrative,” Chapter 8 of the 2006 edition of The nature of narrative. Rather than attempting to be comprehensive, it highlights five particular developments in the field, each connected with issues discussed in the 2006 essay, and it illustrates the interpretive consequences of each developm...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Robert Pirsig’s motorcycle narrative Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into values (1974) revels in narcissism. It is both shaped by the culture of narcissism from which it emerged and, like many other works of motorcycle literature since World War II, it shapes a culture of narcissism in America that goes hand in hand with a wi...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Taking her cue from Freud’s insistence that narcissism is the “universal original condition” of humanity, Linda Hutcheon argues in her book Narcissistic narrative: The metafictional paradox that narcissism is “the original condition of the novel as a genre” (1984: 8). Such “metafictional” or “self-reflexive” literature is regularly dated to the sev...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
For several decades, the concept of narcissism has been used to criticize society and culture(s). This paper discusses the achievements and limits of such approaches. In a first step, it sketches controversies within psychoanalysis around the notion of narcissism itself. It then proposes a categorization of cultural theories that draw on narcissism...
Published in Frontiers of Narrative Studies
Since Ovid’s version of the Narcissus narrative, numerous readings and re-narrations have emerged across the globe that are related to the ancient myth of the beautiful youth who unwittingly sees himself in a pool of water and eventually dies staring at the insubstantial image. Generating a wide spectrum of reinterpretations of values, ideas, and a...
