Narrative Inquiry - Volume 33, Issue 2, 2023

Abstract

In this essay, I aim to shore up the epistemological foundations of memory studies so that it can more productively fulfill its promise to understand the dynamics of shared meaning-making. I argue for theoretical and, hence, methodological, advancement toward a more precise vocabulary for describing the movement of meaning over time and space and between persons as they engage with resources and each other in order to fix and revise shared interpretations. Drawing on the conceptual vocabulary of narrative, I describe some of the central tenets of this “back to the phenomenon” approach to social memory.

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of implicit narrative as an analytic tool that helps to articulate how cultural models of narrative sense-making steer us to certain patterns of experience, discourse, and interaction, and the concept of narrative agency as an analytic tool for theorizing and evaluating the processes in which we navigate our narrative environments, which consist of a range of implicit narratives. As a touchstone for developing these theoretical concepts, which serve not only narrative studies but also overlapping fields such as memory studies and cultural studies, the article analyzes the implicit cultural narrative that has most strongly dominated public discourse on the coronavirus pandemic: the narrative of war. Thereby, the article also contributes to the analysis of pandemic storytelling and its effects on us, as the cultural memory of the pandemic is currently taking shape and affecting our orientation to the future.

Abstract

This article examines the performance of remembered experience within sharing in-the-moment carried out by young women on Instagram. I propose that the small stories analytical framework provides a way to examine at a micro level sharing of ‘memories’ online by addressing practices of selecting the past, showing and telling the past and interacting with the past in digital traces. For digital memory studies, this moves beyond a focus on affordances and infrastructure transformed memory and the examination of how people engage with memories that have been predefined. The analysis demonstrates how the performance of remembered experience is displayed and positioned across the interplay of past, present and future. Young women’s sharing in-the-moment reconfigures the function and meanings of ‘memories’ beyond the platform’s mobilisation of the term. It is part of how they express feelings and experiences about their unfolding lives.

Abstract

Memory studies has, in only a few decades, produced insights in two inter-related processes. First, memory scholars theorized how representations of the past become socially shared. Secondly, they theorized how these cultural and collective memories circulate and are being re-actualized in different contexts. But critiques of the field have targeted the metaphorical and reified nature of cultural memory concepts. This article argues that some concepts developed in social scientific narrative studies could provide cultural memory scholars with a precise and less metaphorical vocabulary to understand how people make sense of non-autobiographical pasts in different interactional contexts. In particular, the article focusses on how positioning theory and unexplained events in narrative pre-construction assist analysis of the flexibility of the remembering self in everyday interaction. The examples in this article concern narrations of the Second World War and Holocaust gathered during fieldwork in the contemporary town of Auschwitz in Poland.

Abstract

The research aim was to gain a more thorough understanding of the experiences by former prisoners of the trauma of the time spent in a Nazi concentration camp and reworking it by dreaming. The material comprised 117 written accounts obtained by psychiatrist Stanisław Kłodziński in the 1970s from 38 former Polish national prisoners of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau (17 women and 21 men). A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the narratives was carried out and two types of dreams were compared in terms of chosen characteristics: camp and post-camp dreams. Camp experiences and a negative emotional tone occurred significantly more often in post-camp dreams. The “beauty” and “symbolicity” categories were present significantly more frequently in camp dreams. It was found that motives related to the time spent in the camp appeared persistently in dreams. This was accompanied by a negative affect and lack of symbolicity typical of PTSD nightmares.

Abstract

The two authors – one from literary and cultural studies, the other a cognitive psychologist – explore how the interdisciplinary perspective of Memory Studies can broaden and enrich current research efforts on flashbulb memories (FBMs). FBMs are memories of the circumstances in which one learned of a public emotionally charged event, such as 9/11. Psychological research on FBMs have focused on their cognitive properties, their putative accuracy and confidence. But we claim that when seen in the broader interdisciplinary perspective of collective memory research, FBMs emerge as inextricably linked up with social, cultural, and narrative dynamics. This article therefore locates FBMs at the intersection of individual and collective memory narratives. Connecting research in cognitive psychology with cultural Memory Studies, we explore how flashbulb narratives bear on social identity and how they might travel across national boundaries or across generations. We further discuss how FBMs are tied to culture, aesthetics, and media history.

This article reviews Narrative Retellings: Narrative Approaches

This article reviews Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain$22.95$22.959781421441269