Methods blog week#6 The first chapter of the Dyson/Genishi book represents the first time in my readings for any of my classes involving personal narrative that I felt fully connected to the text. I have enjoyed certain stories or ideas and definitely learned more and more about this old/new form of narrative inquiry and how recent focus on its perception and effect are hotly considered in academic circles but the presentation of the newly recognized powers and problems of this type of inquiry have generally left me tepid. Not for lack of interest, I'll warrant that personal narrative is a living, vital conduit to data that fills the gaps necessarily left by more academic texts. I think I felt this way before I ever even heard of it, in that there is an instinctual appeal to any technique in any discipline which seeks to gather what is traditionally missed or obscured. I shall further insist that as generalization(along with other forces)will ultimately disenfranchise some outliers in any system which seeks to seeks to categorize them, the role of personal narrative to center the academic spotlight on its own blind spots is particularly apt. A real "right tool for the job", it is. So what's my problem and why does this book successfully slip past it? The flow of time and my adaptation to new ideas and specificities may well have a lot to do with it but also their book(so far) appears not to focus on the two aspects that have deviled me in my studies. As I mentioned the role of personal narrative in highlighting the plight of the ignored and disenfranchised is crucial and it may become an even better advocate and protector of such folks as it evolves. Nonetheless I bristle at the way we seem to be asked to treat "personal narrative" as if it itself was a kind of minority or waif who needs me to take off my blinders and accept truths I have dodged. It's useful, but requires no dramatic personification on its behalf. I suppose there's some vast body of terrified academic automatons out there opposing any use of the personal but I don't see them and I don't fear them. I suspect the bulk of the opposition to personalistics(trademark!)is really a much less absolute resistance to the personal overwhelming the traditional in that it is easier and frequently more appealing to new students who tend toward what they already know.(a disputed but popular thought in composition pedagogy). Further sane and unprejudiced resistance to throwing the old baby out with the new bath water may be sourced to a starry eyed view of all the newly anointed technique can accomplish. A fairy tale belief that armed with personal narrative we can finally start to change the world. Horsefeathers! Nothing worth having is easy, personalistics are a weapon, not a warrior, and alone they have the power to set the fight for equality back as well as forward. Yeah, that's right, I said it, personal narrative can be dangerous to the truth if wrongly used. It is not a golden child, it is a tool. As a nascent scholar who is instinctively, stone cold convinced that these techniques have a real and timely worth, it is clear to me that our job is to slap some parameters on this phenomenon before it picks a fight its going to lose. Too colloquial? I mean if a too personal narrative was used to prove or suggest something important, like that Croation kids suffer far more from the loss of national identity than the mean of kids from other declining nations, then the results of the study could be vulnerable to academic attack, be it well intentioned or otherwise. Those of us who wish to see it last want an open architecture for its employment but we also see the need for some reliable rules about where it shouldn't, oughtn't, and mustn't be used. It can clean the stream or muddy the waters with equal ease. I cannot bear to listen to someone who cannot bear to say anything negative about the thing they love or espouse. Even within the first chapter as I scanned the headings I found ideas and parameters that suggested a healthy respect for a logical middle ground for personalistics to run upon. "Nature and value of case" addressed the concept of scope and how a flexible scope of inquiry is vital to obtaining the most relevant data and participation. "Theoretical assumptions" and "On physical settings and events" both cautioned about even wanting to control the context of a case. With the former outlining the contexts of the personal in terms of language choice and constructs. The defining of cultural "practices" also serves to isolate situations which anchor context in a case. The material under the heading "Widening the angle in Case Construction" was truly an inspiration to me(brace yourself, I may say something nice here)in that it really laid out the idea that the various products of a case or context that has been allowed or even encouraged to shift can be disparate and still create a whole more effective than the sum of its parts. There is the real beauty of incorporating personalistics into academic inquiry, the readers mind is brought to a flexible place by the personal. That flexibility is what fills the jagged gaps in coherence with meaning. The story can(somewhat)be trusted to carry itself without artifice or proof because the personal fires our ability to find a flow of context in the interstitial spaces between complete ideas.