L'Attardé suivi de la notion de distance narrative dans "Discours du récit" de Gérard Genette

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Interesting narrative : being a journal of the flight of Alfred E. Mathews, of Stark Co., Ohio, from the State of Texas, on the 20th of April, and his arrival at Chicago on the 28th of May, after traversing on foot and alone a distance of over 800 miles across the States of Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri, by the most unfrequented routes ...

"Civil War Centennial issue. Facsimile copy ... from the original in the Western History Department, Denver Public Library."

Mind games : applying White’s principles of narrative therapy to the creation of a cabaret about depression and bipolar disorder

This PhD represents my attempt to make sense of my personal experiences of depression through the form of cabaret. I first experienced depression in 2006. Previously, I had considered myself to be a happy and optimistic person. I found the experience of depression to be a shock: both in the experience itself, and also in the way it effected my own self image. These personal experiences, together with my professional history as a songwriter and cabaret performer, have been the motivating force behind the research project. This study has explored the question: What are the implications of applying principles of Michael White’s narrative therapy to the creation of a cabaret performance about depression and bipolar disorder? There is a 50 percent weighting on the creative work, the cabaret performance Mind Games, and a 50 percent weighting on the written exegesis. This research has focussed on the illustration of therapeutic principles in order to play games of truth within a cabaret performance. The research project investigates ways of telling my own story in relation to others’ stories through three re-authoring principles articulated in Michael White’s narrative therapy: externalisation, an autonomous ethic of living and rich descriptions. The personal stories presented in the cabaret were drawn from my own experiences and from interviews with individuals with depression or bipolar disorder. The cabaret focussed on the illustration of therapeutic principles, and was not focussed on therapeutic ends for myself or the interviewees. The research question has been approached through a methodology combining autoethnographic, practice-led and action research. Auto ethnographic research is characterised by close investigation of assumptions, attitudes, and beliefs. The combination of autoethnographic, practice-led, action research has allowed me to bring together personal experiences of mental illness, research into therapeutic techniques, social attitudes and public discourses about mental illness and forms of contemporary cabaret to facilitate the creation of a one-woman cabaret performance. The exegesis begins with a discussion of games of truth as informed by Michel Foucault and Michael White and self-stigma as informed by Michael White and Erving Goffman. These concepts form the basis for a discussion of my own personal experiences. White’s narrative therapy is focused on individuals re-authoring their stories, or telling their stories in different ways. White’s principles are influenced by Foucault’s notions of truth and power. Foucault’s term games of truth has been used to describe the effect of a ‘truth in flux’ that occurs through White’s re-authoring process. This study argues that cabaret is an appropriate form to represent this therapeutic process because it favours heightened performativity over realism, and showcases its ‘constructedness’ and artificiality. Thus cabaret is well suited to playing games of truth. A contextual review compares two major cabaret trends, personal cabaret and provocative cabaret, in reference to the performer’s relationship with the audience in terms of distance and intimacy. The study draws a parallel between principles of distance and intimacy in Michael White’s narrative therapy and relates these to performative terms of distance and intimacy. The creative component of this study, the cabaret Mind Games, used principles of narrative therapy to present the character ‘Jo’ playing games of truth through: externalising an aspect of her personality (externalisation); exploring different life values (an autonomous ethic of living); and enacting multiple versions of her identity (rich descriptions). This constant shifting between distance and intimacy within the cabaret created the effect of a truth in ‘constant flux’, to use one of White’s terms. There are three inter-related findings in the study. The first finding is that the application of principles of White’s narrative therapy was able to successfully combine provocative and empathetic elements within the cabaret. The second finding is that the personal agenda of addressing my own self-stigma within the project limited the effective portrayal of a ‘truth in flux’ within the cabaret. The third finding presents the view that the cabaret expressed ‘Jo’ playing games of truth in order to journey towards her own "preferred identity claim" (White 2004b) through an act of "self care" (Foucault 2005). The contribution to knowledge of this research project is the application of therapeutic principles to the creation of a cabaret performance. This process has focussed on creating a self-revelatory cabaret that questions notions of a ‘fixed truth’ through combining elements of existing cabaret forms in new ways. Two major forms in contemporary cabaret, the personal cabaret and the provocative cabaret use the performer-audience relationship in distinctive ways. Through combining elements of these two cabaret forms, I have explored ways to create a provocative cabaret focussed on the act of self-revelation.

