Abstract
This essay explores the intersection of culture, stories, and personal identity. It looks at narrative identity from a psychological perspective, focusing on the cultural conditioning of remembering one's life and narrating the self. It briefly discusses the concept of dominant cultural narratives (master narratives) and their influence on personal life stories as well as on one's life choices, paying attention to a form of "narrative resistance" where people whose experience does not fit a particular master narrative come up with alternative narratives. The next part of the essay deals with autobiographical writing, in which the questioning of socio-cultural norms and established beliefs is often accompanied by a violation of genre conventions and a search for alternative modes of self-expression, especially in the case of authors from socially marginalised groups. The last section then presents an analysis of the fictionalised autobiography The Woman Warrior by the Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, which depicts the conflict between two different conventions of life storying, models of identity construction, and master narratives that may occur for people of bicultural background. It also exemplifies the power of autobiographical texts to expose prevailing cultural narratives and to offer alternative perspectives.
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