Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Part I About Theories and Philosophies
- Part II About Self
- Chapter 2 Telling Tales About Lives
- Chapter 3 Who Tells What Kinds of Stories?
- Part III About Memory
- Part IV About Interpretation
- Part V About Self, Memory and Interpretation
- Appendix I Tables
- Appendix II Interview Documents
- References
Chapter 3 - Who Tells What Kinds of Stories?
from Part II - About Self
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Part I About Theories and Philosophies
- Part II About Self
- Chapter 2 Telling Tales About Lives
- Chapter 3 Who Tells What Kinds of Stories?
- Part III About Memory
- Part IV About Interpretation
- Part V About Self, Memory and Interpretation
- Appendix I Tables
- Appendix II Interview Documents
- References
Summary
Why are there such songs in my soul
And so few dear names?
Why is a moment of rhythm mere chance
As when Aquilon suddenly comes?
STONE, Osip MandelstamWhile I took the liberty of discussing various typologies of autobiographical narratives in the previous chapter, I do wonder, like Mandelstam (1991), about the songs in the souls of my respondents that were not brought to bear in their impromptu rendition of their life tales. Were the rhythms in their life tales fortuitous or do they offer a partial glimpse into one's consciousness or is it both a chance and an active construction? My penchant is to recognize the boundary line, although not absolute and impermeable, between the lived life and the narrated life. I take my respondents' narratives as their selective representations – both by chance and by choice – of their experiences and my own analysis, in turn, is yet another re-presentation of their life stories and therefore, there are many layers of dialogic relationships. Bakhtin (1981) reiterates frequently that we must never confuse “the represented world with the world outside the text (naïve realism); nor must we confuse the authorcreator of a work with the author as a human being (naïve biographism)” (p. 253). Thus, the immediate reality is that the lived life and the narrated life are indissolubly tied up and are in a continual process of mutual interaction. The disjunction can neither be fused nor torn apart.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Dialogics of Self, the Mahabharata, and CultureThe History of Understanding and Understanding of History, pp. 91 - 102Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010