Personal Narratives and Self-Transformation in Postindustrial Societies

Abstract

This article surveys literature on personal narratives as situated practices in a variety of contexts in primarily Western, postindustrial societies. It begins with an overview of theories that articulate the relationships among narrative, self, and narrating context. I then consider how narratives of the self are shaped in institutional contexts, including those in which narratives are used to evaluate selves or used as a technology for changing selves. The section that follows examines how narrative analysis can be used to examine people's positioning in relation to larger social discourses such as neoliberalism. The final section returns to the relationship between narrative forms and contexts by examining how people narrate themselves across the variety of digital media and online contexts provided by the Internet.