Narratives Of Self Research Articles

The Anabasis of Patrick: Travelling an allegorical narrative map of illness and disability

ObjectivesThis paper examines the stories of Patrick, a man living with cancer and a spinal cord injury. DesignAn intrinsic case study was used to address Patrick's experiences. The design of the study is underpinned by narrative dialogism. MethodPhoto-elicitation interviews were conducted. Visual and verbal data were analysed using a dialogical narrative analysis. ResultsPatrick aligned his experiences with a story titled Anabasis to organize and express them. Although Anabasis is not a story about illness, it provides Patrick with an allegorical narrative map of how to live with disability and survive illness. Within ‘The Anabasis of Patrick’, the analysis identified three stages: walking back again, ‘skipping stages of Anabasis’ and surviving cancer. Throughout the course of his illness, Anabasis shapes how Patrick thinks and feels about his body and exercise, affecting his health behavior. A selection of images provided and discussed by Patrick illustrates the process of re-construction of his narrative self, and evokes the effects that Anabasis has on and for him. ConclusionsThe study illuminates the key role narrative and storytelling hold regarding the (non)participation in exercise by people living with serious health problems. It also shows how visual metaphors represent embodied experiences in an effective, aesthetic and accessible manner, enhancing the knowledge dissemination process. To conclude, practical implications for exercise psychology and generalisations from the research are highlighted.

KNOWING OURSELVES BY TELLING STORIES TO OURSELVES

AbstractPart of the epistemological crisis of the twentieth century was caused by empirically establishing that introspection provides little reliable self‐knowledge. While we all have full actual selves to which our self‐representations do not do full justice, we focus on the formation and existence of a narrative self, and on problematic reliability. We will explore the cognitive neuroscience behind its limitations, including pathological forms of confabulation, the generation of plausible but insufficiently grounded accounts of our actions, and the normal patterns of narrative creation and checking. The evolutionary logic of self‐deception may produce adaptive results, particularly in service of the “commitment strategies” that give our species results otherwise unobtainable. It is largely in our close relationships with other human beings, the relationships so well served by these very strategies, that we may find the powerful counterbalancing feedback which may provide positive change and self‐transcendence. Nevertheless, we will also warn about a shadow side for which religion can provide both acknowledgment and hope.

Singing the nation: Contemporary Greek rebetiko performance as carnivalesque

Abstract Significant ethnomusicological research examines the use of traditional song to embody, perform and promote nationalist sentiment in the contemporary globalizing world. Traditional song as a mechanism for national critique has received less scholarly attention. This is a particularly prominent phenomenon within the contemporary European Union, where the utopian ideal of an increasingly borderless and multicultural region conflicts with conventional structures and ideologies of national belonging. This article examines the popular Rebetiki Istoria club in Athens, Greece, as carnivalesque resistance to state-sanctioned Europeanization projects. Engaging the four categories of a ‘carnivalistic sense of the world’, as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin, this study examines this rebetiko culture as structurally coherent resistance to crypto-colonialist attitudes towards Greece. Emphasizing the role of heteroglossic dialogue in shaping carnivalesque music culture, the article examines how voice and singing in the music culture of this particular club level social hierarchies, and challenge dominant ideologies of national identity. Primary consideration is given to vocal style in the framing of rebetika as carnivalesque, suggesting that a particular politics of voice within the club frames rebetika as strategic commentary on narratives of self and other. In this study, the voice is understood as phonosonic nexus – both an embodied physical presence and a metaphor for intention and authority – that shapes the interpretive frame and signals a particular metanarrative of resistance and subversion guiding the carnivalesque nature of the music culture in the club.

황석영 성장소설에 나타난 ‘자아’와 기억의 공간

황석영 성장소설에 나타난 ‘자아’와 기억의 공간

葛洪의 道敎哲學 -『抱朴子內篇』에 나타난 ‘道 ’ 론을 중심으로

葛洪의 道敎哲學 -『抱朴子內篇』에 나타난 ‘道 ’ 론을 중심으로

The management of survivors’ guilt through the construction of a favorable self in Hiroshima survivor narratives

This study examines how Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors linguistically construct favorable selves – that is, selves that they want to present to others – in stories about events where they may feel survivors’ guilt. While discourse analysts started studying Holocaust narratives in the past decade, the field has not yet investigated narratives from Hiroshima survivors, nor has guilt been extensively investigated linguistically. In narrating those episodes where guilt can be attributed, Hiroshima survivors use various prosodic and syntactic devices to maintain their favorable selves by describing their powerlessness in a chaotic situation. Focusing on the telling of the same experience by three different survivors, the analysis reveals that narrators use various linguistic strategies to protect their positions as moral persons. The study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic management of emotion, especially survivors’ guilt. Furthermore, linguistic examination of Hiroshima stories brings a discourse perspective to the study of global tragedies.

