Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy

Folklorists' study of personal narratives tends to tread a narrow path between the apparently opposed notions of the individual constrained in formulating her experience by cultural models and the individual enabled to create a self by mobilizing cultural resources. In Chapter 2, a preview of a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Folklore Research 2006, Vol.43 (2), p.192-195
Main Author: Sawin, Patricia
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Empathy
Life stories
Narratives
Reviews
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Folklorists' study of personal narratives tends to tread a narrow path between the apparently opposed notions of the individual constrained in formulating her experience by cultural models and the individual enabled to create a self by mobilizing cultural resources. In Chapter 2, a preview of a book on the memory culture of marble carvers in an Italian town, Shuman draws on Walter Benjamin to argue that the possibility for critical practice lies in the tension between personal and collective stories. Shuman shows that "happy coincidence" stories reveal a world more perfect than the narrator suspected, even for those not inclined to credit divine intervention, but that such a vision is inaccessible to someone like Ned Lebow, whose meeting with the French rabbi's wife who helped save children from the death-camp trains revealed what is probably his own horrific story.
ISSN:0737-7037
1543-0413
1543-0413
DOI:10.1353/jfr.2006.0020