Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction Ruediger Heinze (bio) I am not born yet. My Uncle Carl and Brother Tate hurry along the railroad tracks on the graveled crest of the hillside which parallels Finance Street. (Wideman, Sent For You Yesterday 17) I walk into the frame, not noticing the black limousine parked across the street. (Ellis, Glamorama 168) Inside, in the warm light of contemporary domesticity, her roommate is talking long-distance to the first boy she ever kissed. She's talking while vengefully chasing their cats, the cordless phone cradled like a papoose at an interstice of ear and hand and shoulder. We can just make out the melody of her joy. We are standing outside under the window, on the front step. (Moody, "The Grid" 29) What did he even talk to them about–when they were under four eyes?–Ah, well, suddenly, as if by a flash of inspiration, I know. (Ford, The Good Soldier 34) How do the narrators of the four fictional narratives quoted above know what they know? The knowledge they display is temporally, spatially, or cognitively undisclosed to them. If we assume that they project a human consciousness (and there is no evidence to the contrary), they should, for obvious epistemological reasons, either not possess the knowledge they do, or their claims to that kind of knowledge should [End Page 279] be labeled unreliable and/or facetious. The latter explanation might help to account for some of the preposterous knowledge if we follow distinctions made by Phelan and Martin (1999) and argue that narrators may merely report unreliably but do not evaluate or interpret unreliably. However, there are few or no other textual signals that the narrators' reporting is not to be trusted. If we discard reliability as the default of unreliability, the most we can say is that we do not have sufficient information to judge whether the reporting is done reliably or unreliably. For Moody's and Ford's fictional narratives, as well as for most of the other texts discussed in this essay, unreliability cannot satisfyingly explain the exceptional knowledge of the first-person narrators. In Moody's "The Grid," a first-person narrator takes a moment in the present of the narrative as a starting point for unconditionally telling what will happen next, in the end coming back full swing to where the narrative began. The almost declamatory present and future tense and the circularity of the structure leave no room for unreliability because there is no indication of epistemological uncertainty or inconsistency. As regards Ford's The Good Soldier, the supposition that the narrator is merely schizophrenic when he claims to "suddenly . . . know" what he has no access to will not help in elucidating the aesthetic and conceptual motivation behind this statement. How, then, can one conceptualize first-person narrators in fictional narratives whose quantitative and qualitative knowledge about events, other characters, etc., clearly exceeds what one could expect of a human consciousness and would thus make them prone to being labeled "omniscient"? If labeled so, they would meet a criterion narrative theory typically reserves for the variable or zero focalization of authorial narratives: "The knowledge of an internal focalizer . . . is restricted by definition: being part of the represented world, he cannot know everything about it" (Rimmon-Kenan 80). The models of most narrative theory do not or perhaps cannot address this phenomenon, while a substantial number of fiction writers apparently do not seem to care that the "knowledge of an internal focalizer . . . is restricted by definition" (ibid.). Admittedly, the phenomenon has not gone entirely unnoticed, although it has seldom been elaborated. Gérard Genette calls Marcel's narration of Bergotte's dying thoughts an illicit assumption of authorial competence (208). Manfred Jahn calls first-person omniscience "paralepsis" and defines it as an "infraction caused by saying too much; a narrator assuming a competence he/she does not properly have; typically, a first-person narrator (or a historiographer) narrating what somebody else thought, or what happened when s/he was not present" (<http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm>). For third-person narrative situations, "omniscience" usually does not present an immediate problem beyond...

