Narrative Identity Research Articles

The Imperial Castle in Poznań: Histories of its Polonization

The Imperial Castle in Poznań, conceived as a residence for Wilhelm II, reflects a complex history of Polonization. The original project aimed to culturally and politically “elevate” (heben) the eastern German provinces. The castle was at the centre of a symbolical space, surrounded by institutions (Academy Building, Prussian Settlement Commission, etc.) showcasing national identity. After First World War, the building was “polonized”, which included removing German symbols and its establishment as a residence of the President of the Republic, while many of the surrounding buildings housed key Faculties of the newly created University of Poznań. The castle’s role during Second World War as Hitler’s residence and subsequent adaptation in the post-war era further shaped its identity narrative. The decision to preserve it after the war faced opposition, but since its transformation into the “Palace of Culture” in 1962 (renamed “Zamek [Castle] Culture Centre” in 1993), it rapidly become part of public memory. Post-1989, discussions on the castle’s function and identity led to renovations, the establishment of the “Royal-Imperial Route” destined at tourists, a revived interest in its history, and even local pride. The castle, once a symbol of German rule, now stands as a dynamic part of the city’s history, integrating past narratives with contemporary cultural functions. However, the reconstruction of the “Polish” Royal Castle of Przemysł II, which started in 2010, a controversial project aiming to overshadow the “German” Imperial Castle, reflects tensions between historical narratives in Poznań. Recent developments, such as events organized by the LGBT+ community, showcase the castle’s evolving meaning.

National identity in the exhibition of the Silesian museum: A case study based on the methodology of dispositive analysis

This study presents research on the exhibition Encyclopaedia of Silesia at the Silesian Museum in Opava. The aim of the research was to identify the form of Czech national identity that is constructed and reconstructed by this exhibition, by focusing on the elements and narratives through which Czech national identity is presented and constructed. It also examines whether these elements replicate the prevailing ideas and stereotypes related to this identity in society. The research takes the form of a case study based on dispositional analysis, and showed that the narrative of Czech national identity appears in the exhibition. This confirmed that national identity can emerge not only in national museums but also in other types of museum – in this case a regional museum in which national and regional identities are intertwined.

Defining India: Exploring paradigm shifts in the ideas of India

The idea of India is a dynamic concept that continually evolves and adapts to the changing times. The idea of India has been shaped by its rich history, diverse culture and long standing traditions, and witnessed profound changes that have brought about a major paradigm shift in its national identity, self-perceptions, aspirations and challenges. This research paper aims to explore the major paradigm shifts in the idea of India providing insights into the key factors that have shaped its narrative and national identity and shedding light on the driving forces behind the changing idea of India. It examines the originals impact and implications of these paradigm shifts highlighting their significance in shaping India's past, present and future. By using discourse analysis, this paper has systematically examine the shifts in language, representation, and ideology that reflect the changing paradigms of the idea of India and uncovers the underlying power structures, contestations, and social dynamics that drive these shifts, providing a deeper understanding of how different visions of India are constructed, disseminated and contested over time. It also has limitations, particularly its subjective nature and potential to overlook non-discursive factors. However, its ability to reveal subtle changes, it provides a nuanced and in-depth understanding of these shifts that might be missed by other methods.

Technology, Personal Information, and Identity

Novel and emerging technologies can provide users with new kinds and unprecedented amounts of information about themselves, such as autobiographical information, neurodata, health information, or characteristics inferred from online behavior. Technology that provides extensive personal information (PI technology) can impact who we understand ourselves to be, how we constitute ourselves, and indeed who we are. This paper analyzes how PI technology’s external, quantified perspective on us affects identity based on a narrative identity theory. Disclosing the intimate relationship between PI technology and identity sheds light on a whole new range of ethical issues that have received insufficient attention so far. Personal information provided by technology is not just information that belongs to individuals but also changes them.

