Narrative Inquiry - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2006

This paper is inspired by recent trends in narrative research that orient to the meaning-making actions of those involved in describing the life course. Applying concepts of narrative, discourse, and contrast, the complex meaning of growing up is presented by way of Lakeesha’s story, one of the 20 women interviewed for a project on African American gender socialization. Rather than viewing the participant in question as having been subject to the ostensible forces and parameters of socialization, she was offered the opportunity to represent her growing-up experiences in her own terms. She talked herself into being, situating herself as a particular type of women throughout her growing-up story — strategically employing and manipulating particular cultural discourses to do so. Lakeesha’s story is presented in this paper to illustrate a strategic model of narrative activity. In particular, I trace her use of the American Dream to analyze the ways that she situates herself with particular identities linked to local conceptions of successful womanhood. Methodological implications of this approach are considered in the conclusion.

This article adheres to the theorizing on narrative as dialogue and communication. It attempts to wed the notions of narrative and narrative identity — the words given to the self in time — to Luce Irigaray’s writings on dialogue and difference. In this frame, identity is regarded as a continuous becoming of an embodied self in relation to another self. The words that are needed in this becoming express the bodily self and touch the other at the same time. By emphasizing narrating as poiesis and creative work of imagination, it is possible to weave Irigaray’s ideas into a notion of narrative identity that moves between gathering the self in terms of emplotting on the one hand, and talking to the other in poetic words and rhythms that can express the identity as bodily and relational, on the other.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between Mandarin Chinese-speaking children’s narrative skill in telling personally experienced stories in preschool and their later language and reading ability. Fourteen Mandarin-speaking children, 8 boys and 6 girls, were visited at home when they were 3;6, 7;5, and 10;1. The children were asked to tell personal narratives to the experimenter at 3;6 and 7;5 and to complete word definition, receptive vocabulary, and Chinese reading comprehension tests at 7;5 and 10;1. Two of the children’s stories with the greatest number of narrative clauses were selected and measured using adaptations of the narrative assessment profile developed by McCabe and Bliss (2003). A number of significant positive correlations were observed between the children’s narrative skills and their receptive vocabulary, definition, and reading comprehension abilities. These findings suggest that the children who had good narrative skill in preschool also performed better in reading comprehension and language tasks in primary school. This study shows that the continuous and interrelated relationship between early oral narrative and later language and literacy is evident not only in English-speaking children but also in Mandarin-speaking children. The educational implications for this study are highlighted.

Tied to meaning-making, narratives are saturated with political relevance. Narratives do political work on both the individual and collective levels. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the political work performed by a given narrative, both the historical context and local context must be analyzed. This paper uses a comparative dialogic analysis derived from M. M. Bakhtin to illuminate the different types of political work that narratives can accomplish. I compare two slave narratives, each recalling an incident of violence against a slave. Although the narratives describe similar events, their portrayals of slavery differ greatly because of the different political work they perform in their respective contexts. One narrative, produced in conjunction with the abolitionist movement, serves as a piece of political propaganda that frames slavery in an uncompromisingly harsh light. The other narrative, taken from a WPA interview in the 1930s, reveals narrative as a site of political conflict between blacks and whites during the Jim Crow era.

The story about the collective past, which is embedded in the students’ minds, may serve a significant role in learning history. The fit between students preconceived narratives and the official narrative in textbooks might considerably influence their ability to understand and use the official narrative as a cultural tool. 105 12th grade students wrote narratives about the Melting Pot policy in the absorption of the “Great Aliyah” (Mass immigration) to Israel in the 1950’s, a corner stone of Israeli collective identity. The students’ narratives were analyzed in order to identify overt opinions, and basic narrative characteristics, such as plot schemes, agency and recurrent themes. The narratives were compared to the central characteristics of the official narrative of the Great Aliyah mediated through history textbooks. Students’ dominant narrative stood in opposition to the textbooks narrative, putting forward a highly critical perspective of the immigration absorption. Additional findings show students of “Ashkenazi” (European-Jewish) origin to be significantly more critical towards the Melting Pot policy and it’s consequences for the Mizrahi Jews than students of “Mizrahi” (Arab-Jewish) origins. The authors seek to explain their findings within the framework of socio-cultural theory, as evidence of the students’ use of social representation of the past as a cultural tool for explaining a problematic present. The personal historical narrative seems to serve as a tool for positioning the individual in relation to the past and in constructing potentialities of responsibility to contemporary reality.

In this article, we study the oral history interviews of eight survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We give a detailed analysis of a central narrative in their life story, the “selection narrative,” the experience of being forcibly separated from family into groups for labor or death, as it is told in the late 1970s-to-early 1980s and again in the 1990s. We study patterns of structure and variation in the referential aspects of narrative, how narratives recapitulate past actions, and the evaluative aspects of narrative, how narratives are interpreted. Our analysis of these eight sets of repeated narratives focuses on four processes that help structure consistent accounts over time: the past, previous tellings, culture and the interview situation. In each set of repeated narratives, the selection narrative maintains significant portions of the complicating action and evaluations over time. At the same time, various changes are evident that alter the style or interpretation of the narrative. In other words, changes were, in large measure, observed in “how” or “why” the narrative was told but not in “what” was recounted. Our data suggests that despite changes in context, critical aspects of our identities endure over long periods of time.

Cross-cultural and second/foreign language (L2) studies on oral narratives have suggested that one’s native language and culture affect discourse production in an L2 and have detected areas of difficulty for L2 learners in producing extended discourse. However, written narrative has received less attention, although it can provide rich data on cross-cultural differences and hold important implications for L2 literacy acquisition and pedagogy. This study was designed to investigate culturally preferred written discourse styles and their effects on L2 writing of personal narratives. It explored cross-cultural differences in the use of narrative structural features including evaluation between first language written narratives produced by native speakers of American English and first- and second-language narratives written by Koreans learning English. Differences in first language narrative styles were used to explain how Korean EFL learners’ narrative discourse in English could vary from native English speakers’ discourse norms. Participants were Korean adult EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners and American native-English speakers in the U.S. The findings show that specifically Korean cultural strategies were evident in the Korean English learners’ English narrative discourse rather than the preferred discourse style of the target language and culture. The findings hold implications for L2 writing pedagogy and L2 training in discourse production.