Narrative Inquiry - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2006

Narrative research has produced an array of richly-detailed expositions of life as lived, well-interpreted studies full of nuance and insight that befit the complexity of human lives. This paper inquires into the necessity and possibilities of amalgamation of knowledge obtained through narrative research. As narrative studies, with their accompanying interpretations, accumulate, how do we “add them up?” What would a meta-analysis of narrative studies look like? The challenge that confronts us is how assimilate narrative understanding at a conceptual level in a way that does not return to a modernist frame, treating the various research reports as “facts” — but rather to treat them as situated interpretations. Conversation is offered as a metaphor and context within which knowledge is to be understood.

Over the past 25 years, narrative theories and methods have helped to revitalize the discipline of personality psychology by providing new tools and concepts for discerning the inner patterning and meaning of human lives and by helping to recontextualize personality studies in terms of culture, gender, class, ethnicity, and the social ecology of everyday life. This article (a) briefly traces recent historical developments in personality psychology as they relate to the increasing influence of narrative approaches; (b) describes a three-tiered conceptual framework for understanding personality in terms of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life stories; and (c) illustrates one important research program on life stories in personality — studies of the redemptive self.

In this article, I outline what are, in my view, the major conceptual and institutional weaknesses of narrative psychology. However, because my objective is to legitimatize narrative as an alternative vision of psychology, I frame these criticisms as challenges for narrative psychologists to overcome. I argue that narrative psychology has not clearly defined the meaning, scope and basic principles of a narrative approach. I ask: What does narrative mean? Is narrative ethnocentric? Is narrative a science? Can narrative reconcile with the mainstream without losing its critical spirit? Can narrative survive in the academy? Although the challenges are significant, I argue that narrative psychology offers the promise of a systematic form of inquiry that explores meaning and intention in human lives. Narrative research promises to bring us closer to the real subject matter of psychological investigation, that of human intention and meaning, in its appropriate interpretive context.

This article argues that the self is produced, maintained and modified in interaction and discourse. As a situated practice in ongoing social interaction, relying on biographical memory, cultural and situational impacts, the self is developed as a continuous structure allowing reliable expectations. We call this process biographical structuring and suggest a method of a reconstructive analysis. Distinguishing and triangulating the reconstructive perspectives of the lived life, the experienced life, and the presented life, we present a case analysis of an adolescent migrant, thus demonstrating how this kind of analysis can be applied in helping professions.

Before a narrative can be constructed, it must be pre-constructed by a cognitive process that begins with a decision that a given event is reportable. Pre-construction begins with this most reportable event and proceeds backwards in time to locate events that are linked causally each to the following one, a recursive process that ends with the location of the unreportable event — one that is not reportable in itself and needs no explanation. Comparison of such event chains with the sequence of narrative clauses actually produced will help to understand how the narrator re-organizes and transforms the events of real time in the finished narrative.

Labov and Waletzky’s (1997[1967]) path-breaking description of “narrative syntax” arose in the context of variationist sociolinguistic research, and narrative continues to be an important source of data for variationist’ work. In most of this work, however, narrative is not the object of study. Variationist sociolinguists are interested in the structure and function of sounds, words, and phrases found in narrative data, but they have not typically asked how the structure and function of narrative itself might bear on the questions about linguistic variation and language change that define their field. Here I suggest that close attention to the structure and function of narrative can, in fact, shed light on a topic of central interest to variationists, namely vernacular norm-formation. I argue that narratives about encounters with linguistic difference help create shared orientations to particular sets of nonstandard linguistic features and link them with region, class, and other sources of identity. I further suggest that narrative functions particularly well as a vehicle for language-ideological differentiation (Gal & Irvine, 1995) of this sort.

