Experienced Life and Narrated Life Story

Gestalt and Structure of Biographical Self-Presentations

Gabriele Rosenthal, Ruth Schubert

• Publisher: Campus Verlag
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9783593457475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

How do people narrate events in their life story and in the history of their family or families when making a self-presentation? How are narratives and experiences in the present related to experiences and narratives in the past? This book answers these questions with a theoretical and empirical study of the interconnections between remembering, experiencing, and presenting what was experienced, at different points of the life course and of the associated collective histories. It also discusses rules for conducting interviews that support processes of remembering, and for carrying out an analysis that does justice to this dialectic. The author exploits ideas from phenomenology and Gestalt theory in this book, which has become a classic. Since its first publication in 1995, she has increasingly taken inspiration from the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias. Accordingly, this English edition contains a new introduction and a new chapter on this later expansion of her approach to sociological biographical research.

Table of contents

• About the book
• Vita
• Content
• Preface to the new edition
• Preliminary note
• 1. Introduction
• 2. On the Gestalt nature of experience
• 3. On the Gestalt nature of memory and narrative
• 4. On the Gestalt of narrated life stories
• 5. The healing effect of biographical narration
• 6. Methodological implications
• 7. Biographies – Discourses – Figurations: Social-constructivist and figurational biographical research   Artur Bogner & Gabriele Rosenthal
• Appendix
• Notes
• Copyright notice