Current trends in Humanities/Masters’ Academy 11.12.2024 ; 3 p.m.
05 12 2024
The Masters’ School Seminar/ Masters’ Academy will be held on December 11, at 3 p.m.
Our guest is Professor James Phelan.
Applied Humanities: The Example of Narrative Medicine
In recent years, scholars in the humanities have been drawing on their scholarship to address social and cultural problems. In part, this development is a natural evolution of humanities research, and in part, it is a response to cultural discourses questioning the value of the humanities. After making this general case, I will offer some brief glances at work in the environmental humanities and the medical humanities. I will then take a longer look at the narrative medicine movement, with special attention to the work of Rita Charon and her colleagues at Columbia University as well as an offshoot of that work I have been developing called Rhetorical Narrative Medicine. I will conclude with a discussion of Rhetorical Narrative Medicine in practice by sketching a model for
Rhetorical Narrative Medicine Workshops.
BIO:
James Phelan
teaches and writes about narrative theory, the medical humanities, the English and American novel, especially from modernism to the present, and nonfiction narrative. He is the first person in the history of the English department to be awarded both the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award (2007) and the Distinguished Scholar Award (2004). He is the author or co- author of 10 books and editor or co-editor of another 10, as well as approximately 175 essays. His research has been devoted to thinking through what it means to conceive of narrative as rhetoric, even as his individual books have focused on specific aspects of that conception. He has written about style in Worlds from Words (1981); about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots (1988), about a rhetorical approach to a range of narrative techniques and their consequences in Narrative as Rhetoric (1996); about character narration in Living to Tell about It; about judgments and narrative progression (again) in Experiencing Fiction (2007); about literary history and 10 American novels in Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel (2013); about the larger project of rhetorical poetics in Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017); and about his concepts of mimetic, thematic and synthetic components of narrative in a dialogue book with Matthew Clark, Debating Rhetorical Narratology (2020). Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, recently ranked first in the category of “Literature and Writing” by googlescholar. Phelan co-edits, along with Katra Byram and Faye Halpern, the Ohio State University Press book series, The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Among the volumes Phelan has also edited or co-edited are the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (with Peter J. Rabinowitz, 2005); Teaching Narrative Theory (with David Herman and Brian McHale 2010); After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative (with Jakob Lothe and Susan R. Suleiman, 2011); Fact, Fiction, and Form: Selected Essays of Ralph W. Rader (with David H. Richter, 2011); and the forthcoming Fictionality in Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (with Lasse Gammelgaard, Stefan Iversen, Louise Brix Jacobsen, Richard Walsh, Henrik Skov Zetterberg-Nielsen and Simona Gjerlevsen Zetterberg-Nielsen. In 2013, Phelan was awarded an honorary degree from Aarhus University. An Honorary Award video showcases his achievements. In 2016 he was elected a member of the Norwegian Academy Science and Letters. In 2021 he was named the winner of the Wayne C.
Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.