Telling Life Stories: Ethos, Positionality, and Structures of Narrative
The reading and analysing of life stories offer multiple perspectives in understanding the self-reflexivity of authorial consciousness, the rhetorical/stylistic fashioning of ethos, and the fabulation/fictionality of narrative. Lived experiences, of the author as well as the reader, allow perception of meaning against the sedimented social, political, and cultural paradigms of the “master” or “grand narrative,” as Jean-François Lyotard puts in his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition (1979). The dialectic of human action and social reality within such narratives serves to map the interrelated progression of individuals and cultures throughout history.