TY - JOUR
T1 - Writing the Self and Bereavement
T2 - Dialogical Means and Markers of Moving Through Grief
AU - Lengelle, Reinekke
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2020/1/2
Y1 - 2020/1/2
N2 - That expressive writing can be a beneficial response to trauma or grief is well-established in the literature. Grief research also shows that the majority of people are resilient in the face of the death of loved ones. That said, traditional rituals around loss are no longer ubiquitous, well-known phase models of bereavement are contested, and ‘unfinished business’ can create difficulties in the face of loss. Increasingly, bereavement scholars speak of a need for individuals in western society to make meaning of their own grief through narrative construction, though little is said about what constitutes a beneficial story. The author takes an autoethnographic approach to write and reflect on her spouse’s illness and death and explores through a multi-voiced expressive dialogue a personal issue around her bereavement. In an analysis of her writing, using Dialogical Self Theory, she identifies markers which may be indicative of the development of a beneficially constructed narrative. The model of writing-for-transformation is used to describe the overall intent of the process, while the dialogical markers show how progress may be identified.
AB - That expressive writing can be a beneficial response to trauma or grief is well-established in the literature. Grief research also shows that the majority of people are resilient in the face of the death of loved ones. That said, traditional rituals around loss are no longer ubiquitous, well-known phase models of bereavement are contested, and ‘unfinished business’ can create difficulties in the face of loss. Increasingly, bereavement scholars speak of a need for individuals in western society to make meaning of their own grief through narrative construction, though little is said about what constitutes a beneficial story. The author takes an autoethnographic approach to write and reflect on her spouse’s illness and death and explores through a multi-voiced expressive dialogue a personal issue around her bereavement. In an analysis of her writing, using Dialogical Self Theory, she identifies markers which may be indicative of the development of a beneficially constructed narrative. The model of writing-for-transformation is used to describe the overall intent of the process, while the dialogical markers show how progress may be identified.
KW - Narrative
KW - bereavement
KW - dialogical self theory
KW - unfinished business
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079217990&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/14484528.2020.1710796
DO - 10.1080/14484528.2020.1710796
M3 - Journal Article
AN - SCOPUS:85079217990
SN - 1448-4528
VL - 17
SP - 103
EP - 122
JO - Life Writing
JF - Life Writing
IS - 1
ER -