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Narrative Inquiry - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2000
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2000
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Autobiographical Time
Author(s): Jens Brockmeierpp.: 51–73 (23)More LessRecently, a number of studies have drawn attention to the narrative fabric of autobiographical identity construction. In this process, time plays a pivotal role, both as a structure and object of construction. In telling our lives, we deal not only with the classical time modalities of past, present, and future, but also with the different temporal orders of natural, cultural, and individual processes. We find all forms of linguistic constructions of time, such as tense systems, tropes, anachronies, and the use of specific narrative genres. In this paper, I shall argue that in the process of autobiographical identity construction a particular synthesis of cultural and individual orders of time takes place. The result is autobiographical time, the time of one’s life. For this synthesis the form of narrative is not only the most adequate form, it is the only form in which this most complex mode of human time construction can exist at all. Discussing various case studies, I shall distinguish six different narrative models of autobiographical time: the linear, circular, cyclical, spiral, static, and fragmentary model. To study how people make use of these models in their autobiographical narratives is to investigate how we become immersed into the fabric of culture and, at the same time, express our unique individuality.
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Autobiography, Mediated Action, and the Development of Moral Identity
Author(s): Mark B. Tappanpp.: 81–109 (29)More LessThis paper explores a sociocultural approach to the development of moral identity, by considering the recently published autobiography of Ingo Hasselbach. Hasselbach, the founder (in 1991) of the National Alternative neo-Nazi party in East Germany, writes about his childhood and youth, how and why he embraced the neo-Nazi perspective, and how and why he ultimately repudiated the movement that he had helped to create. The analysis of Hasselbach’s story employs a “mediated action” approach to identity formation (Penuel & Wertsch, 1995; Wertsch, 1998). Such an approach entails taking human action as the starting point for the study of identity development, and understanding that mediated action, rather than an inner sense of identity, continuity, or sameness, provides the primary unit of analysis. In bringing a sociocultural perspective to bear on Hasselbach’s autobiographical narrative, this paper thus highlights the connections that emerge in his autobiography between his changing/developing sense of moral identity and his moral actions and interactions in the world. In so doing, it explores and explicates the relationship between Hasselbach’s moral identity and the sociocultural context in which it develops.
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Narrative Repair of Threatened Identity
Author(s): Robert W. Schraufpp.: 127–145 (19)More LessIn terms of positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), a person who has lost a contest may be said to have been forcibly positioned as a ‘loser.’ This threat to social identity requires some repair. Narrators may then tell stories in which they re-position themselves and other actors—collaborators, judges, publics—in new plots (“the real story”) that exonerate them and repair their threatened social identities. This narrative positioning of the other is also a reflexive positioning of the self, and comprises a careful crafting of one’s persona. These dynamics are explored in stories about carnival contests celebrated annually in Andalucía, Spain. In these contests, minstrel groups prepared for months in advance compete with one another for formal prizes before singing their repertoire on the streets. Narratives of identity repair are examined from the autores (directors) of groups that have lost in these contests. (Narrative Identity, Positioning Theory, Conversation Analysis, Carnival, Spain)
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Interactional Positioning and Narrative Self-construction
Author(s): Stanton E.F. Worthampp.: 157–184 (28)More LessMany have proposed that autobiographical stories do more than describe a pre-existing self. Sometimes narrators can change who they are, in part, by telling stories about themselves. But how does this narrative self-construction happen? Most explanations rely on the representational function of autobiographical discourse. These representational accounts of narrative self-construction are necessarily incomplete, because autobiographical narratives have interactional as well as representational functions. While telling their stories autobiographical narrators often enact a characteristic type of self, and through such performances they can become that type of self. A few others have proposed that interactional positioning is central to narrative self-construction, but none has given an adequate, systematic account of how narrative discourse functions to position narrator and audience in the interactional event of storytelling. This article describes an approach to analyzing the interactional positioning accomplished through autobiographical narrative, and it illustrates this approach by analyzing data from one oral autobiographical narrative.
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Narrative Identity Empiricized: A Dialogical and Positioning Approach to Autobiographical Research Interviews
Author(s): Gabriele Lucius-Hoene and Arnulf Deppermannpp.: 199–222 (24)More LessNarrative identity has achieved a scientific status as an elaborate concept of the storied nature of human experience and personal identity. Yet, many questions remain as to its empirical substrate. By exploring the pragmatic aspect of narrative research interviewing, i.e., the performative and positioning aspects of the narrative situation and the narrative product, as well as its particular autoepistemological and communicative tasks, this article tries to bridge the gap between the theoretical concept of narrative identity and the act of constructing identity in research interviewing.Research data generated by autobiographical interviews are usually regarded and analyzed as monological narratives drawn from autobiographical memory. Narrative research interviewing, however, is always a dialogical, pragmatic activity: Narrator and researcher establish an interpersonal relationship made up of institutional, imaginative, socio-categorial and other communicative frames which are enacted by both partners during the interview. This pragmatic constitution of the interview as an interactive process calls for a communicative and constructivist approach to oral narratives which reveals different levels of the listener’s conceptions of himself or herself and the research situation in the narrator’s story. Along with the different voices and identity constructions, the narrator also constructs different recipients in his or her discursive positioning of the listener.By using the concept of positioning, we propose both a conceptual framework and the corresponding analytical tools for identifying textual indicators and contextual interpretative resources for a discursive approach to narrative identity constructions in research interviewing. This option allows insight into the strategies narrators employ to negotiate their identities in the situation itself, which may be fruitful for many research contexts that use the concept of narrative identity. (Narrative, Autobiography, Research Interviewing, Conversation Analysis)
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Narrative Identity in a Solo Performance: Craig Gingrich-Philbrook’s “The First Time”
Author(s): Eric E. Petersonpp.: 229–251 (23)More LessIn the solo performance of autobiographical narrative, the performer’s body is the primary site for the construction of narrative identity. Autobiographical performance emphasizes the tensions between conventionalized forms of representation and the contingent and relational forms of presentation. That is, presenting “a story about myself” both constitutes and performs identity in a narrative that represents this performative accomplishment as having already taken place. The tensions between the presentation and representation of narrative identity are productive opportunities for queer solo performers who seek to make visible and disrupt the power relations and structures of heterosexist discourse. Analysis of a solo performance, “The First Time” by Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, illustrates how the critical reiteration of conventions can be used to make explicit the operation of narrative identity.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 34 (2024)
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Volume 33 (2023)
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Volume 32 (2022)
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Volume 31 (2021)
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Volume 30 (2020)
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Volume 29 (2019)
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Volume 28 (2018)
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Volume 27 (2017)
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Volume 26 (2016)
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Volume 25 (2015)
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Volume 24 (2014)
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Volume 23 (2013)
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Volume 22 (2012)
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Volume 21 (2011)
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Volume 20 (2010)
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Volume 19 (2009)
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Volume 18 (2008)
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Volume 17 (2007)
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Volume 16 (2006)
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Volume 15 (2005)
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Volume 14 (2004)
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Volume 13 (2003)
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Volume 12 (2002)
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Volume 11 (2001)
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Volume 10 (2000)
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Volume 9 (1999)
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Volume 8 (1998)
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Autobiographical Time
Author(s): Jens Brockmeier
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