This article presents an analysis of how a male convert to Islam incorporates events from his life history into a narrative structure in order to construct and maintain a Muslim identity. The study focuses on how the individual and in particular a person's life history becomes social and universal, and how the social and universal becomes particularized and individualized, in the narration of life. The results of the analysis showed that the valued endpoint determines the selection and ordering of (...) different episodes, and the causal connections that are made between them. Many episodes in this convert's life story is similar to other converts' narratives, for example, descriptions of absent significant others during childhood, an inclusion of a Christian phase in life, and the importance attributed to the Qur'an in the process of conversion. The incorporation of these episodes in one's life story and the way the narratives are structured are interpreted as influences from collective narratives. Moreover, the analysis revealed that the selected episodes have important social, individualizing and sedative functions in the flux of discourses in postmodern society. Thus, the individual's Muslim identity is an amalgamation of the particular and the universal and the importance of the narratives lies in the fact that they can integrate particular experiences into a universal structure that gives them a meaning. (shrink)

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (TSE) has shaped African Americans’ views of the American health care system, contributing to a reluctance to participate in biomedical research and a suspicion of the medical system. This essay examines public discourses surrounding President Clinton’s attempt to restore African Americans’ trust by apologizing for the TSE. Through a narrative reading, we illustrate the failure of this text as an attempt to reconcile the United States Public Health Service and the African American public. We conclude (...) by noting the limitations of rhetoric when equal prominence is not given to policy proposals in national apologies. (shrink)

By shifting the focus of analysis from forgetting and remembering to interpreting and making-meaning, Erdelyi allows theoretical consideration of repression to move beyond the heuristic assumption that personal memory is necessarily private memory. In this commentary, repression is considered to be a collective process in which memories are shaped by the need for coherence between individual and social narratives.

Emotional reactions are rather flexible, due to the schema-like organization of complex socio-emotional situations. Some data on emotion development, and on certain pathological conditions such as alexithymia, give further support for the psychological constructivist view put forward by Lindquist et al. Narrative organization is a key component of this schematic organization. The self-related nature of narrative organization provides scaffolding to the contextual dependency of emotions.

This article is a reply to Jeanne Peijnenburg's argument for retrocausality in “Shaping Your Own Life.” Although it is perfectly possible to make sense of the way Peijnenburg deals with the subject of changing the past, there is no need to think this implies retrocausality.

(2001). Making the Things of the World: Narrative Construction and the Project of Bioethics. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 59-61.

Open peer commentary on the article “Building Bridges to Algebra through a Constructionist Learning Environment” by Eirini Geraniou & Manolis Mavrikis. Upshot: In striving to support transition or bridging between arithmetic and algebra through software, Geraniou & Mavrikis come up against the need for learners not simply to “reflect” on what they have been doing, but to withdraw from action every so often, consider what actions have been effective, and construct their own narrative to hold together actions and goals (...) and connections to past experience with other topics. (shrink)

This article is a reply to Jeanne Peijnenburg's argument for retrocausality in "Shaping Your Own Life." Although it is perfectly possible to make sense of the way Peijnenburg deals with the subject of changing the past, there is no need to think this implies retrocausality.

This article argues that the social construction of the borders of Europe is the combined effect of a historical trajectory in which the construction of its outer and its inner boundaries interact. These boundaries make sense to the people because they have a narrative plausibility. On such narrative resonance, real hard borders are grounded. The idea of narrative boundary construction is embedded in a minimalist theory of identity that claims that anything can serve as (...) a boundary within a historically specific situation. The only restriction regarding boundary construction is that a new boundary continues the narrative – either in a continuous or a discontinuous way, either as conservative caring for a tradition or as a revolutionary break with a tradition. This radical break with substantialist notions of Europe's borders and identity implies that such trajectories do not imply any necessity. Whether the European integration process is continuing an old narrative or whether it points towards a specific discontinuity in the further telling of Europe's story, is historically contingent. Europe has just to continue to tell a story about itself that makes narrative sense. (shrink)

