Self-Narratives

The article is a review of travel notes by a famous Finnish ethnographer U.T. Sirelius (1872–1929) about his 1911 expedition along the rivers Pinega, Onega and the White Sea coast. The author focused on a comparative study of the Russians’ and the Karelians’ hunting and fishing practices, as well as technological traditions, wooden architecture, northern ornamental tradition, and the Pomors’ ethnic history. U.T.Sirelius’s field observations about the life of the Russian North population in the beginning of the 20th century are still relevant, as they are important for understanding modern ethno-cultural processes. At the same time candid opinions of “essayist” Sirelius about local traditions were interesting as self-descriptions of the native to the researcher culture, creating in the process of his study of the traditional past a Bakhtin type situation of “a person in front of a mirror”. Sirelius in addition to giving his opinion about (in)viability of these traditions also situationally included the studied history into a contemporary to him ideological context. This controversial approach to the study of the past and present of traditions reflected the geographical, confessional, political, and ethnic specifics of the studied cultures, however in the first place it was a response to a conceptual query of the interpreter himself. This focusing on some cultural aspects and ignoring the others, following fashion of the day in selecting research subjects in addition to illustrating the specifics and the dynamics of research trends was characteristic of the current expectations of cultural and ideological environments to which the interpreters also belonged.

In his monograph, Nikhil Govind argues that the Hindi novel of the 1930s, 40s and 50s became an important medium in which authors, who were also political activists or/and had experienced imprisonment, could reflect their aspirations and doubts about the ideals of the freedom struggle in India. "Between Love and Freedom" carves out "the bi-directionality of literary and political discourse" (p.19) by studying the figure of the revolutionary in the works of Agyeya, Yashpal and Jainendra Kumar. The three authors use sexuality as a comprehensive aspect to pose bigger questions about the nature of revolutionary freedom.

Michelle Obama é a protagonista única do filme, no qual Barack Obama chega a fazer uma ponta. Pelo filme, é possível perceber que os tempos de primeira dama não foram tão confortáveis para Michelle. Assim como a própria decisão de ter filhos também foi um momento difícil para ela, pois teve que abrir mão de alguns sonhos e se colocar em segundo plano. A narrativa autobiográfica no livro e no filme evidenciam um movimento de reapropriação da própria história. Um momento em que ela parece dizer: “eu sou minha prioridade”. “Minha história me pertence”. O filme evidencia o esforço de mulher para controlar sua própria narrativa. E ela consegue. E inspira outras mulheres a fazer o mesmo: “não se veja como estatística e se apodere de sua história”.
https://pensaraeducacao.com.br/pensaraeducacaoempauta/becoming-a-vida-de-michelle-obama-por-ela-mesma/

Calendrier et modalités de soumission Appel à communication : les propositions seront reçues jusqu'au 15 décembre 2021 La journée d'études, en modalité hybride (en présentiel à l'Université de la Réunion), aura lieu le vendredi 4 février 2022 Argumentaire Réfléchir au récit de soi nous invite à penser à la manière dont se construit la subjectivité. Selon Isabelle Galichon, « le récit de soi est à la fois un « texte en devenir » inscrit dans le cadre d'une pratique et un « texte de devenir » puisqu'il porte en lui une potentialité de résistance 1. Cette affirmation invite à considérer plusieurs dimensions dans le récit de soi.

1. Einleitung Die Selbstzeugnisforschung hat sich in den letzten Jahren in Europa zu einem etablierten Forschungsfeld entwickelt. 2 Seit in den 1980er Jahren ausgehend von Forschungen in den Niederlanden der Begriff Egodocument eingeführt wurde, mit dem im englischsprachigen Raum Tagebücher, Memoiren, persönliche Briefe und andere autobiographische Schriften zu einer Textgruppe zusammengefasst wurden, wurden immer mehr Texte entdeckt, die als Egodocument gelesen werden können. 3 Auch in Frankreich werden seit 2003 Memoiren, Autobiographien, Haus-und Familienbücher, Tagebücher, Chroniken, Annalen, systematisch gesammelt. Sie werden im Französischen als Les écrits du for privé bezeichnet. 4 Im deutschsprachigen Raum, in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, hat sich in Auseinandersetzung mit der literaturwissenschaftlichen Autobiographietheorie seit langem der Begriff Selbstzeugnis durchgesetzt. Hiermit

