/tag/personal%20history

8 quotes tagged 'personal history'

The Functions of Event Memory: Some Comments on Nelson and Barsalou (in Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory)
Author: Robyn Fivush
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (1988)
280

The self-concept and memories of past experiences develop dialectically and begin to form a life history. The life history, in turn, helps organize both memories of past experiences and the self-concept. The life history is essentially what Barsalou calls the extended time lines, or the person's 'story line.' It is only with the construction of the life history that we have true autobiographical memory.


288

As children begin to represent events that extend over longer time periods, from daily routines, to weekly routines, and so on, they also begin to develop a sense of self that continues to exist through time.


The Ontology of Memory for Real Events (in Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory)
Author: Katherine Nelson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (1988)
266-267

Sharing memories with others is in fact a prime social activity...learned in early childhood, and the result of this learning is the establishment of a store of memories that are shareable and ultimately reviewable by the individual, forming a personal history that has its own value independent of the general memory function of prediction and preparation for future events.


How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves
Author: Paul John Eakin
Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)
107

...students of memory today hold that past experience is necessarily - both psychologically and neurologically - constructed anew in each memory event or act of recall.


98

...autobiographers are primed to recognize the constructed nature of the past, yet they need at the same time to believe that in writing about the past they are performing an act of recovery: narrative teleology models the trajectory of continuous identity, reporting the supreme fiction of memory as fact. 'You' and 'I' and 'she' and 'he' and 'we' - the dialogic play of pronouns in these texts tracks the unfolding of relational identity in many registers, in discourse with others and within ourselves. The lesson these identity narratives are teaching, again and again, is that the self is dynamic, changing and plural.


94-95

...Patterns of Childhood is indeed [Christa] Wolf's self-narration, an *intra*relational life which works steadily, as we shall see, to reforge the link between selves past and present. Wolf recognizes continuous identity not only as a fiction of memory but also as an existential fact, necessary for our psychological survival amid the flux of experience. \r\n\r\nLooking back some twenty-five years after the end of World War II, the German novelist seeks to understand her own participation in the pernicious ideology of the Third Reich: as a teenager, she had been an ardent member of a Hitler youth group. But how, the narrator asks, can she connect with an earlier self she has repudiated and repressed? How to begin when at least three distinct stories claim her attention? In this intricately layered narrative, Wolf tracks all three chronologies of her inquiry into the past simultaneously: Nelly's childhood in the 1930's through World War II up to 1946, the narrator's trip to Poland to revisit Nelly's childhood home in July 1971, and the narrator's writing of Nelly's story from November 1972 to 1975. What, Wolf would have us ask, can possibly bind these periods of personal history together? Memory? Narrative? Identity? The use of the first person? 'We would suffer continuous estrangement from ourselves,' she observes, 'if it weren't for our memory of the things we have done, of the things that have happened to us. If it weren't for the memory of ourselves' (4). \r\n\r\nDoes memory indeed provide a basis for continuous identity, uniting us to our acts, our experiences, our earlier selves?


Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives
Author: Carolyn Kay Steedman
Publisher: Rutgers University Press (1987)
6

The stories that people tell themselves in order to explain how they got to the place they currently inhabit...are often in deep and ambiguous conflict with the official interpretive devices of a culture.


Food of the Gods
Author: Terence McKenna
Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)
61

Symbols allow us to store information outside of the physical brain. This creates for us a relationship to the past very different from that of our animal companions. Finally, we must add to any analysis of the human picture the notion of self‑directed modification of activity. We are able to modify our behavior patterns based on a symbolic analysis of past events, in other words, through history. Through our ability to store and recover information as images and written records, we have created a human environment as much conditioned by symbols and languages as by biological and environmental factors.