The Scope and Autonomy of Personal Narrative

Abstract

The work of Carol Berkenkotter and others who have expanded the realm of personal narrative studies over the past several decades would not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of those who first brought the study of narrative to nonliterary discourses. By revisiting what personal narratives were to these pioneers—working outward from William Labov in particular—this article considers how the early expansion of the field helps us to understand the far wider expansion of multimodal personal narrative today. In doing so, I suggest that understanding the notion of a personal narrative requires a twofold commitment to inquiry: first, about what makes it narrative; and second, about what makes it personal. These commitments hinge on two crucial junctures, what I call the problem of scope and the problem of autonomy. Framed as questions, the former asks, When does a narrative begin and end? The latter asks, Whose narrative is it? This recuperative essay shows that the heuristics of scope and autonomy can be useful ways to think about the ongoing complexities of personal narrative and its analysis.

Reflections on Being a Learner: The Value of Relationship-based Community Evaluations in Indigenous Communities

“…Personal stories, or small stories, since the work of William Labov in the 1960s and 1970s, have made an important contribution to narrative analysis and sociolinguistics (Ingraham, 2016). Small stories, as defined by Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008 ), are the small, mundane narratives we tell in everyday conversation.…”

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“…In his introduction to an exploration of personal narrative, Ingraham (2017) notes that People tell stories. And not just novelists or screenwriters: We all tell them.…”

“…Our individual stories may assume different forms and content depending on context, timing, situation, stage of life, the particular state of our life, the nature and size of our audience and our relationship to it, etc. While Ingraham (2017) refers to the vernacular sharing of moments of our lives, G. Thomas Couser (2011) expands on oral storytelling to include written or recorded narrations of everyday life. These he defines as "memoir" -a particular genre of life writing that he considers, "especially expressive of cultural values" (p. 233).…”

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“…18 Personal narration, sometimes also known as storytelling, 19 is autobiographic in nature with rich emotional and contextual cues 20 that are required to describe the human experience. 21 Thus, personal narration puts the human into the story. 22,23 Personal narration also overlaps with participatory action research where reflective self-inquiry is carried out with the intention to improve subsequent actions.…”