hi everone,
after reading some of your articles, i am wondering if anyone can help define the precise difference between narrative and discourse analysis accounts of illness.
if discourse a subset of narrative accounts in that it involves analysing a conversation between two or more people, or is narrative a subset in that it involves temporal accounting of illness experience, or do they overlap in some other way?
many thanks if you can clarify this for me.
cheers,
david
Trish here, lurking in a different group! (apologies for encroaching, I was just looking at the great examples posted here)
For my money, narrative is defined by Aristotle as having four components, of which the most important is PLOT (the use of linguistic devices to convey causality, surprise, the unexpected, somethign that deviates from the canonical - and most of all peripetea = TROUBLE). There's also chronology (unfolding over time), characters of greater or lesser virtue (heroes, villains etc), a setting (the 'stage' of course). Following this a couple of millenia later, Kenneth Burke proposed the narrative pentad of Act + Actors + Scene + Agency + Purpose. Enough on narrative for now (except that illness is the ultimate 'trouble').
Discourse is the study of language in use. Why this word rather than that word? Why express an observation in numbers rather than words or pictures? Why this particular metaphor? Why formal language not casual language? What is not being talked about in this document and why? Who is setting the rules for what can and can't be said?
Now, for the advanced level task: given the above, what do you think is the intersection between discourse and narrative? And what lies within narrative but beyond discourse and vice versa?
NB see my paper on discourses of telehealth - might be a good one to think about when answering the above question, so we have a specific example.
thanks trish, that helps, i think.
i like how you differentiated small 'd' discourse from big 'D' Discourse in the paper. i think the macro level Discourse is a bit more like narrative, but i also think the margins between the two can be blurry. (interestingly, you did not use the word 'narrative' a single time in the paper, but probably could have.)
let's see if i got this right using your example of telehealth discourses. the humanist discourse uses a lot of patient-centered language and metaphors, thus their narrative would place the patient in the centre of the plot. some of the other discourses use a lot more technical language and comparisons, placing the health care system and its efficiency and advancement at the centre of their version of the telehealth narrative plot.
in other words, our discourse about a subject can reveal how we perceive the relative importance of the actors and relationships and events in a story, but on its own do not tell the whole story-- the narrative. the narrative on the other hand gives the broad strokes of a story, without spelling out every emotive stop and intonation. it might in fact be easier to see a narrative once we have digested the way the story was told, sort of like you had to read and re-read those text to understand their big 'D' Discourse.
or something like that?
thanks again,
david
Sort of. Discourse doesn't have to take a narrative form. Narrative of course does. Most things can be looked at as narrative AND discoruse. Just like my bike is both steel and a Condor. The taxonomy is not especially helpful I think as the categories aren't mutually exclusive! Then there's the issue of narrative as noun (the story) versus narrative as verb (the story-telling). There's more on narrative later in the course!
