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6 books match the query 'Frank, Arthur W.'
A Quieter Illness
Narratives, Selves, and SilencesArthur W. Frank
University of Chicago Press, 0
In this sequel to The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur W. Frank reminds us of the power of narrative in the lives of ill people and those who care for them.
The Wounded Storyteller became a classic by witnessing the voices of ill people, recognizing how they express themselves in three prevalent narratives: restitution stories, evocations of chaos, and quest stories. Thirty years later, Frank expands this framework. He proposes a fourth narrative: one that seeks no restitution, claims no quest, yet feels no chaos—the stillness narrative. This story allows us to see more clearly our interdependence as well as the wisdom of uncertainty; it also teaches the value of letting go and waiting.
In the stillness narrative, Frank finds new opportunities for dialogue with clinical professionals. They too need healing, and healing moments occur when everyone recognizes their mutual, if asymmetrical, dependence. As Frank tells the stories that won’t leave him, he guides readers toward understanding how the stories they tell and hear affect their capacity to heal both themselves and others.
Health Humanities Reader
Jones, Therese
Rutgers University Press, 2014
In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences.
With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, Health Humanities Reader truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.
Letting Stories Breathe
A Socio-NarratologyArthur W. Frank
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. But they do not merely entertain, inform, or distress us—they show us what counts as right or wrong and teach us who we are and who we can imagine being. Stories connect people, but they can also disconnect, creating boundaries between people and justifying violence. In Letting Stories Breathe, Arthur W. Frank grapples with this fundamental aspect of our lives, offering both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. Along the way he also tells stories: from folktales to research interviews to remembrances.
Frank’s unique approach uses literary concepts to ask social scientific questions: how do stories make life good and when do they endanger it? Going beyond theory, he presents a thorough introduction to dialogical narrative analysis, analyzing modes of interpretation, providing specific questions to start analysis, and describing different forms analysis can take. Building on his renowned work exploring the relationship between narrative and illness, Letting Stories Breathe expands Frank’s horizons further, offering a compelling perspective on how stories affect human lives.
The Renewal of Generosity
Illness, Medicine, and How to LiveArthur W. Frank
University of Chicago Press, 2004
The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process.
The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing.
The Wounded Storyteller
Body, Illness, and EthicsArthur W. Frank
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine; they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering; when they turn their diseases into stories, they find healing.
Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known—Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer—to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic.
Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new.
The Wounded Storyteller
Body, Illness, and Ethics, Second EditionArthur W. Frank
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known—Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer—to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilities. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic.
In this new edition Frank adds a preface describing the personal and cultural times when the first edition was written. His new afterword extends the book’s argument significantly, writing about storytelling and experience, other modes of illness narration, and a version of hope that is both realistic and aspirational. Reflecting on both his own life during the creation of the first edition and the conclusions of the book itself, Frank reminds us of the power of storytelling as way to understanding our own suffering.