Original scientific paper
THE PERSONAL MYTH, THE MYTH OF CHILDHOOD AND THE FAMILY MYTH IN THE ORAL NARRATIVE DISCOURSE?
Jelena Marković
orcid.org/0000-0002-7436-6190
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The process of creating the ''personal myth'', the ''family myth'' or the ''myth of one's own childhood'' has been recognised primarily in the contemporary developmental theory of the life cycle (for example, in Feinstein, Krippner and Granger 1988; McAdams 1985, 1993) and in psychotherapy, particularly family psychotherapy (for example, in Anderson and Bagarozzi 1983), although often diverging from folkloristic, literary-theoretical and anthropological definitions of myth. This text primarily takes as its issue the concepts that are used in the discourses mentioned, but not merely the discourse itself, but rather its methodological procedures and results, all with the objective of providing answers to the following questions: does the personal myth, the myth of childhood, and the family myth exist in the forms of talking about everyday life? Unlike the socio-psychological interest in personal stories as a factor in ''group cohesion'' and as a cognitive means of organising individual experience in a social environment, folklorists are interested in the conventional nature, instability and changeability of life stories with respect to the circumstances under which the telling of the story unfolds, but also related to the structural interrelations of the story, the narration, communicational situation and the narrated content upon which the genre definition of the narrative form also depends.
Keywords
myth; personal myth; family myth; the myth of childhood; talking about life; talking about childhood; personal story
Hrčak ID:
31239
URI
Publication date:
23.12.2008.
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