Experienced Life and Narrated Life Story

How do people narrate events in their life story and in the history of their family or families when making a self-presentation? How are narratives and experiences in the present related to experiences and narratives in the past? This book answers these questions with a theoretical and empirical study of the interconnections between remembering, experiencing, and presenting what was experienced, at different points of the life course and of the associated collective histories. It also discusses rules for conducting interviews that support processes of remembering, and for carrying out an analysis that does justice to this dialectic. The author exploits ideas from phenomenology and Gestalt theory in this book, which has become a classic. Since its first publication in 1995, she has increasingly taken inspiration from the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias. Accordingly, this English edition contains a new introduction and a new chapter on this later expansion of her approach to sociological biographical research.

Gabriele Rosenthal ist emeritierte Professorin für Qualitative Methoden an der Sozialwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Göttingen.