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Full-Text Articles in Communication
Terms Of Perfection, Art Bochner
Terms Of Perfection, Art Bochner
Art Bochner
In this essay, I attempt to think with the story Michael Hyde tells in Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human. Viewing the drive for perfection from the perspective of narrative, I focus on the question of how the language game of perfection might lead in the direction of other ways of understanding ourselves, our writing practices, and the unity of our lives. I question the appropriateness of conventions of rhetorical scholarship that inhibit communication scholars from enacting more personal expressions of rhetorical competence, which could give greater urgency to burning issues at the heart of what it can mean …
Lechem Hara (Bad Bread), Lechem Tov (Good Bread): Survival And Sacrifice During The Holocaust, Carolyn S. Ellis
Lechem Hara (Bad Bread), Lechem Tov (Good Bread): Survival And Sacrifice During The Holocaust, Carolyn S. Ellis
Carolyn Ellis
In Judaism, human nature is understood as existing on a spectrum between yetzer hara (evil inclination) and yetzer tov (good inclination). Jews struggle to suppress the yetzer hara and exercise the yetzer tov. Based on an oral history interview and co-created by a survivor of the Holocaust and a researcher, this story focuses on bread (lechem) and hunger in a Polish ghetto. The narrative encourages reflection about good and evil and about the tangled intermingling of the generosity of self-sacrifice and the instinctive drive for survival.
Warm Ideas And Chilling Consequences, Art Bochner
Warm Ideas And Chilling Consequences, Art Bochner
Art Bochner
In the process of writing my academic memoirs spanning a period of more than thirty-five years, I discovered how crucial the work of Gregory Bateson had been to my life as a teacher, a scholar, and a relational partner. In this paper I celebrate Bateson’s charming and incisive ideas about how communication works, his deep reservations about the worship of quantification, and his astute analysis of what is at stake when we make epistemological errors in everyday life. Reviewing a turning point in my academic life—a conference held in 1979, I reaffirm the importance of warm ideas and provide a …
Love Survives, Art Bochner
Narrative's Virtues, Art Bochner
Narrative's Virtues, Art Bochner
Art Bochner
Reacting to the charge that personal narratives, especially illness narratives, constitute a “blind alley” that misconstrues the essential nature of narrative by substituting a therapeutic for a sociological view of the person, this article speaks back to critics who regard narratives of suffering as privileged, romantic, and/or hyperauthentic. The author argues that this critique of personal narrative rests on an idealized and discredited theory of inquiry, a monolithic conception of ethnographic inquiry, a distinctly masculine characterization of sociology, and a veiled resistance to the moral, political, existential, and therapeutic goals of this work. Layering his responses to the critique with …
Criteria Against Ourselves, Art Bochner
Criteria Against Ourselves, Art Bochner
Art Bochner
In the social sciences, we usually think of criteria as culture-free standards that stand apart from human subjectivity and value. The author argues in this article, however, that conflicts over which criteria to apply usually boil down to differences in values that are contingent on human choices. The demand for criteria reflects the desire to contain freedom, limit possibilities, and resist change. Ultimately, all standards of evaluation rest on a research community’s agreement to comply with theirownhumanly developed conventions. The author ends by considering the personal standards that he applies to works that fall under the new rubric of poetic …
It's About Time: Narrative And The Divided Self, Art Bochner
It's About Time: Narrative And The Divided Self, Art Bochner
Art Bochner
When I learned that my father had died while I was attending a national communication conference, two worlds within me - the academic and the personal - collided, and I was forced to confront the large gulf that divided them. In this article, I weave the story of that experience into the wider fabric of disconnections that promotes isolation and inhibits risk taking and change within universities and academic disciplines. In the process, I question whether the structures of power constitutive of academic socialization are not as difficult to resist as those of one's family, and the consequences as constraining. …