In Part I of this book, I argued that preta narratives participated in a larger world-building process that negotiated the contours of the Buddhist cosmos and, with it, the place of the departed. Through stories about encounters between humans and pretas, Buddhist authors explored the place of the departed in a karmic cosmological system, worked out how to best assist them, and advocated for the importance of the sangha in facilitating these offerings. These tales do not merely reflect the process (...) through which the preta as a specific entity and rebirth category became distinguished from the ancestral departed, but also participated in this process. This illustrates the importance of viewing narratives, in Rob Campany's terms, as argumentative. Stories are not merely the distillation of more abstract doctrine but are sites for the construction of religious worldviews. This illustrates that religious cosmologies are not laid down fully formed in doctrinal treatises. They are cumulatively built over time, and "popular culture" can do important work in the aggregative construction of cosmologies. (shrink)

This paper explores contact disputes in England and Wales. We discuss the legal background as well as separating parents' experiences of contact disputes. Contact has been high on the agenda since the U.K. Government report, Making Contact Work, examined various means for facilitating contact between non-resident parents and their children. More recently, the issue has featured prominently in the headlines, largely as a result of the campaigning efforts of fathers' rights groups who complain of injustice and demand changes in the (...) law. The idea that contact is necessary for children's well-being seems to have acquired the status of uncontestable truth. This paper examines the ways in which these ideas about children's interests have become embodied in adominant welfare discourse that is embedded in law and informs policy thinking. Family law has long abhorred parental conflict, particularly that which involves the children. It is frequently assumed that conflict can be reduced if parents could be persuaded to accept the premises of the welfare discourse. In this paper, we consider how parents themselves, in talking about their experiences of contact disputes, makes sense of family law. We found that parents regularly invoke the welfare discourse in their talk, but they interpret it in unexpected ways. Often these interpretations fuel conflict rather than reducing it. (shrink)

This case study is a sociocultural analysis of how Kareem, a young Black man, both constructed a historical narrative and rearticulated two of his racialized identities. Kareem carried out two mediated actions. In the first, he incorporated cultural tools from the classroom—the schematic narrative template of racial progress and the specific narrative of the Movement—to support his thesis that NBA legend Bill Russell advanced the Civil Rights Movement. In the second, he positioned Bill Russell as a model (...) Black man, drawing on cultural tools forged from his self-identification, his awareness of the racialization of Black men, and his desire to articulate a positive image of them. Data include field notes, audio-recorded conversation, written work, and an interview. The paper concludes with implications of this study for K-12 educators, teacher educators, and researchers: (1) that students’ racialized identities and experiences are cultural tools that can intersect with disciplinary learning; (2) that racialization includes non-racial identities and practices; and (3) that history/social studies curriculum and instruction can facilitate students’ analyses of how narratives function in the learning of the past. (shrink)

Episodic memories can no longer be seen as the re-activation of stored experiences but are the product of an intense construction process based on a memory trace. Episodic recall is a result of a process of scenario construction. If one accepts this generative framework of episodic memory, there is still a be big gap in understanding the role of the narrative self in shaping scenario construction. Some philosophers are in principle sceptic by claiming that a (...) class='Hi'>narrative self cannot be more than a causally inefficacious attributed entity anyway. Thus, we first characterize a narrative self in detail and second we clarify its influential causal role in shaping our episodic memories by influencing the process of scenario construction. This happens at three stages, namely at the level of the input, the output and the process of scenario construction. (shrink)

Narrative construction is a discursive practice: storytellers draw on the language, signs and symbols of their culture to provide meaning through stories. Stories that reflect the values, ideals an...

Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction (...) processes that govern how we interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across different generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. Thus, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology distributes our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction. (shrink)

This essay proposes an expansion of the concept of narrative competence, beyond close reading, to include two more skills: the collaborative construction and compelling performance of stories. To show how this enhanced form of narrative competence can be attained, the essay describes Off Script, a cocurricular medical storytelling program with three phases: 1) creative writing workshop, 2) dress rehearsal, and 3) public performance of stories. In these phases, Off Script combines literary studies, creative writing, reflective practice, collegial (...) feedback, and drama. With increased narrative competence, Off Script participants are likely better equipped to engage in more impactful health advocacy and partner with patients more effectively. (shrink)

This article examines the way in which selfhood is constructed in direct-to-consumer advertisements for antidepressant medications. The sample consists of advertisements that appeared in nine popular magazines between 1997 and 2005, television commercials that ran between 2003 and 2005, and online promotional Web sites. The analysis is divided into three sections. First, it is argued that the ads rely on metaphors of communication, information exchange, and plenitude to construct a relationship between biology and selfhood. Second, in offering the choice for (...) antidepressant treatment, the ads grant individuals a new capacity for the exercise of personal agency. Third, the author describes antidepressants as pills that perform a narrative “magic.” In contrast to religious and psychoanalytic narratives that required individuals to incorporate disavowed elements of their selves into an ongoing life narrative, antidepressants are medications that allow individuals to put aside, or jump over, inexplicable and painful moments in their life. (shrink)

This case study article draws upon experiences of a doctoral student and supervisor to reflect on the way in which we construct ethical narratives around our research. We seek to draw attention to the manner in which strict adherence to ERB guidelines can be problematic and risks causing more harm than it seeks to mitigate. We aim to show that we as researchers should focus on the potential harm caused to particularly vulnerable participants and draw attention to the need to (...) refocus conceptions of ethics away from a narrow, bureaucratic framework and towards moral concerns so as to avoid causing undue harm. (shrink)

The ordeal of `Comfort Women' who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Military during the Second World War became widely known in the 1990s through these women's accounts of their experience. Instead of considering their narratives as historical data which reflect the `true' historical past, this article locates them within a broader framework of thinking of narratives. Drawing on the understanding of narrative as a key to the self and the subject which has been developed in narrative (...) research, as well as Judith Butler on interpellation and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on subaltern agency, this article argues that the `Comfort Women's' testimonies should not be read one-dimensionally in the light of `truth' and `falsity', but should rather be considered as the site of their subject-formation. Their narratives are where agency concurrently emerges, and `Comfort Women' are thus not powerless victims but are active participants in their creation of their own narratives and their own selves. (shrink)

Food sovereignty can be conceptualized as a political proposal for social change in the field of agri-food relations. However, specific strategies of how to achieve this transformative potential are diverse, and context-dependent. The paper explores this diversity by examining discourses on the food sovereignty construction process in Catalonia. Using Q methodology we have explored visions held by individuals participating in the social movement for food sovereignty, identifying five discourses: activism, anti-purism, self-management, pedagogy, and pragmatism. Key strategies of transformation include (...) social mobilization, institutional negotiation, self-management, education to foster value change, and politics of the possible. The relevance assigned to ideological affinity explains different views on the subject of transformation, particularly regarding the involvement of the administration and the productive sector. As regards transformative strategies, discourses assign differing importance to the role of agency for effecting social transformation, which influences their assessment of individual actions as an effective means for social change. Forms of individualized and classic collective action currently coexist within the Catalan agri-food movement, but such diversity is not acknowledged as an effective alliance towards food sovereignty. Moreover, all discourses agree to a dual definition of food sovereignty, both as a process, that is, as democratization of the decision-making process in the agri-food sector, and as a result, that is, establishing an agri-food model alternative to the neo-liberal one. However, the discourses share an unclear view of democracy as decentralized collective decision-making that does not make explicit how this model should be implemented to achieve social control of the agri-food system. (shrink)

