Life Storying in Oral History

Life Storying in Oral History
Author: Jarmila Mildorf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3111073181

This book proposes the concept of "fictional contamination" to capture the fact that fictionalization and literary complexity can be found across different kinds of narrative. Exploring conversational storytelling in oral history and other interviews from socionarratological perspectives, the book systematically discusses key narrative features such as story templates, dialogue, double deixis, focalization or perspective-taking and mind representation as well as special narrative forms including second-person narration and narratives of vicarious experience. These features and forms attest to storytellers’ linguistic creativity and serve the function of involving listeners by making stories more interesting. Shared by fictional and conversational narratives at a basic level, they can bring conversational stories closer to fiction and potentially compromise their credibility if used extensively. Detailed analyses of broad-ranging examples are undertaken against a rich narrative-theoretical background drawn from the fields of narratology, linguistics, oral history, life storytelling, psychology and philosophy. The book is of interest to scholars and students working in these fields and anyone fascinated by the richness of conversational storytelling.

Catching Stories

Catching Stories
Author: Donna M. DeBlasio
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2009-05-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804040400

In neighborhoods, schools, community centers, and workplaces, people are using oral history to capture and collect the kinds of stories that the history books and the media tend to overlook: stories of personal struggle and hope, of war and peace, of family and friends, of beliefs, traditions, and values—the stories of our lives. Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History is a clear and comprehensive introduction for those with little or no experience in planning or undertaking oral history projects. Opening with the key question, “Why do oral history?” the guide outlines the stages of a project from idea to final product—planning and research, the interviewing process, basic technical principles, and audio and video recording techniques. The guide covers interview transcribing, ethical and legal issues, archiving, funding sources, and sharing oral history with audiences. Intended for teachers, students, librarians, local historians, and volunteers as well as individuals, Catching Stories is the place to start for anyone who wants to document the memories and collect the stories of community or family.

An Oral History

An Oral History
Author: Inc Peter Pauper Press
Publisher: Peter Pauper Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-06
Genre: Oral history
ISBN: 9781441327819

"This journal is designed for an adult child to record the story of a parent or grandparent (or someone else's history). Use this keepsake volume of questions and prompts as a conversation guide."--

The Truth about Stories

The Truth about Stories
Author: Thomas King
Publisher: House of Anansi
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2003
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 0887846963

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

Oral History and Photography

Oral History and Photography
Author: A. Freund
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2011-10-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230120091

This book collects original research essays to explore the diverse uses of photographs and photography in oral history, from the use of photos as memory triggers to their deployment in the telling of life stories. The book's contributors include both oral historians and photography scholars and critics.

Telling Stories

Telling Stories
Author: Mary Jo Maynes
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2012-08-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801459036

In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives-autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs-are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples from throughout the world and from premodern as well as contemporary cultures, they draw from labor history and class analysis, feminist sociology, race relations, and anthropology to demonstrate the value of personal narratives for scholars and students alike. Telling Stories explores why and how personal narratives should be used as evidence, and the methods and pitfalls of their use. The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration. Stories show how individuals' motivations, emotions, and imaginations have been shaped by their cumulative life experiences. In turn, Telling Stories demonstrates how the knowledge produced by personal narrative analysis is not simply contained in the stories told; the understanding that takes place between narrator and analyst and between analyst and audience enriches the results immeasurably.

The Greatest Love Story Ever Told

The Greatest Love Story Ever Told
Author: Megan Mullally
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2018-10-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101986689

*A New York Times Bestseller* Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman reveal the full story behind their epic romance—presented in a series of intimate conversations between the couple, including photos, anecdotes, and the occasional puzzle. The year: 2000. The setting: Los Angeles. A gorgeous virtuoso of an actress agreed to star in a random play, and a basement-dwelling scenic carpenter said he would assay a supporting role in the selfsame pageant. At the first rehearsal she surveyed her fellow cast members, determining if any of the men might qualify to provide her with a satisfying fling. Her gaze fell upon the carpenter, and like a bolt of lightning the thought struck her: no dice. Moving on. Yet, unbeknownst to our protagonists, Cupid had merely set down his bow and picked up a rocket launcher...that fired a love rocket (not a euphemism). The players were Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman, and the resulting romance, once ignited, was...epic. Beyond epic. It resulted in a coupling that has endured to this day; a sizzling, perpetual tryst that has captivated the world with its kindness, athleticism, astonishingly low-brow humor, and true (fire emoji) passion. How did they do it? They came from completely different families, ignored a significant age difference, and were separated by the gulf of several social strata. Megan loved books and art history; Nick loved hammers. But much more than these seemingly unsurpassable obstacles were the values they held in common: respect, decency, the ability to mention genitalia in almost any context, and an abiding obsession with the songs of Tom Waits. Eighteen years later, they're still very much in love and have finally decided to reveal the philosophical mountains they have conquered, the lessons they've learned, and the myriad jigsaw puzzles they've completed. Presented as an oral history in a series of conversations between the couple, the book features anecdotes, hijinks, photos, and a veritable grab bag of tomfoolery. This is not only the intoxicating book that Mullally's and Offerman's fans have been waiting for, it might just hold the solution to the greatest threat facing our modern world: the single life.

