Fragments of a self: embodiments, (re)enactments, and re-encounters with memory

Ellen W. Kaplan

Chapter 6 in Memory, Trauma and Narratives of the Self, 2024, pp 133-149 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Our stories tell us who we are. The sense of self acquires temporary coherence through the stories we tell ourselves and others. This chapter considers the self-shaping work of story, looking at acting and writing processes as they contribute to the construction of self. Self-narrative, in its many iterations - memoir, autobiography, life writing - allows us to script an identity which shifts, transforms, dissolves, and reconstitutes itself over time and across circumstances. Actors and writers cannibalize memory to nourish their creative work. Traumatic memory, though unreliable and often inaccessible, may return unbidden to offer a pathway to exploration, revelation, and exposure of the ever-shifting self. The self is singular, but not single. It is unique and persistent, but not stable. We remember, re-member, and mis-remember the past to construct a provisional, always changing indisputably unique, self. We crave unity, but our memories are fractured, selective. When does memory become a story?

Keywords: Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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