"Si yo te dijera...": Un estudio de la narrativa oral.

Personal narrative, the telling of stories based upon one's own life, weaves a relationship between narrator and listener which develops a different sense of time and place. This project consists of the transcription and analysis of taped narratives of an elderly couple from the Sierra de Aracena, in southern Spain. These stories are personal narratives, and reflect the span of this century, including the trauma of the Spanish civil war, as the informants were born in 1903 and 1906. The thesis poses and considers questions concerning the construction of identity through autobiographical narrative, the sense of time and place inherent in oral narrative, gender differences in narrative strategies, and how these various concerns affect a sense and understanding of the evolution of the twentieth century. A self-reflexive methodology is used, for both the transcriptions and the manner of textual criticism. A first chapter examines theoretical concerns, including the question of popular culture and the relationship of this study to other interdisciplinary studies; generalizations, their limitations, and how one can learn from one example; oral literature, the interweaving of oral and written sources, and their relationship with personal narrative. The second chapter contains the earlier narratives from before the civil war, respecting their contexts, showing how they mediate between past and present. The third chapter, concerning the civil war narratives, considers the necessity of story-telling to make sense of the past. Chapter four, Paula's narratives, focuses upon the way she constructs her own sense of personality through narration. Chapter five, narratives from after the civil war, also examines the elements which impinge on the dynamics of narration due to circumstance, including the act of recording, the presence of other listeners, and the shadow of death. The interrelationship of historical time and personal need for interpretation and projection of self clearly permeates the narratives. The listener receives a sense of expanded time lived, collapsing the distance between the beginning and end of this century.PhDRomance Languages and Literatures: SpanishUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104197/1/9501026.pdfDescription of 9501026.pdf : Restricted to UM users only