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Book review: Franziska Gygax and Miriam A Locher (eds), Narrative Matters in
Medical Contexts across Disciplines GygaxFranziskaLocherMiriam A (eds),
Narrative Matters in Medical Co...

Article  in  Discourse and Society · November 2017

DOI: 10.1177/0957926517721078b

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680 Discourse & Society 28(6)

travellers as the Other. For Piazza, empathy is encouraged in one documentary, whereas
the other focuses on the stereotypical and exoticised aspects of travelling culture.
While the book pays detailed attention to the linguistics and visual semiotics of televi-
sion, little discussion is made of the use of sound and music. Lorenzo-Dus, in her explo-
ration of commemoration and collective memories on television news and documentaries
(Chapter 5), acknowledges the need to analyse the aural aspects of TV discourse to fully
capture its nature as an audio–visual medium. However, she only mentions ‘the use of
poignant music when showing footage of the culturally traumatic event’ (p. 116) once
without any elaboration. Likewise, in Chapter 7, in her analysis of different formats of
MasterChef across America, Australia and Britain, Haarman writes of ‘non-invasive
music’ (p. 161), again without further explanation of what that might mean. Other than
these two examples, no other references towards the aural aspects of television is made
in the book; more considerations towards the ways in which sound and music also con-
tribute to television discourses would be much welcomed.
While Part 1 focuses on research conducted by academics, the second part of the book
features industry interviews and reflections. These thoughts from the industry practition-
ers provide a valuable counter-perspective to academic analyses that, as the editors note,
attributes intention to television discourses ‘with often limited direct knowledge and
appreciation of the production processes, its practicalities and imperatives’ (p. xv). For
instance, Bonfigliolo’s chapter is answered by investigative journalist Cathay Newman
(Chapter 9), who suggests that the visual beheading of obese people in news media is
simply due to legal restrictions that require permission to display a person’s face on TV.
Likewise, in response to Piazza’s chapter, documentary filmmaker Olivia Lichtenstein
(Chapter 13) suggests that the different attitudes adopted by the documentaries on travel-
ling culture may simply be down to the channel they were shown on – a programme
screened via a public service broadcaster would be very different in tone than one from
a commercial channel. Through this counterpoint between media producers and the cor-
responding academic explorations, the volume offers an interesting and rounded account
of the complexities of TV discourses.
Ultimately, this edited collection covers a multitude of qualitative, quantitative and
reflexive methodological approaches to the study of discourse in news, documentaries
and the MasterChef franchise. The individual chapters are clearly written with special-
ised academic language largely explained, resulting in a book that is accessible to readers
of different disciplinary backgrounds and levels of knowledge who are interested in the
roles that semiotics and linguistics play in the media.

Franziska Gygax and Miriam A Locher (eds), Narrative Matters in Medical Contexts across Disciplines,
Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2015; vii + 217 pp., $135.00 (hbk, ebook).

Reviewed by: Bingjun Yang, Department of English, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, People’s
Republic of China

Gygax and Locher’s Narrative Matters aims to show the importance of narrative
practices to health, advocating for a central position for narratives within the medical
Book reviews 681

