Coming to Narrative

Arthur P. Bochner is Distinguished University Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. He is the co-author of Understanding Family Communication (Allyn and Bacon); co-editor (with Carolyn Ellis) of Composing Ethnography (AltaMira), Ethnographically Speaking (AltaMira), and the Left Coast Press book series, Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives. He has published more than 100 articles and monographs on close relationships, communication theory, narrative inquiry, autoethnography and genre-bending modes of writing in the human sciences. His current research focuses on memory, narrative, and identity. In 2007, he served as president of the National Communication Association.

• Acknowledgments; Credits; Preface; Chapter 1 Drifting Toward an Academic Life; Chapter 2 Graduate Student Socialization; Chapter 3 Staging a Dissertation; Chapter 4 Raising Consciousness and Teaching Things That Matter; Chapter 5 Double Bind; Chapter 6 Paradigms Shift; Chapter 7 Taking Chances; Chapter 8 Between Obligation and Inspiration; Chapter 9 Disconnecting and Connecting; Chapter 10 Life’s Forward Momentum; Chapter 11 A Twist of Fate; Chapter 12 Healing a Divided Self; Chapter 13 Finishing Touches; Story-Truth;

"The book is a knock-out, a powerful, at times shattering painful narrative. Carefully crafted, its words are chiseled in my brain, It maps a journey many before have taken, but few have had the courage to tell. The best part of reading it is not wanting to stop. There is no in-between here, you're either in all the way, or there is no beginning. But if you are an honest academic, or an honest soul, there is no turning back." Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign