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The article reconsiders Jerome Bruner’s famous article “Life as Narrative” (1987), and in particular its thesis about those who “become” the autobiographical narratives they are telling. Galen Strawson’s recent criticism of narrativity is used as one perspective to weigh Bruner’s thought. Autobiography is, for Bruner, a cognitive achievement, yet he challenges the understanding of narrative as simply following and imitating life. He foregrounds the ways in which life imitates narrative, and the manner in which narrative cognition precedes and organizes experience. However, the key idea about the merger of autobiographical narratives and lived life privileges autobiography vis-à-vis the continuous process of the reception of narratives. Autobiography is never the sole cognitive resource used in organizing experience. The article argues that Bruner’s later emphasis on “folk psychological,” canonical narrativity and the “breaches” of these expectations as a cause of real narratives marks a change in his thought. The function of narration is to contain, solve, or deal with the “uncanniness” of life and shattered expectations. Experience is thus, to some extent, at odds with the preceding autobiographical narratives, and thus calls for revision of the preceding narratives rather than being dominated by them.
Matti Hyvärinen is a Research Director at Tampere University, Finland. He has studied the conceptual history of narrative, the narrative turns and interdisciplinary narrative theory. He is the co-editor of the volumes Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds (Routledge 2015), The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (Benjamins 2013), and Beyond Narrative Coherence (Benjamins 2010). He has published in several journals and edited volumes, including the entry on narrative genres in the Handbook of Narrative Analysis. He serves as the vice-director in the research centre Narrare, at Tampere University.