Throughout the nineteenth century several Western officers joined the Ottoman Army. Not a few adopted Ottoman citizenship, commanded troops, fought in major wars, and rose to the highest echelons of the military. For these men the Ottoman Empire represented a formidable military power, notwithstanding contemporary discourses about its supposed decline. Asking what prompted these military men to emigrate, this article elucidates how they reconciled, for themselves, some of the putative contradictions of their positions as (former) Christian men in the military body of an Empire that drew on Islam as its main source of legitimacy. How did they try to make sense of what they were doing and how did they later remember and represent their Ottoman travails to those they left behind? This article answers these questions through a close reading of the career and memoirs of the Belgian baron Charles de Schwartzenberg a.k.a. Emin Pasha (d. 1878), who was employed in the Ottoman Army for nearly two decades, fighting in the Crimean War before serving in Syria. Typical for the mercenary-like European officers who chose to venture abroad, his biography illuminates the kind of mobility that was possible in, and integral to, the late Ottoman military structure.

Part of the Special Issue “Foreign Fighters and Multinational Armies from Civil Conflicts to Coalition War, 1848-1999,” edited by Steven O'Connor and Guillaume Piketty.

Introduction: The thesis about beneficial effects of writing on physical and mental health occurs quite commonly in modern psychological literature. The notion of “writing cure” (Lepore, Smyth, 2002; Kaufman, Sexton, 2006), which suggest non-controversial positive outcomes of writing exists as a reference to the notion of “talking cure” known from psychoanalysis. The thesis about benefits of writing has been scientifically developed and empirically verified in at least two ways. First, attempts have been made at establishing in what circum- stances or conditions (personality, procedural, types of psychological situa- tions, etc.) does writing have better or worse effects. One of the most signifi- cant contexts considered in numerous studies is a past traumatic experience of an individual and his or her ways of coping with it. Secondly, researchers have tried to formulate a hypotheses explaining why does it happen, i.e. what psychological processes lead to positive effects of writing. The review of stud- ies presented in this part of the paper corresponds to this division. First, a broad context of benefits from writing in different psychological traditions is presented. Next, an attempt at defining the mechanism of positive effects' for- mation with particular emphasis on narrative and self-narrative processes. The second part of the paper presents explorative empirical studies aimed at estab- lishing, with the use of some general indexes, if the tendencies to write and create self-narratives are connected with the quality of life and ego integration, when considering experiences described as difficult and traumatic.

Reading Augustine's "Confessions" after Roland Barthes's "La Chambre claire" ("Camera Lucida") and "Journal de deuil" ("Mourning Diary") helps to delineate an often-overlooked problem in the "Confessions": the reality of the past outside of one's own personal memory. From a theological perspective, the past is grounded in God's eternity. Yet, when it comes to the narration of his own past, Augustine seems to need evidence of its reality. His mother Monica is the hinge that connects the unfolding of his story and the presentness of all time in God. One's own mother, not the figure of the Mother, appears to be the basis of confession and its temporality: she allows the past and the future to intersect the present of Augustine's telling of his story or Barthes's viewing of the photograph. Barthes's mother, in fact, reveals herself as the 'punctum' that opens up what would otherwise be a moment of the past frozen in its image and makes that past operative in the present of the son observer. To explore Barthes's affinities with Augustine, the article also looks at Jacques Derrida's "Circonfession" ("Circumfession") and Jean-François Lyotard's "La Confession d'Augustin" ("The Confession of Augustine"), which show revealing differences from both Augustine and Barthes and, along with Julia Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" and "Le vréel" ("The True-Real"), help to reassess the "mad" proposition of a mysticism of photographic technology offered in "La Chambre claire".

La scelta dei testi presi in esame nel presente lavoro è stata guidata da un interesse di ricerca specifico: il problematico processo di (ri)definizione del sé che ha luogo nel narrarsi. A vario titolo i protagonisti di questi racconti sono chiamati a narrarsi e, nel farlo, ad esprimere una parte o il tutto della propria identità; ciò a cui assistono i narratari (e conseguentemente i fruitori) è uno svelamento " poietico " nel senso greco del termine: nell'essere confidata o rivelata l'identità si (ri)crea.

This essay, written for the Theory of Literature course, was driven in the choice of the novels analyzed and in the interpretative lenses employed by a main research interest: the (re)building of personal identity through the narration of self. In other words, it is my conviction that the question "Who am I?" finds a partial answer just on the condition that a careful,  cooperative interlocutor provides some help.

