Narrative Agency and Structural Chaos. A Biographical-Narrative Case Study

Abstract

<jats:p>The article is an analysis of a single case—a biographical narrative of a Tri-City resident who enters adulthood at the beginning of political transformation in 1989, and whose life path turns out to be an unintentional, dynamic journey between various professions, social worlds and structural positions. This creates a complicated and ambiguous biographical pattern which does not fall into either the socio-economic promotion of the “winner” or into the degradation of the transformation “loser.” The reconstruction of this pattern reveals the hero’s great resourcefulness and entrepreneurship, but also the fragility of the structures stabilizing his life and the volatility of life orientation points. The binder of this biography turns out to be, above all, reflexivity and, what I suggest calling, the narrative agency of the narrator, who can transform his structurally dispersed and chaotic life experiences of the time of transformation into a very original story, making him a strong subject of his own fate. This, however, creates the inevitable tension between the experienced or lived life, life history and the narrated life, life story, prompting us to again pose the question about the commonly assumed, although differently defined, correspondence between the level of reality and the level of its linguistic (in this case—autobiographical) representation.</jats:p>

The Interpretive Interview. An Interview Form Centring on Research Participants’ Constructions

“…In contrast to the other forms of narration-based interviews, the narrative interview developed by Schütze (1977Schütze ( , 1992Schütze ( , 2003 3 forges out the interviewee's orientations by focussing on so-called "extempore narrative renderings" (for more recent versions of the narrative interview, see Eichsteller, 2018;Filipkowski, 2019;Fischer-Rosenthal & Rosenthal, 1997;Svašek & Domecka, 2020). The narrative interview is based on the sociolinguistic structural approach of Labov and Waletzky (1967), according to which the structure of the narration recapitulates the past structures of the original processes.…”

Analyzing suicide life stories on Wikipedia with Highway_star and other textual visualization tools

“…It consists of gathering biographical information about a specific phenomenon. As such it might be considered as a subcategory of biographical studies (Roberts 2002;Kelchtermans and Ballet 2002;Tsiolis 2012;Bühler 2012;Lockhart 2013;Filipkowski 2019), themselves being part of narrative studies (Connely and Clandinin 1987;Bruner 1990Bruner , 1999Feldman et al 1990;Polkinghorne 1995;Josselson and Lieblich 1995;Josselson 1996;Ochs 1997;Kapitzke 1998;Greenhalgh and Hurwitz 1999;Williams et al 1999;Linde 2001;Pavlenko 2002;Bender 2003;Hauser et al 2006;Hill 2007;Hammack 2011;Monteagudo 2011;Saban and Sarıçelik 2018). For example, Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame ask their volunteers, 'How did you become a baker?'…”