ПИСЬМО ЯК ТЕРАПІЯ І СЕНС В РОМАНІ АНН-СОФІ БРАСМ “НАШЕ ПОПЕРЕДНЄ ЖИТТЯ” (2014)

Background. The article regards specifics of a fictional narrative on trauma from the perspective of self-writing by a fictional character. Based on a range of concepts of storytelling as a means of constructing one's identity, an instrument of dealing with posttraumatic consequences, and a form of recovering memory lacunes, formulated by literary critics (Ph. Lejeune, J. Derrida, J. Pavlenko), philosophers (P. Ricoeur), as well as sociologists (J.-C. Kaufmann, A. Giddens), it has been attempted to analyze self-writing strategies as a psychanalytical quest performed by characters in a novel by a contemporary French writer Anne-Sophie Brasme Our previous life (2014). Several conclusions have been made on therapeutic, cathartic, and cognitive impacts within different types of self-writing strategies of the female protagonist (namely, diary and novels by her). Methods. The study primarily aims to integrate the concept of narrative identity proposed by a French philosopher Paul Ricoeur who conceives narrative as an instrument of overcoming the gap between basic philosophical categories, in particular selfhood and identity, as well as apply it in relation to the construction of the narrative identity of the heroine-writer, who experiences deep trauma throughout her life. The analysis of the work uses the personal concept of the French sociologist J.-K. Kaufmann, for whom the narrative in the light of writing about oneself is not only a powerful means of storytelling, but also a tool of for building life perspective through making key choices suggested by narration on oneself. These concepts are revealed on the example of the mechanics of writing on oneself of the main character of the novel chosen for analysis against the background of theses assumed by Philip Lejeune, Jacques Derrida, and Anthony Giddens. Results. The study aims to reveal the life path of the female heroine as a writer, who chooses writing as a way of both escaping from reality and experiencing her trauma be rediscovering it throughout writing about traumatic past. It is concluded that as the heroine thrives towards her past, whereas a clearer perspective of her present and future is built, where writing on oneself appears as a precious key guide between those opposed layers of her hearting psyche. Conclusion. Based on the results of the research, several generalizations are made allowing us to reveal the therapeutic and meaning-making role of artistic writing as a powerful mean of living deeply traumatic experience.

Narrative identity characteristics and personality pathology: An exploration of associations from a dimensional and categorical perspective in a clinical sample of youth.

Narrative identity, as an integral element of personality, has gained increased attention for understanding personality pathology. In this study, associations between narrative identity characteristics (i.e., event valence, theme, contextual coherence, thematic coherence, self-event connection valence, agency, and communion) and personality pathology were examined. Personality pathology was conceptualized as (a) levels of personality (dys)functioning and maladaptive personality traits, (b) six trait facet profiles, and (c) categorical DSM-5 (fifth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) diagnoses. Data of 242 youth (Mage = 18.79; SDage = 2.65) were collected as part of a longitudinal study on personality development. Narratives were assessed with turning point interviews, and trait and functioning levels with self-report questionnaires. The narrative identity characteristics of a negative valence, a negative self-event connection valence, low agency, and low communion were associated with higher levels of personality dysfunctioning, negative affectivity, detachment, and psychoticism. These characteristics were also associated with the borderline, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive, and schizotypal trait facet profiles. No associations were found when considering personality pathology from a categorical perspective. Findings may inspire researchers and clinicians to give personal stories a more central role in their work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Faktografija i fikcija - ogledavanja u romanu Vreme smrti Dobrice Ćosića

