Re: narrative

Judy Diamondstone (diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu)
Fri, 3 May 1996 13:39:47 -0400

Many thanks to Deborah Hicks for her comments on narrative as
a participatory genre [?] or mode of understanding "self." I agree
that Bruner is not concerned with poststructuralist notions of
identity, and it is perhaps on this question that I would want to
think more about narrative/non-narrative resources for
development.

- Judy

I
>think the "genre" view of narrative is not what Bakhtin had in mind in his
>critical rethinking of narrative discourse. I believe that B's work has
>some implications for the conversation we're (xmca'ers) having about
>identity. Important to Bakhtin's work is the sense in which selves are
>constructed in/through discourses, but that selves are characters with
>biographical (ie., narrative) histories. This sense of narrative and
>autobiographical/biographical history is sometimes lost in modernist work
>on "identity". Given Bruner's critique of postmodernist theories of
>discourse (in the back of Actual Minds) and his more recent interest in
>autobiography, I would suggest that his interest in the importance of
>narrative lies more with issues of character (in the philosophical and
>literary sense) than w/ poststructuralist notions of identity.
>
>Deborah Hicks
>U. of Delaware
>
>
>

Judy Diamondstone
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903

diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
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