Jens Brockmeier

Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory

This paper has two objectives: one is to explore the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, an issue traditionally neglected in psychological memory research; the other is to question the widespread dichotomy of individual and social memory. To do so, a cultural-historical perspective is outlined that allows us to conceive of individual memory as an inextricable part of an overarching cultural discourse, the discourse of cultural memory. In this discourse, narrative practices are of central importance because they combine various cultural symbol systems, integrating them within one symbolic space. In order to explain and illustrate this conception of narrative, a historical memorial and work of art is examined. Three narrative orders of this artwork are distinguished—the linguistic, semiotic and performative or discursive—and discussed as particular forms of meaning construction. Together, they constitute a mnemonic system, a symbolic space of remembering and forgetting in which the time orders of past and present are continuously recombined.

Narrativa: problemas e promessas de um paradigma alternativo

The increasing interest in the study of narrative and its social contexts suggests the emergence of another strand to the post-positivist paradigm and a further refinement of interpretive methodology in the human sciences. The problem of accounting for the dynamic patterns of human behavior seems to be nearer to a solution through studies of narrative even than through such well-known approaches as the use of the role-rule model or script theory. In this paper we will look at some of the qualities that have made the study of narrative such a productive approach. In doing so, we shall define the notion of narrative and differentiate it from other patterns of discourse, drawing on socio- and psycholinguistics as well as on literary and philosophical studies. A second concern will be to identify some theoretical difficulties and possible dangers of which, we believe, students of narrative should be aware. Finally, we will outline an understanding of narrative that aims to take into account its particular discursive embeddedness and its transitory character.

Autobiographical Remembering as Cultural Practice: Understanding the Interplay between Memory, Self and Culture

Autobiographical remembering is examined as a cultural practice unfolding in the developmental dynamics of the interplay between memory, self and culture. In discussing the results of recent comparative studies in the United States and East Asia, we argue that autobiographical memory and self are interconnected meaning systems constructed in macro- and micro-cultural contexts—contexts of collectively performed and shared symbols, tools and artifacts. This process involves manylayered interactions between an individual and the belief structures of the society; it also involves various forms of active negotiation among the agents of socialization. As a result, a culture’s genres of autobiographical remembering and its prevailing conceptions of selfhood have a decisive impact on the very nature of mnemonic transmission from one generation to the next. Against this backdrop, autobiographical remembering is described as an important dimension of cultural memory.

After the Archive: Remapping Memory

In this paper I make the case that the notion of memory—the very idea that there is a particular capacity that enables us to remember, to store, and to recall experiences and knowledge, and that in doing so constitutes an essential part of our existence—is in the midst of dissolving. I explore this dissolution of ‘memory’ as an epistemological and cultural paradigm shift. This shift can be observed in a broad spectrum of scientific and scholarly developments and, moreover, in literary, artistic, and public discourses. What all of these have challenged is the idea of memory as storage, an archive. I review four areas of research whose results and debates have fuelled this ‘memory crisis’: the social and cultural, the technological, the literary and the artistic, and the biological and cognitive. At the same time, we find in all these fields emerging perspectives that reach beyond the idea of memory as an archive, offering visions of more open, fleeting, social and cultural practices of remembering and forgetting.

The Role of Language Games in Children's Understanding of Mental States: A Training Study

In this study the authors investigated whether training preschool children in the use of mental state lexicon plays a significant role in bringing about advanced conceptual understanding of mental terms and improved performance on theory-of-mind tasks. A total of 70 participants belonging to two age groups (3 and 4 years old) were randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions. All participants were pretested and posttested with linguistic and cognitive measures. Analyses of pretest data did not show any significant differences between experimental and control groups. During a 2-month period of intervention, children were read stories enriched with mental lexicon. After listening to a story, the experimental group took part in language games and conversations aimed at stimulating children to use mental terms. In contrast, the control group did not participate in any special linguistic activities. The results show that training had a significant effect on emotion understanding and metacognitive vocabulary comprehension in the 3-year-old group and on false-belief understanding and metacognitive vocabulary comprehension in the 4-year-old group.

Reaching for Meaning Human Agency and the Narrative Imagination

In this paper I am exploring meaning and meaning constructions as forms of human agency. Drawing on notions of meaning, agency, and subjectivity by Jerome Bruner and Klaus Holzkamp, my discussion emphasizes the human potentials to act, choose, and imagine as integral to the human condition. Against the backdrop of this discussion, I am particularly interested in the meaning-making resources of language, especially, of two forms of language use. One is agentive discourse—the discourse of agency—because it brings to the fore the constructive dimension of language. The other is narrative, because it is the most complex and comprehensive construction site of human imagination. I suggest that narrative imagination plays a central role in probing and extending real and fictive scenarios of agency.

Enhancing social cognition by training children in emotion understanding: A primary school study

We investigated whether training school-age children in emotion understanding had a significant effect on their social cognition. Participants were 110 children (mean age=7 years 3 months) assigned to training and control conditions. Over a 2-month intervention program, after the reading of illustrated scenarios based on emotional scripts, the training group was engaged in conversations on emotion understanding, whereas the control group was simply asked to produce a drawing about the story. The training group outperformed the control group on emotion comprehension, theory of mind, and empathy, and the positive training outcomes for emotion understanding remained stable over 6 months. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Socio-Technical Lifelogging: Deriving Design Principles for a Future Proof Digital Past

Lifelogging is a technically inspired approach that attempts to address the problem of human forgetting by developing systems that “record everything.” Uptake of lifelogging systems has generally been disappointing, however. One reason for this lack of uptake is the absence of design principles for developing digital systems to support memory. Synthesizing multiple studies, we identify and evaluate 4 new empirically motivated design principles for lifelogging: Selectivity, Embodiment, Synergy, and Reminiscence. We first summarize four empirical studies that motivate the principles, then describe the evaluation of four novel systems built to embody these principles. We show that design principles were generative, leading to the development of new classes of lifelogging system, as well as providing strategic guidance about how those systems should be built. Evaluations suggest support for Selection and Embodiment principles, but more conceptual and technical work is needed to refine the Synergy and Reminiscence principles.

Continuity Amid Chaos: Neurotrauma, Loss of Memory, and Sense of Self

In serious illness or disability, individuals commonly say that their sense of self has dramatically changed. One might expect that the experience of a radically altered sense of self would be even more profound in individuals after neurotrauma because it is the brain itself that suddenly, and often literally, becomes “strange.” The aim of this study was to investigate how people left with autobiographical memory impairments—impairments that also affect the capacity to organize complex linguistic productions such as autobiographical narratives—experience themselves and, specifically, their sense of self. Seven adults who had primarily anterograde memory impairments for 1 year were interviewed. Regardless of the profound changes in their everyday functioning and lives, the stories the participants told evoke a surprising sense of a continuous self. Employing several narrative and discursive techniques, they emphasized sameness and an unbroken connection between their pre- and post-morbid lives. We believe that most individuals felt they did not have to recover their former sense of self because they subjectively seemed to have never lost it.

Introduction: Searching for Cultural Memory

This Introduction situates the papers and commentaries of this Special Issue on ‘Narrative and Cultural Memory’ within the context of a new multidisciplinary research literature that suggests localizing memory in culture and, in doing so, focuses on the role of narrative. This literature is viewed against the backdrop of a fundamental critique of the traditional notion of memory as reflecting one strand in the emergence of a new postpositivist cultural research paradigm in the study of memory.