Mothering Siblings:Diaspora, Desire and Identity in American Born Confused Desi Kay Souter (bio) and Ira Raja (bio) In this essay we consider the construction of cultural identity, motherhood and the family in ABCD, a film of the Indian diaspora that had its world premiere at the 2001 London Film Festival. This film reads family, apparently within familiar narrative structures such as the U.S.-immigrant story, as portrayed in films like Goodbye, Columbus and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the "leaving home" story, as classically portrayed in Pride and Prejudice, where a young person needs to escape from her clueless family. The irritating presence of the mother in the film, and the quickness with which her two children appear to make life-determining decisions following her death, seem to invite discussions of plot and character organized around ideas of individual development, self-improvement and understanding. This is the territory of the desire plot, an account of family history captured for the twentieth century by Freudian-Lacanian readings which position sexual desire within the unconscious history of familial fantasies, understood as vertical and Oedipal. In this territory, mothers and old ladies become, as Mary Jacobus memorably phrased it, little more than "the waste products" of a system in which marriageable women are objects of exchange between men (142) and a mother's death would be expected to grease the wheels of narrative. Identity and narrative are inextricably linked here: a certain understanding of narrative as developmental and teleological paves the way for an understanding of identity as either/or. There are problems, however, in trying to read ABCD as a bildüngsroman structured by what Susan Freidman calls "the temporal plots of the family romance, its repetitions and discontents" (137), rendering the "Indian" characteristics of the plot unreadable, and the apparently self-defeating nature of the characters' choices and behavior, rather pointless. A central [End Page 16] difficulty is that the film both responds to and resists readings based on the Oedipal model of the bildüngsroman with its focus on linear development through time. ABCD, then, presents something of an interpretative puzzle, particularly in terms of the role of "mothering" in structuring the plot and character development. Intergenerational relationships in the diaspora throw into relief the cultural specificity of psychosexual theories of family functioning underpinned by a narrative of desire, Indian as well as Western. Traditional temporally oriented discussions of character, which articulate themes of development and change over time that are interpreted through a psychoanalytic lens, are less useful than reading strategies which shift the focus towards more spatially plotted intercultural encounters (Friedman 136), in which the content of mothering can be understood as a function of cultural locations and interactions, and which may become available to others in the family. In ABCD, siblings provide "horizontal" mothering for each other, a role which is unusual and relatively unexplored in the West,1 and therefore rather opaque in narrative terms. ABCD insists on the significance of the mother, but challenges essentialist ideas of mothering, suggesting that the mothering function can, and sometimes should, be uncoupled from the "birthgiver," and that, in some contexts, mothering is best provided by others.2 Here we are interested in tracing both those aspects of the plot and character development of ABCD that respond to Oedipal models and those that do not, and in elaborating on the relation between the vertical and temporal Oedipal model and a more horizontal and spatial model of narrative analysis. Reframing mothering in the diasporic context enables new ways of theorizing identity, ways that are more sensitive to criteria such as space and ethnicity, and allows a more dynamic and culturally responsive reading of the possibilities of mothers and the mothering function. The Film First screened at the London Film Festival, ABCD was selected, alongside Boys Don't Cry, Being John Malkovich, Cider House Rules, Happy Texas and The Virgin Suicides, for a regional tour of England that immediately follows the festival. The Festival praised the film for being "shockingly accurate and charming" but its significance may not be as immediately accessible as that comfortable appeal to realist criteria suggests. Positioning itself as diasporic or fusion...

Objectless Curiosity: Frankenstein, The Station Agent, and Other Strange Narratives Lorri Nandrea The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. Dorothy Parker Early in Poe's first Dupin story, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," the narrator observes two distinct yet obliquely similar kinds of attention: that of Dupin, and that of a crowd gathered to gaze at the crime scene: We proceeded at once to the Rue Morgue. This is one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch. It was late in the afternoon when we reached it; as this quarter is at a great distance from that in which we resided. The house was readily found; for there were still many persons gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless curiosity, from the opposite side of the way. It was an ordinary Parisian house, with a gateway, on one side of which was a glazed watch-box . . . Before going in we walked up the street, turned down an alley, and then, again turning, passed in the rear of the building—Dupin, meanwhile, examining the whole neighborhood, as well as the house, with a minuteness of attention for which I could see no possible object. (13, emphasis added) The narrator clearly perceives the "objectless curiosity" of the crowd as different from Dupin's "minuteness of attention," though the manner in which Dupin's attentiveness appears to lack an object links the two and invites consideration of what, if anything, does distinguish the crowd's "objectless curiosity" from the detective's examination. [End Page 335] As such, the passage may function as a starting point for investigating the differences between modes of curiosity represented in, and provoked by, narrative fiction. In particular, I hope to trace out, or track down, a routinely denigrated form of curiosity, here designated as "objectless," elsewhere as "idle," "mere," or "just." I intend to explore the possibility of understanding "objectless curiosity" as a mode of apprehending otherness, one that may sidestep dynamics of identification and permit an interestingly non-appropriative relationship to the phenomenal world.1 First, in the context of the story, it is clear that Dupin's minute scrutiny does have an "object," in the sense of a point or goal. He is reading clues and possibilities, attempting to solve the mystery. The narrator's failure to see the point of looking at the whole neighborhood is, as his diction suggests, attributable to his own obtuseness ("I could see no possible object"). Dupin's examination is oriented toward a future moment at which the past, which appears in the present enigmatic, will have been deciphered and fully explained. His act of looking is thus accompanied by an expectation of closure—as Dupin later puts it, "my expectation of reading the entire riddle" (15). By contrast, the crowd's presence appears to be motivated simply by the pleasure it generates in the present—not so much in the present as instantaneous "now"—you arrive and are satisfied—but rather in the prolongation or sustaining of the present pleasure of gazing. Thus, the crowd resists dispersal: Poe writes, "there were still many persons gazing up." Of course, one does not want to discount out of hand, or rather out of class bias, the possibility that these unnamed persons are also attempting to solve the mystery. Yet if we take seriously the narrator's implication that the crowd's curiosity is "objectless" in the sense of lacking an end goal, their gaze would signal a more passive, less rational, or less rationalized attraction to the rupture of the ordinary that has here taken place. The fact that the crowd remains stationary (while Dupin moves around) may suggest a mode of attention that differs from the active, essentially teleological investigation that progresses, through space and time, toward comprehension. Instead, the crowd's curiosity seems to rest with what is, in a sense, ahistorical in the present: what is out of sync, aberrant, disruptive, unexpected...

