Narrative Inquiry - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005

In this article we focus on the negotiation of meaning in narratives. One crucial place for the negotiation of meaning in narratives is its punchline and the sequence it precedes, the post punchline sequence. We will study in detail the interactional construction of the punchline and of the post punchline in institutional talk and private everyday conversation. In our material these activities are systematically examined in a two-step procedure: Firstly, the participants address the modality of the story in their construction of the punchline. Here, the recipient claims a preliminary understanding of the story, and the teller of the story can acknowledge this claim. Secondly, the participants evaluate the story by explicitly negotiating the understanding of the reported experience and by relating the story to a wider context. The first step of this procedure seems to have conditional relevance for step two; therefore we consider the post punchline sequence as part of the narrative. We regard the participants' joint construction of meaning as a central activity, and we approach this topic by investigating how the aspects of modality and negotiation of understanding are constructed and how they contribute to the display of alignment or disalignment in talk.

This article revisits one of the more contentious debates in current studies of narrative: the claim that identities are, in some sense,fabricatedby and in narratives, and the counter-claim that individuals have inherent capacities, such as a dynamic unconscious, that precede or are in excess of any identity-building work that narrative might do. The article approaches this debate via competing theories drawn from sociology and cultural studies, contrasting post-structuralist and Foucauldian theories with a Kleinian cultural analysis of narrative. The theoretical discussion is illustrated via a story told by a young man who apparently had strong investments in heterosexual romance.

This paper introduces a formal procedure for analyzing narratives that was developed by the French/Lithuanian structuralist, A. J. Greimas. The focus is on demonstrating the utility of Greimas's ideas for analyzing one aspect of personal narratives: identity-construction. Reconstructing the basic actantial structure from self-narratives is shown to provide cues to power differentials among actants as perceived by the narrator. Distinguishing narrated events along conflict versus communication axes helps the analyst determine whether an experiential or a discursive domain is of primacy for the narrator. Moreover, investigation of communicative outcomes can be used to validate (or invalidate) findings on power relations. Analyses of narrative plots may afford insights into how people engage objects with cultural valuations within the various social contexts recounted in narrative data. Finally, Greimas's theory of modalities can be used to differentiate among these plots within narrative trajectories. This approach to narrative analysis differs from more traditional “denarrativization” and “renarrativization” approaches in that it affords the researcher a language (or discursive structure) according to which the narrator's, not the analyst's, understandings of character relations and reality conditions become the subject matter of one's research.

The article explores how we can define the concept of political narrative and looks at the implications in terms of analyzing political discourse. The examination of the various strategies used to define narrative, leads to the suggestion that, at least in the context of political narrative analysis, we need structural definitions that stress the barest minimum for terming a message a narrative. Basing on the proposed strategy to define narrative, the article suggests that narrative analysis should operate on two levels: the “thin” level and the “thick” level. The thin level relates to events and situations described in a discourse and their order of appearance in the text. “Thick level” of analysis, relates to everything included in the “narration” and the relation between the components of the thin narrative. The article examines these two levels of analysis in the context of a short statement by Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, at a photo opportunity in the White House. The analysis demonstrates how to apply a combination of thin and thick analysis to political discourse, and how this dual perspective makes a contribution to the study of spatial construction in narratives.

The present study examined the narrative styles of Spanish-speaking Peruvian and English-speaking U.S. American, college-educated mothers as they shared a wordless book with their three-year old children. Results show two distinct book reading narrative styles: Storytellers, who act as the sole narrator of an engaging story with minimal child participation, and storybuilders, who co-construct the story with their young children. The two maternal styles are discussed in relation to possible differences in conceptions of oral narrative and of the roles narrator and audience play in the construction of a story. Results of the present study have implications for literacy intervention programs in culturally diverse populations.

The purpose of this study was to explore street youths' life histories to assess how early negative experiences (e.g., maltreatment) contributed to alternative developmental paths marked by emotional and behavioural difficulties. Ten male and female participants responded to an attachment questionnaire and told their life stories. The data were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative techniques. The results showed that both groups experienced difficulties in attaining educational, employment and relational successes. However, differences were found between gender groups in views of self, with females often describing themselves as victims whereas males' views were often characterized by self-efficacy stemming from successful completion of criminal or violent acts – in other words, as victimizers. Finally, it was found that males were more able to apply developmental advanced interpretations to their life experiences.

This article proposes that close examination of story retellings, both oral and written, can reveal a narrator's attempts to re-emplot a story in various ways. The retellings presented occurred in the context of a teacher education course where, across the semester, Ellie a white teacher, retold the same story six times. The retellings provided a unique opportunity to add to previous research on retold stories by examining differences and similarities in the six narratives that surfaced issues of culture and race related to teaching. The article also contributes methods of narrative analysis used to analyze and compare narrative structure and evaluations across the retellings. Discourse patterns revealed changes in narrative emplotment and evaluation and in the narrator's positioning of herself, a Euro-American teacher, and others, primarily African American students.