Urban fathers positioning themselves through narrative: An approach to narrative self-construction. In A. De Fina, D. Schiffrin & M. Bamberg (Eds.), Discourse and identity, 315-341. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. (Stanton Wortham & Vivian Gadsden)

Many have argued that narrators can partly construct themselves when they tell autobiographical stories. For this reason, autobiographical narrative has been proposed as a therapeutic tool (Anderson, 1997; Cohler, 1988; White & Epston, 1990), as a means to critique unjust social orders (Personal Narratives Group, 1989; Rosenwald and Ochberg, 1992; Zuss, 1997), and as an educational tool (Cohen, 1996; Witherell & Noddings, 1991). This body of work makes at least two important points. First, the self is not an unchanging entity beyond the reach of everyday human action, but is something that can under some circumstances be changed with effort. Second, changing the self can happen through the social practice of narration, not just through the activity of an isolated individual.
      Although this work on narrative self-construction promises both theoretical insight into the processes of self-construction and practical tools for changing the self, most of it has failed to provide a comprehensive account of how autobiographical narration can actually construct the self. A full account would require three components: a linguistically sophisticated account of how narrative discourse creates relevant patterns; an account of the mechanism through which these discursive patterns influence social and psychological processes; and a theory of what the self is, such that it can be partly constructed through such a narrative mechanism. Most existing work on narrative self-construction includes only one or two of these components. Many rely on folk conceptions of how narrative discourse works, instead of systematic linguistic analyses (cf. critiques in Schiffrin, 1996; Wortham, 2001b). Many presuppose implicit or implausible mechanisms through which narration can influence the self. And many fail to offer an account of the self.
      This chapter focuses on the first component of an adequate account, and touches on the second. (Crapanzano (1992), Wortham (2001b) and others begin to describe a complementary account of self, but there is insufficient space here). We argue that any adequate analysis of narrative self-construction must offer more complex and specific accounts of narrative and of the mechanisms through which narrative influences the self. The chapter describes four types of narrative “positioning” that might potentially be relevant to self-construction. Although any one of these might in principle contribute to self-construction by itself, in practice the different types of positioning almost always depend on each other. The most plausible mechanisms for narrative self-construction involve interrelationships across these different types of narrative positioning.
      The chapter illustrates how such interrelationships work by examining a corpus of fifteen autobiographical narratives told by lower class, urban African American men who have become fathers as teenagers. Detailed analysis of one narrative illustrates the theoretical and methodological points introduced above—showing how different types of positioning occur in narrative, and how the various types of positioning might together accomplish self-construction. These analyses also illuminate the challenges faced by young urban men as they struggle to construct themselves as good fathers, in a social context that often impedes good parenting.

Book Chapter