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The Possibility Conditions of Narrative Identity
2019
The focus of this dissertation is narrative identity theory, i.e. the proposition that our sense of self is structured like a story. The imputed advantage of narrativity identity is that it enables great coherence and guidance to our complex lives composed of multiple and often conflicting inner impulses and social demands. The manner in which this is accomplished is that narrativity functions metaphorically as a tacit, formative operation, which transfers the intelligibility inherent in the familiar domain of stories to the more elusive domain of personal identity. Narrativity is an epistemically efficient kind of discourse which can synthesize a multitude of elements into a unity called plot. A plot gives unity to the whole of a story and confers significance to its parts. Both narrativity and metaphoricity are the more recognizable products of an underlying mechanism both share, i.e. productive imagination. This faculty pervasively and continually configures the whole field of ou...
Selves and identities in narrative and discourse
Journal of Pragmatics, 2009
The present volume comprises several contributions to the study of 'self' and 'identity', two notions that in the last decade have become central in many research areas. In Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse three different orientations are represented: the first is rooted in sociolinguistics, the second is ethnomethodologically informed, and the third one draws explicitly on narratives. Despite working in different traditions, the contributions to the volume share the view that self and identity are not essential properties of the individual person but are constituted in talk and social practice. The volume contains an introduction, in which the editors explicate the three different orientations, 13 chapters, and a subject index. According to the editors, in the sociolinguistic tradition, with the exception of Hymes and maybe Labov, narratives were not, until recently, acknowledged as a special genre for identity analysis. Rather, identity was considered to be the result of repeated choices in language use-as the work of Tabouret-Keller and Gumperz demonstrates. In the ethnomethodological tradition, the issue of identity is variously treated. More specifically, Sacks' approach to ''category bound activities'' uses membership categorization analysis (MCA) to explore identities; on the other hand, Critical Discourse Analysis views identities as aspects of larger political and ideological contexts, while conversation analysis (CA) examines identities as locally and situationally occasioned. Finally, narrative approaches take narratives to be the privileged genre for the study of selves and identities and the ordering principle that gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless life. What unifies the chapters of the volume is, according to the editors, the view of narratives as territories where ''identity ontologies'' can be questioned and the conviction that the discursive and narrative processes generating identities are parts of interactive and ''communal'' practices. Amanda Minks' chapter ('Goblins like to hear stories: Miskitu children's narratives of spirit encounters') examines interactive stories told by Miskitu children on Corn Island. Minks focuses on the poetic features, the rhetorical organization, and the social effects of the narratives, suggesting that the children's co-constructed narratives articulate a sense of emplacement in the natural/social/cosmological world. By telling stories and interweaving spirits, landscapes, and known social networks Miskitu children position themselves in a social world that is their own. The second contribution ('Storying as becoming: identity through the telling of conversion') by Cecilia Castillo Ayometzi investigates how Mexicans of an immigrant community come to appropriate and sustain an alternative identity-a ''Christian identity''-brought about through their active participation in a Baptist mission. The tool available for the maintenance of this new identity is a story of conversion, through which tellers reorganize their conception of self and are led into the construction of a collective identity that offers a desirable standing in the community. Catherine Evans Davies ('Language and identity in discourse in the American South: sociolinguistic repertoire as expressive resource in the presentation of self') uses an interactional sociolinguistic methodology to study the style shifting of self-defined ''bidialectal'' speakers of Southern American English. Davies explores the ''reflectivity'' (a cover term for consciousness and awareness) of speakers, demonstrating that there are differing degrees of awareness and differing degrees of ability to shift styles out of context. She also examines the agency of speakers, indicating that differences can be found not only in shifting styles for the presentation of self, but also in crafting a style on the basis of ideological beliefs about Southern English. Isabella Paoletti and Greer Cavallaro Johnson, in their chapter 'Doing being ordinary in an interview narrative with a second generation Italian-Australian woman', combine narrative analysis with a CA approach. The researchers www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Identity as a narrative of autobiography
Journal of Education Culture and Society
This article is a proposal of identity research through its process and narrative character. As a starting point I present a definition of identity understood as the whole life process of finding identification. Next I present my own model of auto/biography-narrative research inspired by hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions of thinking about experiencing reality. I treat auto/biography-narrative research as a means of exploratory conduct, based on the narrator’s biography data, also considering the researcher’s autobiographical thought. In the final part of the article I focus on showing the narrative structure of identity and autobiography. I emphasise this relation in definitions qualifying autobiography as written life narration and identity as a narration of autobiography.