A distance too far away : a novel and exegesis

This practice-led research examines the generative function of loss in fiction that explores themes of grief and longing. This research considers how loss may be understood as a structuring mechanism through which characters evaluate time, resolve loss and affect future change. The creative work is a work of literary fiction titled A Distance Too Far Away. Aubrey, the story’s protagonist, is a woman in her twenties living in Brisbane in the early 1980s, carving out an independent life for herself away from her family. Through a flashback narrative sequence, told from the perspective of the twelve year narrator, Aubrey retraces a significant point of rupture in her life following a series of family tragedies. A Distance Too Far Away explores the tension between belonging and freedom, and considers how the past provides a malleable space for illuminating desire in order to traverse the gap between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be. The exegetical component of this research considers an alternative critical frame for interpreting the work of American author Anne Tyler, a writer who has had a significant influence on my own practice. Frequently criticised for creating sentimental and inert characters, many critics observe that nothing happens in Tyler’s circular plots. This research challenges these assertions, and through a contextual analysis of Tyler’s Ladder of Years (1995) investigates how Tyler engages with memory and nostalgia in order to move across time and resolve loss.

Diaspora identification and long-distance nationalism among Tamil migrants of diverse state origins in the UK

Accounts of Tamil long-distance nationalism have focused on Sri Lankan Tamil migrants. But the UK is also home to Tamils of non-Sri Lankan state origins. While these migrants may be nominally incorporated into a 'Tamil diaspora', they are seldom present in scholarly accounts. Framed by Werbner's (2002) conception of diasporas as 'aesthetic' and 'moral' communities, this article explores whether engagement with a Tamil diaspora and long-distance nationalism is expressed by Tamil migrants of diverse state origins. While migrants identify with an aesthetic community, 'membership' of the moral community is contested between those who hold direct experience of suffering as central to belonging, and those who imagine the boundaries of belonging more fluidly - based upon primordial understandings of essential ethnicity and a narrative of Tamil 'victimhood' that incorporates experiences of being Tamil in Sri Lanka, India and in other sites, despite obvious differences in these experiences. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Hatalmi távolság és intézményi kollektivizmus – a versenyképesség előrejelzése szövegelemzéssel (Power distance and institutional collectivism – Forecast of competitiveness by text analysis)

A tárgyalófelek elé kitett mobiltelefon alkalmazása előrejelzi a beszélgetőpartnerek versenyképességét a versenyképesség-mutatók alapján, javaslatokat adva a tárgyalás további menetére. Ez a vízió nyilván még futurisztikus, ám a csúcsvezetői nyilatkozatok rejtett szövegtartalma alapján következtetéseket levonni a képviselt szervezetek versenyképességi orientációira – ez már ma lehetőség. A GLOBE-projekt kultúrakutatási módszertanával, valamint szövegelemzési módszerekkel sikerült kimutatni a versenyképességet előrejelző hatalmi távolság és az intézményi kollektivizmus szövegbeli jeleit. Mindez eszközt jelenthet egyebek mellett a szervezetfejlesztéssel, hírszerzéssel, HR-gazdálkodással foglalkozó szakembereknek is. _______ The use of the mobile telephones laid in front of the negotiators during their conversations forecasts their indicators of competitiveness and gives suggestions for the further course of negotiation. This is obviously a futuristic vision, but drawing conclusions from the hidden content of top management narratives concerning the competitive cultural orientations of the represented organizations is a possibility that is already available. Using the culture research methodology of the GLOBE project as well as text analysis methods, it was possible to reveal narrative patterns both of the power distance, forecasting competitiveness, and of institutional collectivism. These findings may be useful tools for professionals, among others of organizational development, intelligence service and HR management.

