Although I'm only a second year graduate student in developmental psychology,
I'm intrigued by Jay Lemke and Judy Diamondstone's posting about narrative.
Jay wrote,
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 96 23:53:55 EDT
Narrative. Well Bruner has learned a lot by delineating the role
of narrative in social interaction and identity-formation, but
narrative is not a privileged mode of discourse in my view, and
the exaggerations about how it is the key to everything social,
even personal identity, should be brought up short before a good
idea gets out of hand. Bakhtin provides a better-rounded view of
the relations of discourse and identity, even though he is mainly
operating in a literary framework where narrativity dominates.
There are non-narrative conversational discursive identities, and
non-narrative rhetorical (e.g. persuasive, expository,
analytical) identities made in just the same way as narrative
ones, and the conversational ones are probably more important
than the narrative ones for most people. Foucault describes (in
Archeology of Knowledge) how discursive formations always have
associated roles, for the modes of discourse characteristic of
all kinds of human activities. Narrative gets privileged I think
for two reasons: it dominates in _retrospective_ accounts of
identity, and our current notions of what identity is too often
derive from folk-theory accounts grounded in the use and analysis
of narratives (i.e. identity as a Character vs. identity as a
more generalized consistency of participatory role).
JAY.
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Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 21:27:38 -0400
Thanks to Jay for arguing against the privileging of narrative
in the discursive construction of selves. I totally agree that
the selves constructed conversationally by way of
role & status relations/struggles get inscribed more deeply in
subjectivity than retrospective sense-making - i.e., narrativizing,
which is done out of desire to be some kind of one (which is motivated
I assume by some degree of perpetual dissatisfaction with the
realized self?).
- Judy
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I would like to ask: isn't it possible to combine narrative analysis of the
self with Bakhtin's idea on heteroglossia, especially using the concept of
dialogism, to understand how the self (or selves) relates to the larger
social context? It seems to me that narrative analysis can be a very useful
tool to understand how a person may see himself or herself in relation to,
for example, his or her work. To derive the selves through narrative
analysis could be the first step to understand the _subjective_ perspective
of the person in question. Following this first step, we may study how the
selves, derived from the narrative analysis, relate to the other. A way to
get to this interaction with the other would be to study the dialogized words
emanating from the selves. These words, in turn, would be chosen according
to the surrounding environment from where the speaker is speaking from. The
impression of an initial _subjective_ self, then, may begin to open up after
we realize that the construction of this wishful "working-self" has been
partially shaped by the affordances and limitation given by the work
environment.
You will have to excuse me for trying to summarize these complex interactions
within one short paragraph. It is obviously impossible. But the point that
I'm trying to make is that it seems to me a bit hasty to try to dismiss
narrative analysis based on subjectivism.
Patricio.
-- Patricio S Calderon Internet: calderon who-is-at umdnj.edu Day: (212)642-2562 (school) Evening: (908)247-7579 (home) Developmental Psychology Department City University of New York, Graduate Center