Storying the Good life: Selfhood and Morality through the Biographical Narrative’ Storyline. (original) (raw)

The Life Story Approach: A Continental View

Annual Review of Sociology, 1984

This review examines recent developments in the use of life stories (i.e. oral, autobiographical narratives), placing particular emphasis on work done in continental Europe. Two main trends are identified. The first focuses primarily upon the symbolic in social life and meaning in individual lives. Ways of collecting and analyzing life stories within this perspective (e.g. the narrative interview, objective hermeneutics) are described. The second main trend considers interviewees as informants-in ethnographic fashion. The aim is to get accurate descriptions of the interviewees' life trajectories in social contexts, in order to uncover the patterns of social relations and the special processes that shaped them. The emphasis here is on comparison, on searching for negative cases, and on reaching the point of saturation whereby the sociologist's mental representation of given patterns may be generalized to a whole social milieu. The first trend is now developing faster in Germany and the Anglo-Saxon countries, while the second attracts more attention in the Latin countries of Europe and America. Because life stories are put to multiple uses, no standard methodology is expected to appear in the near future. But several well-tested ways of collecting, analyzing, and publishing life stories should emerge. Life stories are shown to be a rich ground for the formulation of substantive theories, which are conceived of as interpretations rather than as scientific explanations. Different ways of assessing the validity of interpretations are mentioned. Work done with

Young Adult Moral Exemplars: The Making of Self Through Stories

Journal of Research on Adolescence, 2005

The purpose of our research was to explore the differences between young adult moral exemplars and comparison individuals by studying their life stories. Moral exemplars were nominated for their extraordinary moral commitment to the social organizations where they volunteered or worked. Forty moral exemplars, along with 40 matched comparison individuals (total N 5 80), participated in a life narrative interview. These interviews were coded for specific narrative features such as narrative tone, awareness of others' suffering, helpers and enemies, agency and communion themes, redemptive experiences, contamination scenes, personal ideology, and future goals. Moral exemplars differed from comparison individuals on agency themes, redemptive experiences, contamination scenes, awareness of others' suffering, enemies, ideological depth, and future goals. These findings are discussed within a narrative identity development framework.

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.

" Life as Narrative " Revisited

Jerome Bruner is undoubtedly one of the most influential and debated narrative theorists in cultural studies and an important figure in the exchange of ideas between literature, cultural studies, and psychology. Recently (2002; 2008), his work on narrative cognition and " folk psychology " (1990) has gained new vitality in David Herman's work (2002; 2008); whereas Galen Strawson (2004: 428–46) has foregrounded Brun-er's thought by targeting him, among others, in his own criticism of nar-rativity. The purpose of this article is not to evaluate either the whole debate or Bruner's whole contribution to cultural psychology or narrative theory but to study one single article, " Life as Narrative " (Bruner 1987), and especially one of its key arguments. I want to try out the idea that this article, far from expressing some permanent core of Bruner's thought, remains a rare exception and largely unendorsed in Bruner's later work. More specifically, I shall claim, first, that Bruner's position within " the metaphoric discourse on narrative " (which interprets human life, experience , action, identity, or self as narrative) is not nearly as unambiguous as the title of the article might imply and, second, that Bruner's later work does not endorse but rather challenges the radical thesis, according to which telling autobiographical stories and experiencing the world through these stories allows us to " become the narratives by which we 'tell about' our lives " (Bruner 1987: 15). Above all, his later thoughts on the play of folk psychological " canonicity " and its " breach " in actual narratives challenge the easy continuity between life and narrative. Narrative as a metaphor for life has been a vital part of theorizing narrative in social research at least since Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1984 [1981]). There is no modesty or hesitation in MacIntyre's famous argument that it is " because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the * This article is part of my larger project on the conceptual history of narrative, funded by the Academy of Finland. I am grateful to Lisa Muszynski and my reviewers for excellent and helpful comments.

Biography and Form of Life. Toward a Cultural Analysis of Narrative Interviews

Sociológia - Slovak Sociological Review, 2019

This paper introduces the concept of form of life, socially shaped and shared meaning structures of actors situated in material contexts, as a tool for the cultural-sociological analysis of biographies and life trajectories. Following the principles of structural hermeneutics, such an analysis of life-forms treats the interview text as manifestation of a deeper holistic meaning structure, embodied in narratives, binaries and metaphors, without suppressing the contradictions and tensions inherent in every form of life. Finally, the empirical applicability of our approach is illustrated with examples from the qualitative strand of a broader longitudinal panel study as well as an in-depth case study.

Introduction: Analysing Personal Narratives

Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience, 2007

This chapter looks at how life histories have featured in anthropology, and asks how we could be making more consistent and creative use of them. Many 'ordinary', non-famous people have led extraordinary lives, living through dramatic social and political transformations. Anthropologists in the field have unique opportunities to record the lives of those who become our friends and acquaintances, but the very particularities of these narratives can make them seem difficult to analyse. The author proposes that historical consciousness - the individual's awareness of living in a particular place and time, making a life in the face of particular constraints and opportunities - provides a powerful framework for analysis, and vividly brings to life the interface between historical events and personal experience. The stories in this book have been produced in the dialogical encounter between a narrator and an anthropologist, and the contributions in this volume break new ground in their profound consideration of the nuances involved in this process, and the many possible audiences that such personal narratives may be designed to reach. The author argues that life stories are a fertile but still undervalued resource for a more multivocal anthropology that can do justice to personal experience.