Search results for ""Author Nita Schechet""

Narrative Fissures: Reading and Rhetoric is a guide to applied rhetorical criticism of narrative in diverse fields such as cultural studies, ethnography, psychotherapy, historiography, critical legal studies, education, communication, and medicine. The book offers an interdisciplinary toolbox for reading and writing by mapping textual sites as fissures, points of entry for critical reading. These fissures range from short phrases analyzed in the introduction to the fissures of prefacing, framing, textual voices, and gaps discussed in relation to individual texts in part I. Theoretical understanding of rhetorical analysis is combined with technical application of the concept of fissures to suggest methods of reflectively reflexive reading. This section of the book demonstrates techniques of textual entry and analytic anchoring, looking at framing, vocal multiplicity, and narrative time in relation to reader response. Part II shifts perspective to look at writing, exploring ethnography through the concept of fissures in order to suggest methods and uses for reflectively reflexive writing in diverse fields. The critical reading skills surveyed in part I are translated into writing strategies rebalancing the narrative hierarchies of traditional author-informant-reader relations. The final section of the book considers the ethical implications of narrative choices through focus on a single key fissure - narrative resolution - in three similarly situated contemporary fictions. The aim of this last and most tentative section of the book is to provoke thought and invite discussion of the important and under-theorized ethical aspects of narrative. In its structure of progressively tentative consideration of reading, writing, and ethics, Narrative Fissures is also rhetorically self-reflexive, enacting, together with its reader, applications and implications of contemporary thought on narrative.

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Disenthralling Ourselves portrays contemporary Israel in a process of transition. Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli communities share a nation-state divided by the separate truths of its conflicting fundamental narratives. This book considers ways of converting those separate and antagonistic narratives from fuel for conflict to seeds of change. Its purpose is to undo the convenient coherence of collective memory and master narratives through fostering a capacious moral imagination able to apprehend diverse, even contentious, stories and truths. Contemporary Israel functions as a case study in an in-depth and interdisciplinary exploration of conflict resolution, viewing Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli documentary film, poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, peace initiatives, and other elements of collective narrative-building through a prism of three analogously themed Shakespearean plays. This comparative methodology is integrated with theoretical perspectives on reconciliation, resilience, critical reflection, and peace education in presenting concrete alternatives to the convenient comforts of the inimical master narratives that perpetuate what can now be seen as a hundred-year war. The readings offered in this book generate perspectives that can be adopted and adapted in relation to each other in the process of moving from a single static narrative of incessant warfare. The first section, 'Seeing in the Dark,' considers rhetoric and identity formation of cultures in transition. Its first half focuses on revenge cultures and reads Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Juliano Mer Khamis's documentary 'Arna's Children' in a fictive and documentary pairing of people stripped of all but revenge. Its second half considers rhetoric and Israeli identities in transition through the prism of Hamlet. Three genre-challenging authors represent Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli narrative identity formation; Yaron Ezrahi, Emile Habiby,and Anton Shammas reflect a hybridity that emphasi

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