This article contrasts ‘mainstream’ narrative analysis, and the study of researcher-elicited narrative accounts, with conversation analysis and the study of naturally occurring narratives-in-interaction. Our analysis extends previous conversation analytic and discursive psychological work on storytelling (i.e., how stories get embedded in sequences of talk; the actions storytelling does), by focusing on the location and function of speakers’ story formulations and orientations to narrative (e.g. “I think we should start at the beginning”, “You want the full story, or…?”, “there’s always two sides to every story”). Rather than treating such ‘meta-formulations’ as partial expressions of a general folk theory of narrative, we examine their action-orientation and the way they are shaped for the occasions of their production; how members’ commonsense notions of stories are displayed in the interactional contexts in which they are put to use. The argument is illustrated by a range of brief examples from mundane conversation, police interrogation, and neighbour dispute mediation.

Since its ancient origins, narrative theory has involved two broad types of analysis — componential and functional. Componential analysis seeks to isolate the elements and operations that make up narrative. Functional analysis explores the purposes of narrative. Commonly, writers isolate two functions — one emotive, the other ethical and/or political. The broad framework of narrative theory has remained largely the same since its inception. Changes have primarily been a matter of expanding the scope or detail of componential or functional analyses. In the twentieth century, there was a particular expansion of the ethico-political part of functional analysis. One distinctive feature of very recent narrative theory is its use of cognitive neuroscience to expand our componential analyses treating narrative causality and plot organization and our functional analyses treating emotion. Unfortunately, the work on emotional functional analysis has not been integrated with its ethico-political counterpart. This lack of integration may be due to the political economy in which cognitive literary study arose. Moreover, the future of such integration may be less a matter of the analyses themselves and more a matter of the political economy in which these analyses are embedded.

Building on recent studies of speech and thought representation in narrative fiction (Fludernik 1993; Herman 2002; Palmer 2004; Thomas 2002), this essay outlines the advantages of forging interconnections between narrative theory and a range of disciplinary frameworks concerned with talk — including literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis, gender studies, and research on socially distributed cognition. Using Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse as a case study, the essay first explores general theoretical and interpretive issues raised by scenes of talk portrayed in the novel. Then it zooms in on one chapter that centers around a communicative encounter between two characters. This scene both illuminates and is illuminated by research on socio-communicative practices in general. Further, the scene requires a rethinking of modernist narrative construed as a privileging of characters’ interiority over the concrete social and material environments in which they think, act, and communicate. Hence an interdisciplinary approach to scenes of talk like Woolf’s not only necessitates a reconsideration of key ideas in literary studies, but also suggests new directions for narrative theory after the second cognitive revolution.

The current study of literary narrative is a vibrant and various activity, marked not by a single orthodoxy but by multiple approaches. Within that variety there are five especially salient issues currently being investigated: nonmimetic narrative; digital narrative; the fact/fiction distinction; narrative space; and rhetorical aesthetics. Rhetorical aesthetics moves not toward a universal standards of literary quality but toward an understanding of how narratives work on their own terms and of appropriate general criteria for judging those terms. These criteria, as a comparison of the endings of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the novel to film suggests, typically are not purely aesthetic but involve the interrelation of form, ethics, and aesthetics.

Discursive psychologists (Edley, 2001; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell, 1998) have analysed identity work in talk, including the ways in which understandings which prevail in a wider social context are taken up or resisted as speakers position themselves and are positioned by others. In these terms, a narrative is generally understood in two ways. The first is as an established understanding of sequence or consequence, such as a potential life trajectory, which becomes a discursive resource for speakers to draw on (cf. Bruner’s ‘canonical narratives’, 1991). The second is of a narrative as a situated construction, such as the biography produced by a speaker within a particular interaction. In this article, I propose an expanded analytic focus which considers how the versions of a biographical narrative produced in previous tellings become resources for future talk, thus setting constraints on a reflexive speaker’s work to construct a coherent identity across separate interactions and contexts (Taylor & Littleton, forthcoming).

The present article discusses the need for a narrative approach within current identity theory and insists on the importance of an appropriate selection when it comes to a specific approach. It is argued that the most adequate theoretical relationship can be established to a poststructuralist and deconstructivist narratology. This understanding leads to a focus on narrativity and to the performative construction of identity. The question of belonging facilitates further elaboration on the various aspects of identity. Again, narrativity is proposed as a theoretical and methodological approach for analysis. Here situational self-positioning and positioning by others are seen as central in the negotiation of belonging. Particular emphasis is placed on small narratives and on positioning within the discursive situation.

