Bruner’s first two chapters about the uses of narratives and their purposes reminds me of the question we posed in class last week about amnesia being a common theme in many movies. I agree with Bruner that narratives and the most successful narratives change elements of the ordinary. We take ordinary situations and create something new. Since memory is a unique in all of us, it’s a perfect idea for audiences to relate to whether it’s forgetting or remembering. In fact, Bruner notes that storytelling and narratives center on the idea that we can “mind read,” are able to relate and predict the next action. I also think that the ability to empathize with another human is why narratives become so true for us. For instance, when someone chooses to explain something personal to you it requires the other person to recognize a different approach to understanding that person and their narrative. Equally important as empathizing is interpretation. Bruner mentions the importance of language, interpretation, and the validity in translations. If given and story, article, etc. each one of us would interpret differently and its in the interpretation that we question truth and accuracy just as Bruner mentioned the simple telephone game where things are lost in translation. With that said, imagine all the lies created in our memory, over history, etc. The last point I want to observe is why humans are culturally dependent creatures. Bruner explains human cognition and its handedness with cultural changes. I guess you could say that all animals live in a culture and humans live in very complex ones, but we are especially conditioned to dress, talk, eat, etc. in a specific way. Similarly, Dawkins coined the term memes that are like cultural genes in a sense that they reproduce and replicate and I found memes and narratives to be homogenous in the sense that they both instruct.
Bruner discusses narratives and the importance of language in storytelling. Language is vital to humans because we need language in order to narrate the stories we tell in order to recount our memories to those around us. Because we are able to communicate with language, Bruner says a person can then display a self, which is constructed by endless forms of narrative. This got me thinking about how important the self is when coming up with stories. In the first readings we did, we noticed that amnesiac patients lacked a sense of self. Although they were able to speak, the self was missing, which made it impossible for them to create the narrative needed to communicate to others about who they were. Another interesting point Bruner brings up is the role different perspectives play in telling stories. Bruner uses the example of the victor's tale of triumph being the loser's tale of defeat, though both were in the same battle. We often only see things from our perspective and tend to forget to look at the way others around us see something. Bruner then applies this when writing about legal storytelling. Attorneys need to overcome seeing from just their perspective in order to defend their client in the best way possible in order to win the case. An idea Bruner expressed that I liked was "a narrative models not only a world but the minds seeking to give it its meanings." The person telling the story is often telling it with his or her meaning in mind, but once they tell it to an audience, the storyteller has then left his or her story open to be interpreted many different ways. Also, earlier in the chapter, Bruner poses a question regarding why the concept of peripeteia hasn’t been as widely taught to school kids as the Pythagorean theorem has. Bruner later mentions that children enter the world of narrative earlier. I think this answers his question. Because we are surrounded by stories from such a young age, we are in a way able to teach ourselves about narratives, storytelling, and peripeteia in stories without realizing it.
In the article “My Grandfather was not a Nazi,” almost all of the children and grandchildren of the ex-Nazis blocked out gruesome and unflattering details in the stories told to them. This is interesting because not only do they not just disregard those details in those stories, but instead, the children totally rewrote the stories in their mind to portray their grandparents in a better light as either rescuers of Jews or disobeying Nazi law as often as they could. In most of the examples, as the tale was passed down to each successive generation, the story became more and more heroic unlike the original story. According to Bruner, legal stories “need to evoke familiar conventional realities, if only to highlight the offending deviations from them.” (page 12) Although these stories were not told in court and are told informally as memories to close relatives, I think that this applies to this situation because these memories are controversial enough to involve judging a person based on a crime that the grandparents helped commit or did not help commit, much like on a real trial. The children and grandchildren undoubtedly grew up learning extensively about WWII, thus the “conventional reality” back then seems to already be known to them. The children instead did not accept the true reality that their grandparents/parent told them and instead looked for signs in the story that showed even a miniscule evidence that their parents were not true “Nazis” and turned it into their own stories. In their minds, either their grandparents were already against the Nazis from the start or were coerced into joining for economic opportunities and safety.