Story as History - History as Story

Story as History - History as Story
Author: Samuel Byrskog
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2022-03-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 900450205X

Please note that this title is only available to customers in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. NO salesrights for Rest of World. Samuel Byrskog employs models from the interdisciplinary field of oral history as presented by Paul Thompson, coupled with insights from cultural anthropology, in order to examine the interaction between the present and the past as the gospel tradition evolved. The ancient Greek and Roman historians, with their use of eyewitness testimony as sources to the past and as central elements in interpretive and narrativizing processes of the present, serve as the basis for unraveling culture-specific patterns of oral history, and thus for conceptualizing similar aspects during the development of the gospel tradition. Eyewitness testimonies played a central but varying role in early Christianity. They were transmitted in the matrix of discipleship, where verbal and behavioral traditions were passed on through acts of mimesis. The folkloristic notion of re-oralization explains how oral accounts regularly interacted with written texts, indicating a vivid and engaged relationship to the past as well as the semantic significance of oral communication and performance. Factual truth was essential but inseparable from interpreted truth during the course of investigation, transmission, and composition. The gospel tradition developed through a subtle interaction between the unique historic events of the past and the various circumstances of the present. The narrative and historical dimensions of a text cannot be separated, because the semantic codes of a text are often located in the culture and not in the text itself. The gospels are therefore the synthesis of history and story, intertwining the horizons of the past and of the present in their own right.

Life Stories

Life Stories
Author: Charlotte Linde
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 1993-07-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195360842

All adult speakers in Western cultures have life stories argues Charlotte Linde, and the ways in which these life stories are formed and exchanged with others have a powerful effect on all of us. Life stories express our sense of self, who we are and how we got that way. According to Linde, we also use these stories to show that our lives can be understood as coherent, and to assert or negotiate group membership. These life stories take part in the highest level of social constructions, since they are built on cultural assumptions about what is expected in a life, what the norms for a successful life are, and what common or special belief systems are necessary to establish coherence. The life story, illuminated by this engrossing study, is a form of everyday discourse which has not previously been precisely defined or studied. It is an oral, discontinuous unit, consisting of stories which are retold in a variety of forms over a long period of time, and which may be revised and changed as the speaker comes to drop old meanings and add new ones to parts of the life story. The life story is a particularly rich and important area for study, because it represents a crossroads of linguistic structure and social practice. Linde's analysis is of importance to linguistics, as well as having broader implications for anthropology, psychology, and sociology.

A Story to Save Your Life

A Story to Save Your Life
Author: Sarah Bishop
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2022-08-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231555369

Winner, 2023 OHA Book Award, Oral History Association A young woman flees violence in Mexico and seeks protection in the United States—only to be trafficked as a domestic worker in the Bronx. A decorated immigration judge leaves his post when the policies he proudly upheld capsize in the wake of political turmoil. A Gambian translator who was granted asylum herself talks with other African women about how immigration officers expect victims of torture to behave. A border patrol officer begins to question the training that instructs him to treat the children he finds in the Arizona desert like criminals. Through these and other powerful firsthand accounts, A Story to Save Your Life offers new insight into the harrowing realities of seeking protection in the United States. Sarah C. Bishop argues that cultural differences in communication shape every stage of the asylum process, playing a major but unexamined role. Migrants fleeing persecution must reconstruct the details of their lives so governmental authorities can determine whether their experiences justify protection. However, Bishop shows, many factors influence whether an applicant is perceived as credible, from the effects of trauma on the ability to recount an experience chronologically to culturally rooted nonverbal behaviors and displays of emotion. For asylum seekers, harnessing the power of autobiographical storytelling can mean the difference between life and death. A Story to Save Your Life emphasizes how memory, communication, and culture intertwine in migrants’ search for safety.