The subject of this paper is the analysis of Dobrica Ćosić's novel A Time of Death I-IV (1972-1979), primarily from the perspective of possible worlds theory. One of the most important Serbian novels about the First World War, which critics have frequently defined as an epic novel, was inspiring for our research for at least two reasons: the first lies in the fact that historiographic metafiction is still the most prominent literary current in Serbian novelistic production, and the second is that contemporary readers have returned to Ćosić through intensive film adaptations in the recent years. The analysis and survey of the relationship between the factographic and fictional is precisely what led to the illumination and better understanding of the contemporary readers' attitude towards the so-called NEO-historical novel, which, according to Tihomir Brajović, began with Dobrica Ćosić. An interpretation of the characters in terms of possible worlds theory is at the center of attention, particularly the function of extratextual narrative identities of military leaders, statesmen, politicians, and warriors (Nikola Pašić, Aleksandar Karađorđević, Radomir Putnik, Stepa Stepanović, Živojin Mišić, Petar Bojović, Apis, and Stanislav Vinaver, among others). The specific aim of this paper is to understand the creative process whereby the characters were transformed and shaped as they made the transition from fact to fiction and, in this context, to analyze the documentary and artistic function of different types of texts that are incorporated into the narrative fabric of the novel. In particular, the author's auto-poetic comments are deemed particularly relevant to unlocking the process of metamorphosis of the historical into the fictional. Two more questions are addressed as separate research challenges: (1) the importance of the specific way in which the author constructs the so-called historical characters to form national identity in the novel; and (2) the more general issue of historical truth, with particular regard to the nature of historiographic narrative. The methodological starting point for the interpretation of the characters is provided by the tenets of postclassical (cognitive) narratology, with priority given to Hilary Dannenberg's typology of transworld identities.

Chronological and Comparative Reconstruction of Rural Teacher Identity—Narrative Study on Three Cases from the Old, Middle and Young Generation Respectively

Chronological and Comparative Reconstruction of Rural Teacher Identity—Narrative Study on Three Cases from the Old, Middle and Young Generation Respectively

Professional, scholar, or knowledge worker? Identity construction of Chinese management researchers amid the research-practice gap.

We move beyond discussing the desirability and feasibility of bridging the research-practice gap to introducing an identity perspective to explore how Chinese management researchers make sense of the research-practice gap and what kinds of career identities are constructed. We conducted a qualitative study among 34 Chinese management researchers working at or studying for a PhD at research-oriented business schools in China. The findings show that management researchers in typical Chinese higher education institutions prefer constructing a single identity (i.e., professional, scholar, or knowledge worker identity) rather than a hybrid identity such as "academic-practitioner" as studies of their Western counterparts suggest. Moreover, before seeking and emulating role models to construct their desired career identities, researchers in China studying management reflexively search for referent groups by identifying either with a narrow disciplinary group (US mainstream management researchers or traditional intellectuals) or a broad group of knowledge workers. Furthermore, this study delineates how researchers with varying career identity narratives adopt corresponding identity work strategies (i.e., redefinition, defense, and distance) suggesting that identity work strategies do not always lead to achieving or preserving positive identity.

El silbo en Canarias y las nuevas narrativas identitarias insulares. Debates de la autenticidad en los procesos patrimonialistas de islas turistizadas

The publication of Díaz Reyes’ book El lenguaje silbado en la isla de El Hierro (2008) triggered a whole series of reactions in the mass media by politicians and cultural associations with public transcendence, questioning the validity of the process of the subsequent figure of BIC of the herreño whistle (initiated in 2018). These debates raised cross accusations between the differences political–cultural agents involved in whistle spanish in the Canary Islands. Faced with the possibility of recovering other modalities of the whistle (herreño and grancanario), a set of arguments arose in defence of the exclusivity and authenticity of the gomero whistle. Some herreño associations began to produce new identity narratives for the revitalization and recognition of their traditional whistle. Our study focuses on the articulated whistle and on the analysis of the patrimonial and political–identity dynamics in some tourist islands.