In inter-war France, history of philosophy was a very important academic discipline, but nevertheless its practitioners thought it necessary to defend its identity, which was threatened by its vicinity to many other disciplines, and especially by the emergent social sciences and history of science. I shall focus on two particular issues that divided traditional historians of philosophy from historians of science, ethnologists and sociologists, and that became crucial in the definition of the identity of their disciplines: the conception of history (...) and the interpretation of texts. By analysing representative discussions and positions, I shall show that traditional historians of philosophy needed to reassert their own approach to history, which, borrowing the term from Bergson, I define as ‘snapshot’. This approach is focused on a particular idea or text rather than a narrative. I shall also show that history of philosophy, in its traditional form, would have been undermined both intellectually and institutionally by the opposite ‘narrative’ approach of history of science and of the social sciences. Social scientists openly attacked history of philosophy’s methods and, in the eyes of traditional philosophers, its existence as an academic discipline. The same opposition is to be found in evaluation of past texts, which for traditional historians of philosophy were to be read as timeless documents, while for historians of science, ethnologists and sociologists were to be considered as documents exhibiting a particular mentality. However, between these alternatives there were intermediate positions. I shall in particular consider that of Léon Brunschvicg: he embraced a narrative approach and considered texts as documents of different ways of thinking, but at the same time carried on employing philosophical methods and defending the institutional position of philosophy. I shall argue that this was possible partly because of the considerable amount of power he enjoyed at the Sorbonne. (shrink)

Research in epigenetics is demonstrating the importance of maternal care towards offspring early in life for long-term health and behavioral outcomes. Although most of this research has been conducted in rodents, these findings are increasingly framing broader debates about mothers’ moral responsibilities for the health of their offspring. In this paper, I investigate the implications of scientific narratives and research agendas of maternal care for current discourses surrounding maternal epigenetic responsibility. I show how despite clear differences between rodent and human (...) contexts of care, researchers tend to construct rodent maternal care as a form of love or emotional commitment. This construction, which ignores fathers’ care for their offspring, reflects widespread social assumptions about mothers’ particular or “natural” capacities to love their children. This has important implications for how we assign moral blame. Because love is important to our widespread understandings of parental virtues, mothers who act “unlovingly” are prone to being judged in an especially harsh manner. By embedding simplistic and gendered assumptions about mothers’ love for their children, then, epigenetics research perpetuates the tendency to consider mothers especially blameworthy where they are perceived as failing to sufficiently care for or love their children. (shrink)

Employing Critical Autism Studies and Narrative Analysis, this project examines how autistic Twitter users engage in narrative meaning-making through social media. By analyzing the hashtags #ActuallyAutistic and #AskingAutistics this project broadly explores how individuals construct identity when lacking access to positive representations and identity communities. Answering the research question, “How do autistic people construct individual and collective identity narratives through Twitter?,” findings indicate that autistic Twitter users use their social media presence to build virtual learning communities. Common knowledge (...) about autism is often oversimplified and highly medicalized. Therefore, autistics use Twitter to make meaning of their experiences that are not represented within cultural notions of what it means to be autistic. Autistic Twitter users reject medicalized narratives by contesting stereotypes, flipping negative narratives into positive stories, re-inscribing “deficiencies” as beneficial, and resisting rehabilitation and “cure.” Users do important social activist work by building strong autistic communities in ways that counter current negative representation, constructing positive self-affirming individual and community identities and resisting eugenic notions that autistic people are “less valuable.”. (shrink)

By applying terminology from trauma theory and a methodological approach from comics scholarship, this essay discusses three graphic autobiographies of women. These are A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached, We are on our Own by Miriam Katin, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Two issues are at the centre of the investigation: the strategies by which these works engage in the much-debated issues of representing gendered violence, and the representation of the ways traumatized daughters and their mothers deal with the (...) identity crises caused by war. (shrink)

Using Fredric Jameson’s theory of the ideologeme to trace representations of working- and white working-class characters through a selection of contemporary literary texts, this article shows how t...

