Other
Narrative Theory and Stories that Speak to Us
(2012)
Abstract
This exhibit is a theorized response to an understanding of narratives in the DALN. It explore how people’s first-hand stories about reading and composing bring alive our scholarly understandings of those socially constructed narratives, as well as the complex cultural, political, ideological, and historical contexts which shape and are shaped by those practices and the values associated with them. It is also an account of why the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) was created to preserve peoples’ narratives about literacy. The exhibit explores why literacy narratives are important, how they carry information about reading and composing that is valuable, not only for scholars and teachers, but for librarians, community literacy workers, individual citizens and groups of people. Such narratives are powerfully rhetorical linguistic accounts through which people fashion their lives; make sense of their world, indeed construct the realities in which they live. The DALN narratives are sometimes laden so richly with information that conventional academic tools and ways of discussing their power to shape identities; to persuade, and reveal, and discover, to create meaning and affiliations at home, in schools, communities, and workplaces, are inadequate to the task. For this reason, the exhibit focuses on the work of narrative theorists such as Jerome Bruner (1986 and 1991), Linda Brodkey (1986), Jens Brockmeier and and Donal Carbaugh (2001), Michael Bamburg (1997 and 2005), and Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen (1988), among others.
Keywords
- Composition (Language arts),
- English language -- Rhetoric -- Study and teaching,
- Academic writing -- Study and teaching,
- Literacy -- Study and teaching -- United States
Disciplines
Publication Date
2012
Comments
Published by the Computers and Composition Digital Press, an imprint of Utah State University Press.
At the time of writing, Kathryn Comer was affiliated with Barry University, Miami FL.
Citation Information
Selfe, Cynthia L., and the DALN Consortium. “Narrative Theory and Stories That Speak to Us.” Stories That Speak to Us: Exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. Ed. H. Lewis Ulman, Scott Lloyd DeWitt, & Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013. Web.