Light the towel : narrative and the negotiated unconscious

This investigation is a practice-based inquiry. It takes place in the context of writing and editing a novel manuscript: The earth does not get fat (Prendergast 2012). The unpublished novel manuscript is a fractured narrative, a tale told in multiple first-person voices. One of the problems the writer encountered, as the novel developed, was a problem from the perspective of logic and continuity: the stories did not fit together in a linear way. As a result, the writer felt estranged from the writing and, at the same time, strangely familiar with it. Despite having produced the narrative, the writer felt that it was ‘other’. This paper summarises the writer's methodology; it explains the writer's attachment to this fractured style of telling. This fractured style is assessed within the context of the mind's ability to produce its effects without full consciousness. The analysis of authorial intention therefore focuses upon the influence of altered states of consciousness upon narrative material. In particular, the writer uses Andreas Mavromatis’ (1987) work on hypnagogia: described as ‘the unique state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep’ to describe the experience of the operation of the unconscious in authorial intention.

Does the cognitive interview promote the coherence of narrative accounts in children with and without an intellectual disability?

We examined whether the cognitive interview (CI) procedure enhanced the coherence of narrative accounts provided by children with and without intellectual disabilities (ID), matched on chronological age. Children watched a videotaped magic show; one day later, they were interviewed using the CI or a structured interview (SI). Children interviewed using the CI reported more correct details than those interviewed using the SI. Additionally, children interviewed using the CI reported more contextual background details, more logically ordered sequences, more temporal markers, and fewer inconsistencies in their stories than those interviewed using the SI. However, the CI did not increase the number of story grammar elements compared with the SI. Overall children interviewed with the CI told better stories than those interviewed with the SI. This finding provided further support for the effectiveness of the CI with vulnerable witnesses, particularly children with ID.

Is narrative identity four-dimensionalist?

The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo-Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four-dimensionalist, temporal-parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self-reference and self-experience, on the other, can’t be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves — which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity-constituting somewhat under-motivated.

Cross-curriculum priorities and the ethics of interpreting Indigenous texts

Deakin University’s first-year unit, ‘Reading Children’s Texts’, is mandatory for the B.Ed. (Primary). Newly revised, it addresses the cross- curriculum priorities, Indigenous histories and cultures, and Australia’s engagements with Asia. The unit introduces the study of narrative, genre, and ideology. But how should the political topics embedded in the English curriculum be framed for pre-service teachers, and how relevant are literary texts to the teaching of ethical interpretation of texts to both primary and secondary students?

Does extensive free narrative prompting minimise the effect of mental reinstatement on children's recall of events?

The effect of mental reinstatement on children's recall is unclear. One factor that may impact its effectiveness is the degree to which interviewers prompt children during an interview. We examined whether interviewers’ degree of narrative prompting moderated the effect of mental context reinstatement during children's recall of a staged event. Younger and older children were interviewed 7–10 days after the event. Half were told to mentally reinstate the context and half were not. In a fully crossed design, half also received extended narrative prompting during the interview and half did not. We predicted that extensive narrative prompting should reduce any observable benefit of mental reinstatement, especially for older children. However, mental reinstatement had no beneficial effect on recall performance. It is possible that methodological differences, low statistical power, and a small effect size may have reduced the observable benefit of mental reinstatement in comparison to other studies. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that until further research can clearly define the parameters in which mental reinstatement is useful, and therefore produce findings with greater consistency across studies, there is little support for its use in investigative interviews with child witnesses.

Indigenous knowledge and climate change : the Wathaurong and Gadubanud narrative for the Great Ocean Road region

For more than forty thousand years Aboriginal people of Australia have been confronted with major climate, ecological and geological changes as well as annual seasonal variations. Many of these changes have been captured in the cultural traditions of Maar (the people) of the south-west Victorian coast and the knowledge has been transferred from generation to generation through Dreaming stories. Many Dreaming stories recount the forming of the coastal landscape and Sea Country. Weather patterns and climate change were gauged by the occurrence of natural events such as the tidal changes, sea level rise, landscape changes, behaviour of animals, and the availability of food sources. Can this ancient knowledge provide answers for adaptation and resilience to a rapid changing climate? Drawing upon recent literature on coastal climate change in the Great Ocean Road Region (GORCC, 2012), literature review of indigenous environmental planning (Kooyang Sea Country Plan, 2004), and investigation of settlement patterns of the Wathaurong and Gadubanud people, this paper reviews the changes in the landscape due to climate change and explores traditional knowledge as input to a potential design based adaptation model for coastal settlements of the Great Ocean Road Region.

Book review: Richard Lance Keeble and John Tulloch (eds), Global literary journalism: exploring the journalistic imagination

Reviews a new book on international literary journalism and includes critical commentary on the Australian field of literary journalism.