An identity structure in narrative: Discourse functions of identity-in-practice
Narrative Inquiry, 2012
This article refocuses the discussion of identity in narrative and practice by looking at structuring-in-practice and beyond to the discourse functions of identity. The narrative of an Ethiopian Israeli female college student is analyzed, wherein she tells about changing elementary schools — a context mirroring the immediate situation in her new academic setting. The analysis identifies and labels the partial, microgenetic elicitation of identity-attributable imagery in each utterance and then consolidates the accumulation of those images into the various groupings relevant in the narrative. In the particular narrative studied here all consolidated images contrast against the one identity-attributable image that is interactionally advantageous. This result, found in all 28 prototypical narratives in my corpus of 46, is evidence of a poetic identity structuring of narrative serving two discourse functions: (1) metasemantic- the contrastive identity work creates and indexes the narrat...
scielo.org.co
Narrative is a system of understanding that we use to construct and express meaning in our daily lives. The stories we narrate are not just resources for the development and presentation of the individual self; they allow us to see how identity is constructed within social and cultural worlds . Schools and communities play a powerful role in shaping students identities; the ways in which stories are told and the identities they create are influenced by the environment in which they take place. In this paper, by using excerpts from a conversation I had with a High School student in an urban school in Bogotá, I will discuss how narrative analysis can be used to understand the way students construct their identities within their schools and communities. First, I will present the theoretical contexts linking narrative with self-construction. Next, I will discuss the methodological implications in the process of collecting and representing experiences highlighting the possibilities of narrative to make visible the construction of identities. Then pieces of a narrative told in a research interview will be analyzed illustrating different approaches of narrative analysis. The paper will conclude with a section that outlines the implications of using narrative in educational research.
Narrative Identity: A Personal Roadmap
2022
The author addresses the theme of narrative identity in an interpretative itinerary that employs sociological, psychological and psychoanalytic concepts to explore the circular relationship between sense of identity, self/other recognition and the space-time perspective. Observing the solitude of the individual in late-modern society, the second part of the book proposes a way out: becoming actively involved in the crafting of our lives by writing our own story. Autobiography is not a melancholic withdrawal but a way to restart the journey of life with greater awareness of one's limits and possibilities. In addition to being a learning process, developing the negatives of one's life can foster a sense of both serenity and self-responsibility. The story could have been different, but when we try to tell it honestly we may learn to love it a little more or at least see and accept it for what it truly is.
Representation and Enactment in Autobiographical Narrative
2001
Speech is multifunctional, both communicating denotational content and establishing interactional positions for interlocutors. In some cases, the denotational and interactional functions of speech interrelate and even depend on each other. This paper describes a type of speech event in which the interrelations between denotation and interaction are particularly salient autobiographical narratives in which the events described and the relationships enacted run parallel. Further study of such speech events promises to illuminate how the denota-tional and interactional functions of speech can sometimes contribute to each other.
From the point of view of hermeneutic psychology, the self is a product of action and of representation, with narratives of the self as a major representational and structuring principle. In this sense reality is interwoven with narrative fictions. Experimental fictions and reflexive narratives are therefore a prime cognitive instrument in the development of complex structures of self-identity and subjetivity.
Researching Identity Through Narrative Approaches
2014
This chapter discusses the development of narrative approaches in the study of identity formation and change in educational linguistics. Narrative approaches are promising for examining identity because they allow researchers to study how people position themselves in relation to larger societal structures and macrolevel discourses. Narratives can be analyzed to study identities as they relate to ideological topics such as beliefs and attitudes, and they are especially well suited for identifying the discursive positions that individuals take up in the stories they tell when making sense of their own and others’ lives. In educational linguistics, narratives have become increasingly used to understand how people negotiate their identities in classrooms and in their everyday life. The analysis of narrative encompasses both life history autobiographic narratives as well as more interactionally contextualized narratives that take place in educational contexts. Those who are interested i...
Who am I? Narration and its contribution to self and identity
Theory & Psychology, 2011
This article critically examines the recent turn to narratives as tools for identity construction and identity analysis. While self and sense of self will be used largely as synonyms, the attempt is made to draw up a distinction between self (sense of self) on one hand and identity on the other. Rather than starting with a definition of features and functions of self and identity, I propose to start from the identification of three practical challenges that self and identity formation processes are facing. These three challenges will be explicated in terms of dilemmatic spaces within which identity activities—and at their center: narrating—are “navigated.” They consist of: (i) a successful diachronic navigation between constancy and change, (ii) the establishment of a synchronic connection between sameness and difference (between self and other), and (iii) the management of agency between the double-arrow of a person-to-world versus a world-to-person direction of fit. While biograph...