Introduction

This collection of essays is dedicated to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, one of the leading contemporary narratologists, a critic and literary theorist who exerted a major influence on the shaping of this field. She also supervised the doctoral dissertations of over forty younger scholars, some of whom have extended narrative analysis to other disciplines.

Narratology, the theoretically oriented study of narrative, may be intradisciplinary or interdisciplinary. Rimmon-Kenan's earliest work, starting with her doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Frank Kermode and published in 1977 as The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James (University of Chicago Press), was largely of the former kind, though aided by categories provided by philosophy (in particular, logic) as well as literary criticism. This was followed by a number of analytic studies of different writers, such as Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Vladimir Nabokov. The methodology at this point was that of descriptive poetics: a system of structural concepts was used to shed new light on specific texts, further refining the system itself as a result of that process.

In her second book, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (Methuen, 1983),Rimmon-Kenan systematized, complemented, and amended the best up-to-date achievements of the study of narrative. The book promptly became required reading in fiction and theory courses throughout the scholarly world. It was translated into several languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Finnish, Czech) and repeatedly reprinted. In 2002 an expanded edition came out as part of a special publication by Routledge of the ten best-sellers of the New Accents series.

The mid-1980s saw a crisis of descriptive poetics—for a variety of internal and external reasons. Rimmon-Kenan was one of the first to realize that one way of dealing with this crisis was to explore other disciplines in which narrative acts play an important role, such as law, historiography, and psychoanalysis. She shifted to the interdisciplinary study of narrative, in which the narratives studied are affiliated with one discipline while the methodology and the system of concepts used are based on another branch of learning. In 1987, the research project that she conducted within the framework of the Center for Literary Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem led to the publication of a collection of essays, Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature (Routledge/Methuen), which she edited.

From the mid-eighties on, the courses that Rimmon-Kenan taught and the graduate work that she supervised were devoted to the intersection of literary studies and other fields. Her 1996 book, A Glance beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity (Ohio State University Press), is an epistemological approach to narrative that also addresses ethical issues. It was largely this approach that gave rise to the subject of the conference held in her honor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in November 2005, "Narrative as a Way of Thinking." Selections of papers from that conference are now being published by Literature and Medicine and Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. The latter journal is sponsored by the Hebrew University's School of Literatures, of which Rimmon-Kenan was the founding director.

Not only artists but also scholars can transmute painful experience into fruitful work. Stimulated by her own health problems and by friends' illnesses, Rimmon-Kenan translated her concern with ideological aspects of disease and health-care issues into a literary investigation. In recent years she concentrated her research on illness narratives. In the current cooperative project of the two journals, two papers are most directly associated with the issues of social and professional ethics regarding the state of public health and cases of individual illness: Shira Wolosky's "Medical-Industrial Discourses in Muriel Rukeyser's 'The Book of the Dead'" in Literature and Medicine and Rita Charon's "Narrative Lights on Clinical Acts: What We, Like Maisie, Know," in Partial Answers. The essays collected in this issue of Literature and Medicine, including Wolosky's article, deal with narratives of trauma, personal (Nirit Salmon-Bitton's "'Himself He Devises Too for Company': Self-Making in Samuel Beckett's Company") or communal (Amos Goldberg's "Trauma, Narrative...