The narrative self, distributed memory, and evocative objects

In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our (unfolding) life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology of artifacts in our environment. Lifelogs, photos, videos, journals, diaries, souvenirs, jewelry, books, works of art, and many other meaningful objects trigger and sometimes constitute emotionally laden autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is thus distributed across embodied agents and various environmental structures. To defend this claim, I draw on and integrate distributed cognition theory and empirical research in human-technology interaction. Based on this, I conclude that the self is neither defined by psychological states realized by the brain nor by biological states realized by the organism, but should be seen as a distributed and relational construct.

Subjectivity of the Anomalous Sense of Self Is Represented in Gray Matter Volume in the Brain.

The self includes complicated and heterogeneous functions. Researchers have divided the self into three distinct functions called “agency,” “ownership,” and “narrative self”. These correspond to psychiatric symptoms, behavioral characteristics and neural responses, but their relationship with brain structure is unclear. This study examined the relationship between the subjectivity of self-related malfunctions and brain structure in terms of gray matter (GM) volume in 96 healthy people. They completed a recently developed self-reported questionnaire called the Embodied Sense of Self Scale (ESSS) that measures self-related malfunctions. The ESSS has three subscales reflecting the three distinct functions of the self. We also determined the participants’ brain structures using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and voxel-based morphometry (VBM). Multiple regression analysis revealed a significant negative correlation between ownership malfunction and the insular cortex GM volume. A relationship with brain structure could thus only be confirmed for the ESSS “ownership” subscale. This finding suggests that distinct brain structures feel ownership and that the ESSS could partly screen for distinct brain structures.

Stability of Repeated Work-Related Life Stories

The issue of stability of the narrative self, meaning to what extent an individual's story about a certain stretch of life stays the same over time, was examined by comparing working life stories concerning the same period but narrated 10 years apart. Twenty middle-aged individuals were interviewed in 1999 and in 2009. The analysis of the interview data was based on the parallel use of narrative analysis and the analysis of cultural distinctions. The results indicate that the core of the work-related narrative identities that were expressed in the first interviews also emerged in the second interviews. In our view, this lends support to the idea that people have a stable way of making sense of their past—that is, a continuous “inner narrative.”

The Tipping of the Big Stone-And Life itself. Obesity, Moral Work and Responsive Selves Over Time.

Why is "everything I know is the right thing to do a million miles removed from what I do in reality?" This question posed by Rita, my main interlocutor and friend in a fieldwork that started in 2001-2003 and was taken up again in 2014-2015, opens up an exploration of moral work and moral selves in the context of the obesity epidemic and weight loss processes. I address these questions through the notion of "moral laboratories" taking up Mattingly's argument that moral cultivation over time cannot be disconnected from a notion of self. Mattingly has consistently argued for a biographical and narrative self, which is processual and created in community. Along these lines, and by recourse to the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels' phenomenology, I will propose the notion of a responsive self. The responsive self highlights the eventness of ongoing experimentation against the odds and captures equally pathic and agentive dimensions of a self that both persists and is transformed over time.

A narratable self as addressed by human rights

The paper extends the critique in earlier research of human rights as exclusive of otherness and difference by introducing the work of Adriana Cavarero (2000) on a narratable self. Hence, the formation of human rights is thus about the relations between different narratable selves, not just Western ones. A narrative learning, drawing on Cavarero (2000) , shifts the focus in human rights learning from learning about the other to exposing one’s life story narrative through relationality.

Place-people-practice-process: Using sociomateriality in university physical spaces research

Pedagogy is an inherently spatial practice. Implicit in much of the rhetoric of physical space designed for teaching and learning is an ontological position that assumes material space as distinct from human practice, often conceptualising space as causally (and simplistically) impacting upon people’s behaviours. An alternative, and growing, perspective instead theorises infrastructure as a sociomaterial assemblage, an entanglement, with scholarly learning, teaching, institutional agendas, architectural intent, technology, staff, students, pedagogic outcomes, and built form all participants in an active symbiosis of becoming. This article synthesises and works with spatial theories to elaborate on the emergent literature and illustrates a sociomaterial understanding through narratives of self and staff, teaching and learning in a university context. The terms sociomaterial, assemblage and entanglement allude to a relational ontology underlying spatial-social being-becoming. This understanding can support the realisation of the intent underlying transformations of material spaces to create collaborative and inclusive university environments, where staff and students can learn, belong, and become as part of a scholarly community. I argue that sociomaterial theory is valuable to make meaning of the inseparable mélange of people, place, technologies, interaction, discourse, feeling, value and power that is teaching and learning.

