Overview

It has been widely acknowledged that in the past few decades, there has been a 'narrative turn' - an interest in the storied nature of human life. However, very little work has discussed the role of imagination. Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life looks at how stories and imagination come together in our daily lives, influencing not only our thoughts about what we see and do, but also our contemplation of what is possible and what our limitations are. Without imagination, we are forever doomed to the here and now. But our imaginations are always influenced by our own particular experiences, which we recount to ourselves and others through stories - both told and untold. Combining scholarly research with personal experience, Andrews examines how story and imagination come together in different areas of life such as education, politics, and aging. She focuses on the importance of the narrative imagination when listening to the experiences of others who have very different experiences of the world, asking if it is ever possible to understand the suffering of others. She asks what kind of stories influence our thinking about who we are becoming in our aging selves. In the chapter on teaching, she looks at the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship and the stultifying effect of some educational practices and policies on the imagination. The discussion on education and global citizenship leads directly into the chapter on political narratives, where Andrews uses the example of Barack Obama as one of the most strategic storytellers of our time.Narrative and imagination are integrally tied to one another; this is immediately clear to anyone who stops to think about stories real and imagined, about the past or in a promised, or feared, future. In asking why and how this is so, Andrews directs us to ruminate on what it means to be human.

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9780199812394

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Reviews

This book is a gem -- an imaginative, scholarly voyage into the rich territory where the possible and the actual must live together in the stories we tell to ourselves and to each other. -- Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life is a delightful and perceptive book. Molly Andrews is a master of what she refers to as 'The integration of personal experience with rigorous scholarship.' Her book is full of insights. -- Mary Warnock This is an engaging and insightful book by the internationally renowned scholar of political narratives, Molly Andrews's. In this book, unlike in her previous works, she is not focusing on a particular research project but integrates her previous works into reflections on different aspects of the role of imagination in everyday life. Unlike some other scholars who see 'heroic lives' and 'everyday lives' as mutually exclusive, the power of Molly Andrews work is her ability to show how the two are interwoven in the lives and imaginations of political activists - and the rest of us - in different parts of the world. -- Nira Yuval-Davis, Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging , University of East London [Narrative Imagination] provides useful methodological insights into the work of oral historians--the inherent tensions in suspending disbelief when interviewing subjects and the difficulty of truly apprehending the world of others... The sauce of this book is thickened by Andrews's vivid autoethnographic style-she describes brief moments of clarity while sharing space with two million people at Obama's second inauguration or talking with her daughter's friends about growing up. Such encounters show that there are stories everywhere, and so our work as oral history scholars and teachers is to stir conversations that embrace the transformative role of our imaginative, and sometimes imagined, lives. --Oral History

This book is a gem -- an imaginative, scholarly voyage into the rich territory where the possible and the actual must live together in the stories we tell to ourselves and to each other. -- Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life is a delightful and perceptive book. Molly Andrews is a master of what she refers to as 'The integration of personal experience with rigorous scholarship.' Her book is full of insights. -- Mary Warnock This is an engaging and insightful book by the internationally renowned scholar of political narratives, Molly Andrews. In this book, unlike in her previous works, she is not focusing on a particular research project but integrates her previous works into reflections on different aspects of the role of imagination in everyday life. Unlike some other scholars who see 'heroic lives' and 'everyday lives' as mutually exclusive, the power of Molly Andrews work is her ability to show how the two are interwoven in the lives and imaginations of political activists - and the rest of us - in different parts of the world. -- Nira Yuval-Davis, Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London

Author Information

Molly Andrews is Professor of Political Psychology and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London. Her research interests include the psychological basis of political commitment, psychological challenges posed by societies in transition to democracy, patriotism, conversations between generations, and gender and aging.

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