Making Stories: Law, Literature, and Life has rekindled my grappling with what constitutes reality and truth. Memories serve as symbolic representations of reality and our narratives further filter and shift our perception of past realities. We’re constantly reworking our narratives; reconstructing them based on our shifting self schemas, and altering what we express based on our expectations of others’ interpretations of our selves based on our narratives. What I view as true now for my past self may be completely divergent from what was real for me at that moment in my past as I was experiencing it. Time necessitates narrative change, however this evolution of thought and self concept does not negate what was once true, though past truths are not always congruent with our present constructs of self and reality. Numerous developmental psych and trauma studies have indicated that severely traumatized children utilize imaginative play earlier, longer, and more frequently than children who have avoided trauma. Based on this I have to wonder whether traumatized children process memories differently, and in term develop divergent sorts of narrative structure and malleability than the nontraumatized. It is my speculation, based on Bruner’s discussion of children and narrative, that these children may be more prone to embellishment, and more skilled at adapting their narrative presentation of themselves (aka lying.) Along these lines, concerning the manipulation and reevaluation of the self, I’m drawn to the concepts of reality in terms of the use of I in narrative poetry, and to some extent nonfiction writing. While an author may acknowledge a poem as autobiographical in nature, the poem is articulated from the point of view of ‘the speaker.’ Writing allows us to construct a truth, either on an emotional or a literal level, however it is acknowledged that I serves as a facet of self and is only a representation, not wholly the actual person, as for sake of sound, aesthetic and craft, the exact details of a situation may be altered. In this way writing provides a distance, a subtle divorce, between self and narrative. Somehow I don’t view these alterations to reality fail in terms of truth, but I’m interested to know what others would say about that.
“Finding the language to narrate what occurred, what was felt, what was remembered in order to survive helps integrate even the most extreme experiences into our lives.” Louise De Salvo, Writing As A Way of Healing
Bruner discusses how “fiction creates realities so compelling that they shape our experience not only of the worlds the fiction portrays but of the real world.” (9) I think this means that fiction often creates a sort of “conventional” world in which the story is told and therefore, “… our notions of reality are quite conventionalized.” (22) But what does this really say about the way in which we tell stories and about the way we read them? Welzer’s papers, Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi, discussed the idea of heroization and how one often holds their grandparents in a positive light and either block out, or refuse to hear the negative things they might have done in their lives. In this scenario, it might not be the storyteller who is omitting facts, but the listeners. One of the most interesting examples from this study was when one of the eyewitnesses wanted his grandchildren to ask him questions but they refuse, claiming they already know all there is to know about the subject. So this omits storytelling altogether and focuses on what we do and do not want our memories of someone to be made of. Another subject Bruner discusses is the perspective from which a particular story is told. “The victor’s tail of triumph is the loser’s tail of defeat, though both were in the same battle.” (23) So while two people could be in the same place, at the same time, they might not experience the same things. Their memories for the events that took place will be different. Our cultures, or the places we grew up could affect the ways in which we remember events. We might pay attention to different things because of what we deem important and will therefore have a different memory of a certain event. But then how does one figure out, say in a court of law, which person is telling the “truth”? I suppose that therein lies the question of whether or not our memories are that reliable or not.