Interplay between Narrative and Bodily Self in Access to Consciousness: No Difference between Self- and Non-self Attributes.

The construct of the “self” is conceived as being fundamental in promoting survival. As such, extensive studies have documented preferential processing of self-relevant stimuli. For example, attributes that relate to the self are better encoded and retrieved, and are more readily consciously perceived. The preferential processing of self-relevant information, however, appears to be especially true for physical (e.g., faces), as opposed to psychological (e.g., traits), conceptions of the self. Here, we test whether semantic attributes that participants judge as self-relevant are further processed unconsciously than attributes that were not judged as self-relevant. In Experiment 1, a continuous flash suppression paradigm was employed with “self” and “non-self” attribute words being presented subliminally, and we asked participants to categorize unseen words as either self-related or not. In a second experiment, we attempted to boost putative preferential self-processing by relation to its physical conception, that is, one’s own body. To this aim, we repeated Experiment 1 while administrating acoustic stimuli either close or far from the body, i.e., within or outside peripersonal space. Results of both Experiment 1 and 2 demonstrate no difference in breaking suppression for self and non-self words. Additionally, we found that while participants were able to process the physical location of the unseen words (above or below fixation) they were not able to categorize these as self-relevant or not. Finally, results showed that sounds presented in the extra-personal space elicited a more stringent response criterion for “self” in the process of categorizing unseen visual stimuli. This shift in criterion as a consequence of sound location was restricted to the self, as no such effect was observed in the categorization of attributes occurring above or below fixation. Overall, our findings seem to indicate that subliminally presented stimuli are not semantically processed, at least inasmuch as to be categorized as self-relevant or not. However, we do demonstrate that the distance at which acoustic stimuli are presented may alter the balance between self- and non-self biases.

The Self-Effacing Buddhist: No(t)-Self in Early Buddhism and Contemplative Neuroscience

One of the core teachings of Buddhism is the doctrine of anattā. I argue that there is good evidence that anattā as understood in early Buddhism should be viewed less as a doctrine and a metaphysical pronouncement (‘no-Self’) than as a soteriological claim (‘not-self’) – an appeal and a method to achieve, or move progressively closer to, liberation. This view opens up anattā to empirical scrutiny – does un-selfing, as an act, lead to liberation? Neuroimaging data collected on Buddhist or Buddhism-inspired meditators show interesting correspondences with this view of not-self as a possibly soteriological strategy. First, meditation leads to a quieting of the narrative self. Second, this quieting of the narrative self seems to lead to at least momentary increases in well-being. Third, this process can be learned, and seems to be already underway after a mere 40 hours of experience. Finally, very highly accomplished meditators seem to be able to tune down even the core self and truly experience anattā, including an apparent subduing of reflexive awareness.

Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts: Art, the Literary, and Life Experience