Between 1591 and 1637, nobleman Sweder Schele van Weleveld recorded all kinds of different aspects of his life and that of his family members into his volumnious 1800-page chronicle. Among those recordings are a great many which give us valuable insights into the struggles a cross-border nobleman like Sweder Schele faced when both the Eighty and Thirty Years War were raging near his estates. This bachelor thesis, which was awarded a 9 for its innovative look at the subject and elaborative writing, discusses the value of personal accounts and narratives of war and crisis in early modern times through a discussion of Sweder Schele's chronicle. It discusses his personal accounts and reflections on the subject of war and how this approach can alter our view of the grand "master-narrative" of heroic winners and evil villains, but also how it can be used to gain insights into the daily struggles faced by early modern people in times of war.

Combining narratological analysis with autobiography studies, this article looks at examples of focalization strategies in several autobiographical works. It adopts Dorrit Cohn's distinction between consonant and dissonant self-narration (identification or distance between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I) to explore how authors engage creatively with different positions of the autobiographical "I," and how this engagement contributes to their texts' aesthetic qualities. Starting from a brief exposition of the role of the narrating-I and the experiencing-I in autobiographical narratives, the article discusses the juxtaposition of the two selves' perspectives in Sylvia Fraser's My Father's House, which is achieved by means of a dexterous combination of consonant and dissonant self-narration. Examples of dissonant self-narration from Günter Grass's Peeling the Onion and Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind and of consonant self-narration from Mary Karr's memoir trilogy (The Liars' Club, Cherry, and Lit) then demonstrate how self-dissonance may help convey a work's meta-autobiographical message, while self-consonance seems to contribute to readers' immersion in the narrative.

This paper considers the transgressive potential of vulnerability through Judith Butler's work on self-narration. The first part of the paper shows how Butler uses the notion of vulnerability to theorise how the subject is constituted through social norms and relations to others. This calls for a closer look at the way that the notion of vulnerability is foregrounded in Butler's recent work through an exposition of her use of the notions of corporeal vulnerability, precariousness, and ecstatic relationality in Precarious Life. The second part of the paper links the discussion of vulnerability with self-narration. By turning towards the questions Butler raises in Giving an Account of Oneself, this part of the paper will dwell on her reflections on how a vulnerable subject is not able to give a coherent account of itself due to the subject's self-opacity and dependence upon constitutive features that are beyond its grasp. This leads her to maintain that a coherent and complete narrative of one's life is an impossibility, if not a fiction. Yet, the need to give an account of oneself persists as a painful necessity, in traumatic writing, for example. It is in this painful persistence that the transgressive potential of vulnerability – and of trauma – can be apprehended. The paper will conclude by considering the uneasy relationship between Butler's account of the vulnerable subject, and the transgressive textualities of trauma.

Internet studies are rapidly approaching disciplinary status in academia (Silver 2006: 2). As ethnographers we find Internet cyber-culture(s) and social networking using advancing communication technologies to be provocative and relatively unexplored ethnographic topics. As Romani studies scholars we seek out research applications relevant to our specific interest in culture change among Gypsies (Romanies) and Travelers in the United States (GR&T peoples). As cyber-ethnographers using a ‘data dredging’ methodology we explore Internet cyber-subcultures comprised of youthful GR&T peoples. We describe GR&T adaptive and creative uses of some interfacing new mass communications technologies; for example, photo cell phones, the Internet and personalized web logs. GR&T adolescents using these technologies construct self-ascribed identities and ascribe identities to others via their online Internet communications. They also reveal their values and material cultures. GR&T ‘self-narratives’ encountered in their photo-blog guest books comprise a distinctive written argot. From these online data sources we isolate and discuss specific themes, and a theoretical implication.

Keywords: Gypsy-Americans (Gypsies, Romanies), Travelers, cyber-ethnography, data-dredging, Internet websites, youth photo blogs, guestbooks, self-narratives, identity issues

Geçtiğimiz yıllarda Ontolojik Güvenlik Teorisi (Ontological Security Theory – OGT) Uluslararası İlişkiler (Uİ) disiplininde kendine önemli bir yer edindi. Teori, devlet davranışlarını devletin öz-anlatıları üzerinden anlamlandırırken, bu öz-anlatıların yeniden üretilmesinin altında yatan sosyo-psikolojik dinamikleri de ortaya koydu. Özellikle, fiziksel güvenliğin öncüllüğünü tartışmaya açarak ve öz-anlatılar yoluyla devlet kimliğinin oluşması ve korunması süreçlerinde devlet-toplum arasındaki diyalektik ilişkiyi ortaya koyarak önemli katkıları oldu. Bu makalenin birincil amacı OGT’nin ana argümanlarını ve araştırma konularını Türkiye Uİ camiasına tanıtmaktır. Aynı zamanda OGT’nin mevcut eleştirel güvenlik kavramları ve kimlik yazını ile bağlantısının yetersizliğinden kaynaklanan eksiklikleri değerlendirilmektedir.

« Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure » 1 : ce début de la Recherche du temps perdu est en quelque sorte l'initiation à la recherche d'un moment sublime dans la vie du moi qui se souvient. Cette ouverture représente en même temps la fin d'un long cheminement littéraire. Pour la trouver, Proust a dû passer par les nombreux escaliers en spirales de ses avant-textes 2. Le narrateur du roman, qui avance un « moi » pour faire vivre en lui comment il est devenu narrateur, condense ainsi dans cette entrée la scène primaire, l'archè, de quelqu'un qui est parti pour apprendre l'art d'écrire 3. Mais cette première phrase résume bien d'autres choses encore. Elle n'annonce pas moins que la révocation d'un projet précurseur qui, sous le titre de Contre Sainte-Beuve, était longtemps l'approche de la future Recherche. Comme les avant-gardes qui le côtoyaient, Proust envisageait d'y ébranler les fondements philosophiques dont se réclamait Sainte-Beuve, « le maître inégalable de la critique du e siècle » 4. En reprenant une formulation acerbe d'Hippolyte Taine, Proust qualifiait sa méthode d'analyse botanique, sans pour autant contredire l'exigence philosophique en soi qui voulait que l'oeuvre d'art se vouât à la recherche de la vérité 5

Ever since Freud pioneered the " talking cure " , psychologists of various stripes have explored how autobiographical narrative bears on self-understanding and psychic well-being. Recently, philosophers have taken up the question of whether autobiographical narrative plays an essential or important role in the constitution of agentic selves. However, embodiment has received little attention from philosophers who defend some version of the narrative self. Catriona Mackenzie is an important exception to this pattern of neglect, and this paper explores Mackenzie's work on embodiment and self-narrative with the aim of better understanding the adequacy of autobiographical narrative as an account of the agentic self. I argue that Mackenzie's narrative account of embodied subjectivity and agency is incomplete, for it overestimates the reach of narrative and underestimates the cognitive and agentic powers of the lived body.

محمد كريم و جان رنوار. سينمائى مصرى و سينمائى فرنسى عاشا تجربة البدايات و التحولات فى العصور الأولى للسينما. كتب كل منهما مذكراته السينمائية فتناولا الفترة التى امتدت من نهايات القرن التاسع عشر و حتى منتصف القرن العشرين.
ما الذى يجمع هذين الاسمين؟ هل تعارفا؟ هل تأثر أحدهما بالآخر؟

Internet studies are rapidly approaching disciplinary status in academia. As ethnographers we find Internet cyber-culture(s) and social networking using advancing communication technologies to be provocative and relatively unexplored ethnographic topics. As Romani studies scholars we seek out research applications relevant to our specific interest in culture change among Gypsies (Romanies) and Travelers in the United States (GR&T peoples). As cyber-ethnographers using a ‘data dredging’ methodology we explore Internet cyber-subcultures comprised of youthful GR&T peoples. We describe GR&T adaptive and creative uses of some interfacing new mass communications technologies, for example, camera cell phones, the Internet and personalized web logs. GR&T adolescents using these technologies construct self-ascribed identities and ascribe identities to others via their online Internet communications. They also reveal their values and material cultures. GR&T ‘self-narratives’ encountered in their photo-blog guest books comprise a distinctive written argot. From these online data sources, we isolate and discuss specific themes, and a theoretical implication.