In recent decades, memory studies in Colombia in relation to the internal armed conflict have become a point of reference for multidisciplinary work with collectives and communities, and are also an important topic on the state agenda. This article explores the remembering subjectivities, narrative marks and cultural trauma that emerge from the experiences and perspectives in a memory work Antiguo Espacio Territorial de Capacitación y Reincorporación (AETCR) de Pondores. In addition, the tensions involved in thinking about cultural trauma from (...) subjects marked by the exercise of armed violence are analyzed. For this purpose, a narrative analysis is developed that integrates thematic recurrences, expression of the experience, features of orality and structure of the story. The methods used to carry out this study include a participatory approach and life stories of reincorporated persons and the surrounding community in the context of the AETCR. The study focuses on the ways in which memory expressed narratively conceives practices such as forgiveness and coexistence as possible experiences, through the experiences and thoughts of the AECTR community. (shrink)

Sociologists have identified many factors that mitigate the progressive effects of the legal mobilization to end sexual violence. Within this body of research, however, there is little interrogation about the social construction of sexual harm. I use the case of child sexual abuse to investigate how prosecutors make sense of sexual harm. Data are qualitative interviews with 43 prosecutors. Findings reveal that prosecutors use a framework of sexual identity to construct sexual injury on the child’s body. The perceived harm (...) centers on the anticipated loss of the child’s heterosexual potential. Girl victims are thought to grow into sexual promiscuity, and boy victims are thought to grow into sex offenders. Prosecutorial constructions of child sexual abuse cases are future-oriented, which increases their urgency, and these constructions also imagine the child as a person in formation, rather than a fully actualized person with intrinsic rights. In revealing how the state of sexual victimization is not only deeply gendered but also heteronormative, this research has theoretical implications for childhood studies, queer studies, and anti-violence advocacy. (shrink)

Recent research into LGBTQ kinship has suggested that reproductive technology might stabilise and/or disrupt dominant ideals about the importance of biogenetic relatedness in family formation. This article examines the way adults raised in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) households are interested in tracing queer family histories, rather than solely their biological relations. Data comes from biographical narrative interviews with twenty-two adult children raised by LGBTQ parents. The article examines how participants’ kinship stories relate to parents’ identities and (...) journeys to, and through, LGBTQ parenthood. Knowledge of queer kinship was pivotal in the process of self-making and enabled participants to produce and express connections between themselves and their LGBTQ parents. Furthermore, queer social histories allowed them to articulate their affinity to LGBTQ communities and culture more widely, particularly noting their knowledge and experience of socio-legal discrimination against LGBTQ people. Thus, kinship narratives of people raised by LGBTQ parents highlight that the desire to ‘know where we come from’ is not rooted exclusively in biogenetics. In this case, kinship stories disrupted the established biogenetic narrative, stressing the importance of LGBTQ culture and history for constructing a connection between collective and individual identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Narrative, and the Lifeworld: The Construction of Collective IdentityAlan G. GrossAt the beginning of King Lear, at the point of ceding his throne to his three daughters, Lear asks each for a public acknowledgment of her love. Goneril and Regan flatter their father with effusive declarations, but Lear’s youngest, and his favorite, Cordelia, refuses to do so:I love your Majesty According to my bond; no more (...) or less...................... Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all.(1936, 1.1.94–107) [End Page 118]Furious, Lear disinherits his daughter.Cordelia’s speech is remarkable only in its articulation of what Lear should have known; its dramatic impact is a consequence of Lear’s reaction to his daughter’s argument for divided loyalty that is based on a string of commonplaces that are part of the lifeworld that Lear and his daughter—and every other person in the play—inhabit. Any part of this lifeworld may be thematized, of course; it may be brought out into the open as a topic of discussion. That is what Cordelia does; under duress, she shifts from what Jürgen Habermas calls communicative action to a level he calls discourse, a level that reveals the relationship between the personal and the social as well as their underlying cultural presuppositions. Because Lear refuses to grasp the obvious, the narrative progress of the play is temporarily interrupted and permanently veers off course. Although on occasion we can thematize aspects of our lifeworld, the lifeworld as a whole cannot be subject to scrutiny; it is the totality of certainties, skills, practices, and interpretative frames that we take for granted as we each find our way in the everyday worlds that form the changing horizons of our experience. I take it for granted that too many cooks spoil the broth; telephoning is a skill I do not puzzle over; waiting patiently in line is a social behavior I practice without thinking; with no special effort, I interpret the intimacy of a couple’s relationship by the way they publicly behave toward each other.The lifeworld, a concept initiated by Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Alfred Schütz, Martin Heidegger, and Jürgen Habermas, has been largely neglected by rhetorical theorists and critics. It is the purpose of this paper to show that remedying this neglect opens up fruitful avenues of critical practice and theory. I proceed, first, by defining the lifeworld. Next, I shift perspectives: I analyze how collectivities make sense of their lives by telling stories about themselves grounded in their lifeworld values. It is in the lifeworld’s role in storytelling that, I claim, Aristotle’s Rhetoric becomes an important part of the picture. This is because the Rhetoric is, at bottom, a theory of the way lifeworld values enter into the public sphere. This characterization of the Rhetoric permits us to reconcile two important instantiations of the lifeworld, Habermas’s and Aristotle’s, a reconciliation in which communicative action becomes a special case of rhetorical interaction. Finally, from the perspective of the lifeworld, I reflect on the significance of an exemplary case of the construction of collective identity, the Selma march. [End Page 119]Defining the LifeworldEdmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences contains the first explicit philosophical analysis of the lifeworld as “the world that is constantly pregiven, valid constantly and in advance as existing.... Every end presupposes it; even the universal end of knowing it in scientific truth presupposes it, and in advance” (1970, 382). Because the lifeworld is presupposed in everyday communication, it can be entered only by disciplined reflection: “Contemplation is privileged to the extent that it reveals the structures of the world and has them as theme” (1973, 65). Although the lifeworld... (shrink)

