ABSTRACT

We Find Ourselves in Other People’s Stories: On Narrative Collapse and a Lifetime Search for Story is a collection of five essays that dissolves the boundary between personal writing and academic writing, a longstanding binary construct in the discipline of composition and writing studies, in order to examine the rhetorical effects of narrative collapse on the stories we tell about ourselves and others. Taken together, the essays theorize the relationships between language and violence, between narrative and dementia, between genre and certainty, and between writing and life.

chapter 1|17 pages

Learning to Keep My Distance

chapter 2|19 pages

Searching for Stories

chapter 3|19 pages

Witnessing the Collapse

chapter 4|20 pages

Narrative Fragility

chapter 5|12 pages

We Are All Telling It Slant

chapter |5 pages

Epilogue