Journal of Narrative and Life History - Volume 5, Issue 4, 1995

AbstractThis study addresses some of the multiple factors that play a role in children's developing narrative abilities. It starts by reviewing approaches to narrative analysis that have had an impact on the study of children's narratives since the 1970s. Such analyses are reevaluated from a developmental perspective, based on crosslinguistic findings from picturebook narratives. The generality of these results is then examined by comparing narratives produced by children in different elicitation settings, based on findings from a large-scale Hebrew-language sample. Finally, an attempt is made to integrate these findings along different dimensions involved in developing narrative knowledge, as manifested by children at different phases of development: in recruiting linguistic forms for narrative functions, in combining foreground plotline events with affective evaluation and background circumstances, and in perceiving what it means to tell a story in task-appropriate ways. The development of narrative abilities is shown to yield a complex web of interrelations between abstract narrative competence and how this is realized in storytelling performance. (Linguistics)

AbstractFrom Normandy combat veterans, we obtained narrative evidence on the experiences of loss and grief associated with their involvement in the invasion in France, June 6, 1944. Twelve veterans were interviewed in person in Nor-mandy at the time of the 1994 reunion, and 31 were subsequently interviewed by telephone. We present veterans' reports of battle experiences on D-Day and how they believe those experiences were manifest in psychological reactions over the last 50 years. Our analysis of these reports is framed by a theoretical conception that emphasizes the value of developing and communicating story-like constructions, which we refer to as accounts, as a constructive way of psychologically coping with severe stressors and loss over time. Most of the veterans reported lifelong grieving associated with their losses at Normandy. This grief recurred for most on anniversary dates and when thinking of war and death in general. For some, it was manifest in compelling, regular thoughts about the loss of their friends and their firsthand experiences of loss during the D-Day fighting. Many veterans also reported years of depression associated with their war experience. Some indicated that they kept their stories and feelings mostly private over the half century, and only now, around the time of the commemoration, did they open up. Veterans who indicated that they coped best with their trauma over time emphasized the healing power of working on and telling their stories to close others. (Grief Work, Social and Clinical Psy-chology)"These are the fathers we never knew, the uncles we never met, the friends who never returned, the heroes we can never repay."-President Bill Clinton speak-ing at the American cemetery near Omaha Beach, Normandy, France, June 6, 1994."I don't think there's a day that goes by that I don't think and grieve about it. When you think about it, you think it was just yesterday. It's so clear in my mind. I'll never forget."-Normandy combat veteran, age 74, reflecting on his experience during the D-Day invasion.

AbstractOral narratives are increasingly used in speech and language evaluations for measuring language skills, and to measure children's organizational skill within a broader communicative context. Because of this, oral-narrative analyses are applied to diverse age ranges and populations. However, there are few studies examining the production of narratives of child speakers of African American English (AAE), and these previous studies offer conflicting views on the nature of narratives in this population. Because of this, the purpose of this study was to investigate the production of narratives of AAE speaking children using elicitation procedures that were standard across participants. Fifteen partici-pants were selected from a predominantly African American low-income com-munity of Springfield, Massachusetts. Highpoint and story-grammar analyses-two analyses that are often applied narratives in previous studies- were applied to the samples gathered from these participants. The results indicated that (a) subjects produced a greater number of more advanced (com-plete and complex) structures than lower level structures within story grammar analysis at all age levels, and (b) the most advanced structure (classic structure) was observed more often than any other structures within highpoint analysis. (Speech/Hearing/Language Pathology)

AbstractThe multivocality of hatred is revealed through the analysis of a journal entry portraying a complicated emotional relationship between a young woman, a 6-year-old girl, and the girl's mother. Two competing readings of hatred are presented, revealing the different narrative positions from which the subject speaks. One is a psychoanalytic discourse, tracing the intrapsy-chic, object-related hurts that were reactivated from the past and projected in present experiences. The other is a constructionist reading, which focuses on conflicts over values and ideas, suggesting a communicative theory of ha-tred. It is concluded that these different voices are not hierarchical, but rather alternately dominate the text, depending on the position of the speaker and the context. The meaning of hatred is thus revealed as neither unified nor univocal. Rather, the narrative perspective mediates between childhood hurts and normative and ethical reason. It constructs two stories, both of which illustrate similar (but not identical) plots of suffering, mis-recognition, and dependency. (Social Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Construc-tionism, Emotions)