Life Journeys, Personal Experiences and Stories. Possibilities for Research on Community Resilience

Struggles of being and becoming: A dialogical narrative analysis of the life stories of Sami elderly

This study investigates the interplay of community narratives and individual stories in a Roman Catholic religious community. Catholic sisters were asked about their personal life stories and the community narrative of their religious order. Links were found between the values and actions conveyed in the community narrative and those reported in the individual life stories. The community narrative acted as a vessel for the preservation of the principles on which the community was founded. This narrative is central to the life of the sisters, being taught to new sisters, told at community events, and used during times of renewal. New sisters choose to interpose their own life story with the community narrative in the face of attractive alternatives. After a period of formation, they develop a sense of communal identity. In this study, the number of stories members generated about each other reflected their strong sense of community. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Life stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending. Our sense of the ending depends on our basic faith concerning the ultimate meaning and value of our life story. The entire life story of Jesus Christ and its particular ending in the resurrection equips Christian faith with its sense of the ending of both our individual life stories and of the universal story that is history. The resurrection expresses the belief that the Storyteller’s Creator Spiritus of life-giving love, which enabled Jesus Christ to find his true story, also enables us to find our true stories with the same love that survives death in the resurrection of the just.The story of the Last Judgment, which also expresses faith’s sense of an ending, implies that the love which survives death is a responsible love. We are responsible for the incipient life stories that we have gratuitously received; and we are responsible for finding our true stories in virtue of the life-giving love that we have received. Our freedom is such that we are not necessarily predetermined by the gift of the life-giving love to the finding of our true story. What has been freely received may be freely rejected.

Any consideration of Estonian theatre from the point of view of biographical theatre needs to include the work of playwright and director Merle Karusoo. Productions based on various life narratives (diaries, letters, biographical interviews) form the core of her work that can be defined as biographical or memory theatre. Her work has also been viewed within the context of community theatre or political theatre; Karusoo has herself referred to her work as sociological theatre. Life narratives have functioned in Karusoo’s productions as the basis for restoring oppressed or denied collective discourses of memory. Her productions emerged within the framework of the more general process of restoration of historical heritage and the rehabilitation of collective memory at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Life story can be viewed as the essence of Merle Karusoo’s theatre. The personal in the life story in the production activates the emotional memory of the audience; for older generations such theatre facilitates a legitimisation of remembering one’s life story in entirety, and for younger generations it functions as a vehicle of collective, historical and national memory. The current article outlines the main stages of Karusoo’s biographical theatre, highlights major productions of each stage and provides an overview of their reception. Karusoo’s theatre dates back to 1980s. Productions based on life stories of the generations born in 1950s and 1960s, Meie elulood (Our Biographies) and Kui ruumid on täis ... (Full Rooms) both in 1982, mediated fragments of life stories of 16 drama students, focusing on the processes of self-conception and -reflection of young persons. In the context of the Soviet regime that exerted firm ideological control over the private lives of its citizens, Karusoo’s productions struck an especially powerful and unusual chord. Karusoo’s biographical theatre has gathered momentum and assumed a more solid shape since the end of the 1980s. Productions based on the diaries and/or letters of women--Aruanne (The Report, 1987) and Haigete laste vanemad (The Parents of Sick Children, 1988)--are mono-dramas, reflecting upon the loss of the voice and life story of an individual and the theme of historical conformism and fear brought about by the violent and hypocritical nature of the Soviet society. The next stage of Karusoo’s work focused on the “destiny years” of the Estonian nation, featuring, for example, life stories focusing on failed emigration to the West and the life experience of those executing the orders of the Soviet authorities during the 1949 deportations. Productions such as Kured läinud, kurjad ilmad (Snows of Sorrow), Sügis 1944 (Autumn 1944), both in 1997 and Küüdipoisid (The Waggoners, 1999) belong to this stage. The reception of Waggoners as a production that eroded the “us” and “them” binaries of the national community was especially polemical. In 2000, when the bilingual Save Our Souls was staged, focusing on the lives of prison inmates convicted of manslaughter and featuring both Estonian and Russian-speaking actors, marked the emergence of the theme of ethnic minorities in Estonia in Karusoo’s work. Karusoo’s biographical productions have evolved from generational life stories and the life stories of individuals to collective portraits of historically and/or socially determined groups. In 2006 Karusoo staged generation monologues Täna me ei mängi (Today We Will Not Play) and Küpsuskirjand 2005 (Essay 2005) that make visible how the semantic space of “us” and the phenomenon of “returning” the life stories to the people have assumed increasingly wider dimensions in Karusoo’s work over decades. Karusoo’s theatrical method has been compared with the work of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba, Ariane Mnouchkine and Suzanne Osten, Anna Deavere Smith and German theatrical grouping Rimini Protokoll. Karusoo has herself emphasized that the process of self-conceptualisation needs to proceed via the story of one’s own people, and the past has to be remembered in an emotional way. Her biographical theatre has subjected life stories to artistic filtering, resulting in the enhancement of their affective resonance as well as in generalizations. Her productions have theatrically mapped an extensive share of Estonia’s life narrative and historical memory-scapes.

