Characteristics of narrative from the perspective of developmental cultural psychology

The third chapter in Jerome Bruner's book "Acts of Meaning" discusses personal narrative and the way it relates to development.

“I have been at great pains to argue (and will argue further later in this chapter) that one of the most ubiquitous and powerful discourse forms in human communication is narrative.” 77

This next part is particularly interesting to me:

“Narrative requires, as mentioned in the preceeding chapter, four crucial grammatical constituents if it is to be effectively carried out. It requires, first, a means for emphasizing human action or “agentivity”—action directioned toward goals controlled by agents. It requires, secondly, that a sequential order be established and maintained—that events and states be “linearized” in a standard way. Narrative, thirdly, also requires a sensitivity to what is canonical and what violates canonicality approximating a narrator’s perspective: it cannot, in the jargon of narratology, be “voiceless.” 77

In this quotation, i think he is referring to language acquisition readiness.

“A second requirement is early readiness to mark the unusual and leave the usual unmarked – to concentrate attention and information processing on the offbeat.” 78.

“Roman Jakobson told us many years ago, the very act of speaking is an act of marking the unusual from the usual.” 79

He argues that we have an “innate” predisposition for narrative structure and that push influences our readiness to learn the basics of narrative before we learn other kinds of logic and structure.

Bruner discusses talking to ourselves on 88 “John Dewey proposed that language provides a way of sorting out our thoughts about the world. . . .” and proceeds to use the example of a little girl named Emily who talked to herself at night, recited books, talks about what she did all day and what she thought she would do tomorrow. I think is fascinating as it relates to childhood, development, storytelling, children’s literature, journal writing, and maybe even prayer.

“But looking closely at the transcripts and listening to the tapes, there were times when we had the irrestible impression that Emily’s leaps forward in speech were fueled by a need to construct meaning, more particularly narrative meaning.”

Finally makes some mention at the end of how in general primatologists and others make too much of an emphasis on how primates (including people) engage in conflict and aggression and fail to note the amazing ways we keep peace, which he doesn’t explicitly say this but it seems that he is getting at narrative as a peace-keeping and conflict-resolving structure (he does say that) and that fact may mean that it has allowed us to evolutionarily select for narrative skills. I’m sure there are other ways to note how narrative is important for maintaining collective society which seems to be a big trait we’ve evolved for. . .

Another text in my mind lately is a chapter from an un-named book by Peggy Miller (the instructor of the cultural developmental psychology class I took my first semester of graduate school) called Narrative Practices: Their role in socialization and self-construction. (I got it in PDF form for class).

This chapter introduces the idea of self-construction which I think is fascinating in relationship to other things I have read and heard about narrative.

“Because both the experience of the self and the events in a story are organized with respect to time, narrative is especially well suited to representing self-continuity.” 160. This of course reminds me of the Radiolab interview with Paul Broks “If you ask me who I am, I’ll tell you a story.” And Robert Krulwich's "my self is the story of what has happened to my body over time." The fact that so often in our psychology readings (these readings included) narrative is tentatively heralded as a cultural universal also lends itself to support of this viewpoint of narrative as a vital way of constructing self.

This particular chapter goes into interesting detail about the ways that cultural values influence how the storyteller casts themselves or another protagonist – for example, the toughness and cleverness valued in the South Baltimore families, the “self-favorability” bias or the tendency to value the kids independence, and how these values then shape the way the narrator creates their own persona in the story.

Finally, there is one more side note that I found to be particularly interesting:

“This brings us to the issue of memory. When approached via personal storytelling, remembering emerges as a process that occurs in the service of something else. Events are not remembered for the sake of remembering, but for the sake of creating tellable stories about the self.” 175.