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Book
ReviewAn
Important Contribution To the Study of NarrativeNarrative analysis: studying the
development of individuals in society. C. Daiute and C. Lightfoot, editors,
2004. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage; ISBN 0761927972, pbk, 300 pp.,
£27.00
SAGE Publications, Inc.2005DOI: 10.1177/09675507050130010502
Malcolm Wagstaff
University of Southampton
Narrative
analysis has an obvious appeal to all of us interested in auto/biography.
The use of narratives is one way in which people make sense of life and a
central concern of the book is human development seen as social process. Thus,
the appeal of narrative analysis to researchers is, according to the editors,
its ability to examine people's lives holistically, to examine how social
histories not only influence identity and development but also provide insights
into the relations between the self and society, and to allow notions of value
into the research process. Most of the book, in fact, aims to identify and
evaluate the rationales, practices, caveats and values of the many approaches
involved in narrative analysis. Its structure is given by three ways of conceptualizing
the subject. The first sees nar- rative analysis as a root metaphor. The second
recognizes that narratives are culturally developed ways of organizing experience
and knowledge, while the third goes further and conceptualizes forms of discourse
as embodiments of cultural values and personal subjectivities. Each concept
has a separate section.
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Part
I is concerned with literary narratives. It takes seriously the idea that
knowledge of the world is constituted and transformed through the use of language
in discourse and narrative. The contributors to this section use methods taken
from literary criticism to analyse blocks of text in the search for meaning
beyond that bestowed by the immediate context and to show how text relates
to both authors and readers. But stories are not `life itself' and so the
existence of an imaginative element is recognized. Freeman sets out how he
came to recognize this as he moved from an analysis of life narratives derived
from questionnaires and interviews to an examination of memoirs, autobiographies
and other personal documents. Sarben seeks to identify how the readers' attention
moves from the printed page to an involvement with both the characters and
also their times, past or future. Lightfoot, in turn, examines how historical
analysis provides a frame for examining developmental changes in the portrayal
of the self in fictional stories produced by contemporary adolescents, while
Lee et al. explore how the repertoire of traditional Afro-American narratives
appears to influence the stories written by children from that background.
In Part II the contributors focus on the way in which the construction of
narratives takes place through conversations conducted in particular con-
texts and expose the danger of losing the most revealing information when
analysis separates content from the way in which narratives are expressed.
Daiute demonstrates, through an analysis of the auto/biographical and fictional
writing of 7 to 10 year old children, how – even at an early age – narrating is a form of social positioning and that power relations are important.
Bamberg argues that since narratives are interactively con- structed, they
should not be regarded as transparent windows into the speaker's mind, subjectivity
and lived experience. An analysis of position- ing is required. This is where
discursive psychology comes in, as Stanley and Billig show. Nelson argues
that the interactions of very young children with parents and others produce
forms of `narrativizing', even in the crib and precede their functional use.
Part III deals with how individuals come to know themselves within a larger
context and whether they can construct narratives which run counter to the
culturally received or dominant ideas of, for example, iden- tity, gender
and mental health. Carney reveals that the personal narratives of Holocaust
survivors often adhere to the normative expectations of resilience and transcendence,
but that some do not. Similarly, Stewart and Malley identify features in the
narratives of nine women graduates which have been largely ignored or submerged
in the official history of their gen- eration. The use of counter-narratives
to construct alternative identities to those imposed by society at large is
revealed by Solis' study of Mexican immigrants to New York City. Both Solis
and Gergen show that personal stories are malleable and multifaceted. They
can be changed, for
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example,
when the narrator is faced with an unwanted response from a listener or when
they desire to preserve a particular form of identity. On the other hand,
as Gergen points out, some stories achieve such a settled form that the tellers
can no longer revise them. Chandler et al., however, tackle the intriguing
question of whether a sense of core personal identity can be retained in the
face of evidence for apparent change. The book fulfils its purpose admirably.
A variety of forms of narrative analysis are presented and their utility demonstrated.
Many readers will be stimulated to experiment with narrative analysis themselves.
However, the detail of the case studies tends to be overwhelming, unless one
is interested in a particular psychological or sociological field. Skipping
is advised, using the introduction and the admirable summaries at the beginning
of each section. I would have welcomed a typology of forms of narrative analysis
near the beginning of the book, instead of discover- ing it towards the end
in the contribution by Chandler et al. Something like Solis's guidelines for
the novice analyst could also have been provided earlier, perhaps in an identified
sub-section. The general sections of these two chapters are perhaps the place
to start for those who think narrative analysis might be useful to their research
but have no experience with it.