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Jackson, Michael Histories. The Politics of Storytelling - Part III
, e-publikation ISBN 978-87-635-0060-9 s. 227-285 i: True
133 DKK
20 $
18 €
Part III of The Politics of Storytelling also contains the table of contents, preface and references for the entire book.
From the beginning of the chapter:
It is a truism that all stories get subtly reshaped and reconstrued every
time they are told. To extend Heraclitus’s metaphor of time and the river,
one might say that it is impossible to ever tell the same story twice. And
this applies to rumours and folktales, as well as the most rigorously
documented events. Even when print promotes an illusion of fixity, and
fosters the ideal of an authorized version, stories are inevitably revised in
memory and reworked as they pass through the hands and minds of a
community. Accordingly, such antinomies as the ‘personal’ and the ‘social’
or the ‘private’ and the ‘public,’ do not define distinct genres of narrative,
but only moments in a drawn-out dialectic in which individual life stories
become interleaved with the narratives of a nation, and shared stories
assume new meanings in the uses to which each individual puts them
according to his or her particular predilections and experiences. It is in
this two-way transformation of private into public personae, and shared
worldviews into personal allegories, that narratives attain their power –
their seeming ability to fuse Then and Now, Here and There, the One
and the Many. As Walter Benjamin observed (1968:92), stories are like
vessels shaped from wet clay under a potter’s hands. While each pot
conforms to the stylistic and utilitarian conventions of a single society at
a certain moment in time, it simultaneously bears the tell-tale traces of an
individual potter’s hands.
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