Abstract
Abstract
This chapter follows findings in narrative medicine studies, where a need for a shift of focus from story content to the act and context of storytelling has been identified. For mental well-being, ways of storytelling seem more important than the “what” of the story. This chapter proposes an interdisciplinary combination of literary studies inspired by the narratological analysis of discursive voice and the investigation of narrative positioning, which originates in psychology. The analysis of interviews of two elderly persons focuses on how the narrators discursively and evaluatively relate their narrating self to their former self and what kind of positionings they use in their life storying. The two examples showcase two very different ways of narrating. Most importantly, the analysis of the different ways the storytellers narrate their lives points towards very different conclusions concerning the mental well-being of the two interviewees than what might be expected from the content of the interviews.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
Reference28 articles.
1. C8P67Abbott, H. P. (2007). Story, plot, and narration. In D. Herman (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to narrative (pp. 39–51). Cambridge University Press.
2. Positioning between structure and performance.;Journal of Narrative and Life History,1997
3. C8P69Bamberg, M. (2004). Positioning with Davie Hogan: Stories, tellings, and identities. In C. Daiuete & C. Lightfoot (Eds.), Narrative analysis: Studying the development of individuals in society (pp. 135–157). Sage.
4. C8P70Barthes, R. (1977). Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives. In Image-music-text, transl. S. Heath (pp. 79–124). Fontana.
5. Narrative as social action: A narratological approach to story, discourse and positioning in political storytelling.;International Journal of Social Research Methodology,2020