Autobiographical childhood narratives: Processes of remembering and reconstructing.
Item
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Title
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Autobiographical childhood narratives: Processes of remembering and reconstructing.
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Identifier
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AAI9218269
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identifier
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9218269
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Creator
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Sebris, Sandra Beatrice.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Katherine Nelson
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Developmental | Folklore | Anthropology, Cultural
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Abstract
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The interrelationship between individual and cultural-historical dynamics in the construction of autobiographical narratives is investigated in this study. Design of this study is based upon the premise that the autobiographical narrative is a selectively constructed text, influenced by various factors including the initial experience of the past event and the confluence of personal and communal interpretations, both from the past and present.;Autobiographical narratives were gathered from a group of adults who had experienced a common cultural-historical upheaval as children, 4 to 12 years old. The primary interviewees were 10 sibling pairs of Latvian ethnic origin, born between 1932 and 1940 in Latvia. All of these interviewees had left Latvia with their families in 1944, due to war-induced circumstances, in response to the advancement of the Soviet troops. As a result of the Nazi occupation of Latvia, they had been implicitly and explicitly coerced to leave for Germany, where they experienced the massive Allied bombings during the last several months of the war, as well as the continuous threat of the Soviet troop movement. Many of the events experienced during this time were imbued with cultural-historical significance.;This study aims to explore several focal relationships: the relationship between the "lived experience" of the past and the autobiographical narrative of the present; the relationship between the culturally-generated meanings and "one's own voice"; and the relationship between the stable and changing aspects of the autobiographical narration. Discrepancies and similarities between sibling and peer accounts are identified and analyzed. Similarities among narrative accounts are shown to indicate patterns in the appropriation of culturally generated meanings. Differences in selection and elaboration of events are shown to engender a "making sense" of one's lived experience, the creation of "narrative identity" and the expression of ideological "voice". Comparison of interviewee accounts of the same experience recollected upon several occasions reveals that the narrative descriptions of a specific event tend to be repeated in a highly similar, although not identical form. The slight variations upon retelling suggest that the autobiographic narrative is not recollected in some rote manner, but rather as a temporally sequenced whole. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
