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Any study of personal narrative involves researchers and performers in contested, hence political, concerns of context and power. These concerns tend to be obscured methodologically by three commonplace assumptions: personal narrative is a text, personal narrative can be fully transcribed and analyzed, and personal narrative is not performance. This essay examines these assumptions and illustrates their methodological implications with an excerpt from an interview narrative with a breast cancer survivor.
Peterson et al. (Tue,) studied this question.