When we tell any sort of story, we are not doing to “take inventory” of our lives, to keep track of all happenings in our life situation as if they were items in a store. My own experience validates what Brunner writes about, which is that there is an underlying motive to “storytelling”. Even when the facts are completely accurate, the choices we make as to what to include, versus exclude show this. For example, one may be trying to convey to someone what we had a great experience when we share all of the positive details, and exclude the negative, or vice versa for a negative one. It also makes sense that we conceptualize our own lives’ narratives according to previous stories or occurrences which we have internalized, such as when the author viewed his journey on a boat as an enactment of a story from the bible. Similarly, my friend leaving the country to travel to Asia, sees his journey as a sort of “walkabout,” the kind the Aboriginals took on while temporarily leaving western society his justification for why he will not have contact with any of his friends. I couldn’t help but re-ponder the metaphysical question of “what is reality?” when reading this selection. The fact that we have such different narratives suggests, to me, either the existence different realities or one reality which is never fully seen by any individual person. It all depends on how you define this it seems. Even in a very practical sense, we can see this issue in the courtroom, as Brunner, in the second chapter discusses how stories in the court of law are distrusted and judged; showing us that our recounts of the past are certainly not carbon copies of reality. On a general note, however, how could storytelling of our own lives not be subjective? Not only are we all experiencing our own “realities” but we are all creating them. To me this does not seem like such a surprising phenomenon. Why it is that we have the particular perspectives we do? In addition, what all of the underlying experiences, emotional patterns, attachments, and so on (as Brunner said about children) contribute to this seems, for me, to be the most interesting realm which could extend from this sub-theme. However, there are certainly no clearly-defined single answers.
Bruner talks about the importance of narrative and how it is almost as natural as language itself. We might have heard a story being told many times before and know it by heart but we might not understand it. When we are told to narrate the stories, we often stumble and come out with our own narrations because we look at the story from our own perspective. In class, we talked about how we do not fully remember our past. We might have some memory about it but we cannot be precise about what exactly happen. Does this mean that when we're telling someone about our past, we're telling them according to our own perspective and that we might be exaggarating it a little? Do our perspectives of our past change according to our age?
Stories are also usually created from reality and are narrated to deliver a message. Bruner says that narrative gives shape to things in the real world and often bestows on them a title to reality. Besides, with different perspectives of a narrative, it is interesting to see how a certain situation can give different impacts to people.
What if everyone narrated the same way and had the same perspectives on things?
In this reading Bruner exemplifies the importance of perspective. He points to the example of the victor’s tale vs. the loser’s tale. One is of triumph while the other is of defeat. Our historical documents which American children are forced to learn through tests, papers, and presentations are backwards. They are not only biased. They all come from one perspective. That perspective is of the people in power. The “man.” More specifically white men for centuries. We haven’t been exposed to very many historical accounts from the female perspective. Beyond that the poor perspective. Beyond that the black, latin, asian etc. perspective. The child’s perspective. And the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning peoples’ perspectives. Because of this void every battle and war that American children are forced to study is tainted by the war-hero/victor’s perspective. The “historical facts” are pushed in a way that is hard to refute at a young and impressionable age. Who were the Pilgrims? Can we learn everything there is to know about them from what they write about themselves? No! What were the children at the time thinking or feeling. If we looked into their diaries or pictures we might have gotten a better since of who these “pilgrims” were. This all comes back to language, another of Bruner’s points. The words Americans use to describe the people that they rape/exploit/kill etc. are very strategic. The hostiles for instance is a term that can weaken the perception of a whole peoples’ humanity. Even the holocaust. Some say that slavery should be given a name that is either a holocaust or something to that affect. There are holocaust museums and plays. It is wrong to make a joke about it. I am half Jewish and well aware of the horrific significance of that historic event. I am also half Haitian. This makes me wonder at how African Americans in this country are continually mistreated in the way that our history is portrayed and at times ignored. Furthermore with all my solidarity with Haiti, a country that I love and have visited and raised money for, many American people’s false notions of it baffle me. Haitians do not primarily tell the history of Haiti. Haitians do not shape the current events in Haiti either. The media frames Haiti around whenever it has the U.S. physically inside of it. The shape of the U.S maps frame the power and centrality of our country. Every story that we tell or read is informed by our own biases and position in society and the world. The defeated or the invisible people do tell their stories. It is a question of whether we allow them to be heard and placed as high as the visible victor’s stories are now in this day and age.