Shape Stops Story Elizabeth F. Emens A Comment "I would like to suggest," Rosemarie Garland-Thomson tells us, "that 'shape structures story' is an informing principle of disability identity" (113). In her essay in this volume, Garland-Thomson eloquently describes how our bodies tell stories, create stories. Her founding principle—shape structures story—draws upon an essay by Caroline Walker Bynum about metamorphosis and continuity, about change as identity. Garland-Thomson's twist on this idea is best captured in her exegesis of Simi Linton's memoir of identity formation after her car accident: "Although her new shape is instantaneous, the new sense of self develops as a process that is simultaneously growth and healing. The recently impaired body pulls along the new sense of self, which resists and struggles as it reforms itself within a new community based on a shared sense of being in and relating to the world" (Garland-Thomson 119). The changed body pulls along the inner self, shaping and recreating that self in ways before unimagined. The account Garland-Thomson gives us of shape structuring story may seem at first surprising. Initially her idea of bodies creating stories rather than stories creating bodies seems in tension with what is arguably a dominant narrative of disability studies—the idea that the social model of disability should triumph over the medical model. [End Page 124] The medical model views disabled bodies as bodies needing a cure, whereas the social model views disability as a social category created by the context in which we live. Under the social model, someone who cannot walk up stairs is disabled only because stairs assume one kind of body rather than another. As Simi Linton asks her students, "If I want to go to vote or use the library, and these places are inaccessible, do I need a doctor or a lawyer?" (120). Whereas the dominant nondisabled culture tends to medicalize disabled bodies—always seeking a cure—disability studies focuses on the social context that renders certain bodies disabled. Garland-Thomson's rendering of disability as a shape that makes stories, rather than of bodies as constructed by storytelling, might seem then to invert the prevailing narrative of disability studies: the rejection of the medical model in favor of the social model. On closer inspection, though, Garland-Thomson says nothing to embrace the medical model over the social. Her account offers nothing to suggest that disability is a state that needs curing. On the contrary, through the narratives supplied by the film Murderball and works by Cheryl Marie Wade and Simi Linton, as well as her own narrative of the tongue dance, Garland-Thomson celebrates the power of bodies beyond the "norm" to create beautiful and powerful stories, stories to be cherished, not erased through medical cures. As she tells us early on, the imagined narratives of disability and disabled bodies are typically not "pretty ones" (114). As collected and rendered by Garland-Thomson, they become not pretty but passionate, powerful, extraordinary. Her essay climaxes with her description of the tongue dance, an elaborate dance begun by a colleague who is able to move only his tongue, and who therefore moves his tongue better than anyone. The original tongue dancer leads a train of aspiring imitators at the annual Society for Disability Studies dance, in a ritual that Garland-Thomson inscribes as the ethnic folk dance of the disability community. The dance—"the eroticism of [which] is lost on none of us" (121)—perfectly portrays the two themes Garland-Thomson teases out of her freshly positive narratives structured by disability: sexuality and community. Garland-Thomson generously narrates the tongue dance for those outside the community of the dance. Drawing on the language of disability, she renders the dance "accessible" to outsiders (00[8]), implying that they too might participate vicariously. But ultimately the outsiders are not participants. Their function is instead to bear witness to this moment of sexuality and community, to the power of bodies beyond the norm to come together in new ways that far...