Private stories in public discourse: Narrative analysis in the social sciences

This study adopted a structural perspective in the examination of life events in the context of an individual's life story. Ten men and ten women at each of three age groups (young, middle-aged, and older adulthood) identified, on a time line, personally significant life events from their past and anticipated future. Results indicated that women identified a greater number of life events and reported a younger age corresponding to their first event than did men; this was especially true for older women. Older participants, in general, identified fewer future events than did younger participants and reported an older age for their last event; the corresponding range of time covered from the first to the last event was also longer. Event type also varied by age and gender. Recency played a central role in the allocation of life events, although late adolescence and early adulthood were especially dense event periods for all groups. Discussion focuses on the roles of gender, age, and the life course in the ways in which events are configured in the life story.

Cultural life scripts have been defined by research as culturally shared expectations and public knowledge of primarily positive life events that occur in sequence in an individual’s prototypical life course. In contrast, life stories are based on personal experiences and life events within one’s own life. They represent autobiographical memories that are part of episodic memory. A mixed methodology was used with two studies. First, the quantitative component investigated whether the life scripts and life stories of deaf individuals who grew up using spoken language in hearing families were similar to the life scripts and life stories of hearing individuals or culturally Deaf individuals. Then, a qualitative narrative analysis captured a more detailed description of how these individuals recalled growing up as an oral deaf person, and later being exposed to sign language and Deaf culture. Both studies highlighted the importance of communication in both positive and negative ways.

The work of Per Olov Enquist, one of the most important contemporary Swedish authors, is known far beyond Sweden’s and Europe’s borders, and thus even received in North America. A great many of his fictional documentary works and dramatic plays, the biographies of poets such Hans Christian Andersen, Selma Lagerlöf, Knut Hamsun, and August Strindberg, as well as the bestselling novels Lewis Journey, The Royal Physician’s Visit and The Book about Blanche and Marie, have secured a firm position for this Norrland author in the canon of world literature. The continuous transgression of the borders between historical facts and their fictionalization builds the basic characteristic of Enquist’s literature. For Enquist, the goal of writing is to sound out the “innermost space of human existence.” He is eager to explore those secrets and ambiguities that underlie certain historical events or individual life stories. How is individual life determined? And how do individuals find their place in the world? In several of his works, the author uses the metaphor of drawing topographical maps to illustrate the search for one’s own identity as an attempt to position oneself in the world. Starting from his memory of lying on the kitchen floor as a young boy and drawing maps of his native village Hjoggböle, the area around Bureå, the Västerbotten and Norrland region as well as of his native country Sweden, Enquist reveals to his readers what it is that he considers literature to be: the compression of real signs into a fictional space which resembles reality, but, at the same time, moves beyond the boundaries of reality. Through an analytical synopsis of those works that use the motif of map-drawing as a central theme and often refer to each other in direct intertextual reference, namely the novel Captain Nemo’s Library, the essay collection Kartritarna [‘The cartographers’], and Enquist’s biography Ett annat liv [‘A different life’], this article examines the metaphorical function and poetological meaning that the depiction of the author’s own region and home as well as references to his own life story and origin have in Enquist’s work.

This article explores one of Jane Austen's narrative techniques, focusing on her characters' telling of and writing on their past. To incorporate events that characters experienced at different times or locations, she uses life stories constructed by an individual told in the first person. She relies on the characters' subjective telling of their own life stories at crucial points in the plot, rather than leaving the description to the omniscient narrator. In so doing, she provides fresh ways of reading; she enables the reader to get involved in the narrative by sharing an individual's life story and at the same time she ensures that the reader places the character's narrative at some distance. Her use of this method of stories allows her to follow and develop literary tradition. Inheriting the tradition of the letter-writing generations, she provides a new use of life-story telling and a new way of reading them.

