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Emotional histories: materiality, temporality and subjectivity in oral history interviews with fathers and sons.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Hall, Richard 

Abstract

This article is about uses of oral history for telling intimate stories of intergenerational relationships across life-courses. It conceives of interviews about families’ lives as unresolved emotional histories, which are inter-subjective, and under perpetual negotiation. While interviewees draw on historic cultural scripts and social relationships to tell their stories, they also engage with continuities of feeling, in relationships which are ongoing. Drawing on research with men about their post-war experiences of fatherhood and ‘sonhood’, I explore the materiality and temporality of oral history interviews, before examining subjectivity and social relationships using linguistic and psychoanalytic interpretive strategies. I conclude that men’s narrations of parenting experiences produce idiosyncratic emotional histories, which are nevertheless bound by particular familial and gendered dynamics, historic sociocultural contexts, and the present-day situations in which they are recalled and retold.

Description

Keywords

Journal Title

Oral History

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0143-0955

Volume Title

47

Publisher

Oral History Society

Publisher DOI

Rights

All rights reserved