I would like to thank Diane, Eva & Philip for reading and responding to
my paper. I had begun to worry that it would disappear underneath all
those Pokemon, not to mention the various end-of-semester tasks.
As I read their messages, Diane and Eva were actually saying two
different things, and Philip picked up on both threads, so I'll respond
to them in turn.
Diane points out the parallel between the narrated and narrating events
-- that Margaret finds herself in an interactional position during the
interview that in some respects parallels the narrated events of
institutionalization that she describes. Of course, being a volunteer
interview subject in a university psychology department differs in some
respects from being sent involuntarily to boarding school, but I agree
that there's a parallel here. If it is in some respects "obvious,"
however, it is not "absent" from the paper. The last paragraph before
the conclusions states explicitly that there is such a parallel between
narrated and narrating events, and in fact this parallelism is the core
of the argument in the longer book-length analysis of these data. But
it is true that, in excerpting a piece of the analysis for this paper I
have not always clearly maintained this important point, so thanks to
Diane for clarifying it.
Philip's point about the "co-construction" of the self follows on Diane
here, in pointing to the importance of interactional processes and local
context in constructing the self. These are somewhat peculiar data in
that respect, because the interviewer is so unreactive that it's hard to
avoid an emphasis on Margaret's contributions. But the main point of
the paper, stated many times, is precisely that we should attend to the
interactional positioning enacted in social events (co-constructed among
narrator and audience) in examining how autobiographical narrative might
contribute to the self. And in fact the analysis attends to the
interviewer's contributions, such as they are, and to the interactional
event that's projected onto the interview by the interviewer and
Margaret's speech. So I can't see it a fair criticism to say that I've
ignored co-construction.
Eva and Philip raise a different point, about how my "scientific zest"
and "opaque affect" lead to a lack of compassion in the analysis.
First, let's be clear that I did not do this interview myself. But the
point does nonetheless raise an interesting question about the position
of the researcher, and as someone interested in exploring positioning I
can't very well sidestep this. But I'm not willing to give up the
analytic rigor that the paper begins to provide for this sort of
analysis. Too much narrative analysis is sympathetic and unconvincing.
So the question is whether we can do systematic and empirically
plausible research that also shows compassion for and perhaps even forms
relationships with subjects (though in this case of course I couldn't
form a relationship because I do not even know this woman's real name).
I guess I would like to know more about whether people are asking me to
change the tone a bit by inserting sympathetic sentences here and there,
or whether they think that a fundamentally different sort of approach to
the problem is necessary.
It seems to me that, if we want to study emotionally and relationally
sensitive processes and data, and if we want to understand how these
sorts of psychosocial phenomena get constituted, we need good analytic
approaches to them. The art of how people like Margaret represent their
trauma, the maintenance and perhaps the transformation of processes that
sustain the impact such trauma has on people, take place in part through
the sorts of positioning that I am trying to study. If we give up
working systematically on these sorts of data, we lose an opportunity to
understand and perhaps intervene.
-- Stanton Wortham Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216 (215) 898-6307 http://www.upenn.edu/gse/fac/wortham/
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