Story and Identity

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-181
Author(s):  
Karen E. Shackleford ◽  
Cynthia Vinney
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the way fictional stories impact personal identity. It discusses how identity develops with a particular focus on adolescence. Then, it sheds light on how fiction contributes to identity construction as teens gain insight into things like careers, relationships, values, and beliefs through stories and how these insights can impact their choices for their futures. The chapter also looks at the way people’s emotional investments in their favorite stories can cause them to become extensions of themselves and how this may lead them to use these stories as symbols of who they are. Finally, it explores the topic of narrative identity—the internalized, constantly evolving life story each person tells of himself or herself—and how fiction influences and becomes incorporated into people’s life stories.

The Transformative Self

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Literature History

Everyone wants a good life. Some try to create a good life by cultivating personal growth. They have a transformative self. This book explains how people form a transformative self, primarily in their evolving life stories, to help cultivate growth toward a life of happiness, love, and wisdom for the self and others. It introduces an innovative framework of values and personhood to strengthen and integrate three main areas of study: narrative identity, the good life, and personal growth. The result is a unique model of humane growth and human flourishing. Each chapter builds on that framework to explore topics central to the transformative self, such as how cultural beliefs of a good life shape our narrative identity; how narrative thinking shapes cultural and personal beliefs of a good life; how cultural master narratives shape our ideals for personal growth; how growth differs from gain, recovery, and other positive changes in the life story; how happiness, love, wisdom, and growth serve as superordinate goods in life; how the hard and soft margins of society thwart and facilitate personal growth; the dark side of growth; and the lengthy development of authenticity and self-actualizing. This book synthesizes scholarship from scientific research across several subfields of psychology to philosophy, literature, history, and cultural studies. It offers a creative and scientifically grounded framework for exploring three of life’s perennial questions: How do we make sense of our lives? What is a good life? and How do we create one?

What oral historians and historians of science can learn from each other

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 673-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL MERCHANT
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Library ◽  
National Life ◽  
Life Story Interviews ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis paper is concerned with the use of interviews with scientists by members of two disciplinary communities: oral historians and historians of science. It examines the disparity between the way in which historians of science approach autobiographies and biographies of scientists on the one hand, and the way in which they approach interviews with scientists on the other. It also examines the tension in the work of oral historians between a long-standing ambition to record forms of past experience and more recent concerns with narrative and personal ‘composure’. Drawing on extended life story interviews with scientists, recorded by National Life Stories at the British Library between 2011 and 2016, it points to two ways in which the communities might learn from each other. First, engagement with certain theoretical innovations in the discipline of oral history from the 1980s might encourage historians of science to extend their already well-developed critical analysis of written autobiography and biography to interviews with scientists. Second, the keen interest of historians of science in using interviews to reconstruct details of past events and experience might encourage oral historians to continue to value this use of oral history even after their theoretical turn.

The Narrative Identity Structure Model (NISM)

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Dunlop
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Internal Structure ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Structure Model ◽  
Internal Representations ◽  
Social Expression

In this article, I provide an overview of the Narrative Identity Structure Model (NISM). NISM offers a framework for understanding how life stories are represented internally (cognitively) and how elements of these stories are expressed externally (through writing, conversation, etc.). Within a narrator, there exist numerous life stories, with each story corresponding to a recurrent context (i.e., a social role) relevant to the life in question. Contextualized life stories share mutually constituted relations with the generalized life story, which works to establish a sense of differentiation and continuity across, rather than within, contexts. Furthermore, when elements of the storied self are expressed, these expressions are an inseparable combination of internal representations and elements of the immediate and broader social and cultural milieu. Thus, along with at least two dimensions (viz. internal structure and social expression), NISM is a highly contextualized conceptual model of the storied self.

scholarly journals Links Between Life Stories and Identity Profiles in Emerging Adults From Georgia

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 422-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nino Skhirtladze ◽  
Nino Javakhishvili ◽  
Seth J. Schwartz ◽  
Koen Luyckx
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Emerging Adults ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Life Story Interview ◽  
Dual Cycle ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Methods

In this study, we examine personal identity formation using two approaches: a dual-cycle model of identity development and a narrative life-story model. We used quantitative and qualitative methods for studying personal identity: Luyckx et al.’s Dimensions of Identity Development Scale and D. P. McAdams’ life-story interview. Using six cases selected from a sample of 62 Georgian emerging adults, we illustrate how identity profiles created using six identity dimensions (exploration in breadth, commitment-making, identification with commitment, reflective exploration in depth, reconsideration of commitment, and ruminative exploration) are reflected in life stories depicting participants’ paths toward identity commitments and their ideas about the future and life themes. This article demonstrates how identity dimensions are connected to the context and how this connection is manifested in their life stories. The research illustrates theoretical exemplification by case studies and exemplifies the manifestation of dual-cycle identity development theorizing in case examples through narratives.

scholarly journals Narrative Identity in Late Adulthood

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Cierpka
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Middle Adulthood ◽  
Late Adulthood ◽  
History Of

Abstract Narrative identity is recognized as a process and viewed in dynamic terms, as an entity subject to constant changes in the course of one’s life. It is assumed that an increasing need to make changes in one’s history of life emerges in middle adulthood. A generative script is revealed, containing a plan to become part of the lives of future generations. The process of creative integration of one’s life story may gather momentum in late adulthood, when individuals explore their identity in the context of their life’s work. In order to test the above assumptions, narratives of participants aged 65-80 years who were wives/mothers/grandmothers or husbands/fathers/grandfathers during their lives were analyzed. Six main themes characteristic of life stories in late adulthood were identified, along with groups of traits, behaviors and values which participants wished to pass on to subsequent generations. The narratives clearly featured a generative motivation and the need to integrate one’s story.

