Telling to Understand, 1st ed. 2020 The Impact of Narrative on Autobiographical Memory

This book illustrates the link that unites memory, thought, and narration, and explores how the act of telling helps people to understand themselves and others. The structure of the book is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the aspect of narrative comprehension?the person as narrator. It identifies two different origins of narrative comprehension (memory and play) and argues that the narratives we produce starting from autobiographical memory are intended to give order and meaning to events that happened in the past, in order to be able to interpret the present. Conversely, the narratives we produce starting from play are aesthetically constructed, not forced to respect reality, and because of this create potential new worlds of understanding. The second part of this book is devoted to the study of narrative understanding as an understanding of the other. Chapters examine the different points of view a listener can adopt in order to interpret the text produced by a narrator and how these points of view can interact with each other. The book concludes with a consideration of narrative comprehension in the digital world, and examines the principal effects of stories and narrative on the notion of self in the realm of the ?Internet galaxy.?

Telling to Understand will be of interest to researchers and students in cognitive science, psychology, literary studies, philosophy, education, and educational technology, as well as any reader interested in enlarging their concept of narrative and how narrating modifies the self.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Part One: Narrative Understanding of Oneself

Chapter 2. Autobiographical Memory

            2.1 The Laboratory of Proust

            2.2 What Memory and Autobiographical Narrative Have in Common

            2.3 What is Autobiographical Memory

            2.4 Beyond the Archive Model

Chapter 3. From Autobiographical Memory to Autobiographical Narrative

            3.2 Looking for a Connection

            3.3 Conclusions

Chapter 4. The Autobiographical Narrative

            4.1 The Heaviness of Voice

            4.3 Memory Becomes Autobiographical Narrative

            4.4 Conclusions

Chapter 5. The Narrative Dialogue

            5.1 Research on Expressive Writing

            5.3 How the Other Transforms the Narrative

            5.4 Narration and Conversational Rules

            5.5 Conclusions

Chapter 6. From Play to the Narrative

            6.2 Playing with Consistency and Variability

            6.3 When Play Becomes a Tale

            6.4 Conclusions

Chapter 7. The “Playful” Narrative

            7.2 From Art to Science

            7.3 The Principle of Reducing the Discrepancy

            7.4 Stories as Tools to Solve the Unexpected

            7.5 Conclusions

Part Two: The Narrative Understanding of the Other

Chapter 8. Count and Recount

            8.2 From Gesture Language to Verbal language

            8.3 From Pictographic Representation to Writing

            8.4 Conclusion: The List as a Unifying Genre

Chapter 9. Man of Multiform Ingenuity

            9.2 The Multiplicity of Thoughts

            9.3 Errors of Reasoning

            9.5 The Two Hemispheres

            9.6 Conclusions

Chapter 10. Narration and Fuzzy Logic

            10.1 The Intersection of Sets

            10.2 Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Systems

            10.3 Fuzzy Logic

            10.4 Narrative “Logic” and Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Systems

            10.6 Conclusions

            11.1 Text and Paratext

            11.2 Three ways of Interpreting

            11.4 Interpretative Cooperation

            11.5 Conclusions

Chapter 12. Narrative Understanding in the Digital Age

            12.1 The Text is Dangerous

            12.3 Towards the Disappearance of the Text

            12.4 Towards the Disappearance of the Self

            12.5 Conclusions: A Fourth Way of Interpreting

Chapter 13. Conclusion

Andrea Smorti has a master degree in Philosophy (University of Florence), a specialization in School Psychology (University of Siena) and in Sport Psychology (University of Rome). He was Dean of the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Florence and he is currently a University Professor in Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology - University of Florence. Using a Cultural Psychology stance in the last three decades he has been studying the problem of autobiographical narrative in different personal and social contexts, with particular regard to painful and illness experiences. 

Explores the problem of “voice” in the relations between memory and narrative

Situates questions surrounding narrative within a wider scientific-cultural context

Offers an understanding of narrative theory and the autobiographical self for the internet age