Narrating Selves in Everyday ContextsArt, the Literary, and Life Experience Mari Hatavara (bio), Matti Hyvärinen (bio), and Jarmila Mildorf (bio) Narrative sense making draws resources from cultural expectations, narrative conventions, and generic models. In narrative—just as in life experience—"[t]he coincidental, unexpected, experimental, even the chaotic, are all necessary and integral aspects" (Hyvärinen et al. 9). And the imagination plays a vital role in how we devise and tell our stories (Andrews). For these reasons, making sense of and communicating experiences are necessarily modified by culturally existing models, and people draw on the literary and the artistic in their everyday storytelling and self-expression. What is more, our everyday involvement with social and other media confronts us with stories and storytelling opportunities in ways that blur the boundaries between living one's life and sharing and co-constructing experiences and values. This special issue explores the literary and artistic in everyday narratives across a wide range of contexts: new media, medicine and therapy, social work, and oral history. It looks at various case studies of incidentally occurring storytelling practices and the (auto)biographical processes manifest in these practices. The contributions ask: how is a sense of narrative self constituted and negotiated in different mediatized environments? What are the culturally available stories and modes of narration for sharing our experience? How do different narrative techniques enable us to represent and communicate our own experience and that of another? By paying attention to the interplay between narrative form, story content, and wider situational [End Page 293] or cultural contexts of social interaction, these contributions demonstrate the broad relevance of both narrative and narrative analysis. The six articles address a number of questions pivotal in narrative theory and crucial to practices based on a narrative understanding of the self. These include the relation between culturally available grand narratives and mundane, interactional small stories (Georgakopoulou), between historical accuracy and narrative imagination, between living a life and telling about it, and between the personal and the social in storytelling practices (see also Schiff et al.). Furthermore, we explore how everyday storytelling practices are related both to the larger, more encompassing conception of a narrative we typically call our "autobiography" or someone else's life story—that is, the difference between "small" and "big" stories, as Bamberg calls them. Each article reflects on these major questions both theoretically and through the analysis of a specific test case. These analyses test the applicability and adaptability of theoretical models and analytical methods in transdisciplinary narrative studies. The first article by Daniel D. Hutto, Nicolle Brancazio, and Jarrah Aubourg offers an insightful overview of Narrative Medicine and Narrative Practice with the aim to lend those practices a strong philosophical support. Hutto, et al. demonstrate the importance of narrative to psychological reality, and the vitality to engage in second person storytelling practices to learn and develop a person's narrative abilities. Therefore, it is a misunderstanding to prefer past accuracy over a future trajectory, or to juxtapose unfavorably disjointed reality with plotted narratives in any effort to maintain and improve mental well-being. Narrative skills are shown to be crucial to having better resources and responsiveness in life. Whereas the article by Hutto et al. focuses on the large frame and philosophical ground for narrative practices in medicine and therapy, the article by Anneke Sools, Sofia Triliva, and Theofanis Filippas investigates a case study of unemployed Greek young adults with a view to exploring narrative futuring. This approach is grounded in the insight that gaining new experiences requires differentiating between past and future. What is more, in order to facilitate change, an imagined future needs to be both desired and believable, which requires narrative construction and communication. Sools et al. show future selves to be both cultural and linguistic constructions, where the personal and the cultural are negotiated and where language modes essentially adhere to content matter. [End Page 294] The third article of this issue addresses the epistemological and temporal dimensions of the self from a different angle: Matti Hyvärinen and Ryoko Watanabe analyze rehabilitation encounters with elderly people with advanced dementia with the help of the model of narrative positioning. Their analysis...

Kim Richmond’s Women Political Prisoners in Germany: Narratives of Self and Captivity, 1915–91

Kim Richmond’s Women Political Prisoners in Germany: Narratives of Self and Captivity, 1915–91

“Looking back (and forth)”: Acknowledging the people who make personal narratives plausible

The past decade has seen a noticeable rise in the number of people embracing autoethnography as an “alternate” research methodology. As a result, a plethora of first-person narratives and pieces of creative non-fiction now exist for truth-seeking scholars to access for authentic inspiration. The author’s unique contribution to the ongoing conversations was first inspired by the professional confessions of a friend and former colleague. Sociological introspection, packaged as a piece of creative non-fiction, should stimulate sociological imagination, evoking a memorable, equally meaningful reaction. In this paper, the author’s goals is to inspire rather than inform, encouraging readers to take time to think about their sport management memories and the meanings attached to their sport management experiences. Readers should question the plausibility of producing professional narratives of self. Readers are encouraged to have a conversation between themselves and the various leaders, legends, and legacy-makers they have followed in order to become who they are. The author encourages readers to reflect on the things they have seen, the places they have been, and the lived experiences they have produced along the way. Readers are prompted to consider the costs and consequences of presenting autoethnography through the guide of creative non-fiction.

Women Political Prisoners in Germany: Narratives of Self and Captivity, 1915–91

Women Political Prisoners in Germany: Narratives of Self and Captivity, 1915–91

Dementia, Positioning and the Narrative Self

Dementia, Positioning and the Narrative Self

Figures of Feeling in Honoré de Balzac's La Peau de chagrin

In this article, I read Balzac's La Peau de chagrin as a novel of feeling, in which Raphael's act of telling his life story entails a sensory encounter with the narrative self. Beginning with the novel's emblematic epigraph, then following through a series of significant encounters within it, I show that Raphael, by putting his life into narrative, is forced to come upon himself as narrative object. Examining these encounters first through the vector of physiognomy, then through twentieth-century theories of play, and always paying particular attention to the visual aspects of touch and feeling, I read them as moments of corporeal mimesis which cast Raphael in a thing- or object-like state. This spectacle of mimesis, in which subject is cast as object, is aptly figured by the magical piece of skin at the novel's centre, the organ of touch, shrinking at the expression of desire and thus functioning as a visual measure for the compromised narrative life.