“Who am I?”- 13
PIN jc19265
263). These rights are not only available within particular speech communities, but are also
distributed among social groups and social contexts. Within this approach, narratives are not
limited to only “retelling” past events, but rather are questioned for how they shape the present
and future action of particular speech communities (Langellier, 1989).
Narrative as discourse. Mokros (1996) observes that identity is communicatively
constituted either through discourse or through interaction. By discourse, Mokros refers to social
constraints and enablements, which direct human action and provide the guidelines through
which self and identity is constituted. Discourse can be understood as both private and public.
For example, in examining “what counts as real?,” Mokros and Deetz (1996) question how
public discourses define teen pregnancy, depression/suicide, and cancer as “important issues,”
serving to maintain dominant groups’ ideology and control and position certain individuals and
groups as disenfranchised. Private discourses were then simplified and realigned with dominant,
public discourses, obscuring the complexity, tensions and interplay between public and private
discourse.
Approaching the study of narrative from a critical theory perspective, Mumby (1987,
1993) is interested in how, through narrative, discourses are constructed to legitimize certain
groups and positions, and solidify these structures, thus making it difficult to even articulate
opposing viewpoints. As Mumby (1993) explains, narrative functions as a way of challenging
current knowledge claims because it is oriented towards social phenomena. Drawing on the
work of Lyotard (1984), who questions the usefulness of metanarratives in a postmodern era,
Mumby (1993) focuses on “little narratives” that continuously challenge the social order--a
social order that is a contested and tenuous site for the struggle for meaning.
Convention