Biographical narratives are an integral part of the human life: we relate our stories, tell ourselves about ourselves, and others about others. By virtue of being so common, they have become an area of interest in many academic disciplines, with each field providing researchers with distinct analytical tools. As the interest in narratives increased, social sciences saw the emergence of the “narrative turn,” and, subsequently, the “linguistic-textualist turn,” which appeared in the 1980s (Wengraf, Chamberlayne & Bornat, 2002). Biographical narrative has been investigated by such disciplines as literary criticism, history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, culture studies, and gender studies (Rak, 2005). Despite sharing a common area of interest, researchers' use of analytic tools from fields other than their own remains very limited. The resulting hermeticism may be rooted in the lack of understanding of other perspectives, inability to employ analytic terms in research, or fear of losing one's own research identity. By overcoming these concerns and expanding the analytical framework, it may be possible to discover new insights into the research subject.

The Discursive Turn in Narrative Studies

Following the anthropological distinction between life as experience (what the individuals experience, what meaning they give to the events, what the accompanying emotions are) and life as a narrative (a text embedded in a context, addressed to a recipient, the rules governing its creation) (Bruner, 1984, p. 7), it can be noted that each approach involves different methodological implications. Whereas the former emphasizes the ways in which the narrator interprets the world and the accompanying emotional states (a phenomenological, naturalistic approach) (cf. Denzin, 1989), the latter entails a ‘cold,’ post-positivist analytical perspective. It is the approach where “a storied narrative is the linguistic form that preserves the complexity of human action with its interrelationship of temporal sequence, human motivation, chance happenings, and changing interpersonal and environmental contexts” (Polkinghorne, 2005/1995, p. 7).