Comment utiliser les traces spécifiques produites par les individus en exil pour enrichir l'étude et la compréhension des migrations ? L'étude de l'exil et, plus généralement de la migration, s'appuie depuis longtemps sur l'utilisation de Mémoires et de récits, sur des témoignages. Le renouvellement récent des méthodes d'analyse des écrits du for privé permet de réévaluer l'usage qui peut être fait de ces récits dans la perspective d'une histoire des migrations. Les écrits personnels du clergé émigré pendant la Révolution se prêtent particulièrement bien à cet exercice. Sur un total de trente-mille prêtres et religieux ayant migré, le corpus proposé à l'étude est composé de quatre-vingt-dix Mémoires, carnets de voyage, journaux et diaires. La mise en comparaison de ces écrits offre la possibilité de mieux cerner les identités individuelles et les caractéristiques collectives de ce groupe. L'analyse des formes des récits ouvre une fenêtre sur le sens assigné par les acteurs à leur migration. Et leur réutilisation à la fin du XIXe siècle dans un contexte politique conflictuel, vise à constituer la migration en thème mémoriel privilégié et les récits qui en sont fait, en outils politiques.


English :
Retrospective self-narratives such as memoirs and diaries are one of the main sources in migration studies. What value are they to migration scholars, besides their testimonial dimension? A recent renewal in the field of self-narrative studies in modern history re-evaluates their worth and develops new methods of analysis. These methods can be profitably used in the study of the exiled clergy's self-narratives during the French Revolution. Out of the thirty-thousand priests, monks and nuns who emigrated, this study focuses on ninety self-narratives, including Memoirs, diaries and travel accounts. Because this collection of writings revolves around the same theme, comparing them gives a clearer view of the collective identity of the authors as well as their singularity as individuals. The genre chosen by each author also gives clues as to the meaning they give to their displacement. Finally, the fact that they are published or reprinted at the end of the 19 th century tends to show a political intention behind their use; it seems to stem from a desire to turn these Memoirs into a tool to show the republican movement as intrinsically threatening to Catholics. One of the main sources of the field of migration studies are the emigrants' self-narratives.

En este artículo nos centramos en el estudio de los espacios de la intimidad, intentando poner en juego esta dimensión muchas veces dejada de lado en los estudios sobre comunicación y ciudad. Nuestro análisis se inscribe en una investigación etnográfica más amplia, en relación a las transformaciones en el hábitat y las formas de habitar a partir de las acciones de un plan socio-habitacional estatal en Uruguay. En primer lugar, proponemos un desplazamiento conceptual desde la noción de lo privado a la de lo íntimo. En segundo término, tratamos las estrategias y tácticas de abordaje de la intimidad surgidas en nuestro trabajo de campo. Posteriormente, nos sumergimos en dos casos de estudio que permiten tratar las cuestiones centrales al respecto.

In this paper we focus in studying intimate spaces, aiming at putting into play this dimension often times set aside by communication and studies of cities. Our analysis is part of a wider research of ethnographic nature about the transformation of the habitat and ways of dwelling, parting from the actions of a social housing plan in Uruguay. First, we propose a conceptual shift from the notion of the private to the intimate. Second, we address the strategies and tactics of the intimacy approach that emerged from our fieldwork. Later, we dive into two case studies that allow addressing our central questions.

Karoline Kummerfeld (1742-1815) zählt zu den bekanntesten deutschsprachigen Schauspielerinnen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Als zeitweiliger Bühnenstar begeisterte sie ihr Publikum. Vor allem ihre autobiographischen Schriften haben dazu beigetragen, dass sich ihre Bekanntheit und ihr Ruhm erhalten haben. Diese Schriften werden hier erstmals als eigenständige Texte ediert und umfassend kommentiert. Zugänglich wird so die Alltags-und Lebensgeschichte einer außergewöhnlichen Frau und Person, die auf vielfältigen Handlungsfeldern aktiv war: als Schauspielerin und Tänzerin, als Geliebte, Freundin, Tochter, Schwester, Ehefrau und Witwe sowie als Unternehmerin. Ihre Aufzeichnungen geben Einblicke in die uns heute fremde Welt einer Wanderschauspielerin, die den Versuch wagte, im bürgerlichen Leben heimisch zu werden, und die nach ihrem Abgang von der Bühne noch fast drei Jahrzehnte lang in Weimar eine Nähschule leitete.

The study presents a marginalized person’s life story, personal and historical narratives. The analysis aims to comprehend the collected re-miniscences that otherwise did not follow a clear narrative structure (ti-me, topics). A structural reading of the narratives reveals that the micro and the macro level, the interpretation of the history of the person and of the history of the nation have a common pattern, the victimized personal narrative echoes a victimized narrative of the national history. Time, to-pics are unimportant as the narrative ceases to be historical, and rather becomes mythological, exemplifying a timeless truth that is capable of explaining both the personal and the national tragedies and failures.

