Autobiographical Remembering and Storytelling in Context and History

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the complex connection between processes of autobiographical remembering in relation to historical events and the narratives constructed and communicated in such practices. In the narratives that follow, we discover the means by which a former political dissident during the late 1970s in Argentina constructs a narrative self that fosters a sense of living in history. This is accomplished as a result of connecting and synchronizing the subject's autobiographical experiences with the larger social milieu, thereby making them more meaningful. By integrating theories of autobiographical memory and narrative in social and cognitive psychology with discursive and pragmatic theories in linguistics, we demonstrate how such a synthetic approach can contribute to the development of sound empirically based theories of autobiographical memory and narrative in naturalistic communicative interactions.