PUBLICATIONS
SYLLABI

Many have claimed that the self gets constructed in narrative discourse. Using a systematic approach to analyzing narrative, I have asked: how do narrators partly construct themselves while telling autobiographical narratives? In order to answer this question, I argue that we must answer three questions. First, what is the structure of narrative discourse? I argue in Narratives in Action that there are at least four types of patterns established in narrative discourse: the characters and events described; the "voices" or recognizable social types that narrators attribute to these characters and events; the "ventriloquation" or "evaluation" that narrators do, through which they adopt their own moral and political stances on the social types they portray; and the interactional positions that narrators adopt with respect to interlocutors in the event of storytelling. An adequate account of narrative self-construction will describe which of these levels is relevant, and it will provide an empirically adequate method for analyzing the relevant patterns. Second, what is the "mechanism" of narrative self-construction? How might we construct ourselves by telling stories about ourselves? How does a particular event of narration influence the longer term object or process that we call the self? An adequate account of narrative self-construction will describe how this causal relation between speech and self works. Third, if narrative is central to self-construction, what is "the self"? An adequate account of narrative self-construction will also provide a theory of what the self might be. The publications in this section all try to answer one or more of these three questions.