A digital society enables the construction of one or more identities in its multiple virtual spaces, which entails a narrativization of the self in all those spheres: one’s story as the creation of new identities and new projections of one’s own identity. Therefore, the construction of this identity by means of a textual or audio-visual story in the Internet has facilitated a whole new narrative of identity, which, of course, has antecedents in real-life cases, in traditional narratives and in the border between both worlds. In order to understand the contemporary phenomenon, we cover a series of representative and defining cases from a social and a historical perspective within the Hispanic and international sphere, with a special emphasis on its impact on contemporary production. Our study addresses how these impostors, their instruments and their procedures are directly linked with current phenomena of the representation of the self, both with a biographic and fictional vocation.

Człowiek jest zawsze opowiadającym opowieści (...), widzi wszystko, co mu się przydarza, w kategoriach tych opowieści i stara się przeżywać swe życie tak, jakby je opowiadał J. P. Sartre, Słowa W konstruktywistycznym ujęciu, reprezentowanym przez narratywistów, od "życia jako takiego" znacznie istotniejsza jest nasza "opowieść" o nim. "Naturalną formą procesów myślenia na własny temat oraz procesów podejmowania decyzji -stwierdza Jerzy Trzebiński -jest konstruowanie autonarracji, tzn. fabuły przedstawiającej ograniczoną czasowo historię, w której występuje własna osoba" 1 .

The following essay aims to provoke questions around the relationship between one's own identity and the power words have upon definitions of self. Who am I? The notion of self is a quality that essentially suggests each of us is different. Who am I? You are the story you play in your head. Storytelling is what shapes human thinking. Our imagination is weaved with narrative and this forces us to think a certain way. What vertebrates our thinking are words which are symbols for concepts used to organize and shape self-stories. Throughout time, words have acquired so many different meanings that people interpret them differently. People adopt and appropriate words without knowing what they fully mean, without knowing where they come from and without being completely aware of their weight upon shoulders. Words are handed over (as sounds, concepts, visual forms), thus shaping our narratives and our silences. Why is the narration of self split into what we say and what we keep silent? These silences kept inside sit on the throat, weighing too much to be swallowed. Undesirable shares a negation prefix with invisible. Invisible not as in lack of form, color, or matter, but as that which we don't speak of, what doesn't stand out, what is silenced. How can one reshape or construct different definitions of oneself? By performing archaeological digs on words and ideas to discover what lies beneath and unlearn unpleasant parts of the script of our life story. One's own story becomes different after being narrated, questioned, and rewritten in order to unpack language and reveal new ways of seeing.

The understanding of traditional security is undergoing a more multi-faceted transformation. Security itself is no more regarded as being limited to a physical presence, it requires a stable self as well. Claiming this, ontological security theory enables scholars to examine state behavior which strengthens identity values via self-narratives. This study aims to reveal that the traditional security perception of Canadian governments is limited in evaluating their relations with the Arctic states and indigenous people, therefore, in recent years, the relevant governments have provided Canadian ontological security in the Arctic region by constructing indigenous people as self-narratives. Therefore, in this paper, instead of traditional national security, it is mentioned that ontological security theory better articulates the state behavior of Canada both domestically and internationally. In the study, the qualified document analysis method is used by examining the reports that include the indigenous peoples as a significant part of Canada's national identity and the declarations announced at the ministerial meetings of the Arctic Council after the chairmanship of Canada. In this way, the study concludes by mentioning that Canada has built its ontological security by constructing self-narratives from indigenous peoples to have a robust position in the Arctic.

There are a variety of options in a narrative approach to the self.  I limit myself to one approach that argues narratives have important roles in our lives without it being true that a narrative constitutes and creates the self.  My own position is broadly sympathetic with that view, but my interest lies with the question of whether there is truth in the claim that to create one’s self-narrative is to create oneself.  I argue that a self-narrative may be multiply realised by the inner self—impressions and emotions—and the outer self—roles in work and life.  I take an optimistic attitude to the idea that narrative provides a metaphor that may stimulate insight in the nature of self if we accept a plurality of narrative selves.  This paper mines a vein of research on narratives for insights into selves without being bewitched into accepting implausible conclusions.