The Northern Borderland and Eastern Kujawy – Parallels: The Construction of Narrative Identity in the Cycle of Stories “Konopnicka’s Desk” by Maria Danilewicz Zielińska

Maria Danilewicz Zielińska was a writer from the region of Kujawy, but she spent her entire adult life in exile. Her autobiographical stories collected in the volume entitled Biurko Konopnickiej [Konopnicka’s Desk] are an example of constructing a narrative identity based on people rooted in their homelands and related events. The first of the local homelands is Kujawy: the author was born in Aleksandrów Pograniczny (today: Aleksandrów Kujawski) and lived there for the first twenty-one years of her life; the second one is the northern Borderland (Kresy) of the former Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Danilewicz had close family ties with the latter, as well as a living memory of its poets and writers. The family, historical and literary parallels connecting but also separating both geographical and cultural areas form pairs. The first one is Kujawy with its towns, nature, inhabitants and their customs, and, on the other hand, the Vilnius and Navahrudak regions, their poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz and Władysław Syrokomla, and ordinary people with their dramatic fate of being displaced. The second pair are rivers and stories related to them: the Vistula and the Nemunas. All these components are places of memory which constitute a hybrid identity of the émigré author from a historical and cultural borderland, an identity constructed by autobiographical memory. Weaving these parallels, she endows them with familiarity, avoiding pathos and mythologisation. Nevertheless, the overwhelming longing for the lost homeland is coupled with its idealisation, especially apparent in the descriptions of nature.

African-American Cultural Expression: The Defiance of Black Aesthetics

This research delves into the transformative realm of Black Aesthetics as a profound and resilient cultural resistance strategy employed by African-Americans. In a historical context marked by the degradation of the genuine image of African-Americans through Western perspectives, Black Aesthetics emerges as a dynamic force challenging stereotypes and reclaiming agency over cultural narratives. The study explores the foundational influences of key socio-political movements, namely the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Power Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement, in shaping and catalyzing the development of Black Aesthetics. During the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance served as a crucible for cultural revitalization amid the multifaceted struggles faced by African-Americans. Fueled by a desire to break free from racial stereotypes, this movement laid the groundwork for the emergence of Black Aesthetics as a tool for empowerment and self-expression. The subsequent impact of the Black Power Movement and the Civil Rights Movement on Black Aesthetics is examined, revealing how these movements contested prevailing Western perspectives and sought to redefine the narrative surrounding African-Americans. The Black Power Movement, emphasizing self-determination and autonomy, stood in stark contrast to the assimilations goals of the Civil Rights Movement, collectively contributing to the nuanced evolution of Black Aesthetics. Through an interdisciplinary lens, this research navigates the intersection of art, ideas, and socio-political dynamics, elucidating how Black Aesthetics serves as a cultural resistance mechanism. It explores the multifaceted dimensions of this resistance, including the creation of alternative narratives, the celebration of cultural identity, and the reclamation of dignity. Ultimately, this research contributes to a comprehensive understanding of Black Aesthetics as a transformative force in cultural resistance, shedding light on its historical roots, its evolution through significant movements, and its enduring impact on reshaping the narrative of African-American identity.

Rupture of Body and Mind in Hiroshima Mon Amour:

Alain Resnais has devised a narrative of fractured identity, trauma, and incommunicability in Hiroshima Mon Amour. With its minimal aesthetics, intricate movement and jettisoned conventionality, the film becomes a new map for theorizations in literary, cultural, and psychoanalytic spaces. This study uses these spaces for a phenomenological inquisition of “rupture” by positioning the subjects of the narrative within them, thus creating a spectrum for identity analysis as well. By delineating the characters as fragments and totalities, it strives to provide a critical reading of trauma and the separation it postulates in the corporeal identity. Kristevan conceptualizations of “abject” and “melancholia,” Freudo-Lacanian postulation of “spatial geometry,” and Kantian “spatiality” are used as modalities for the demarcation of new narratives within literary, social,cultural, and epistemological dialectics. The study further aims to structuralize rupture as generating new cartographies of spatiality while hinging on the film’s narrative framework of storytelling through the body and the mind.

