Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 5, Issue 1, 1995

AbstractNarrative is acknowledged to be a primary means by which children develop the voice of their own culture. In recent years, and as a result of the increased interest in story grammar research, retellings have also become a useful tool for assessing children's understanding of stories and teaching comprehension. The assumption across most previous studies is that narrative, especially folktales, provides the same story-schema support, no matter what the culture of the child may be. This cross-cultural study examines the relative effects of literacy and culture on the narrative form of written story retellings. Empirical findings confirm the hypothesis that two disparate populations, otherwise equated for levels of literacy, western-style schooling, and cognitive development, differ significantly in the structural components of their written story retellings. The story grammar of Mandler and Johnson (1977) was evaluated for discrimina-tory power. Categorizations of specific components of the story grammar showed qualitative differences from culture to culture. Results support culture-specific theories of story schema. (Sociolinguistics, Education)

AbstractWe examined low-literacy and literate adults' conceptual knowledge in two domains: narrative (composition and recall) and social cognition. Results indi-cated that the performance of the two groups was qualitatively different and that subjects in each group used a similar knowledge structure on both types of tasks. Specifically, the low-literacy group largely accounted for action se-quences by referring to the characters' context-specific intentions or to the subjects' own personal experience. In contrast, the literate subjects utilized a decontextualized mode of reasoning, wherein they interpreted the characters' intentions. We argue that the move toward this decontextualized reasoning is profitably viewed by considering it in terms of conceptual knowledge struc-tures, each consisting of a set of semantic and syntactic elements and having a wide yet delimited range of application. (Psychology)

AbstractI make use of insights from narrative psychology to illuminate claims made by advocates of the controversial multiple personality doctrine. The notion of "repressed memories" of childhood abuse is one of the foundations of the claim that one body can host two or more personalities. Until recently, a therapist could help a client reconstruct a failing self-narrative without being concerned with the historical truth of recovered memories. In the current litigious climate, clients bring suits in courts of law for damages supposedly caused by long-unremembered childhood instances of abuse by parents or other adults. In the forensic setting, the narrative truth that flows from the recovery of repressed memories is not enough; historical truth is required. I discuss the role of imagining in the construction of rememberings and the difficulties in establish-ing the historical truth of any remembering.(Psychology)

AbstractAfter the occurrence of a disruptive illness, questions tend to arise about oneself and one's way of life and its moral meaning. These questions concern what kind of person one is and how one can sustain one's identity and self-image in the face of disruptive events. In this sense, the reconstruction of a life narrative is a moral quest. In this article, an analysis is presented of an interview with a former psychiatric patient concerning his mental illness and experience of psychosis. The analysis of this man's reconstructive work shows that he assigns the disruptive event a particular place in his life narrative to invest it with meaning and sense. This means not only establishing what has happened but also why it has happened. An important condition for the narrativization of disruptive events is the identification of a "platform," which can serve as a basis from which the reconstructive work can start. The platform defines the point from which a connection with one's previous life can be established. The identification of a platform can be viewed as the formulation of a voice; that is to say, a kind of normative order of the relation among the actions, events, and persons who figure in the life narrative. (Psychology)