Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

An Adaptation of Life: Ethnographically Grounded Fiction as a Method of Inquiry into Personal Accounts of Traumatic Events

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
True Event Adaptation

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture ((PSADVC))

Abstract

This chapter relays traumatic events undergone by survivors of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. They have been re-storied into an ethnographically grounded work of fiction, drawing on collaboration with these protagonists. The work takes the form of a Web-based dialogued stream, subdivided into 33 vignettes, allowing for random access and using reverse chronology—in order to mimic not only the flows and whims of memory but also those of the Internet. While making a case for arts-based research as a valid method of inquiry, it argues that both processes (i.e. storying from lived experience and re-storying from autobiographical accounts for research purposes) constitute balancing acts between figuration and disfiguration that attempt to bridge the gap between sensuous experience and interpretation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Bibliography

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press, 1965.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Dialogical Imagination. M. Holquist (ed.), Caryl Emerson, and M. Holquist (trans.). University of Texas Press, 1981 [1975].

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Problems of Dovstoevsky’s Poetics. Caryl Emerson (trans.). University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1972].

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Caryl Emerson and M. Holquist (eds) and V. W. McGee (trans.). University of Texas Press, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. P. Morris (ed.). Bloomsbury Academic, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  • Balzac, Honore. “The Unknown Masterpiece.” In The Human Comedy. Wentworth Press, 2016 [1831].

    Google Scholar 

  • Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Hill & Wang, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Roland Barthes. Macmillan, 1988 [1975].

    Google Scholar 

  • Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. Cornell University Press, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester University Press, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  • Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, 1968 [1949].

    Google Scholar 

  • Cole, Andra L., and J. Gary Knowles, eds. Lives in Context: The Art of Life History Research. AltaMira Press, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Couser, Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Cosson, Alex, and Rita L. Irwin, eds. A/r/tography: Rendering Self Through Arts-Based Living Inquiry. Pacific Educational Press, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. “A Thousand Plateaus.” Brian Massumi (trans). Vol (II) Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Continuum, 2004 [1980].

    Google Scholar 

  • De Maistre, Xavier. Voyage Outour ma Chambre. Flammarion, 2003 [1794].

    Google Scholar 

  • De Man, Paul. The Autobiography as a Disfiguration. In The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Columbia University Press, 1984.

    Google Scholar 

  • Denzin, Norman K. “The Many Faces of Emotionality: Reading Persona.” C. Ellis and M. G. Flaherty (eds). Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience. Sage, 1992: pp. 17–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (4th ed.). Sage, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Diversi, Marcelo. “Glimpses of Street Life: Representing Lived Experience Through Short Stories.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998: pp. 131–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doherty, Willie. “30th January 1972.” [Multimedia Installation] Retrospective Exhibition, IMMA, 2002 [1993].

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. False Memory. C. Christov-Barkargiev and C. MacGiolla (eds). Merrel, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground and The Double. Penguin Classics, 2009 [1864].

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner, eds. Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. AltaMira, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  • Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fludernick, Monica. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. Routledge, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  • Frank, Katherine. “The Management of Hunger.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 6, no. 4, 2000: pp. 474–488.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday, 1959.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrington, Walter. Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life. Sage, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hutchigs, Tim. “Wiring Death: Dying, Grieving and Remembering on the Internet.” In D. Davies and C. Park (eds), Emotion, Identity and Death: Mortality Across Disciplines. Ashgate Publishing, 2012: pp. 43–58.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols. M. L. Von Franz and J. L. Henderson (eds). Picador & Pan Books Ltd., 1978 [1964].

    Google Scholar 

  • Labov, William. “Narrative Pre-Construction.” Narrative Inquiry, Special Edition, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981 [1968].

    Google Scholar 

  • Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, 2004 [1995].

    Google Scholar 

  • Lawrence, David Herbert. “Studies in Classical American Literature.” Vol II. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.H. Lawrence. E. Greenspan, L. Vasey, and J. Worthen (eds). Cambridge University Press, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leavy, Patricia. Method Meets Art. The Guilford Press, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. The University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962].

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “The Living and the Dead.” Tristes Tropiques. Penguin, 2012 [1955].

    Google Scholar 

  • Llewellyn, Nicholas. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c. 1500 – c. 1800. Reaktion, 1991

    Google Scholar 

  • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marwick, Alice, and Nicole B. Ellison. “There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven! Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol. 56, no. 3, 2012: pp. 378–400.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Eric J., and Geraldine V. Gwynne. A Life Apart: A Pilot Study of Residential Institutions for the Physically Handicapped and the Young Chronic Sick. Tavistock Publications, 1972.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Nancy. But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives. Columbia University Press, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Neumann, Birgit. “Fictions of Memory: Die Allgegenwart von Erinnerung und Identitat in Literatur (Kanadische) und Kulturwissenschaft.” Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (eds). Medien und Culturelle Erinnerung. Walter de Gruyter, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pandolfi, Maria. “Memory Within the Body: Women’s Narrative and Identity in a Southern Italian Village.” Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar (eds). Duke University Press, 2007 [1991].

    Google Scholar 

  • Payne, David. “Autobiology.” Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. C. Ellis and A. P. Bochner (eds). AltaMira, 1996: pp. 49–75.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plummer, Ken. Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds. Routledge, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richardson, Laurel. “Poetics, Dramatics, and Transgressive Validity: The Case of the Skipped Line.” Sociological Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 4, 1993: pp. 695–710.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Riessman, Catherine Kolher. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Sage, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rinehart, Robert. “Fictional Methods in Ethnography: Believability, Specks of Glass, and Chekhov.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998: pp. 200–225.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford University Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schindler’s List. Dir. Stephen Spielberg [Film] Amblin Entertainment, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography: Extravagant Lives, Extravagant Questions.” Biography vol. 24, no. 1 (Winter) 2001: pp. 1–14.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Swidler, Ann. “Culture in Actions: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review, vol. 51, no. 2, 1986: pp. 273–286.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. University of Chicago Press, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • The Great Dictator. Dir. Charles Chaplin [Film] Charles Chaplin Productions, 1940.

    Google Scholar 

  • The Suicide Squad. Dir. David Ayer [Film] Warner Brothers, 2016.

    Google Scholar 

  • Veale, Kylie. “Online Memorialization: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape for Remembering the Dead.” Fibreculture, vol. 3, 2004. Available at: http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-014-online-memorialisation-the-web-as-a-collective-memorial-landscape-for-remembering-the-dead/. Accessed January 2018.

  • Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse, Penguin, 1927.

    Google Scholar 

  • Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing. Verso, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Ester T. Roura

Authors
  1. Ester T. Roura
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ester T. Roura .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media, Film and Communication, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Davinia Thornley

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Roura, E.T. (2018). An Adaptation of Life: Ethnographically Grounded Fiction as a Method of Inquiry into Personal Accounts of Traumatic Events. In: Thornley, D. (eds) True Event Adaptation. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97322-7_9

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation