Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history.
In Telling Stories leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, interaction, society, and culture; and they investigate various settings such as therapeutic and medical encounters, educational environments, politics, media, marketing, and public relations. They analyze a variety of topics from the narrative construction of self and identity to the telling of stories in different media and the roles that small and big life stories play in everyday social interactions and institutions. These new reflections on the theory and analysis of narrative offer the latest tools to researchers in the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Deborah Schiffrin and Anna De Fina
1. Where Should I Begin?
William Labov, University of Pennsylvania
2. The Remediation of Storytelling: Narrative Performance on Early Commercial Sound Recordings
Richard Bauman, Indiana University
3. Narrative, Culture, and Mind
Jerome Bruner, New York University
4. Positioning as a Metagrammar for Discursive Story Lines
Rom Harré, London School of Economics and Political Science/Georgetown University
5. “Ay Ay Vienen Estos Juareños”: On the Positioning of Selves through Code Switching by Second-Generation Immigrant College Students
Alan D. Hansen, Luke Moissinac, Cristal Renteria, and Eliana Razo
6. A Tripartite Self-Construction Model of Identity
Leor Cohen
7. Narratives of Reputation: Layerings of Social and Spatial Identities
Gabriella Modan and Amy Shuman
8. Identity Building through Narratives on a Tulu Call-in TV Show
Malavika Shetty
9. Blank Check for Biography? Openness and Ingenuity in the Management of the "Who-Am-I-Question" and What Life Stories Actually May Not Be Good For You
Michael Bamberg
10. Reflection and Self-Disclosure from the Small Stories Perspective: A Study of Identity Claims in Interview and Conversational Data
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
11. Negotiating Deviance: Identity, Trajectories and Norms in a Graffitist’s Interview Narrative
Jarmila Mildorf
12. Interaction and Narrative Structure in Dementia
Lars Christer Hydén and Linda Örulv
13. Concurrent and Intervening Actions during Storytelling in Family “Ceremonial” Dinners
Jenny Mandelbaum
14. Truth and Authorship in Textual Trajectories
Isolda E. Carranza
15. Legitimation and the Heteroglossic Nature of Closing Arguments
Laura Felton Rosulek
16. Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives
David Herman
17. The Role of Style Shifting in the Functions and Purposes of Storytelling: Detective Stories in Anime
Fumiko Nazikian
Reviews
"Every chapter in the book raises interesting and critical issues about how theorists and researchers are to identify, understand and delimit the complex, transactional event(s) they purport to study and report on. Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life is an extremely engaging collection of diverse papers that I would highly recommend to anyone doing or considering doing research involving narrative, discourse analysis or text anaylsis. The individual chapters in this book are fully worth reading independently, and taken as a collection interconnected by the three underlying themes, the book itself is a valuable contribution to the field of narrative research and discourse analysis."—Discourse Studies
"Including important new work by towering figures in the field as well as intriguing new voices, both American and international, this collection advances the theoretical landscape and expands the study of narrative into an array of new domains. This volume makes a significant contribution to the field of narrative in particular and discourse analysis in general."—Deborah Tannen, professor, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University
Contributors
Michael Bamberg Richard Bauman Jerome Bruner Isolda E. Carranza Leor Cohen Anna De Fina Alexandra Georgakopoulou Alan D. Hansen Rom Harré David Herman Lars Christer Hydén William Labov Jenny Mandelbaum Jarmila Mildorf Gabriella Modan Luke Moissinac Fumiko Nazikian Linda Örulv Eliana Razo Cristal Renteria Laura Felton Rosulek Deborah Schiffrin Malavika Shetty Amy Shuman
About the Author
Deborah Schiffrin is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is the author of In Other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative.
Anna De Fina is an associate professor in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. She is the author of Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse.
Anastasia Nylund is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University.