Editor’s ColumnOn Critical Dialogues James Phelan This issue contains two different contributions to our section on Dialogues, an exchange between Barbara Olson and Jonathan Culler about Culler's essay on "Omniscience" published in January 2004, and a collaborative effort by Jan Baetens and Kathryn Hume following up on Hume's essay on "Narrative Speed" published in May 2005. I recommend both Dialogues for the ways in which they advance the conversations about their respective issues. Here I'd like to use Baetens and Hume's description of their Dialogue as a starting point for some reflections on critical dialogues more generally and on potential uses of our Dialogue section. Baetens and Hume describe their essay as "an attempt to remediate the traditional 'reply' to a scholarly article, followed by a 'reply to the reply' by the first author" (351). This description implies that they believe their mode of collaboration is superior to the mode of turn-taking—at least for their case. I infer (which means that Baetens and Hume do not necessarily imply) three reasons underlying their belief, two having to do with the nature of the argument itself, the other having to do with the spirit of critical exchange. (1) Baetens and Hume collaborate because they can, and (2) because they recognize that speaking together will make a stronger case for their views than speaking by turns. In other words, although Baetens did not endorse every feature of Hume's original article, when the two of them explored his response, they were able to agree on the new formulations articulated in this issue. Presenting their conclusions together gives those views greater force. (3) Baetens and Hume collaborate because they believe it provides a better model for critical exchange than the more oppositional turn-taking model. Collaboration fosters cooperation and a willingness to alter one's position, while turn-taking fosters conflict and a tendency to defend entrenched positions. [End Page 205] The first two reasons and the third are closely but not inextricably connected. When two critics can come to agreement about the basic issues, they can more readily conduct their dialogue with a spirit of cooperation. But without much trouble we can also imagine a scenario in which Baetens and Hume (or two other critics engaged in a different dialogue) are unable to agree sufficiently to write a collaborative piece, yet are still able to take their turns in a way that reflects such a spirit. Consequently, we can separate the degree of agreement or disagreement between critics from the spirit in which they conduct a dialogue. That separation, in turn, opens up the question of whether the spirit of cooperation should be a touchstone we use to evaluate dialogues. In other words, should we expect better dialogues to be conducted in this spirit and inferior dialogues to be conducted in a more oppositional spirit? My answer is no. But not, I hasten to add, because I have anything against the spirit of cooperation. My answer is no because I think it would be a mistake to hold out any single model of critical dialogue as best for all exchanges. Sometimes cooperation and mutual movement toward a new position will be most productive. But at other times sharp disagreement and the corresponding effort to find new and better reasons for one's position will be more productive. Sometimes a middle way between cooperation and the pursuit of new reasons for one's positions will work best. And so on for other possible dialogic relations. At the same time, each way has its risks. The risk of a commitment to cooperation is that the participants find an illusory common ground because they paper over important differences. The risk of defending entrenched positions is that one's ego becomes overly invested in the endeavor; when both parties fall victim to this risk then the exchange can become less about the issues and more about a power struggle between clashing egos—and at that point, the exchange is no longer worthy of the name dialogue. The risk of the middle way is that neither participant fully engages the ideas of the other, as each thinks "I can concede...

What is identity? In an article I published in this journal two years ago, I defined as notion that what we are is a story of some kind. Before investigating its social and somatic sources, I added that I regarded this idea as counterintuitive and even extravagant. James Phelan liked my characterization of identity enough to quote twice in an article of own in Narrative last October. In that Editor's Column, Phelan praises the British philosopher Galen Strawson for his overall effort to debunk the identity thesis as both effective and salutary (209). As the lead-in to commentary on Strawson, Phelan casts me as the apostle of identity, and would seem to follow, accordingly, that my views have been debunked by Strawson. As Phelan concludes, I'd be guilty-along with Oliver Sacks, Jerome Bruner, and others-of reducing the numerous and complex relations between the self and one's narratives about the self to a single [narrative] model (210). When I finished reading the Editor's Column, I didn't recognize myself in Phelan's Eakin, not surprisingly because Phelan quotes me selectively to suit own agenda, a protest against what he calls narrative imperialism, impulse by students of to claim..,. more and more power for our object of study and our ways of studying (206). So to set the record straight at the outset, permit me to run the entire passage in which Phelan found cue. In what follows, I reflect on Oliver Sacks's observation that it might be said that each of us constructs and lives a 'narrative', and that this is us, our identities (110, emphasis original):

