Part I of The Politics of Storytelling also contains the table of contents, preface and references for the entire book.
From the beginning of the chapter:
My aim in this chapter is to explore the relationship between violence and
storytelling, and to examine the ways in which stories help people cope
with the consequences of violence.
Because violence, like storytelling, occurs in the contested space of
intersubjectivity, its most devastating effects are not on individuals per se
but on the fields of interrelationship that constitute their lifeworlds. This
is why violent threats against those one loves, or the loss of family and
homeland, can be more damaging than any assault against oneself, and
why a person’s powerlessness to speak or act against such events is so
terrible; for in violence one can act only under the threat of pain, of
degradation or of death – and speak only to debase or incriminate oneself,
or assent to the other’s will. In such situations, recovering one’s freedom
to speak and act becomes a matter of life and death, for, as Hannah
Arendt puts it, a “life without speech and without action ... is literally
dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer
lived among men” (1958:176).
...