Emotions and the dialectic of narrative identity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Stanghellini
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Character Trait ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This chapter argues that a significant part of a person’s self-experience and self-understanding is based on self-narratives—an ongoing process of establishing coherent formulations about who I am, who I was, and where I am going. Through self-narratives I seek to understand my actions and experiences as a semantically coherent pattern of chronologically ordered elements, and to grasp the way I relate myself to that understanding and to the world. The emotional experiences of moods and affects play a crucial role in the life and self-experience of the person. A given mood can develop itself into a character trait, that is, a permanent part of one’s sense of personal identity; this transformation occurs pre-reflectively and without a deliberate and thematic involvement of the person. Through narratives, moods can also be incorporated actively, reflectively, and thematically into a person’s identity. Moods are connected to self-understanding. My questioning about myself is often elicited by my mood before my identity becomes an explicit problem.

Narrative identity and the re-conceptualization of lone motherhood

2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa May
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Lone Mothers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Narrative Constructions ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Normative Account

Lone motherhood tends to be viewed as something a woman is, an identity that defines the woman. This article takes a different route into lone motherhood by focusing on identity construction in the life stories of four Finnish lone mothers. Faced with dominant narratives that define lone motherhood in negative terms, the narrators construct a counter-normative account of their lone motherhood through a dialogue with different cultural narratives on motherhood, independence and family. Furthermore, the social category of lone motherhood is not one that the lone mothers themselves adopt in their narrative constructions of the self. Instead, they attempt to create space for themselves within the normative narratives on motherhood and womanhood, thus refuting the idea that lone motherhood is constitutive of identity. At the same time, the life stories reveal how powerful the cultural narratives on motherhood and family are – lone mothers can challenge them, but they can never escape these narratives completely. (Lone Motherhood, Narrative Identity, Life Stories, Cultural Narratives)

scholarly journals Saying no (to a story): personal identity and negativity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tereza Matějčková
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The Self ◽  
Birth Certificates ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe concept of narrativity and narrative identity has two birth certificates: it is linked to the phenomenological tradition—beginning with Arendt’s “political phenomenology” —and to the tradition of German Idealism gradually slipping into existentialism. In this article, the author focuses on the latter tradition that helped to pave the way of the concept of narrative self. Key among the thinkers of Classical German Idealism has been Hegel, often considered the philosophical storyteller. Yet the author argues that Hegel’s concept of narrativity is not exclusively applied to the self and has hardly any role in the constitution of consciousness. This is the reason why Hegel (rather than thinkers who place the core of personal identity into narrativity) has the means to formulate a more convincing concept of the self and personal identity. The author does not deny that narrativity is seminal, both for leading a life as a human being and as a concrete person; however, originally consciousness and self-hood are born out of negativity. One enacts one’s selfhood, once one realizes that one has to interrupt narrativity, step in, refuse to live by it, or just ordinarily rephrase it consciously and by this appropriate it.

scholarly journals The Creative Process, Memoir, And Redemption

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Lawrence Karn ◽  
Takahiko Hattori
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Challenging Problem ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
The Relationship

Stories live to be told to others, Dan McAdams (2008) writes: Life stories therefore are continually made and remade in social relationships and in the overall social context provided by culture. As psychosocial constructions, life stories reflect the values, norms, and power differentials inherent in societies, wherein they have their constitutive meanings. The construction of coherent life stories is an especially challenging problem for adults living in contemporary modern (and postmodern) societies, wherein selves are viewed as reflexive projects imbued with complexity and depth, ever changing yet demanding a coherent framing. This paper considers the memoir as a kind of life story, to be explored through selected memoirists, researchers, and scholars by focusing on the relationship between identity construction, memory, history, and imagination. Narrative structure, as well as the compelling experiences and ideas detailed in memoirs, will be analyzed to arrive at a better understanding of issues related to the creative process.  

scholarly journals Experiences of Mexican teenage students when choosing a math degree: A mathematical narrative identity study

Uniciencia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 245-264
Author(s):  
Gustavo Martínez-Sierra ◽  
Jonathan Cervantes-Barraza ◽  
Lorena Jiménez-Sandoval
Keyword(s):  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
General Description ◽  
Good Teacher ◽  
Future Expectations ◽  
Efficacy Belief ◽  
Mexican Students ◽  
Depth Analysis

There is little qualitative research on mathematics education focused on the experiences of young students when choosing a mathematics degree and how these experiences are assimilated into their mathematics life stories. The objective of this narrative inquiry is to identify the experiences of Mexican students who choose a mathematics degree through their mathematics life story. The conceptualization of a mathematical narrative identity divided into motivations, sources of motivation, and expectations allowed the identification of the following: (1) motivation of Mexican students for choosing a math degree, (2) sources of this motivation, and (3) future expectations related to this choice. This qualitative study was conducted based on a case study to prepare an in-depth analysis of multiple cases and frame them into a general description. Data was gathered from 47 interviews to collect students’ mathematics life stories. The four thematic analyses gave the following results: (1) the three main motivations were “liking mathematics”, self-efficacy belief, and the desire to become a “good teacher”, (2) the two main expectations were “being a good teacher” and “learning more mathematics”, and (3) the four main sources of motivations were self-efficacy belief, having “good teachers”, indirect experiences, and mastering knowledge. Results have similarities with the importance of self-efficacy beliefs and differences between “liking mathematics” and the desire to become a “good teacher” regarding the psychological explanations about the motivational forces to choose a math degree.

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