Teaching about racial violence in a place of historical trauma

PurposeThe authors describe an original unit plan that draws from local and national concerns for truthful history education about the history of racial violence in the United States. The unit plan contextualizes one impetus for truth and reconciliation in a community with a history of anti-Black violence.Design/methodology/approachThe participants partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative to pilot the unit in their district’s new African American History course. The unit drew on historical research and cultural memory to situate local history within a broader context of racism and violence.FindingsThe teachers identified eight goals for the unit so that students could understand racialized violence, acknowledge racism as the lived experience of many of their students, and participate in a collaborative learning environment with productive discussions. Speaking from their own experiences with racism, and creating opportunities for students to do the same, the teachers aided the community in voicing long-silenced memories.Research limitations/implicationsBesides bridging some of the gaps between local, regional, and national histories, more research is needed to further examine historical trauma and its implications for both the past and present, in order to amplify and humanize experiences of racism. Additional research is a critical step in developing more thoughtful, empathic and holistic discussions of history and racism at the local level.Practical implicationsIn the wake of the recent past, the authors have learned that teaching about the history of racial violence can be enhanced and empowered by reference to relevant current events. The resurgence of racially charged language and violence over the past few years makes this goal more urgent than ever. This unit gives practical guidance to teachers who face this challenge.Social implicationsThe sociopolitical reality of historical trauma and racism must be confronted, and proximity to key events is important in conveying the urgency of racial violence and the need for history education that addresses it. Teachers are making difficult decisions about their options for teaching about race, and they are understandably concerned about any perceived missteps. Nonetheless, inclusive, truthful history education is an appropriate and essential response to narratives of exclusion and silence as the authors help students to develop deliberative skills concerning difficult topics such as racial violence. Teachers and students, together, can do the crucial work of remembering.Originality/valueThe stripping away of narrative agency, identity and history can cover up stories about the stripping away of life and dignity. In the unit plan, the authors recognize truth and reconciliation—especially in the education of people who have relatively little exposure to topics of race and racism—as elemental to a restorative stance against racism.

From Where Does She Speak?

This article investigates the rise of the feminine creative voice in the age of modernism through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s fictional and nonfictional writings. Her invaluable insights into the long history of women’s subjugation, as well as the fortunes of her contemporaries, provide a framework for an examination of how women established their position as capable members of society in the changing modern milieu. This essay examines Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, and her polemical essay A Room of One’s Own, with a view to demonstrating modern women’s path to creating their artistic identity. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity, I investigate women’s unique way of (re)gaining their confidence and articulating their own voice during the process of self-formation. Following Woolf’s lead, I consider their double status: as both an object of fascination in works of literature and a source of oppression in real life. I also use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of historically effected consciousness (Wirkungsgeschichtes Bewusstsein) to reveal the productive interpretative distance that can help us unravel the complexities of the historical and contingent nature of the development of the female artistic genius. An interrogation of women’s imaginative self-manifestations opens the way to the discovery of crucial truths that pertain to the hermeneutics of female creativity.

Momenty (nie)ciągłości psychologii narracyjnej

The thematic diversity and the way narrative is understood demonstrate the vitality of the concept and the phenomenon of narrative in psychology. This article presents some questions and dilemmas that narrative psychology, which is still a young discipline in search of its scientific identity, pose to researchers. It is not our ambition to resolve these questions; instead, we perceive them as moments of (dis)continuity in the ongoing narrative story and as markers of the directions of research and theoretical considerations. We identify such themes as the distinction between utterance and narrative, the space between author and listener, the directions in which the notion of narrative identity is expanding, and the link between narrative structure and narrative process. The methodological diversity the narrative perspective introduces allows us to pose research questions in a qualitative and quantitative approach.

