Life and Narrative : The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience

Life and Narrative examines the perennial mystery of how people encounter, manage, and inhabit a self and a world of their own - and others' - creation and the ramifications of these creations. From both literary and social science perspectives, this volume grapples with the process of how life and narrative interact with each other.

Brian Schiff is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology and Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention at the American University of Paris. A graduate of The University of Chicago's Committee on Human Development, Schiff's research uses narrative in order to examine the meeting place between person, social relationships and culture. He is editor of Rereading Personal Narrative and Life Course, New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development and author of A New Narrative for Psychology.

A. Elizabeth McKim is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, and a founding member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative. She is co-editor of the journal Narrative Works: Issues, Investigations, & Interventions, and the co-author (with William L. Randall) of Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old.

Sylvie Patron is a Lecturer and Research Supervisor in French Language and Literature at the Université Paris Diderot. A specialist in the history and epistemology of literary theory, she has published Le Narrateur: Introduction à la théorie narrative, La Mort du narrateur et autres essais, and the collective volume Théorie, analyse, interprétation des récits. She is the author of numerous articles, published in both French and English, on the narrator and other problems in narrative theory.