Direct-to-consumer television advertisements for Lyrica in the United States create narratives of gendered domestic normalcy to which women with fibromyalgia are encouraged to aspire through pharmaceutical intervention. This paper unpacks images and narratives within these advertisements to demonstrate that they rely on metaphors that represent gendered expectations in order to evoke guilt and provoke a desire for what Joseph Dumit calls “health as risk reduction,” and what I argue is an attempt to show disability being erased. Following Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding (...) model of communication, viewers play a role in constructing societal expectations for women with chronic pain and for themselves. (shrink)

Although the role played by narratives and particularly by narratives of personal experience in the construction of identity has been widely investigated, the presence and contribution of such narratives in institutional discourse has received comparatively little attention. Our study focuses on two narratives in university lectures, which show that such narratives are a means of textually constructing not only personal but also professional identities. Analysis reveals that the professors position themselves as experts, exploiting the use of pronouns and other (...) referring expressions in addition to self and other evaluation, in order to distance themselves from non-expert others. In doing so, they make little use of the technical terminology often found in representations of professional selves. In offsetting self-aggrandizement with self-mockery, the professors' narratives display an ideological dilemma typical of the expert in current North American culture, which involves see-sawing between expressions of expertise and equality. (shrink)

Is the self narratively constructed? There are many who would answer yes to the question. Dennett (1991) is, perhaps, the most famous proponent of the view that the self is narratively constructed, but there are others, such as Velleman (2006), who have followed his lead and developed the view much further. Indeed, the importance of narrative to understanding the mind and the self is currently being lavished with attention across the cognitive sciences (Dautenhahn, 2001; Hutto, 2007; Nelson, 2003). Emerging (...) from this work, there appear to be a variety of ways in which we can think of the narrative construction of the self and the relationship between the narrative self and the embodied agent. I wish to examine two such ways in this paper. The first I shall call the abstract narrative account, this is because its proponents take the narrative self to be an abstraction (Dennett, 1991; Velleman, 2006). Dennett, for example, refers to the self as a centre of narrative gravity, to be thought of as analogous to a mathematical conception of the centre of gravity of an object. The second I shall call the embodied narrative account and this is the view that the self is constituted both by an embodied consciousness whose experiences are available for narration and narratives themselves, which can play a variety of roles in the agent’s psychological life. (shrink)