|
Self-Analysis:
A Call for Multimodality in Personal Narrative Composition |
 |
three Use the multimodal narrative to teach audience. Being able to use music was certainly an affordance for my narratives. Used correctly, music can create the emotional connection needed for a personal narrative, and I chose to use pieces which would be both meaningful to the audience and to the narratives. For example, when narrating my opportunity to learn to play the piano and the flute in my audio composition, I chose to have “Fur Elise” playing in the background. “Fur Elise” is a composition with which most piano students are familiar, and it is also one that I remember learning to play. Therefore, the piece had meaning for both myself and some of my audience. While those emotional connections can certainly be made in written texts, being able to use music in the narrative also gave the piece an additional layer of richness that it wouldn’t have had on paper. The opening dulcimer music set the tone for the piece, and actually being able to hear my grandfather and my mother singing in the background as my mother and I talk about their singing gives the audience a sample of the singing in a way that talking or writing about it could never achieve. But
it was ultimately the actual narrative which would make the connection
with my audience or not. I’ve never felt comfortable narrating my life
on paper. When asked if I ever write for my own enjoyment, I’m
always quick to answer that I’m not a creative writer at all. I
tried writing stories when I was younger, but those stories were never
effective at communicating what I was trying to express. I couldn’t
seem to find a successful way to bring the characters voices to life—to
let them tell their stories. Glenda Hull tells us that, “some forms
of representation seem better for expressing or performing some kinds
of meaning than others” (231), and for me, the audio and video compositions
allowed me to have my story told without feeling the pressure of telling
it myself. I interviewed my family. Having them tell their stories
allowed me to let the story be told without telling it myself. I
simply decided which stories best fit into my outline, and then I added
a narration which would connect my family’s stories together. Of course,
that doesn’t mean it’s their narrative instead of mine. I made
the decision which stories to tell and which stories to leave out. My
narration in |