Tożsamość narracyjna osób z chorobą nowotworową

Research about health loss shows that the way we experience critical moments and build a new identity are important in giving meaning to disease. It allow to integrate the experience of illness into the whole of life. The aim of the research was to analyze the narrative identity reflected in the life history and to explore the factors contributing to the differences in the formed narratives. A research question was: what narrative about one’s life does a person with an oncological disease create? The Polish adaptation of Dan McAdams’ life story interview was used. The study was conducted in group of four people with cancer remission. The research material was subjected to McAdams’ proposed sequence and consistency analysis. Elements of hermeneutic analysis were also used. The patients identity is coherent and mature, their narrative include the time from childhood to the present. Narratives differ in the degree of paying attention on the description of emotional experiences, the level of detail and the way of moving to the next stages of the story. Patient include the disease in their narratives, doing so in an individual way. However, it is possible to distinguish two ways of storytelling. One of them is the location of the disease in the broader background of the life situation, the other – recognizing the disease as the main moment in a given part of the story, constituting its title. It seems interesting to perform comparative research in a group of people, who are during diagnosis of cancer and relate them to the results of people in remission stage.

РАТ КОЈИ ЈЕ ИЗБИО СА ТРИ ДЕЦЕНИЈЕ ДОЦЊЕ

The paper gives arguments for the thesis that, from the perspective of Russian geopolitical interests and their protection, the military intervention in Ukraine was inevitable and came with the delay of three decades. On the one hand, it is a direct consequence of the USSR breakup and the NATO encirclement of Russia, through extending the North Atlantic Alliance to the former member-countries of the Warsaw Pact, some of the former member-states of the USSR (the Baltic countries), as well as all the former Yugoslav republics (except for Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina). On the other hand, it is the result of building new state identities in the anti-Russian narrative, with the violence exerted against ethnic Russians and Russophones, which was particularly pronounced in Ukraine. At the same time, the West pursued a perfidious policy towards Russia. The three-decade delay is the consequence of the illusions cherished by the West and of untimely Russian learning the lessons from the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, for which the West is most directly responsible. Concurrently, the attitude towards the compatriots who remained outside the borders of Russia also partly explains Russian policy during the Yugoslav crisis in the last decade of the 20th century. The ultimate goal of such Western policy is in the idea of achieving the “breakthrough to the East” via breaking up Russia (“decolonization of Russia”) and, furthermore, via breaking up China, which was declared as the sole global competitor of the USA in the latest US National Security Strategy from 2022. Key words: disintegration of the USSR, breakup of the SFRY, Russia, Ukraine, genesis and causes of the ethnic conflict, 2022 Russian military intervention.

A true crime story: The role of space, time, and identity in narrating criminal authority

Abstract This article presents a theoretical and methodological argument for employing a narrative-based approach to explore criminal organisations’ (COs) claims to political authority, accompanied by an empirical example. International Relations scholarship is increasingly interested in the role narratives play in political meaning-making processes, with violent non-state actors (VNSAs) beginning to occupy a central space in such investigations. This work has contributed important insights into how VNSAs, such as terrorists and insurgents, mobilise narratives to challenge state authority. However, this literature still needs to take stock of groups that do not directly challenge the state but rather live within it. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and using the Sicilian Mafia as a case study, I show that COs exercise and construct their narratives of political authority by reappropriating the state’s key constitutive narratives of space, time, and identity. By reflecting the same form of (statist) political imagination via alternative spatial, temporal, and identity configurations, these groups simultaneously reject and reproduce modern articulations of political authority in their spatio-temporal and identity dimensions.

Pedagogy of Responsibility

The following article reconstructs the philosophy of education implicit in Paul Ricœur’s late writings —above all, his “Autonomy and Vulnerability”— to address the current crisis in the humanities. In keeping with Kant and the Bildung tradition, Ricœur reminds us that education aims, above all, at self-formation. In particular, a “pedagogy of responsibility” serves as a bridge between vulnerability and “autonomy”: shorthand in Ricœur’s thought for character, intellectual independence, and moral maturity. Unlike orthodox Kantians, however, Ricœur highlights the indispensable role symbolic representation plays in the cultivation of autonomy, mutual recognition, and three related modes of identity: narrative identity, personal identity, and moral identity. Moreover, we learn this art of identity-formation from sustained study in the humanities (literature, philosophy, history, etc.).