Embodied Narratives: Connecting Stories, Bodies, Cultures and Ecologies eds. by Laura Formenti, Linden West, Marianne Horsdal (review)

Increasingly, the narrative form is viewed as a natural and universal medium for apprehending and representing human experiences. Much remains to be discovered, however, about how the content and structure of narratives are mediated by culture and social structures (e.g., race, gender, and social class). As an attempt at offering an analytic framework for locating narratives within a broader social context (i.e., time, history, and place), Embodied Narratives is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on narrative analysis.

The book is composed of fourteen chapters divided into two parts (though the parts are not clearly marked in the table of contents but described only in the introductory chapter). The main objectives of the book are described in Chapter 1. The overarching goal is to understand how learning is narratively linked with social contexts and the body. Specifically, the editors describe the book as:

a contribution to forging greater connectedness in understanding learners and learning. . . . At the heart of the writing lies a fundamental aspiration: to better understand and theorise how the body and relationships, both to immediate and wider worlds, find expression in learning biographies, and how such experiences can be enhanced.

(24)

Overall, the editors emphasize that the collection is an interdisciplinary endeavor that consciously avoids self-serving rivalries. In their words, the book works against “typical academic competitiveness, a kind of symbolic cannibalism” (25).

Moving beyond the introductory chapter, Part I (Chapters 2–5) primarily focuses on broader theoretical issues about the relationship between the body and identity, as well as their immediate and larger sociohistorical context. In essence, Part I theorizes the connection between self (the agent) and society (the larger social structures surrounding the self). The chapters in this section cover a wide range of concepts, some better explained than others. Specifically, Chapter 2, Marianne Horsdal’s “The Body and the Environment in Autobiographical Narratives and Autobiographical Narrative Research,” is entirely devoted to establishing one of the book’s major themes: “our stories are embodied” (47). However, a careful reading of the book would suggest that the reverse is equality true: our bodies are storied. This chapter puts forth evidence from a wide array of fields (from neuroscience to the phenomenology of social interaction) to establish the interconnectedness of the body and the social. Chapter 3, by Linden West, uses several concepts borrowed from Bourdieu and other notable social theorists to describe the reflexive connection between agency and social structure. Taking a more semantic, or at least language-centered, approach to analyzing narratives, Chapter 4 focuses on words and their socially constructed meanings. As the chapter’s author, Rob Evans, explains it, “Language shapes and determines the interaction out of which the life history is narrated. The telling shapes in turn the language use” (84). Evans emphasizes the reflexive relationship between agency and social structure evinced in earlier chapters. Continuing with the same theme, Chapter 5 considers historical variations in the construction of agency. Specifically, the chapter’s author, Peter Alheit, traces the history of the subject (or agency) from the pre-modern to the post-modern era, covering a period of time roughly from 1200 to 1980.

To a large extent, Part II (Chapters 6–14) illustrates earlier discussions using data primarily from the experiences of adult students in higher education. This portion of the book includes some of the more analytically coherent and empirically grounded chapters. Chapter 6 traces the meaning and origins of stories of one’s birth across three levels of analysis: the micro (the individual here and now), the meso (the institutional context), and the macro (cultural and discursive context). Though more could have been said about the connections between the three levels of analysis, Laura Formenti offers a brilliant analysis of autobiographical narratives in this chapter. Chapter 7, by Juan Carlos Pita Castra, analyzes artists’ identities with a focus on...