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- Volume 15, Issue, 2005
Narrative Inquiry - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2005
Volume 15, Issue 2, 2005
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Narrating singleness: Life stories and deficit identities
Author(s): Jill Reynolds and Stephanie Taylorpp.: 197–215 (19)More LessThis paper discusses a speaker's narrative and discursive work to counter the negative associations of an identity as a single woman. An analysis of extracts from one interview exemplifies patterns found in a larger body of data. The speaker's story does rhetorical work (Billig, 1987) against the dominant ‘coupledom’ narrative of a life which progresses through stages associated with the heterosexual family, including love, marriage and parenthood. Her own life narrative is structured differently. The three structures we discuss are resources which can accommodate the unique details of a particular speaker's life as a single woman while also doing work against commonly held assumptions that singleness is a deficit identity. (Deficit identity, Single women, Narrative, Discursive, Coupledom)
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Young people's stories of conflict and development in Post-war Croatia
Author(s): Colette Daiute and Maja Turniskipp.: 217–239 (23)More LessScholars have begun to study the participation of children in war, but there is little research on the longer term consequences among those born during or after the war. This article explains how a socio-historical discourse perspective can expand research on the psycho-social effects of war. Drawing on a study of stories of conflict by children in post-war Croatia, the authors propose the concept “trans-generational development” to account for the legacies of war on social identity and knowledge. The focus of the analysis is 59 narratives written by 10 to 17 year olds identifying as Serb and Croat in the context of their participation in community center devoted to post-war recovery and development. The analysis identified complexity in young authors' representations of social relations across generations, especially around issues of ethnicity – a major issue fueling the 1990's wars in the former Yugoslavia. For example, the young authors characterized their parents' generation as divided, bitter, and socially impotent, their own generation as collaborative, wise, and resourceful, and future townspeople as active in the face of political and economic challenges. These patterns suggest how young people express identities and knowledge of the war period, yet, with support, also reason beyond the ideological and emotional legacies of war. Such story-telling complexity underscores the need for complex conceptualizations and applications of narrative theory to research and practice in war and other troubled settings.
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Improving story complexity and cohesion: A developmental approach to teaching story composition
Author(s): Anne McKeough, Lynn Davis, Nicole Forgeron, Anthony Marini and Tak Fungpp.: 241–266 (26)More LessThe aim of the present study was to analyze the relative effectiveness of two first grade instruction programs: a developmental program that focused on the structural and social-psychological components of stories and their cohesion and a process oriented approach. A total of 43 children participated in daily sessions over 3 months (experimental group N = 22, comparison group N = 21). Measures of conceptual language and oral narrative were obtained and participants' protocols were analyzed for plot and coherence. Statistical analyses showed that the developmental method was more effective than the process approach in advancing the complexity and cohesion of children's narratives. To explore the interactions between instruction and learning, a time series analysis was conducted with seven randomly selected experimental group participants. These results showed that gains did not follow a linear pattern and that performance was shaped by the cognitive complexity of task demands. Implications for the development of narrative thought and classroom instruction are discussed. (Narrative, Instruction, Development)
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Narrative positioning and the construction of situated identities: Evidence from conversations of a group of young people in Greece
Author(s): Argiris Archakis and Angeliki Tzannepp.: 267–291 (25)More LessThe present paper is a study of narrative and its relation to the construction of conflicting identities in interaction. The paper is concerned with a group of young Greeks who categorise themselves as members of a particular subculture, but also construct a number of other, often conflicting, identities through the stories they tell in the course of their conversations with two researchers. By focusing on the many narratives these people volunteer to recount to the researchers, the paper aims to delve into narrative positioning and its relation to the plurality of emerging identities in the specific encounters. Particular emphasis is placed on the young people's attempt to delegitimate established figures of power and authority in order to legitimate their own group and present a positive image of themselves. By providing a detailed discussion of identities as constructed in situated discourse, the paper also aims to stress the dynamics of identity construction in context. (Narrative positioning identity construction, Plurality of identities In-group relations, Delegitimation, Category affiliation)
