Critical Story Work as Resistance to Colonizing Narratives

Conveners:

David Boje dboje@nmsu.edu,

Carolyn Gardner carolyn.gardner@mac.com,

Grace Ann Rosile garosile@nmsu.edu,

Jo Tyler jat235@psu.edu

We are noticing that story research has taken a very critical turn in both poststructuralism and Native writing.  This workshop invites critical researchers to bring their ideas regarding some of the differences that poststructuralism and Native storytellers are proposing as important distinctions between narrative and story. We believe that Native American scholars (Cox 2006, King 2005, and Silko 1981) are especially attuned to this distinction due to the impact of colonialism and postcolonialsim. However, we find attention to the difference between story and narrative in the work of Derrida (1991), Bakhtin (1973), and Schotter (1993), among others.  The work of Boje (2007) is cited below as a catalyst for your own thinking in this area, and is not intended to exclude perspectives but rather to provide a common focus for discussion.  Boje (2007) writes:  “The importance of the difference between story and narrative is that narrative, in its aspiration to be theory, ends up in a hegemonic relationship to story”.  Narrative and story are typically treated as synonyms: different words that mean the same thing. Derrida raises two questions. First, what if narrative and story are homonyms: words that seem the same but refer to different things? Second, what if story and narrative form the border for each other to comprehend each other:

Each “story” (and each occurrence of the word “story,” (of itself), each story is at once larger and smaller than itself, includes itself without including (or comprehending) itself, identifies itself with itself even as it remains utterly different from its homonym. (Derrida, 1991: 287).

Derrida puts narrative into a relationship to stories larger and smaller than themselves: 

… The question-of-narrative covers with a certain modesty a demand for narrative, a violent putting-to-the-question an instrument of torture working to wring the narrative out of one as if it were a terrible secret in ways that can go from the most archaic police methods to refinements for making (and even letting) one talk that are unsupposed in neutrality and politeness, that are most respectfully medical, psychiatric, and even psychoanalytic. (Derrida, p. 261).

The violence is methods that force a narrative linearization out of the interrogation of story, to put an origin, a middle, and an end into a BME (beginning, middle, and end) linearization. Retrospective sense making is the demand to return to the scene to “tell us exactly what happened” (p. 260), “to force a narrative out of the narrator” (p. 263), or to assemble “narrative fragment” (p. 263) after narrative fragment into some originary detective-puzzle in a “linearity” of writing narratives.

One implication of this difference between story and narrative is that narrative, in its quest for petrification (Czarniawska, 2004) ends up ignoring the life of story, reducing it to a structuralist form, an abstraction that is lifeless, detached from its relational community bonds.

For example, an increasing number of Native-indigenous authors are positing a more vibrant role of story, beyond Fabula, and in resistance to Euro-American Formalist and Structuralist narrative. Leslie Marmon Silko (1981) says "White ethnologists reported that the oral tradition among Native American groups has died out" (p. 28). Narrative Sjuzhet/Fabula tends to turn native story into museum artifacts, as archetype narratives devoid of "harsh realities of hunger, poverty and injustice" (p. 280). Thomas King (2005 in The Truth About Stories), agues that narrative compromises story. The Fabula of story, the social fabric of story, loses its voice. King argues that story shapes identity differently from narrative. In particular the American Indian identity concocted in American-European ethnology, folklore, anthropology, history, and other narrative-literature --- is being challenged by Native storywriters. James Cox (2006) looks at narrative (in the tradition of the Euro-American enterprise of Sjuzhet/Fabula) as "tools of domination” (p. 24), and a "colonial incursion" (p. 25).

Also resisting narrative control of story, Bakhtin (1973: 12) says “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological framework.” Story, for Bakhtin, is decidedly more dialogical than narrative, as, for example, in the “polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1973: 60). 

In Table 1 we compare John Shotter’s (1993: 113) dimensions of theory versus account.  Shotter does not apply his theory/account dimensions as a way to distinguish narrative-story.

Table 1: Shotter’s Theory and Account Dimensions (Source: Boje, 2007)

Shotter does not include monologism, mono-perspectivity, deadness, or retrospective grave in his list of theory dimensions, nor dialogism and multi-perspectival qualities in aspects of account (he does talk of them elsewhere). The point of Table 2 is to illustrate that in the main, narrative aspires to be theory, while story seems to be more an account. This account is also dialogic, multi-perspectival, living, and prospective sensemaking.

