Narrative Inquiry - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2000

Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder characterized by a unique physiological and behavioral profile, involving excessive sociability and relatively spared linguistic abilities in spite of mild to moderate mental retardation. The present study examines the narrative development of children with Williams syndrome and, for the first time, compares their performance to typically developing chronological-age matched children to examine the development of both structural linguistic abilities as well as the use of evaluation to elaborate and enrich narrative. Thirty children with Williams syndrome (5- through 10-years-old) and 30 typically developing age- and gender-matched comparison children were asked to tell a story from a wordless picture book. Results indicated that as a group, children with Williams syndrome committed significantly more morphological errors and used less complex syntax than comparison children, not surprising considering their language delay and impaired cognitive abilities. Significantly, children with Williams syndrome greatly exceeded comparison children in their elaboration and use of evaluative devices and showed particular preference for types of evaluation which serve as social engagement devices, reflecting their profile of excessive sociability. (Williams syndrome, Narrative, Evaluation)

This paper explores the applicability of a narrative approach to the understanding of psychological trauma and the process of recovery. We focus on a comparison of stories told by three survivors of sexual abuse in research interviews drawn from an ongoing study of recovery and resiliency in treated and untreated trauma survivors. Our aim is to learn how survivors make and remake the meaning of their experiences over the course of their lives and at different stages in their recovery, and to understand the role and functions of survivors’ stories in the recovery process. Replacing long-standing feelings of powerlessness with a new sense of agency and reclaiming a positive identity from a “damaged”self-definition are neither easy nor painless tasks. These accounts suggest the importance of “turning points”that open possibilities for sexual abuse survivors to restory their experiences and arrive at new understandings that support their efforts to confront and deal with past traumas, and move on with their lives. We also call for more attention—by researchers, therapists, and others in survivors’ lives—to the effects of our expectations and needs for coherent stories with positive endings that may make it difficult for us to “hear”what survivors are trying to tell us. (Narrative, Trauma, Sexual abuse)

The specific narrative feature of ‘evaluation’, as described by Labov and Waletzky (1967/97), is not a discrete and secondary structure, but rather is embedded in the continuous acts of description that constitute a story, as well in the second-order evaluations provided by reported speech. Making use of Bakhtin’s (1984) concepts of polyphony and dialogism and recent work on ‘active voicing’, it is argued that (a) evaluation is a continuous and constantly shifting process within the narrative encounter; and (b) within this process, polyphony becomes a means towards the objectification of personal experience. Narratives are not the static discourses of literary theory and structuralist analysis, but dialogically evolving episodes of interaction, in which evaluations are frequently co-constructed between speaker and listener. (Narrative, Evaluation, Polyphony, Dialogic, Co-constructed, Objectification)

This article describes the conventions of sanctioned and non-sanctioned narratives in two institutional discourses, medical encounters and support groups. In the well-established institutional discourse of medicine, sanctioned narratives are specifically invited and non-sanctioned narratives are effectively deflected through standard conventions. In the less well-established institutional discourse of support groups, the line between sanctioned and non-sanctioned narratives is considerably blurred and the conventions for deflecting a non-sanctioned narrative are not necessarily effective. (Medical communication, Institutional Discourse, Conversation Analysis, Narrative Analysis)

This paper presents initial analyses of the opening sequences of a number of courtship and marriage stories told by elderly Italian-Australians. Using a conversation-analytic perspective, the paper contributes to the study of how storytelling is a co-construction of teller and audience. The focus is on how the storyteller(s) and the interviewer, referring to a list of topics that might be covered in the story, negotiate how the story should be told. These instances of conversational storytelling differ from those in naturally occurring settings, since the storytelling is being recorded; further, they are distinctive because the storytellers know that the audio-recordings will be later transformed into chapters in a book. Therefore, there is a distinctive “for the record”orientation by both storyteller and interviewer, as might occur with oral history research. This paper explicates what might be involved in getting stories started under such circumstances. Some of the theoretical issues that arise from the analysis include the status, for storytellers, of the assumption that there is a correct or true story that represents what once happened. The orientation taken to analysis of the storytelling, however, is concerned with the “act of telling”(cf. Bamberg, 1997). This paper thus contributes to a pragmatic approach to narrative and narrative analysis.

In this article we examine the use of narrative strategies in the construction of a self. We focus on the function one woman’s (alias Rachel) narrative serves in terms of constructing a coherent self through her account, via a magazine interview, of “How I became a lesbian escort”. We highlight the relational nature of narrative self construction, i.e., the ongoing dialogue between the use of cultural narratives in a story and the individual’s positioning in relation to such elements to create a unique and coherent self in that setting. (Narrative, Positioning, Construction of Self, Identity, Lesbian Escorting)

While narrative focuses on particular protagonists and events, narrative also situates tellers and their audiences within a web of historical and cultural expectations, ideologies, and meanings, more broadly. As such, narrative creates shared understandings and community among those participating in narrative activity. Moreover, the narrative process extends beyond the boundaries of the here and now to embrace people and places in a cultural past. This article examines the religious narrative accounts of the apparition of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe told in children’s religious education classes called doctrina at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles. The children that attend these classes are of Mexican descent and their lessons are taught in Spanish. The article analyzes the linguistic and interactional means through which narrative renditions of the story of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe construct Mexican identity. The narrative renditions tell the story of the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Tepeyac, near Mexico City, in the year 1531, thirteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire to the Spanish conquest. These diasporic narrative accounts transcend time and space, as they continue to be told by Mexican Catholics at places beyond the geopolitical borders of Mexico. Moreover, these narrative tellings are instrumental for positioning teachers and students in a postcolonial moment that revisits the hierarchies of Mexico’s colonial regime vis-à-vis their current experiences as immigrants in Los Angeles.

A corpus of children’s personal narratives was analyzed for themes of passivity and disaffiliation, the polar opposites of agency and communion, respectively. The subjects were 96 working class children between the ages of 4 and 9 years. In their personal narratives, children cited themes of passivity more than themes of disaffiliation, with weakness being the most frequently cited individual theme of passivity. With age, children increasingly described weakness in others. Correlations across the agency-passivity and communion-disaffiliation modalities revealed theoretically unpredicted, but empirically interpretable, results.