8 comments:
Bruner’s first two chapters about the uses of narratives and their purposes reminds me of the question we posed in class last week about amnesia being a common theme in many movies. I agree with Bruner that narratives and the most successful narratives change elements of the ordinary. We take ordinary situations and create something new. Since memory is a unique in all of us, it’s a perfect idea for audiences to relate to whether it’s forgetting or remembering. In fact, Bruner notes that storytelling and narratives center on the idea that we can “mind read,” are able to relate and predict the next action. I also think that the ability to empathize with another human is why narratives become so true for us. For instance, when someone chooses to explain something personal to you it requires the other person to recognize a different approach to understanding that person and their narrative.
Equally important as empathizing is interpretation. Bruner mentions the importance of language, interpretation, and the validity in translations. If given and story, article, etc. each one of us would interpret differently and its in the interpretation that we question truth and accuracy just as Bruner mentioned the simple telephone game where things are lost in translation. With that said, imagine all the lies created in our memory, over history, etc.
The last point I want to observe is why humans are culturally dependent creatures. Bruner explains human cognition and its handedness with cultural changes. I guess you could say that all animals live in a culture and humans live in very complex ones, but we are especially conditioned to dress, talk, eat, etc. in a specific way. Similarly, Dawkins coined the term memes that are like cultural genes in a sense that they reproduce and replicate and I found memes and narratives to be homogenous in the sense that they both instruct.
Bruner discusses narratives and the importance of language in storytelling. Language is vital to humans because we need language in order to narrate the stories we tell in order to recount our memories to those around us. Because we are able to communicate with language, Bruner says a person can then display a self, which is constructed by endless forms of narrative. This got me thinking about how important the self is when coming up with stories. In the first readings we did, we noticed that amnesiac patients lacked a sense of self. Although they were able to speak, the self was missing, which made it impossible for them to create the narrative needed to communicate to others about who they were. Another interesting point Bruner brings up is the role different perspectives play in telling stories. Bruner uses the example of the victor's tale of triumph being the loser's tale of defeat, though both were in the same battle. We often only see things from our perspective and tend to forget to look at the way others around us see something. Bruner then applies this when writing about legal storytelling. Attorneys need to overcome seeing from just their perspective in order to defend their client in the best way possible in order to win the case. An idea Bruner expressed that I liked was "a narrative models not only a world but the minds seeking to give it its meanings." The person telling the story is often telling it with his or her meaning in mind, but once they tell it to an audience, the storyteller has then left his or her story open to be interpreted many different ways. Also, earlier in the chapter, Bruner poses a question regarding why the concept of peripeteia hasn’t been as widely taught to school kids as the Pythagorean theorem has. Bruner later mentions that children enter the world of narrative earlier. I think this answers his question. Because we are surrounded by stories from such a young age, we are in a way able to teach ourselves about narratives, storytelling, and peripeteia in stories without realizing it.
In the article “My Grandfather was not a Nazi,” almost all of the children and grandchildren of the ex-Nazis blocked out gruesome and unflattering details in the stories told to them. This is interesting because not only do they not just disregard those details in those stories, but instead, the children totally rewrote the stories in their mind to portray their grandparents in a better light as either rescuers of Jews or disobeying Nazi law as often as they could. In most of the examples, as the tale was passed down to each successive generation, the story became more and more heroic unlike the original story. According to Bruner, legal stories “need to evoke familiar conventional realities, if only to highlight the offending deviations from them.” (page 12) Although these stories were not told in court and are told informally as memories to close relatives, I think that this applies to this situation because these memories are controversial enough to involve judging a person based on a crime that the grandparents helped commit or did not help commit, much like on a real trial.
The children and grandchildren undoubtedly grew up learning extensively about WWII, thus the “conventional reality” back then seems to already be known to them. The children instead did not accept the true reality that their grandparents/parent told them and instead looked for signs in the story that showed even a miniscule evidence that their parents were not true “Nazis” and turned it into their own stories. In their minds, either their grandparents were already against the Nazis from the start or were coerced into joining for economic opportunities and safety.