Do possible worlds really exist? Or is there one (actual) world, and infinitely many (im)possibilial Despite sounding like something out of science fiction fantasy or theoretical physics, depending on who you run with, the question of possible worlds has been debated in certain philosophical circles since the turn of the twenti eth century, ranging from set theory in mathematics to modal philosophy to semi otics.1 The link between the three disciplines lies in the ontological fiat, or performative, that brings a possible world into existence, however that existence may be defined. For Umberto Eco, possible worlds are at base cultural constructs, but, then again, so is the real world; for David Lewis, the founder of modal realism, possible worlds are just as real as the real world; and for David Hubert, one of the early developers of mathematical set theory, the set-theoretical universe, which un derpins possible worlds theory, quite simply is paradise.2 My project in this essay is to detect if (and how) the theory of possible worlds may underpin certain aspects of the narrative of drama and performance, and more specifically, the 1990 play, Worlds, by Canadian playwright John Mighton. In order to do so, I will interrogate the seminal article Eco published in 1978 on tex tual semiotics, Possible Worlds and Text Pragmatics: 'Un drame bien parisien', and consider how the theory of possible worlds is transferable to a narratology of drama and performance. In the course of this discussion, though, I also want to peel back two further layers and consider: (1) the way Eco's work depends upon and de parts from the possible worlds theories of philosophy, especially that of Lewis, and (2) the way Lewis and Eco depend upon mathematical set theory. Finally, I hope to put the whole thing back together by appraising how the play Worlds navi gates the theory(s) of possible worlds.3

In the December 2004 issue of Ratio, Galen Strawson published an important essay in which he mounted a groundbreaking attack against what has become virtu ally the standard view of how we construe our lives: the identity thesis, which insists that our identity is a function of the story that we construct about our selves. Specifically, he forcefully challenges both the descriptive and normative as pects of the thesis, the judgment, on the one hand, that, in Oliver Sacks's words, of us constructs and lives a narrative (105), and the judgment, on the other, that, as Marya Schechtman puts it, we ought to construct our lives narratively, that, indeed, we must do so to achieve full personhood (119). The overall argument of Strawson's piece divides into two major sections, each of which has two parts: (1) a defense of what he calls an Episodic approach to self-experience, in which the self, considered as self, is a now phenomenon disconnected from the past and the future, and an attack against what he calls the prevailing Diachronie approach to self experience, in which the self, considered as a self, is understood to persist in time from the past into the future; and (2) a defense of a non-Narrative form of self-repre sentation and an attack against the dominance of the Narrative form of self-represen tation. The aim of Strawson's case at large is to reconfigure the terms and the conditions of the discussion of the relations obtaining between the self and its repre sentation. In my view, one cannot read this piece without being impressed by its icon oclastic turn, by its temerity in facing down the almost universal endorsement of the identity thesis, and by its unflinching insistence that the Episodic/non Narrative approach to self-representation has equal standing with the Diachronie/ Narrative approach, that in point of fact it just might be, primus inter pares.

Conjectural History and Satire:Narrative as Historical Argument from Mandeville to Malthus (and Foucault) Frank Palmeri (bio) I. Conjectural History and Satire In Book Three of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith attempts to explain the mechanism by which feudal economic and social relations in Europe came to be transformed into relations typical of and dependent on capital markets. The feudal forms were characterized by the power of large landowners, who supported hundreds of retainers. However, Smith argues, with the gradual appearance of luxury goods, the great proprietors chose to adorn themselves rather than to support their retainers: "For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged . . . the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them" (418–19). With their retainers dismissed, and their tenants becoming more independent, the large landholders bargained away their power, "not like Esau in time of hunger and necessity, but in wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles fitter to be the play-things of children than the serious pursuits of men" (421). Smith does not cite documentary or other sources to support his argument here, nor does he offer quantitative evidence or calculations. Instead, he provides a plausible hypothetical narrative to bridge the gap between earlier and later stages of society. His account is consistent with known or accepted facts and with an understanding of psychology ("all for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind" [418]). But the narrative is also sharply [End Page 64] satiric, implying that the loss of unquestioned political and social dominance by the great landowners was due only to themselves—to their childish and shortsighted pursuit of "baubles." Far from being unique or unusual, the combination of speculative history and satire in this passage is exemplary of a frequent convergence of these genres of narrative in the eighteenth century. In this passage and in others, Smith constructs a speculative narrative in order to explain the passage from one stage of society to another, as did the other eighteenth-century historians whose works will be considered here. The literary form most closely related to their narrative plots—satire—is often associated with the local and political and not with large-scale historical explanations. Part of the significance of the story of conjectural history in the eighteenth century, then, arises from its distinctive interweaving