Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews (eds.), Considering
counter-narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. x, 381. HB $126.00.
Growing out of two special issues of the journal Narrative
Inquiry, this volume assembles six chapters that “contemplate
the meaning of counter-narratives and their relationship to master or
dominant narratives” (p. x). The book also contains six clusters of
commentaries written in response to each of the focal chapters, along with
rejoinders by the six “primary” authors. As the editors point
out in their introduction to the book, the format of dialogue and
contestation is meant to synergize with the main subject of the volume,
since the concept “counter-narrative” is itself “a
positional category, in tension with another category” (x). By and
large, the organization of the volume is effective and makes for
stimulating reading; occasionally, however, commentators treat the chapter
to which they are ostensibly responding less as an opportunity for
dialogue than as a platform for showcasing their own explanatory
frameworks or descriptive nomenclatures (see, e.g., the commentary by Jaan
Valsiner, 245–76). More generally, the range of issues explored by
the 29 different contributors to the volume – the range of contexts
in which the authors and commentators show narrative and narrative
analysis to be pertinent concerns – suggests the extent to which the
“narrative turn” has taken hold in fields such as social
psychology, gender studies, sociolinguistics, public health, and the other
domains of research represented in the book. But by the same token, the
volume raises the question of whether the contributors share a sense of
what narrative is and how it functions – that is, whether they are
in fact investigating a common object (or set of common objects:
narrative, master narrative, counter-narrative), or rather operating with
more or less distinct conceptions of stories and methodologies for
studying them.