Making Stories: Law, Literature, and Life has rekindled my grappling with what constitutes reality and truth. Memories serve as symbolic representations of reality and our narratives further filter and shift our perception of past realities. We’re constantly reworking our narratives; reconstructing them based on our shifting self schemas, and altering what we express based on our expectations of others’ interpretations of our selves based on our narratives. What I view as true now for my past self may be completely divergent from what was real for me at that moment in my past as I was experiencing it. Time necessitates narrative change, however this evolution of thought and self concept does not negate what was once true, though past truths are not always congruent with our present constructs of self and reality.
Numerous developmental psych and trauma studies have indicated that severely traumatized children utilize imaginative play earlier, longer, and more frequently than children who have avoided trauma. Based on this I have to wonder whether traumatized children process memories differently, and in term develop divergent sorts of narrative structure and malleability than the nontraumatized. It is my speculation, based on Bruner’s discussion of children and narrative, that these children may be more prone to embellishment, and more skilled at adapting their narrative presentation of themselves (aka lying.)
Along these lines, concerning the manipulation and reevaluation of the self, I’m drawn to the concepts of reality in terms of the use of I in narrative poetry, and to some extent nonfiction writing. While an author may acknowledge a poem as autobiographical in nature, the poem is articulated from the point of view of ‘the speaker.’ Writing allows us to construct a truth, either on an emotional or a literal level, however it is acknowledged that I serves as a facet of self and is only a representation, not wholly the actual person, as for sake of sound, aesthetic and craft, the exact details of a situation may be altered. In this way writing provides a distance, a subtle divorce, between self and narrative. Somehow I don’t view these alterations to reality fail in terms of truth, but I’m interested to know what others would say about that.
“Finding the language to narrate what occurred, what was felt, what was remembered in order to survive helps integrate even the most extreme experiences into our lives.”
Louise De Salvo, Writing As A Way of Healing
Bruner discusses how “fiction creates realities so compelling that they shape our experience not only of the worlds the fiction portrays but of the real world.” (9) I think this means that fiction often creates a sort of “conventional” world in which the story is told and therefore, “… our notions of reality are quite conventionalized.” (22) But what does this really say about the way in which we tell stories and about the way we read them?
Welzer’s papers, Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi, discussed the idea of heroization and how one often holds their grandparents in a positive light and either block out, or refuse to hear the negative things they might have done in their lives. In this scenario, it might not be the storyteller who is omitting facts, but the listeners. One of the most interesting examples from this study was when one of the eyewitnesses wanted his grandchildren to ask him questions but they refuse, claiming they already know all there is to know about the subject. So this omits storytelling altogether and focuses on what we do and do not want our memories of someone to be made of.
Another subject Bruner discusses is the perspective from which a particular story is told. “The victor’s tail of triumph is the loser’s tail of defeat, though both were in the same battle.” (23) So while two people could be in the same place, at the same time, they might not experience the same things. Their memories for the events that took place will be different. Our cultures, or the places we grew up could affect the ways in which we remember events. We might pay attention to different things because of what we deem important and will therefore have a different memory of a certain event. But then how does one figure out, say in a court of law, which person is telling the “truth”? I suppose that therein lies the question of whether or not our memories are that reliable or not.
When we tell any sort of story, we are not doing to “take inventory” of our lives, to keep track of all happenings in our life situation as if they were items in a store. My own experience validates what Brunner writes about, which is that there is an underlying motive to “storytelling”. Even when the facts are completely accurate, the choices we make as to what to include, versus exclude show this. For example, one may be trying to convey to someone what we had a great experience when we share all of the positive details, and exclude the negative, or vice versa for a negative one. It also makes sense that we conceptualize our own lives’ narratives according to previous stories or occurrences which we have internalized, such as when the author viewed his journey on a boat as an enactment of a story from the bible. Similarly, my friend leaving the country to travel to Asia, sees his journey as a sort of “walkabout,” the kind the Aboriginals took on while temporarily leaving western society his justification for why he will not have contact with any of his friends.
