Finding Deer on the Side of the Road: Storytelling Tensions and Borderlands in American Identity
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Authors
Mayville, Sarah J.
Issue Date
2005
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
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Abstract
My Senior Individualized Project has become a testament to the importance of
storytelling within American culture. The first section contains six life narratives
collected at the Washington Square Coop Apartment building in the Edison
neighborhood of Kalamazoo, Michigan. I feel this service-learning component puts forth
a true and diverse population of American lives and knowledge. In addition to providing
narratives, it benefits the community by giving the individuals who participated a sense
of personal validation, as well as a finished product of a story to save or pass on. I collected the narratives orally, then composed and organized the stories. The narratives
were written with the purpose of maintaining the integrity of the speaker's true voice,
thus keeping their authenticity. From the six collected, I refer to three specifically in the
critical analysis. The second section contains my own creative non-fiction narrative. I
wrote many of my stories with ideas of work and education in mind, themes which arose
out of the life narratives I collected. The third part consists of critical analysis that
attempts to bridge the life narratives, my creative non-fiction, and traditions in American
literature and autobiography, continuing the focus on work ethic and education. Each
section takes a different angle on the storytelling traditions in America, attempting to
uncover where the individual and cultural communities merge. Storytelling, though
sometimes devalued as solely an academic practice, is essential to perpetuating and
creating the traditions and ideologies surrounding the definitions of our American lives.
Description
vi, 132 p.
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License
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