Description
An outbound link to Jerome Bruner, “Research Currents: Life as Narrative,” Language Arts 65, no. 6 (1988), https://www.jstor.org/stable/41411426.
I WOULD LIKE to try out an idea that may not be quite ready, indeed may not be quite possible. But I have no doubt it is worth a try. It has to do with the nature of thought and with one of its uses. It has been traditional to treat thought, so to speak, as an instrument of reason. Good thought is right reason, and its efficacy is measured against the laws of logic or induction. Indeed, in its most recent computational form, it is a view of thought that has sped some of its enthusiasts to the belief that all thought is reducible to machine computability.
But logical thought is not the only or even the most ubiquitous mode of thought. For the last several years, I have been looking at another kind of thought, one that is quite different in form from reasoning: the form of thought that goes into the constructing not of logical or inductive arguments but of stories or narratives. What I want to do now is to extend these ideas about narrative to the analysis of the stories we tell about our lives: “Autobiographies.” …
OUTBOUND LINK
“Research Currents: Life as Narrative” (Jerome Bruner, Language Arts 65, no. 6, October 1988)
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