IT service desk process improvement : a narrative style case study

This paper is a detailed case narrative on how a Faculty of a leading Australian University conducted a rigorous process improvement project, applying fundamental Business Process Management (BPM) concepts. The key goal was to increase the efficiency of the faculty’s service desk. The decrease of available funds due to reducing student numbers and the ever increasing costs associated with service desk prompted this project. The outcomes of the project presented a set of recommendations which leads to organizational innovation having information technology as an enabler for change. The target audience includes general BPM practitioners or academics who are interested in BPM related case studies, and specific organisations who might be interested in conducting BPM within their service desk processes.

The use of narrative text for injury surveillance research : a systematic review

Objective: To summarise the extent to which narrative text fields in administrative health data are used to gather information about the event resulting in presentation to a health care provider for treatment of an injury, and to highlight best practise approaches to conducting narrative text interrogation for injury surveillance purposes.----- Design: Systematic review----- Data sources: Electronic databases searched included CINAHL, Google Scholar, Medline, Proquest, PubMed and PubMed Central.. Snowballing strategies were employed by searching the bibliographies of retrieved references to identify relevant associated articles.----- Selection criteria: Papers were selected if the study used a health-related database and if the study objectives were to a) use text field to identify injury cases or use text fields to extract additional information on injury circumstances not available from coded data or b) use text fields to assess accuracy of coded data fields for injury-related cases or c) describe methods/approaches for extracting injury information from text fields.----- Methods: The papers identified through the search were independently screened by two authors for inclusion, resulting in 41 papers selected for review. Due to heterogeneity between studies metaanalysis was not performed.----- Results: The majority of papers reviewed focused on describing injury epidemiology trends using coded data and text fields to supplement coded data (28 papers), with these studies demonstrating the value of text data for providing more specific information beyond what had been coded to enable case selection or provide circumstantial information. Caveats were expressed in terms of the consistency and completeness of recording of text information resulting in underestimates when using these data. Four coding validation papers were reviewed with these studies showing the utility of text data for validating and checking the accuracy of coded data. Seven studies (9 papers) described methods for interrogating injury text fields for systematic extraction of information, with a combination of manual and semi-automated methods used to refine and develop algorithms for extraction and classification of coded data from text. Quality assurance approaches to assessing the robustness of the methods for extracting text data was only discussed in 8 of the epidemiology papers, and 1 of the coding validation papers. All of the text interrogation methodology papers described systematic approaches to ensuring the quality of the approach.----- Conclusions: Manual review and coding approaches, text search methods, and statistical tools have been utilised to extract data from narrative text and translate it into useable, detailed injury event information. These techniques can and have been applied to administrative datasets to identify specific injury types and add value to previously coded injury datasets. Only a few studies thoroughly described the methods which were used for text mining and less than half of the studies which were reviewed used/described quality assurance methods for ensuring the robustness of the approach. New techniques utilising semi-automated computerised approaches and Bayesian/clustering statistical methods offer the potential to further develop and standardise the analysis of narrative text for injury surveillance.

Comparison of high-speed videokeratoscopy and ultrasound distance sensing for measuring the longitudinal corneal apex movements

Two different methods to measure binocular longitudinal corneal apex movements were synchronously applied. High-speed videokeratoscopy at a sampling frequency of 15 Hz and a customdesigned ultrasound distance sensor at 100 Hz were used for the left and the right eye, respectively. Four healthy subjects participated in the study. Simultaneously, cardiac electric cycle (ECG) was registered for each subject at 100 Hz. Each measurement took 20 s. Subjects were asked to suppress blinking during the measurements. A rigid headrest and a bite-bar were used to minimize undesirable head movements. Time, frequency and time-frequency representations of the acquired signals were obtained to establish their temporal and spectral contents. Coherence analysis was used to estimate the correlation between the measured signals. The results showed close correlation between both corneal apex movements and the cardiopulmonary system. Unraveling these relationships could lead to better understanding of interactions between ocular biomechanics and vision. The advantages and disadvantages of the two methods in the context of measuring longitudinal movements of the corneal apex are outlined.