In summary, we suggest that narrative is compatible with a managerialist quest for tools, cookbook recipes, and quick scripts, that are taken to be implicative of deep structure setting limits and control on story, rending them into abstract archetypes. Narrative can now be defined as monologistic, mono-perspective, mono-plot BME linearity, discrete-events, wholeness, finalized and merged parts, and too explicitly rendered as abstract hierarchy to be more than rational-formulaic. This is not a reflexivity, but just deadness, in a retrospective grave. Story can be defined as more dialogistic, multi-plotted, multi-perspectival, eventing-ness, systemicity-ness, unfinalizedness, unmergedness, and rich in spirals of reflexivity, living in the now, and comfortable with prospective sensemaking.

Partial Bibliography

Aristotle (written 350 BCE). E.g. (1954) translation Aristotle: Rhetoric and Poetics. Intro by Friedrich Solmsen; Rhetoric translated by W. Rhys Roberts; Poetics translated by Ingram Bywater. NY: The Modern Library (Random House). Poetics was written 350 BCE.

Bakhtin, M. M. 1940/1968. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Cambridge/London: The M.I.T. Press. 1940 date dissertation 1^st submitted; 1968 English publication.

ng (Boje, ning (Boje, 1991, 2001t uses?trieved in databases without the willing consent of story authors. sions, and the prolifeBakhtin, M. 1973. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. & Trans.). Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (ed. Holquist, M.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. Speech genres and other late essays (C. Emerson, trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. 1990. Art and Answerability. Edited by Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov. Translation and Notes by Vadim Liapunov; supplement translated by Kenneth Brostrom. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.  From Bakhtin’s first published article and his early 1920s notebooks

Bakhtin, M. M. 1993. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translation and Notes by Vadim Liapunov. Edited by Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. From Bakhtin’s early 1920s notebooks. 1993 is First English printing.

Benjamin, Walter. 1936/1955/1968. The Storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov, Pp. 883-110. In Illuminations, Edited with introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn.  NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1955 in German, 1968 in English. 1936 was original publication of “The Storyteller”: Orient und Oksident, 1936, Mieke bal

Boje, D. M. 2007. Storytelling Organization. London: Sage.

Bruner, Jerome. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MASS.: Harvard University Press.

Cox, James. (2006). Muting White Noise: The Subversion of Popular Culture Narratives of Conquest in Sherman Alexie's Fiction. University of Oklahoma Press.

Czarniawska, B. 2004. Narratives in Social Science Research. London: Sage.

Derrida, J. 1991. The Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Trans by Peggy Kamuf (editor). NY: Columbia University Press. 

Shotter, John (1993). Conversational Realities. London: Sage.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. (1981). Storyteller. NY: Arcade Publishing.

The motivation for the workshop is simple: neither the PDW nor the main program events at the AOM give us enough opportunity to engage in in-depth discussion of papers in critical management studies. So the workshop will be organized as a series of parallel streams (working groups). Each stream will consist of people who have contributed papers on a well-defined topic (perhaps with some invited discussants), and the group will work together over the course of the day-and-a-half, going around the room discussing the papers in turn. In order to maximize discussion, authors will not present their own papers, but rather participants will be asked to present and discuss each others' papers. We will also arrange a couple of plenary sessions and some social time where all the participants come together.

We are yet to finalize the cost of the workshop, but based on present estimates, we anticipate that the workshop will cost between $400 and $550 for each participant, depending on whether they choose to stay for two nights or three, and whether they choose single or double rooms.  The fee will include meals (lunch and dinner on 7th and all 3 meals on 8th).  We will finalize the details quickly on this front.

If you wish to be part of this stream, please submit a 250 word abstract to dboje@nmsu.edu, carolyn.gardner@mac.com, garosile@nmsu.edu, and jat235@psu.edu  by January 15^th, 2008.  Please note that submissions can be concurrently on review at the regular AOM 2008 conference as well.  The submission of an abstract constitutes a good-faith agreement to submit a full paper for the stream by June 1, 2008 if the paper is accepted.  The final paper should be less than 8000 words in length.

NEW DATES (as of 30 December 2007)

Feb 20: Abstracts of papers submitted to stream conveners
March 10: Submissions accepted/rejected
June 15: Full papers submitted by this date for inclusion in the Workshop.