Fellowship: Interdisciplinary

Telling Stories, 2008. Submitted in Evidence for a Fellowship Year

My next fellowship application has simply got to succeed. I can feel it! I'm going to make it my first accomplishment in the realm of "interdisciplinary studies," and I'm going to do continue some of the work that the authors of the book Telling Stories have done here.

Maynes, M. J, J. L Pierce, and B. Laslett. Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. Cornell Univ Pr, 2008.

Reviews and publication blurbs a book can help me with the application proposal:
First, the blurb gives me the general statement of the problem:

The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration.

The key emphasis here the connection between a life story and the larger social structures that produced it. The individual in society, we might say. Or "the connections between individual life trajectories and collective forces and institutions beyond the individual," as one reviewer says.

The role of the researcher is clearly one major issue to consider here. One reviewer says the book is great for any "would-be narrative historians." It seem to me that the fact that a literary scholar should ever consider himself in this game is testament to the changing role of literature as cultural studies takes permanent hold. This is a vague thought, but I'll be back at it after I grade a few papers.

One last thing for now. The two-page review of this book in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth gives us questions to ask when it points out deficiencies in the book:

Although the authors recurrently take pains to situate recent theorizing
within a broad historical framework—e.g., enlightenment view of human
agency and critics of this view and the development and subversion of positiv-
ist epistemology—shortcomings must be noted: The authors overlook certain
pertinent pioneering texts, namely Virginia Yans-McLaughlin’s application
of philosophical phenomenology, “Metaphors of Self in History: Subjectivity,
Oral Narrative, and Immigration Studies” in her edited volume Immigration
Reconsidered (1990). Curiously, too, Telling Stories does not include the pro-
tean theoretical field of performance studies in relation to personal narratives.
Various scholars in communications studies and theater actively address the
complicated issues involved in staging personal narratives, especially with nar-
rators among the audience joining those among the performers.
Telling Stories has little directly to say about the value or use of personal
narratives to the historical study of childhood and youth, but, indirectly, this
brilliant presentation of current theories and methods of personal narrative
scholarship has enormous importance to such study. On the occasions that
reference is made to childhood and youth experience as recollected by adults—
e.g., the early development of career choice, experiences of socially marginal-
ized mothers, memories of schooling, rebel youth outlook and activism, letters
related to marital choice—we learn of these years’ formative role in the shaping
of adults’ consciousness and behavior. Although these are very useful texts for
scholars of childhood and youth, we long for direct interviews of children and
youth about their lives, considered with the same kind of careful historical con-
textualization and theoretical sophistication represented in the best analyses of
adult personal narratives. In a suggestive discussion of Adelheid Popp’s early
adult autobiography about her Austrian pre—World War I childhood and her
adult activism as a socialist feminist, the authors state that at ten she no longer
thought of herself as a child. One is left to wonder when and how do individu-
als identify as a child or as a youth or as an adult. The authors follow up their
Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 281
sketchy discussion of Popp by noting that in China, biographies that make
reference to childhood “tend to be forumulaic and perfunctory” (p. 35). The
authors define their subject as life stories through adult retrospection, which, in
effect, precludes the study of narratives of more limited, particularly childhood
and youth, time spans. This restriction, however, doesn’t undermine most of the
arguments of their superb book.
Despite the authors’ admirably concise, self-scrutinizing, and clear presen-
tation of personal narrative issues, this is not a book for most undergraduates.
It requires readers with experience in the field of personal narratives’ research
and those with appreciation for the immense value of close scrutiny of the
assumptions guiding their practice. As such, it serves tellingly the interests of
graduate students and faculty and those engaged professionally outside aca-
demia in public history and personal narrative work.