Growth Structure in Personal Narratives

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-226
Author(s):  
Jack Bauer

Narrative content and structure are intertwined. However, this chapter identifies the features of narrative structure that do not overlap with narrative content. Narrative content conveys the facts, themes (i.e., value orientations), and tones (i.e., value fulfillments) of a story, whereas narrative structure conveys the objectively assessed degrees of complexity and coherence (i.e., value perspectivity) by which the narrator interprets the narrative content. The transformative self tends toward a relatively complex and coherent narrative structure, which develops over time, manifesting as psychological maturity and wisdom. The value perspectivity of narrative structure is what distinguishes wisdom from goods such as happiness, love, and meaningfulness. However, wisdom blends structural perspectivity with humane themes. This chapter distinguishes narrative phenomena that sound like structure but function more proximally as content: closure, subtypes of coherence, continuity over time, and affective sequences. The chapter also explores narrative structure in dialogical positioning. The chapter concludes by summarizing Chapters 4–7.

Author(s):  
Marina S. Chvanova ◽  
Irina A. Kiselyova

We examine the formation of the concept of “value orientations”, “professional value orientations of students”. The classification is presented taking into account the following profes-sional value orientations: “professional and personal”, “professional and group”, “social and pro-fessional”. Professional value orientations are analyzed taking into account their importance, with subdivision into instrumental and terminal ones. We consider the development of professional value orientations in a historical and logical sequence with a change of stages, with characteristic features, taking into account the presented classification. The following periods are considered: the second half of the 19th – early 20th century, 20–40s of the 20th century, 50–60s of the 20th century, 60–80s of the 20th century, 80–90s of the 20th century, 21th century. The characteristic features of the stage, the means of influencing the value orientations of young people, are analyzed, which made it possible to identify the transformation of professional value orientations over time, including in the context of Internet socialization.


2021 ◽  
pp. 159-192
Author(s):  
Jack Bauer

Theme in a personal narrative conveys the narrator’s value orientations (what the person values, is motivated by, needs, or believes is important in an event) but not whether the event turns out well (tone does that). Three great themes in both literature and life stories are agency, communion, and growth. Themes of eudaimonic growth are central to the transformative self. Growth themes come in various, overlapping forms, notably agentic, communal, reflective, and experiential forms. Growth themes and growthy tones work together to convey not only the value orientation of growth but also the value fulfillment or attainment of eudaimonic growth, experienced as a sense of meaningfulness. Growth themes link actions to motives and to mechanisms of development, which may be why growth themes are powerful predictors of separate measures of happiness, love, wisdom, and growth, regardless of the type of event.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert N. Lupton ◽  
Steven M. Smallpage ◽  
Adam M. Enders

The correlation between ideology and partisanship in the mass public has increased in recent decades amid a climate of persistent and growing elite polarization. Given that core values shape subsequent political predispositions, as well as the demonstrated asymmetry of elite polarization, this article hypothesizes that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism moderate the relationship between ideology and partisanship in that the latter relationship will have increased over time only among individuals who maintain conservative value orientations. An analysis of pooled American National Election Studies surveys from 1988 to 2012 supports this hypothesis. The results enhance scholarly understanding of the role of core values in shaping mass belief systems and testify to the asymmetric nature and mass public reception of elite cues among liberals and conservatives.


1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masahiko Minami

Abstract This study presents empirical evidence o f Japanese preschool children's (a) narrative discourse competence and narrative structure and (b) rhetorical/expressive flexibility, compared to adults. With data on oral personal narratives told by Japanese preschoolers and adults, and with verse/stanza analysis (Gee, 1985; Hymes, 1981) and high point analysis based on the Labovian approach (Labov, 1972; Peterson & McCabe, 1983), it was discovered that children's and adults' narratives are similar in terms o f structure in that they both tend to have three verses per stanza, and that children and adults tend to tell about multiple experiences. By contrast, there are some clear differences in terms o f content and delivery. Whereas children tend to tell their stories in a sequential style, adults emphasize nonsequential information. Specifically, compared to children's narratives, adults' narratives place considerably more weight on feelings and emotions. The findings of this study strongly suggest that oral personal narratives told by Japanese preschoolers do not represent the final phase o f development. Rather, they still have a long way to go. (Narrative Development; Narrative Structure)