of fictional and historical modes. But perhaps most importantly, in both the fictional and the non-fictional modes, conjectural history demonstrates the indispensable role of narrative in providing answers to questions about the nature of human society and the identity of human beings. The narrative explanations provided by conjectural history constitute the bridge between sacred texts such as the book of Genesis and the modern discipline of cultural anthropology. When Enlightenment thinkers sought to work out a naturalistic narrative of the course of human societies, they had to develop a form of a universal history that would avoid having recourse to providence for its explanations. Outside the bible and religious traditions, however, the available evidence was limited, uncertain, and fragmentary, consisting primarily of the writings of travelers, merchants, and missionaries over the preceding two centuries of European exploration and expansion.1 To give an account of the earliest stages of human social life, and to fill in gaps or transitions between eras already represented in the historical record, they fashioned the genre of conjectural history, attempting to construct psychologically plausible narratives of what could or must have happened in order for human beings to have developed the use of articulate language, or to have brought into existence the institutions of religion and government. Dugald Stewart called these works "Theoretical or Conjectural" (34) histories because they offered hypotheses that would be in accord with and help explain the historical record, just as a history of physics or mathematics offers hypotheses that seek to be in accord with and help explain observable phenomena in the natural world. Such narratives were sometimes carried forward so that they overlapped with classical...

Sick persons and those who care for them become obligatory story-tellers and story-listeners. Hippocrates knew this, Chekhov knew this, Freud knew this, and yet knowledge of the centrality of storytelling was obscured in medicine throughout much of the last century. With the rise of interest in the humanities in general and literary studies in particular among medical educators and practitioners, today's medicine is being fortified by a rigorous understanding of narrative theory, appreciation of narrative practice, and deepening respect for what great literary texts can contribute to the professional development of physicians and the care of the individual patient (Hawkins and McEntyre; Anderson and MacCurdy). This rise of the power of storytelling in medicine helps me to conceptualize what has been evolving in my own practice of internal medicine and in the emerging field of narrative medicine. You'd think that doctors, nurses, and social workers know of the centrality and privilege of storytelling in their practice. What else do we think we are doing when we ask someone in pain about their situation? Even the junior medical student who says, "What brought you to the clinic today?" and is met with the answer, "The M104 bus" knows that he or she is in search of a story. And yet, there has been an odd diminishment of the status of storytelling in medicine ever since we decided we knew enough about the body by virtue of reducing it to its parts that we did not need to hear out its inhabitant. [End Page 261] As a general internist and literary critic, I have been brooding about the place of narrative in medicine for a long time. Our Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University has developed an agenda in research, teaching, and scholarship devoted to examining and studying the relations of narrative thinking and practice to being sick or taking care of sick people. Indeed, the field of literature-and-medicine or medical humanities has for decades been excavating the relationships between literature and medicine, both in terms of literary texts and literary theory (see Hunter; Gilman). Narrative medicine is a more evidently clinical cousin of this intellectual discipline. I define it as medicine practiced with the narrative competencies to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness (Charon). Not unlike nuclear medicine or internal medicine, you can practice narrative medicine and still be a doctor! It became clearer and clearer to my colleagues and me that doctors, nurses, and social workers need rigorous and disciplined training in reading and writing for the sake of their practice. I am by no means the only one to have observed that being a close reader equips one to perform some of the most difficult tasks of the health care professionals: attentive listening, simultaneously being transported by a text while analyzing it most meticulously and critically (Keats would call this negative capability and psychiatrists might call it splitting), adopting alien perspectives, following the narrative thread of the story of another, being curious about other people's motives and experiences, and tolerating the uncertainty of stories (Holt). More recently, many of us within medicine and within literary studies have realized the critical importance that writing—autobiography, memoir, pathography, fiction, personal essay—has developed within health care.1 Patients and their families are giving voice to their suffering, finding ways to write of illness and to articulate—and therefore comprehend—what they endure in sickness.2 The therapeutic potential of narrative medicine expands when we encourage patients to join us in writing their own medical charts, for patients are, or should be, the co-authors and curators of whatever records are kept about them. Health professionals, too, are writing reflective essays about their practice for medical journals or the trade press (Bolton). By telling of what we undergo in illness or in the care of the sick, we are coming to recognize the layered consequences of illness and to acknowledge the fear and hope and love exposed in sickness. * * * In examining the...