Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture by Jens Brockmeier, Donal Carbaugh (review)

humanities 359 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the public good. In their contributions, former students Kath Curan and Kirsten McAllister discuss the ways that Zaslove helped them to embark on a lifelong voyage of critique, while several colleagues describe Zaslove=s interventions in the development of their own thinking. John Doheny and Richard Day write explicitly about the decline of critical thought in the university, as it becomes more and more beholden to a corporate agenda and to discourses stressing efficiency and measurable outcomes. In >The University as Anarcho-Community,= Day argues forcefully for a fundamental reconceptualization of the task of the university that would depend in part on the recognition that >social research can be most valuable precisely when it fails to produce its intended result.= Such a university can be seen as both the project of the new critical theory the subtitle announces, and the space where Zaslove=s anarcho-modernism might be given room to flourish. What is perhaps missing from this collection is Zaslove=s own voice. There aren=t many intellectual figures whose work inspires poems and stories: after reading through these testaments to the power of Zaslove=s teaching and writing, I was left with a craving to encounter his work for myself. At the present time, this is more difficult than it might seem. If Zaslove isn=t as well known as he perhaps should be, it is because his work has often been published in obscure and hard-to-find journals and books. A collection of his own work would make a fine complement to this muchdeserved festschrift. (IMRE SZEMAN) Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh, editors. Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture John Benjamins. vi, 308. US $68.00 Narrative and Identity is an engaging collection of papers that examines how human beings construct their identities through various forms of narrative. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, >Narrative and Self Construction,= we find Jerome Bruner=s paper on the construction of narrative . He draws our attention to the erroneous Romantic stereotype of the >Self= finding itself by withdrawing from the world, and concludes that each individual autobiography is an >expression of the culture.= In the next article, Jens Brockmeier and Rom Harré admit the need for a new approach in the investigation into various modes of narratives. They uncover two persistent fallacies in narrative analysis: one, the ontological fallacy B the misconception that there is a narrative or a story >out there= waiting to be discovered. Two, the representation fallacy B that there is one unique human reality represented in a true narrative. They argue that narrative is not a way of >externalizing= an >internal= reality within a linguistic frame. Moreover , they assert that the study of narrative is not a probe into representa- 360 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 tion but rather >a specific mode of constructing and constituting reality.= Brockmeier and Harré warn that narrative ought not to be treated as a firm and cognitive entity but rather as a set of rules about the >ordering and making sense of experiences.= In the next chapter, Ron Harré delves into a study of metaphysics and the >self.= The last chapter in this selection is written by Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier, who further explore the integrity of narrative in relation to history and the life stories of writers such as Proust and Augustine. Upon examining autobiographies, they conclude that narrative integrity encompasses the >living= and the >telling,= thus becoming a >conceptual space= where identity and meaning meet. In the second part we find a collection of articles about life stories in a cultural context. Donal Carbaugh=s paper on the stories of Mr Rising Wolf, a Blackfoot from the Montana reservation, is close reading of ritualized ceremony >translated= into Western narrative tradition. Carbaugh dissects the personal story to show that it >activates not just individual acts of volition but cultural acts of spiritual guidance.= Carol Fleisher Feldman=s paper is a study of national narrative in relationship to individual autobiography and the >making of the self.= Kristin...