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Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, by Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 186pp. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 9780801473920.
Three experienced and reflective users of narrative analysis have provided the rest of us a valuable guide for thinking about what narratives are and how we as gatherers and interpreters of stories might think about the work we do. They point to recent uses of personal stories to undermine various hegemonic versions of history and to the way life stories allow a more holistic version of the person as social agent. But this is not just an argument for the value of narrative evidence. Rather, it provides a methodological and theoretical guide for those who do narrative analysis and those who read the results.
The view throughout is constructivist, recognizing the degree to which every telling of a life story is a socially contingent event, an active effort at self-construction in dialog with the immediate and imagined authence. And throughout the book, the authors practice what they advise. The make their case by introducing a number of historical and social science works (including their own) that have been based on narrative evidence. They tell us enough about those stories that they become familiar as we go along. And in so doing, they trip ever so slightly over one of the dangers they warn about, occasionally allowing readers to get lost in the stories and left wondering when we will get to "the point." The challenge, they note, is to tell enough of the story to show its own inherent logic and fullness, while still maintaining the analyst's interpretive discipline over it. The object, they argue in...