Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts: Art, the Literary, and Life Experience

Narrative sense making draws resources from cultural expectations, narrative conventions, and generic models. In narrative—just as in life experience—"[t]he coincidental, unexpected, experimental, even the chaotic, are all necessary and integral aspects" (Hyvärinen et al. 9). And the imagination plays a vital role in how we devise and tell our stories (Andrews). For these reasons, making sense of and communicating experiences are necessarily modified by culturally existing models, and people draw on the literary and the artistic in their everyday storytelling and self-expression. What is more, our everyday involvement with social and other media confronts us with stories and storytelling opportunities in ways that blur the boundaries between living one's life and sharing and co-constructing experiences and values.

This special issue explores the literary and artistic in everyday narratives across a wide range of contexts: new media, medicine and therapy, social work, and oral history. It looks at various case studies of incidentally occurring storytelling practices and the (auto)biographical processes manifest in these practices. The contributions ask: how is a sense of narrative self constituted and negotiated in different mediatized environments? What are the culturally available stories and modes of narration for sharing our experience? How do different narrative techniques enable us to represent and communicate our own experience and that of another? By paying attention to the interplay between narrative form, story content, and wider situational or cultural contexts of social interaction, these contributions demonstrate the broad relevance of both narrative and narrative analysis.

The six articles address a number of questions pivotal in narrative theory and crucial to practices based on a narrative understanding of the self. These include the relation between culturally available grand narratives and mundane, interactional small stories (Georgakopoulou), between historical accuracy and narrative imagination, between living a life and telling about it, and between the personal and the social in storytelling practices (see also Schiff et al.). Furthermore, we explore how everyday storytelling practices are related both to the larger, more encompassing conception of a narrative we typically call our "autobiography" or someone else's life story—that is, the difference between "small" and "big" stories, as Bamberg calls them. Each article reflects on these major questions both theoretically and through the analysis of a specific test case. These analyses test the applicability and adaptability of theoretical models and analytical methods in transdisciplinary narrative studies.

The first article by Daniel D. Hutto, Nicolle Brancazio, and Jarrah Aubourg offers an insightful overview of Narrative Medicine and Narrative Practice with the aim to lend those practices a strong philosophical support. Hutto, et al. demonstrate the importance of narrative to psychological reality, and the vitality to engage in second person storytelling practices to learn and develop a person's narrative abilities. Therefore, it is a misunderstanding to prefer past accuracy over a future trajectory, or to juxtapose unfavorably disjointed reality with plotted narratives in any effort to maintain and improve mental well-being. Narrative skills are shown to be crucial to having better resources and responsiveness in life.

Whereas the article by Hutto et al. focuses on the large frame and philosophical ground for narrative practices in medicine and therapy, the article by Anneke Sools, Sofia Triliva, and Theofanis Filippas investigates a case study of unemployed Greek young adults with a view to exploring narrative futuring. This approach is grounded in the insight that gaining new experiences requires differentiating between past and future. What is more, in order to facilitate change, an imagined future needs to be both desired and believable, which requires narrative construction and communication. Sools et al. show future selves to be both cultural and linguistic constructions, where the personal and the cultural are negotiated and where language modes essentially adhere to content matter.

The third article of this issue addresses the epistemological and temporal dimensions of the self from a different angle: Matti Hyvärinen and Ryoko Watanabe analyze rehabilitation encounters with elderly people with advanced dementia with the help of the model of narrative positioning. Their analysis...