If the Self Is a Text,What Genre Is It? Structure and Ideology in Narratives of Adult Learning

Abstract

In this article, the author argues that the narrative forms imposed on students closely follow the narrative conventions of the Bildungsroman, the novel of human emergence that has traditionally been associated with what educators of adults would call experiential learning. The author’s presenting question—If the self is a text, what genre is it?—is the literary form of the question of where the life narratives valorized in adult learning originate, why they appear to be unmediated and authentic, and what ideological meaning they carry. The author further argues that students are expected to reproduce quite particular narrative conventions: the use of the past to explain the present, and vice versa; memory as a form of psychic coherence; a double plot that has an echo in a split protagonist; and the erasure of social conflict. In the conclusion, the author briefly focuses on magical realism as an alternative narrative of experience.