Re: narrative
Deborah A Hicks (hicks who-is-at UDel.Edu)
Fri, 3 May 1996 10:12:47 -0400 (EDT)
I agree with Gordon Wells that there is good reason to focus one's
attention on the role of narrative in the construction of identities. My
thinking centers around, however, a more critical view of Bruner's
delineation of narrative as a mode of thought distinct from scientific or
analytical reasoning. Surely scientific/analytical reasoning is always
interwoven with "everyday" or narrative-based kinds of reasonings. A
structuralist interpretation of narrative backs one into the corner of
depicting narrative as plot-structured events, basically story form. A
more participatory view of narrative, as articulated by Bakhtin and
others, would suggest a different view: that narrative is constructed
precisely through dialogic acts experienced in prosaic, everyday life. 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