Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 4, Issue 3, 1994

AbstractDue to the problems involved in trying to determine the validity of life history accounts in the psychoanalytically based encounter, the concept of narrative has proven very useful for promoting the view that the client's tellings represent different versions of the truth rather than a truth that exists prior to and independent of the storied constructions, as Freud's archeological model would have it. However, although the irreducibly narrative character of client talk is not contested, the claim developed herein is that client talk is structured around the practice of account-giving—more specifically, giving accounts of the self. Our mode of investigating this claim was to examine a client's use of a pair of linguistic markers (the discourse markers I MEAN and SO), which have been characterized as forms that function expressively to convey the speaker's attitudes and evaluative stance toward the content of the discourse. Based on this characterization, it was hypothesized that, in the therapeutic context, such forms would be used by the client as a way of carrying out the proposed agenda of providing self-accounts. (Discourse Analysis/Psychotherapy Research)

AbstractThis autobiography of Assefa Woldegebriel, an Ethiopian intellectual who experienced the upheaval of the 1970s, considers how analysis and description of presentations of self can be reconciled with more standard historical texts. Autobiographical narrative is used here to pose questions about representation in historical accounts, the representation of historical consciousness, and the analytical categories that are applied to informants. In standard uses of this material, there are several tacit assumptions made about the structure of the subject. These assumptions involve the application of analytical concepts, including "person," "self," "agent," and "consciousness." This is a personcentered account about the nature of power in different kinds of texts dealing with the same time period. Educated Ethiopians of all ethnicities and nationalities played important parts in pre- and postrevolutionary society. Ethnicity, class, national identity, and education combined in contradictory ways to stamp their experience with significance. In this study, materials from secondary sources are woven into interview material to provide a cultural account of life in Ethiopia during the late 1960s and 1970s. (Anthropology; Oral History—Theoretical Issues; Ethiopia)

AbstractThis article explores narrative discourse in the classroom as individual and social meaning construction. Drawing largely on the work of Bakhtin—in particular, his theory of consciousness as a dialogic "boundary phenomenon"—the article positions classroom narrative discourses as co-constructions of meaning. The primary goal of the article is methodological in that it articulates how one might go about studying narratives as neither "inside" the individual nor "out there" in culture. A set of focusing questions are developed for exploring narratives in the classroom. Four focusing questions explore such aspects of narrative discourses as the sociocognitive history of activity settings, the moment-to-moment enactment of meaning, the individual child's reconstruction of meaning (his or her "internalization" of discourses), and developmental changes that occur in how children construct meaning from within textual contexts. These four questions are then applied to a case study of one child's classroom narrative discourses. This study of one first-grader serves as an exemplar of how such overlapping forms of textual inquiry could be applied to a developmental study of children's classroom discourse and learning. Last, issues of a societal-ethical nature are discussed as an important dimension of the theoretical and methodological positioning of narrative as a boundary phenomenon. (Classroom Discourse; Education)