I couldn’t help but re-ponder the metaphysical question of “what is reality?” when reading this selection. The fact that we have such different narratives suggests, to me, either the existence different realities or one reality which is never fully seen by any individual person. It all depends on how you define this it seems. Even in a very practical sense, we can see this issue in the courtroom, as Brunner, in the second chapter discusses how stories in the court of law are distrusted and judged; showing us that our recounts of the past are certainly not carbon copies of reality.
On a general note, however, how could storytelling of our own lives not be subjective? Not only are we all experiencing our own “realities” but we are all creating them. To me this does not seem like such a surprising phenomenon. Why it is that we have the particular perspectives we do? In addition, what all of the underlying experiences, emotional patterns, attachments, and so on (as Brunner said about children) contribute to this seems, for me, to be the most interesting realm which could extend from this sub-theme. However, there are certainly no clearly-defined single answers.
Bruner talks about the importance of narrative and how it is almost as natural as language itself. We might have heard a story being told many times before and know it by heart but we might not understand it. When we are told to narrate the stories, we often stumble and come out with our own narrations because we look at the story from our own perspective. In class, we talked about how we do not fully remember our past. We might have some memory about it but we cannot be precise about what exactly happen. Does this mean that when we're telling someone about our past, we're telling them according to our own perspective and that we might be exaggarating it a little? Do our perspectives of our past change according to our age?
Stories are also usually created from reality and are narrated to deliver a message. Bruner says that narrative gives shape to things in the real world and often bestows on them a title to reality. Besides, with different perspectives of a narrative, it is interesting to see how a certain situation can give different impacts to people.
What if everyone narrated the same way and had the same perspectives on things?
In this reading Bruner exemplifies the importance of perspective. He points to the example of the victor’s tale vs. the loser’s tale. One is of triumph while the other is of defeat. Our historical documents which American children are forced to learn through tests, papers, and presentations are backwards. They are not only biased. They all come from one perspective. That perspective is of the people in power. The “man.” More specifically white men for centuries. We haven’t been exposed to very many historical accounts from the female perspective. Beyond that the poor perspective. Beyond that the black, latin, asian etc. perspective. The child’s perspective. And the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning peoples’ perspectives. Because of this void every battle and war that American children are forced to study is tainted by the war-hero/victor’s perspective. The “historical facts” are pushed in a way that is hard to refute at a young and impressionable age. Who were the Pilgrims? Can we learn everything there is to know about them from what they write about themselves? No! What were the children at the time thinking or feeling. If we looked into their diaries or pictures we might have gotten a better since of who these “pilgrims” were. This all comes back to language, another of Bruner’s points. The words Americans use to describe the people that they rape/exploit/kill etc. are very strategic. The hostiles for instance is a term that can weaken the perception of a whole peoples’ humanity. Even the holocaust. Some say that slavery should be given a name that is either a holocaust or something to that affect. There are holocaust museums and plays. It is wrong to make a joke about it. I am half Jewish and well aware of the horrific significance of that historic event. I am also half Haitian. This makes me wonder at how African Americans in this country are continually mistreated in the way that our history is portrayed and at times ignored. Furthermore with all my solidarity with Haiti, a country that I love and have visited and raised money for, many American people’s false notions of it baffle me. Haitians do not primarily tell the history of Haiti. Haitians do not shape the current events in Haiti either. The media frames Haiti around whenever it has the U.S. physically inside of it. The shape of the U.S maps frame the power and centrality of our country. Every story that we tell or read is informed by our own biases and position in society and the world. The defeated or the invisible people do tell their stories. It is a question of whether we allow them to be heard and placed as high as the visible victor’s stories are now in this day and age.
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