Telling Stories, Speaking Personally: Reconsidering the Place of Lived Experience in Composition.

Abstract

Academic Storytelling and the Limits of Conventional Knowledge Tell me a story. phrase strikes a chord in the Western imagination, evoking images of children at bedtime, fireside intimacy, the most natural and unimpeded of human communications. And yet, such associations mask the immense variabil ity of the forms and functions of in contemporary and traditional cultures, and the very conditions that, in recent years, have enabled the practice(s) of storytelling to emerge across the disciplines as a powerful challenge to Western discursive norms. turn towards story, testimony, and the in professional discourse is a complex and many-sided phenomenon. In one sense, as a mode of professional discourse is nothing new. Autobiography, the essay, the memoir, the travelogue, and other written genres of have long enjoyed an important position in the pantheon of Western literary genres, and reading and writing in some of these genres has long been a staple of writing instruction (see Connors, The Rise). This relative isolation of within literary studies is determined significantly by what has been reductively perceived as the bias of personal writing, that is, subjective when compared with the more objective rhetorical stances generally associated with other forms of professional writing that seem to represent unmediated modes of knowledge. By contrast, we wish to highlight the move towards a practice of and the which deliber ately challenges the boundaries of this reserved space of Western culture for aesthetic self-reflection. Increasingly, the work of a number of minority and third-wo rid writers reflects a sense of as the marrow of a heritage that can revive dispossessed cultures and experiences, and make possible a newly critical relationship with the dominant culture. As Trinh Minh-Ha puts it, [storytelling is the oldest form of building historical consciousness in commu

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