Literature, Life-Writing, and Identity

Notes

1. “Personal identity, understood as a complicated interaction of one’s own sense of self and other’s understanding of who one is, functions as a lever that expands or contracts one’s ability to exercise moral agency.” Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, xi.
2. Jane Kroger, Identity in Adolescence, 2.
3. Furthermore, the populations used prior to the 1960’s to explore this topic were typically institutionalized youth as opposed to a normative population, so our understanding of development processes is relatively new. Kroger, 8.
4. Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, 128.
5. “The difficulty of sorting through lessons about racial identity also relates to the ways in which messages about race, as well as sexuality, class, and gender are signaled to children in countless, everyday ways—the furniture in their homes, their verbal expressions and accents, the ways they hold their bodies in public settings, the children with whom they are allowed to play. Often, these lessons are stated indirectly though lessons about manners, taste, and rituals.” Thompson and Tyagi, “Storytelling as Social Conscience: The Power of Autobiography” in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, xiii.
6. Green, Herb, “Turning the Myths of Black Masculinity Inside/Out” in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, 253-4.
7. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crises, 96. “Erikson painted not only a more optimistic picture of human capabilities, but also shifted the emphasis of psychoanalysis from pathology to healthy functioning. Finally, Erikson recognized that personality development did not end in adolescence but rather continued to evolve throughout the lifespan.” Kroger, Identity in Adolescence, 16.
8. Jane Kroger, Identity in Adolescence, 209.
9. Jill Campbell, in seminar on “Literature, Life Writing, and Identity”, 7/10/2017.
10. https://www.slideshare.net/sharonelin/authors-tone 7/15/2017.
11. Mark Saltzman, in lecture at Yale National Initiative, 7/13/2017.
12. Jill Campbell, in seminar on “Literature, Life Writing, and Identity”, 5/5/2017.
13. “The search for a new and yet reliable identity can perhaps best be seen in the persistent adolescent endeavor to define, overdefine, and redefine themselves and each other in often ruthless comparison, while a search for reliable alignments can be recognized in the restless testing of the newest in possibilities and the oldest in values.” Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crises, 87.