engleski

Traditional Style and Formation of Personal and Group Identity Through Everyday Story

The paper concentrates on the process of evaluating personal past connected with remembering childhood and youth. The analyzes start from semantic aspect of life stories of women born between two world wars from rural, mostly insular and littoral, parts of Croatia. The description aims towards stylistic analysis of verbal construction of personal and social identity in the stories through the accentuation of expressive and emotional parts of the narration. After recording several examples of life stories telling about experiences from the middle of 20th century, become visible that all interviewers through their narratives evaluate own personal memory and make an effort to bridge generation gap between a younger interviewer and the older interviewee. When a narrator starts a process of testimony about childhood and youth, he/she also begins recalling experiences and emotions together with comparisons to the contemporary situation. Interviewed women had difficulties in expressing certain emotions and feelings about own early life period. Social and cultural expectations directed processes of gender and status construction in traditionally organized communities and narrators censored some aspects of their lives in the stories. During the narrative process, interviewees remembered almost forgotten things, people, and places. Recorded and transcribed texts showed typical stylistic patterns. Analysis and comparison of stories lead to a list of standard features characteristic of good storytellers.

Everyday story ; Personal identity ; Collective memory ; Interview ; Narrative

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