Public and private narratives

This essay examines a conference on narrative. The field of narrative studies is by nature interdisciplinary, which leads to certain strengths and weaknesses, both of which were evident during the conference. On the one hand, as a result of the myriad approaches to and definitions of narrative and narrative analysis, the conference perhaps lacked a sense of coherence. However, the conference showed that overriding this weakness in narrative studies is the fruitful cross-fertilization that can occur when a field is truly interdisciplinary. Thus, concepts and theories can and do travel from one discipline to another, gaining new meaning and providing new insight on the way.