Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Overview: theory, method and analysis
- Part II Private and public identities: constructing who we are
- Part III The gendered self: becoming and being a man
- Part IV The in-between self: negotiating person and place
- Editors' introduction
- 13 Group identity, narrative and self-representations
- 14 Performing self, family and community in Moroccan narratives of migration and settlement
- 15 Making it personal: shared meanings in the narratives of Holocaust survivors
- References
- index
15 - Making it personal: shared meanings in the narratives of Holocaust survivors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Overview: theory, method and analysis
- Part II Private and public identities: constructing who we are
- Part III The gendered self: becoming and being a man
- Part IV The in-between self: negotiating person and place
- Editors' introduction
- 13 Group identity, narrative and self-representations
- 14 Performing self, family and community in Moroccan narratives of migration and settlement
- 15 Making it personal: shared meanings in the narratives of Holocaust survivors
- References
- index
Summary
Introduction
The focus on narrative studies across the humanities and social sciences reflects a shared concern with the interpretation of subjective experience. Life stories may be, as Mark Freeman asserts, our best “inroad into the phenomenon of self-understanding and selfhood” (1993: 6). Indeed, by listening closely to talk, how tellers describe who they are and where they come from, life stories allow us to explore subjective understandings in great complexity and draw interpretations about how persons make sense of self and world. If we accept the premise that narratives allow us special insight into the process of identity, then, a more adequate understanding of life narratives should help us to better understand the character of identity. We might, therefore, begin by asking, what is a life story? How are we to read and interpret life stories? Are life narratives the product of the person, the situation of telling, or something else?
When interpreting a life story, it is common practice to consider the individual level of analysis. After all, there is a real person who is sitting before us, describing the details of her/his past. Tellers, typically, use the first-person singular and speak with their own distinct voice. Elements of personality and our unique life experience are important contexts in understanding a life story (McAdams 1996). Such a tradition, beginning with Freud's case studies, and on through Henry Murray and Robert White's work, allows us to see how the contours of the past are shaped through the eyes of single persons with their unique developmental history and life circumstances (Runyan 1982).
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- Information
- Discourse and Identity , pp. 398 - 425Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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