Marya Schechtman's 'Narrative Self-Constitution View' proposes that for some conscious entity to be a person they must have a narrative self-conception. I argue, however, that Schechtman's seemingly intuitive criteria for personhood are too narrow, given my own experiences and phenomenology as a person with an 'episodic' temporal temperament. I draw on Galen Strawson's paper 'Against Narrativity' to defend my view that there can exist persons who perceive themselves to be entirely without a cohesive narrative at all, and go on to argue that it is both unethical and unintuitive to deny these kinds of people personhood. In my positive thesis I propose that it may be possible to argue that selves must be capable of local narrativity to be considered persons, but that we should reject the requirement of global narrativity for selfhood on the basis that it is contrary to our accepted world view of who constitutes a person.

This essay sets up a dialogue between the self-narrative of an irregular cavalryman (deli) Deli Mustafa that recounts the campaigns he took part in between 1801/2 and 1825 and the corpus of Ottoman archival sources written about Kara Feyzi, an irregular soldier (sekbân) and bandit leader who marshaled a successful, trans-regional organized crime network that pillaged Ottoman Rumeli from 1793 to 1823.  It does so in order to tell a larger story about how imperial governance came to depend on wide-spread networks of violence for defending and policing the Empire but became imbricated in their criminal activities during this period of Ottoman history.  Together, Kara Feyzi and Deli Mustafa’s stories shed light on much larger interpretative and moral communities forged upon the same kinds of “texts,” narrative strategies, group experiences, exchange of material and symbolic resources, or simply a concept like honor woven throughout the narratives discussed below. 

This essay builds on recent historiography that revisits honor as a discourse that imperial officials, subjects, warriors, irregulars, and bandits all invoked in everyday relations as well as crisis.  Rather than emphasizing honor as the mechanism of social organization in the absence of the reaches of the modern state as it featured in twentieth-century anthropology of the Mediterranean, this essay illuminates the ways in which the discourse of honor (and its relational components) mediated the integration of individuals, groups, and local communities into much larger entities such as trans-regional networks and structures of the state.  As it will be argued, the reliance of imperial governance on the trans-regional networks of violence to police and defend empire resulted in a precarious intimacy that conventionalized the unconventional, insubordinate behavior of vast echelons of Ottoman society, making violent behavior a marker of prestige and masculine aesthetic—indeed an enduring legacy of the Ottoman past from Serbia to Syria.

Self-narrative (as reporting one's own experience in a narrative form) is a significant source of information for a psychologist, because the self-narrative reflects an individual pattern of meaning-making, which is constitutive for the sense of identity. It is claimed that the usefulness of methods (instructions) aimed at generating self- narrative should be assessed. The moreuseful the instruction is, the highere level of narrativity it produces. It might be assumed, that there are some factors (intrapersonal and situational), which may modify the effects of self-narrative elicitation instructions. One of the intrapersonal factors is the self-narrative inclination - a dispositional tendency to story-telling about one's own experience. The book concerns the estimation of narrativity levels in the texts produced by the participants during three different self-narrative elicitation instructions (1. open-ended question; 2. photo-elicitation interview; 3. life-as-book metaphor)...

The autobiographical discourse is not limited to the episodic narration of what has been lived. It finds its foundation in the human action of narrating configured in the temporal course of experience. In this paper, we propose an interpretation of the narratives of young readers from the backlands of Rio Grande do Norte-Brazil, focusing on their Literary Education processes. The data reveals their perceptions about the gesture of composing memories and narrating them, in addition to their relations to Reading and Literature as symbolic knowledge. We are interested in understanding their literature reading narratives based on the memories evoked during individual interviews, highlighting the heuristic and autopoietic value of the self-narrative. The analysis suggests that the act of narrating plays an important role in young reader's lives as it brings the possibilities of reframing the past, assigning new meanings to the present and envisioning life projects in the future.

The autobiographical discourse is not limited to the episodic narration of what has been lived. It finds its foundation in the human action of narrating configured in the temporal course of experience. In this paper, we propose an interpretation of the narratives of young readers from the backlands of Rio Grande do Norte-Brazil, focusing on their Literary Education processes. The data reveals their perceptions about the gesture of composing memories and narrating them, in addition to their relations to Reading and Literature as symbolic knowledge. We are interested in understanding their literature reading narratives based on the memories evoked during individual interviews, highlighting the heuristic and autopoietic value of the self-narrative. The analysis suggests that the act of narrating plays an important role in young reader's lives as it brings the possibilities of reframing the past, assigning new meanings to the present and envisioning life projects in the future.