Jerome S. Bruner (Foto: Weber State University), einer der bedeutendsten Psychologen des letzen Jahrhunderts, der u.a. wichtige Grundlagen für eine konstruktivistische Lerntheorie gelegt hat, wird in diesem Jahr 95 Jahre alt. Ein klassischer Text von ihm, der 1991 in„Critical Inquiry“ erschienen ist, befasst sich mit der narrativen Konstruktion von Wirklichkeiten und ist auch online zu lesen:„Much of what I have to say will not be at all new to those who have been working in the vineyards of narratology or who have concerned themselves with critical studies of narrative forms. Indeed, the ancestry of many of the ideas that will concern me can be traced back directly to the debates that have been going on among literary theorists over the last decade or two. My comments are echoes of those debates now reverberating in the human sciencesnot only in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics, but also in the philosophy of language. For once the„cognitive revolution“ in the human sciences brought to the fore the issue of how„reality“ is represented in the act of knowing, it became apparent that it did not suffice to equate representations with images, with propositions, with lexical networks, or even with more temporally extended vehicles such as sentences. It was perhaps a decade ago that psychologists became alive to the possibility of narrative as a form not only of representing but of constituting reality, a matter of which I shall have more to say presently. At that point cognitively inclined psychologists and anthropologists began to discover that their colleagues in literary theory and historiography were deeply immersed in asking comparable questions about textually situated narrative. I think one can even date the„paradigm shift“ to the appearance of a collection of essays drawn from this journal in 1981 On Narrative. If some of what I have to say about the features of narrative, then, seems old hat to the literary theorist, let him or her bear in mind that the object is different. The central concern is not how narrative as text is constructed, but rather how it operates as an instrument of mind in the construction of reality“
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