Social wariness and anxiety can take different forms. Paranoid anxiety focuses on the malevolence of others, whereas social anxiety focuses on the inadequacies in the self in competing for social position and social acceptance. This study investigates whether shame and shame memories are differently associated with paranoid and social anxieties. Shame, traumatic impact of shame memory, centrality of shame memory, paranoia and social anxiety were assessed using self-report questionnaires in 328 participants recruited from the general population. Results from path analyses show that external shame is specifically associated with paranoid anxiety. In contrast, internal shame is specifically associated with social anxiety. In addition, shame memories, which function like traumatic memories, or that are a central reference point to the individual's self-identity and life story, are significantly associated with paranoid anxiety, even when current external and internal shame are considered at the same time. Thus, traumatic impact of shame memory and centrality of shame memory predict paranoia (but not social anxiety) even when considering for current feelings of shame. Our study supports the evolutionary model suggesting there are two different types of 'conspecific' anxiety, with different evolutionary histories, functions and psychological processes. Paranoia, but less so social anxiety, is associated with traumatic impact and the centrality of shame memories. Researchers and clinicians should distinguish between types of shame memory, particularly those where the self might have felt vulnerable and subordinate and perceived others as threatening and hostile, holding malevolent intentions towards the self.

This paper reports a systematic review of 28 evaluations of interventions that aimed to describe the benefits of the use of the life story for nursing-home residents with dementia, particularly with reference to their sense of identity. The 28 studies were published during 1990–2003. The review focuses on the methodology of the evaluations, and on how the studies contributed to our understanding of the value of using a resident's life story in care interactions. The studies were divided into three groups by the purpose of the intervention: to raise self-esteem and self-integration; to improve life quality; and to change behaviour. The features of the interventions that were associated with enhanced sense of identity were a thorough and encompassing treatment of the individual's life story, the translation of the life story into care interactions, and active encouragement of the residents' initiatives. Only one intervention had all of these features. The diverse aims and forms of the interventions were mirrored by the diverse methodologies of the evaluation studies. Recently the trend has been towards more rigorous designs that measure a few precisely-defined quantitative outcomes but at the cost of a narrower appreciation of the impacts. Given that there is still a great deal to learn about how best to deliver sensitive, individualised and effective support and care to people with dementia, it is argued that qualitative assessments have been too hastily discontinued.

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

The appearance of Hanna Bloch Kohner on a 1953 episode of the series This Is Your Life is among the earliest presentations of a Holocaust survivor's personal history on American television. Analysis of the program explores how television—a collaborative, corporate medium—shapes the telling of an individual's life story, and how the program relates the story of the Holocaust in terms of personal history. The article also examines how the program's producers employed television's distinctive characteristics to enable, limit, or otherwise shape the presentation of the Holocaust, and how the episode indicates that its creators understood its subject as being somehow singular, even as the conceptualization of the Holocaust was emerging, before the term Holocaust entered American public discourse. The article also considers how the program reflects the social and political context of post-World War II America in general and postwar American Jewish life in particular. Finally, the article considers how analysis of this program offers insight into other, later presentations of the Holocaust on American television, especially those dealing with the life story of an individual survivor. (Yiddish Studies/Jewish ethnology)

Remembering the early Soviet period is still one of the main anchor points for identity building in Estonian society. The experience of the Soviet occupation is used as a filter through which meani...

Generativity is an adult's concern for and commitment to promoting the development and well-being of future generations. A growing body of research has shown that individual differences in generativity are associated with particular patterns of parenting, social support, and religious and civic involvement. Research has also suggested that highly generative American adults tend to construct self-defining life stories (narrative identities) that feature the psychological theme of redemption—the deliverance from suffering to an enhanced status or position in life. Through stories of redemption, narrators often articulate how they believe they experienced a "second chance" in life. Redemptive life stories told by highly generative American adults may also incorporate themes of (a) childhood advantage, (b) early awareness of the suffering of others, (c) moral clarity and steadfastness, (d) the conflict between power and love, and (e) future growth and fulfillment. Redemptive narratives function to support and justify a highly generative approach to life in the middle-adult years. At the same time, these individual life stories told by highly generative American adults affirm, work through, and sometimes call into question broader cultural narratives in American history and heritage.