humanities. Containing contributions from 15 authors from the fields of linguistics, liter-
ary and cultural studies, clinical psychology, psychiatry and medicine, the volume pur-
sues an interdisciplinary dialogue on topics ranging from narrative texts and practices to
the relation between narratives and medical humanities and dealing with texts as diverse
as autobiographies, graphic novels, medical treatises and reports, short stories, reflective
writing, online narratives and creative writing.
Narrative may be either written or spoken to be practised for specific purposes. In Part
I, written narrative texts on illness and medicine are approached from a literary and cul-
tural studies perspective. Chapter 2 focuses on representations of autism in selected
American autobiographies, where perseverance and success have begun to replace
notions of disability and defect. Chapter 3 argues that since language is the means to
express absence/loss, autothanatographies tend to become actual life writing texts as
omnipresent representations of dying and death. A third important form of written narra-
tive, historical accounts, is covered in Chapter 4; here, different types of pox accounts are
analysed to demonstrate that the narrative form offers the patients a way to make sense
of their suffering.
After having demonstrated the significance of narratives, Part II shifts to narrative
practices in health contexts from the perspectives of psychiatry, psychology and linguis-
tics. Illness narratives in the psychotherapeutic session are analysed before prototypical
patterns of narrative self-thematisation can be identified in the context of illness, suffer-
ing and deficiency (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 uses extracts from transcribed interviews and
video clips placed online to show how the patient’s voice has been given space, and thus
other patients can share it as a transient ‘third space’ that allows them to explore new
subject positions in their narratives. Narratives in computer-mediated contexts are ana-
lysed in Chapter 7 to demonstrate how interactants engage in metadiscourse about
doctor–patient interaction and co-construct the narrative through intertextual strategies.
Chapter 8 addresses a special form of communication: reflective writing focused on
encounters with memorable patients, which is found to be a valuable tool for students to
become aware of their clinical communication skills and the narrative core on which
such skills are based.
The history of the medical humanities presented in Part III shows that compassion
tends to overshadow the need for a structural analysis of medicine and medical care and
that critical medical studies and interdisciplinary theory integration should be encour-
aged (Chapter 9). Chapter 10 argues, however, that present-day medical students are
quite ambivalent about incorporating narrative into medical practice, having uncritically
accepted the dominant paradigm of biomedicine.
The ‘narrative turn’ which began in the past century has resulted in numerous find-
ings, but with various definitions of narrative no consensus has by far been reached on
many key issues. Usually narrative is taken as one of the key constituents of human
identity, self-representation and cultural transmission, being embedded in larger dis-
courses. Sociolinguists and discourse researchers now raise questions about the role of
narrative in communication, and many regard storytelling as a fundamental ‘discourse
unit’ that is acquired in the process of socialisation. Through a variety of approaches,
this collection shows the richness and scope of the concept of narrative and its signifi-
cance for discourse studies.
682 Discourse & Society 28(6)

Recent work on how narrators position themselves and others in the storyworlds has
led to the study of identity construction and positioning theory, focusing on materials
such as life stories and small stories. Such narratives are pervasive in medicine, not only
in patients’ presentation of their medical problems, but also as a crucial part of profes-
sional work. By demonstrating how narratives in medical contexts inspire and expand
theoretical research in different disciplines, this collection deepens discourse analysis in
the medical contexts. Foregrounding the narrative construction of illness, and looking
into how illness narratives can be understood and analysed, the book helps open perspec-
tives to see how narratives shape people’s experience in medical contexts and in other
texts as a useful communicative means. Two significant insights out of these perspec-
tives are prominent: empowerment is usually evoked whether narratives are experienced
by the suffering autobiographer, the patient, the practitioner, the medical student or the
reader; readers may become aware of the many different angles from which narratives
can be analysed and understood, and benefit from the variety and multivocality of narra-
tives on the experience of illness.
One shortcoming, if any, is some imbalance in author and participant backgrounds,
which weakens one of the two aims of this volume: to advocate a central position of nar-
ratives in medical humanities. Most authors work in areas other than medicine, none of
the three authors of studies in medical humanities is a medical professional, and only two
studies employed medical students as participants. Although it may be difficult to per-
suade medical professionals to join in discourse research, such a collaboration should
prove a worthwhile endeavour for this strand of research.

Jan Osborn, Community Colleges and First-generation Students: Academic Discourse in the Writing
Classroom, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; ix + 200 pp., US$100.00 (hbk), US$79.99
(ebook).

Reviewed by: Pamela Olmos-López, Faculty of Language Sciences, Benemérita Universidad

Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico

In this book, Osborn takes a critical literacy studies approach to explore academic dis-
course in the writing classroom. Although the study focuses on the very specific context
of a community college in California, it raises issues that are applicable whenever mul-
ticulturalism and multilingualism are a feature. The introductory chapter sets out the
aims and context of the project, describing the characteristics, purpose and history of
community colleges. Following the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the
author aims to provide a critical view of the writing classroom in community colleges in
their role of gatekeepers for higher education for students with diverse socio-economic,
cultural and language backgrounds. Osborn’s case study seeks to understand the com-
plexity of these elements in the literacy practices of the composition classroom.
Chapter 2 discusses the concept of identities, considering issues of diversity, power
and social relations, as students of community colleges are characterised by the diversity
of their backgrounds. The author then discusses how the multiculturalism and multilin-
gualism of students intersect in the writing classroom. Osborn devotes Chapter 3 to the

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