Telling Tales: A Complicated Narrative About Courtship

This paper presents a progressive understanding of the shifting power relations that are constructed in the telling of a courtship and marriage narrative by an Australian-Italian couple who have been married for well over thirty years. The focus on relations of power is pursued through attention to aspects of the sequenced talk to show how the couple work together to tell the interviewer a newsworthy story that is "old news" to each other. The use of two analytical frames derived from different combinations of narrative analysis (NA), conversational analysis (CA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) facilitates two readings of the same data. The two frames provide different means of showing how the story tellers negotiate and happily survive specific threats to produce a congenially delivered story in the end. The use of first, a "bottom-up" approach to the data followed by a "top-down" approach enables power relations first at the local level between husband and wife to be inserted later into a wider ideological and discursive context. Overall the paper shows how the application of multiple perspectives to narrative analysis can deepen our understanding of storytelling practices. (Narrative analysis, Conversation analysis, Critical discourse analysis)