The politics of personal narrative methodology
- 1 April 1997
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Text and Performance Quarterly
- Vol. 17 (2) , 135-152
- https://doi.org/10.1080/10462939709366178
Abstract
Any study of personal narrative involves researchers and performers in contested, hence political, concerns of context and power. These concerns tend to be obscured methodologically by three commonplace assumptions: personal narrative is a text, personal narrative can be fully transcribed and analyzed, and personal narrative is not performance. This essay examines these assumptions and illustrates their methodological implications with an excerpt from an interview narrative with a breast cancer survivor.Keywords
This publication has 29 references indexed in Scilit:
- Personal narratives and young men in prison: Labeling the outside insideWestern Journal of Communication, 1996
- The forum: The performance turn—and tossQuarterly Journal of Speech, 1995
- Narrative and time: A phenomenological reconsiderationText and Performance Quarterly, 1994
- Can Cultural Studies Find True Happiness in Communication?Journal of Communication, 1993
- Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politicsCommunication Monographs, 1991
- A Linguistic Approach to NarrativeJournal of Narrative and Life History, 1991
- The Problem of Speaking for OthersCultural Critique, 1991
- Two styles of narrative construction and their linguistic and educational implicationsDiscourse Processes, 1989
- Units in the production of narrative discourseDiscourse Processes, 1986
- Who's got the floor?Language in Society, 1981