Author(s):  
Xue Chen

The subject of analysis is the space of death in the “Sun of the Dead,” considered as an existential reality opposite to the vital intentions of a person, a manifestation of social voluntarism, a being category that does not intersect with the space of life. Conclusions are drawn about the relationship between temporal and spatial features in the narrative structure. The parameters of the space of death are presented as characteristics of the discreteness of the artistic space of the story. The boundaries of the space of death, its dominance over time, the influence on the tempo-rhythmic features of the text, the types of character consciousness are described.


Author(s):  
Yolanda Iglesias

The objective of this study is to present the meaning, complexity, innovation, and relevance of Don Quixote’s narrative structure within the literary tradition. First, this chapter reviews the diverse perspectives and interpretations among scholars when attempting to establish the narrative structure created by Cervantes. It highlights the directions in which scholars have, over time, been arguing about the narrative structure of Don Quixote, to show how some enigmas remain unsolved. Second, this piece re-examines previous literature with the goal of solving some of the unexplained gaps in the narrative and framing the relevance of the structure in Don Quixote, which is one of the main pillars supporting the argument that Cervantes’s masterpiece is the first modern novel.


2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Downing

A social dimension to business development and inertia is currently acknowledged in several accounts of learning, business models, vision building, and innovation, and through more general concepts of networking, social capital, and embeddedness. Here a constructionist perspective is developed to improve our understanding of the interactions between entrepreneurs and stakeholders in all of these areas. This identifies narrative and dramatic processes that describe how notions of individual and collective identity and organization are coproduced over time. A framework is created to show how selective and emotional processes that produce storylines, emplotment, and narrative structure support sense making and action making.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-164
Author(s):  
Masahiko Minami

Abstract The studies presented in this paper connect the story-related quality and the language-related quality of narrative discourse. The term “coherence” refers to whether or not a text makes sense at a global level, whereas “cohesion” describes the linguistic relationships among clauses in a narrative, such as how the surface linguistic elements of a text are linked to one another at a local level. Using a content-based narrative analysis, a trilogy – a set of three independent but interrelated studies – introduced in this paper quantitatively analyze oral personal narratives through three lenses. As examples of devices for cohesion, the paper qualitatively examines the use of two linguistic devices, tense (past and non-past) and voice (active and passive), and tries to show how narrators deploy organizational strategies in the use of these linguistic forms. The paper (1) examines varied topics in different narrative contexts (genre, topic, oral or written), (2) reveals how both coherence and cohesion serve as the twin engines of narrative, and (3) emphasizes the significance of paying attention not only to the narrative content/structure but also to the appropriate use of linguistic devices so that we can fully grasp language-specific ways of expressing affective elements in narrative.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Cohn ◽  
Ryan Taylor ◽  
Kaitlin Pederson

AbstractThe visual narratives of comics involve complex multimodal interactions between written language and the visual language of images, where one or the other may guide the meaning and/or narrative structure. We investigated this interaction in a corpus analysis across eight decades of American superhero comics (1940–2010s). No change across publication date was found for multimodal interactions that weighted meaning towards text or across both text and images, where narrative structures were present across images. However, we found an increase over time of narrative sequences with meaning weighted to the visuals, and an increase of sequences without text at all. These changes coincided with an overall reduction in the number of words per panel, a shift towards panel framing with single characters and close-ups rather than whole scenes, and an increase in shifts between temporal states between panels. These findings suggest that storytelling has shifted towards investing more information in the images, along with an increasing complexity and maturity of the visual narrative structures. This has shifted American comics from being textual stories with illustrations to being visual narratives that use text.


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