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  • Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History
  • Joyce Avrech Berkman
Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. By Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2008. vii +186 pp. $19.95 paper.

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"Untitled Child's Drawing." By Zoe, c. 2006.

This skillfully conceived interdisciplinary study of theories and methods in the use of personal narratives encompasses the central issues of life history analysis. Its three authors, widely published scholars at the University of Minnesota in history, American studies, and sociology, were able to write sounding as one voice. The book's chapters highlight these issues: human agency and self-understanding; historical construction of personal narratives; forms of narration; the intersubjective relationship between narrator and analyst from the interview to editing, transcribing, and publishing an interview; and the conditions for making credible arguments based upon the collection and interpretation of personal narratives. In their discussion of human agency, the authors prioritize "people's articulated self-understanding" (p. 1). In the footsteps of scholars of race, gender, social class, civil rights and gay movements, and global inequality, they focus on the importance of collecting and interpreting the stories of marginalized and subordinated people as crucial for historians to understand how individuals "experience their relationship to social and cultural realities" (p. 2). Throughout their work the authors emphasize historical influences on every aspect of personal narratives and collective memory, from what is remembered to modes of narration, from governmental and self censorship to styles of recounting. Such historical embeddedness, they insist, neither vitiates the uniqueness of the individual nor the operation of human choice, claiming both are fundamentally enigmatic. Although most of the personal narratives examined are oral histories, the authors compare these with diaries, letters, autobiographies, and memoirs and introduce key questions applicable to this array of diverse personal genres. As their book's multifaceted title suggests, the writers argue that personal narratives not only tell individual experience, they are "telling," i.e., significant and revelatory. [End Page 279]

Until the publication of this book, while we have enjoyed a spate of excellent anthologies of essays on oral history, we have had no comprehensive, coherent, and critically probing study of the diverse complex issues of theories and methods of gathering and analyzing personal narratives. The authors assemble evidence for their arguments from a remarkable range of social science and historical studies of personal narratives spanning various time periods and regions of the globe. Their examples, each perceptively selected, number among the most original and searching analytic publications during the past few decades. The book's annotated footnotes take the reader into further fascinating areas of inquiry.

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 positivist 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 protean 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 narrators 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 marginalized 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...

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