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Identity commitments in personal stories of mental illness on the internet
Author(s): Raya A. Jonespp.: 293–322 (30)More LessThe Internet augments the informational flows that organize biographies in late modernity. Sufferers of bipolar disorder (manic depression) may turn to the Internet for accessible information, to learn about others' experiences and impart their own knowledge. Personal accounts posted in the public domain become themselves part of those informational flows, and thus acquire a dual life at a boundary between private and public domains. This poses certain challenges for the investigation of computer-mediated autobiographical telling, which are identified in this paper and negotiated in an analysis of downloaded personal accounts of bipolar disorder. Two of the stories are selected for a close look. Story 1 tells about achieving long-term remission through personal resolve and psychological alternatives to medication. Story 2 tells about becoming able to talk about the illness through the achievement of a social identity as “manic depressive”. The stories' similarities, differences, and comparability with the other texts are discussed with a view to theorizing how such texts position their implied author in the illness experience. Building upon Bakhtin's idea of a text's plan and its realization, a concept of “identity commitments” as textual properties is proposed. (Narrative identity, Computer-mediated communication, Bipolar disorder, Bakhtin)
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The dark side of tellability
Author(s): Neal R. Norrickpp.: 323–343 (21)More LessThis article propounds a revised, two-sided notion of tellability – one which encompasses both the familiar lower-bounding side of tellability as sufficient to warrant listener interest and the generally ignored upper-bounding side where tellability merges into the no longer tellable of impropriety. It demonstrates how tellers and recipients of stories orient to the upper boundary of tellability in various ways, signalling discomfort as they approach the threshold of impropriety, but also conspiring to breech and go beyond the boundary of impropriety in the pursuit of greater intimacy and entertainment. It is within the framework of the lower boundary and upper boundary of tellability that narrators are free to construct their individual identities. (Tellability, Identity construction, Transgressive narratives, Conversational storytelling)
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Participant transposition in Senegalese oral narrative
Author(s): Sabina M. Perrinopp.: 345–375 (31)More LessThis article examines a Senegalese narrative practice in which speakers make co-present individuals into denoted characters in their stories, a process I refer to as “participant transposition.” I analyze participant transposition in illness narratives recorded in Dakar, Senegal, during phases of which I am even recruited to play the part of the narrator's past self. I demonstrate how this narrative practice allows speakers to calibrate the realm of the story (the denotational text) with the storytelling event (the interactional text). (Illness narrative, Transposition, Textuality, Interaction, Senegal)
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Children's narratives of sexual abuse: What characterizes them and how do they contribute to meaning-making?
Author(s): Svein Mossige, Tine K. Jensen, Wenke Gulbrandsen, Sissel Reichelt and Odd Arne Tjerslandpp.: 377–404 (28)More LessPersonal narratives from ten children who all claimed to have been sexually abused were analyzed and compared to narratives of stressful events the children produced in therapy sessions. The narratives were compared to each other along the following dimensions: level of elaboration, narrative structure, contextual embeddedness, and causal coherence. Each child's attempt to find purpose and resolution was also analyzed. The stressful event narratives were generally more elaborate, more structured, and more contextually embedded and coherent than the sexual abuse narratives. Very few of the sexual abuse narratives contained resolutions or causal connections that are considered important for contributing to meaning- making. It is suggested that in order to understand the difficulties children face, a narrative perspective needs to include the emotional significance of the events to be narrated, and a trauma perspective must include the cultural impact of the event. A theory that intends to understand children's narration difficulties should encompass both these perspectives. (Narratives, Child sexual abuse, Traumas)
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Narratives of West Bank women settlers in “multi-problem families”: A case of conflicting master-narratives
Author(s): Chaya Possickpp.: 405–420 (16)More LessThis article presents part of the findings of a qualitative study conducted from January-July 2003, of the experiences of women in “multi-problem families” who live in a “high-risk” settlement on the West Bank. The impetus for the project was a dilemma that arose among social workers who were providing services to West Bank communities during this period. The article presents a narrative analysis of three of the interviews in order to illustrate a process of corroboration and subversion of master narratives in the construction of personal narratives.
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)
Most Read This Month
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Autobiographical Time
Author(s): Jens Brockmeier
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