STYLE AND AUTHORSHIP IN PAIN REPORTS

Abstract

Through the analysis of reports on sorrow and pain, this paper attempts to investigate how speakers find relief and internal resources to reconstruct their lives by means of a narrative. The proposed reflections derive from two correlated experiences: (i) the observation of the speeches of mothers and fathers who belong to a group that supports grieving parents (speeches that promoted a favorable development of the mourning period); and (ii) the fact that the researcher herself had the opportunity to participate as the co-author of an unusual story: one involving a transsexual who underwent sex reassignment surgery and later wrote about the experience in order to transform pain into narrative. In the two cases, curative effects were noticed as well as identity empowerment, both stemming from the process of narrativization of pain. The peculiarities of such textual construction co-operate to put the notions of authorship and style into question, the definitions of which are located between a conventional way of understanding these notions (related to an autonomist conception of the language subject) and a discursive way (related to a social and historical conception of the subject). We made use of reflections proposed by Possenti (1988, 2009, 2012), who draws on the notion of author, according to Foucault (1969), and questions the notion of style. The perspective that runs through all the parts of the reflection in this paper is Pragmatics, which understands language as being performative (AUSTIN: 1975) and a place of excellence for the construction of identity (RAJAGOPALAN: 2003, 2006). From a narrative construction standpoint, this paper takes the reflections of Paul Ricoeur (2010) mostly into account.