Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 3, Issue 1, 1993

AbstractThis study investigated effects of maternal elicitation style, repeated recall sessions, and retention interval on 2-year-olds' autobiographical memory. Ten mothers and their children from 24 to 30 months of age verbally recalled the same four events once a week for 4 weeks. Two weeks later, an experimenter interviewed children about the same events as well as about four new events. Half of the events had taken place in the recent past (up to 6 months); the other half were from the remote past (6 to 10 months). Children recalled specific information about events occurring up to 10 months in the past, although they recalled more information about recent events than about remote events. Chil-dren were very much dependent on an adult partner to cue their recall. If specific cues were not provided, children rarely volunteered information. Chil-dren's conversations with their mothers affected their recall with the experi-menter: Children responded to more information requests, produced more offers of information, and recalled more specific information about events they had previously discussed with mothers than when recalling new events with the experimenter. However, children recalled more information with their mothers than with the experimenter, and prior discussions with mothers did not increase the amount of information children recalled with the experimenter. Two mater-nal elicitation styles were identified that were related to differences in children's responsiveness and amount of recall: Children of high elaboration mothers were more responsive and recalled more information than children of low elaboration mothers. (Psychology)

AbstractA number of scholars have recently followed Bakhtin's lead in recognizing the analytic importance of discourse that contains more than one genre. This article discusses the opening lines of an address by a civil rights activist, the Reverend Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., to an audience that consisted mainly of college stu-dents. After adumbrating the general themes he planned to address, Chavis told a personal narrative regarding his success in desegregating the library in his home town in the 1950s. Although Chavis initially drew on academic lecturing style in establishing textual authority, linguistic features of the narrative linked the form of the discourse to the social milieu he was representing, thus estab-lishing narrative authenticity. Both sections contain a stylistic overlap of fea-tures found in performed African-American sermons. Drawing on Gates's (1988) use of the term Signifyin(g) and a new model of genre (Briggs & Bau-man, 1992), I suggest that this dialogue of genres enables Chavis to Signify on the ongoing speech event and its political-economic location as well as to critique the textual economy of segregation. (Linguistic Anthropology)

AbstractLiterary narrative theory offers robust conceptual frameworks for understand-ing the act of writing, the act of reading, the configuration of plot, and the narrative contract that binds writer and reader together. This article applies some current theoretical approaches used in studying literary storytelling to the storytelling that takes place in the doctor's office, conceptualizing the patient as the writer or teller and the doctor as the reader or listener. By inspecting clinical medicine as a narrative enterprise, shot through with the ambiguities and language-borne allusiveness of the fictional text, this study demonstrates ways in which patients and doctors may better understand their complex and often unsuccessful attempts to hear one another to the end. (General Internal Medicine and Literature)

AbstractJoining the call of lifespan developmental theory to study time, narrative analy-sis offers new opportunities for exploring development "in time" as lived and experienced. The narratives were collected as part of a qualitative study of relations between families and schools during adolescence and told by a second-ary teacher and mother of adolescents. The narrator expresses her feelings and beliefs as plot rather than recreating a prior sequence of events. The article addresses the multiple layers of characterization (author/interviewer, narrator/ mother and teacher, subject/her daughter) examining the terms and perspec-tives of each. Implications for developmental and educational theories are discussed. (Qualitative Research in Developmental Psychology and Education)