In various professional fields today, a profusion of practices are inspired by or draw sustenance from narrative inquiry; similarly, narrative inquiry must attend to these practices as they are vital to its future. Ultimately a full fledged dialogue between scholars and practitioners is to be sought. We review three major domains in which narratives are in action: psychotherapy, organizational change, and conflict reduction. We conclude by taking up theoretical issues raised by these practices. Of particular concern are questions of why narratives are effective in social change, and what theoretical orientations are most adequate to the challenge of practice.

Narrative research is frequently described as a rich and diverse enterprise, yet the kinds of narrative data that it bases itself on present a striking consensus: they are autobiographical in kind (i.e., about non-shared, personal experience, single past events). In this paper, I put forth a case for under-represented narrative data which I collectively call (following Bamberg 2004a, b; also Georgakopoulou & Bamberg, 2005) “small stories” (partly literally, partly metaphorically). My aim is to flesh small stories out, to urge for the sort of systematic research that will establish connections between their interactional features and their sites of engagement and finally to consider the implications of their inclusion in narrative research for identity analysis (as the main agenda of much of narrative research). I will thus propose small stories research as a “new” narrative turn that can provide a needed meeting point for narrative analysis and narrative inquiry.

There has been an increasing emphasis in narrative inquiry on “small” stories (i.e., those derived from everyday social exchanges) rather than “big” stories (i.e., those derived from interviews, clinical encounters, autobiographical writing, and other such interrogative venues). The latter, it may be argued, inevitably entail a problematic distance from everyday reality and may thus be said to embody life “on holiday.” On one level, this is surely true: big stories, insofar as they entail a significant measure of reflection on either an episode, a portion of a life, or the whole of it, are a step removed from those everyday goings-on that are the focus of small stories. Far from necessarily being a liability, however, the distance that is intrinsic to big story narrative reflection creates opportunities for understanding that are largely unavailable in the immediacy of the moment. Big stories and small stories thus complement one another; taken together, they represent a promising integrative direction for narrative inquiry.

This article is a pledge that we actually should care about the differences between what has recently been coined ‘small’ versus ‘big’ stories because they represent very different approaches to narrative inquiry. In the attempt to pull other contributions of this special issue into the debate between small and big, I argue that the small story approach is able to theoretically and methodologically enrich traditional narrative inquiry — not in a peaceful, complementary fashion, but by more radically re-positioning big story approaches as grounded in dialogical/discursive approaches such as small story research.

My review of the past thirty years of narrative scholarship returns to the work of Harvey Sacks and Erving Goffman, situated in Dell Hymes’ ethnography of communication, to examine where their interactive model for understanding narrative has taken us. Although in some disciplines, narrative research is used as empirical evidence of how people interpret their experiences, Sacks’ work points more to the ways that personal narrative destabilizes the relationship between narrative and experience. Current work focuses on narrative at its limits, including the study of fragmented, rather than coherent, selves; multiply voiced, rather than monologic, points of view; and compromised, rather than easily empathetic, relations of understanding. This work builds on, rather than departs from, research on narrative thirty years ago. In this essay, I suggest a connection between early research on entitlement and contemporary research on the ethics of narrative, and I focus in particular on the problem of empathy.

Narrative is one of many strategies for making texts or coming to understand the world. This paper attempts to restore narrative to that status: as one mode of writing or telling among others. The main example developed is the contrast between blues ballads such as “Frankie and Johnny,” which tell a story, and traditional or modular blues songs, which do not.

We review some of the recent trends that have made the collection and exploration of narratives especially prominent among the social sciences. While we acknowledge the significance of narratives in many aspects of social life, we sound a note of caution concerning the popularity of ‘narratives’, and ‘testimony’, not least among ‘qualitative’ researchers. We suggest that too many authors are complicit in the general culture of ‘the interview society’, and are too ready to celebrate narratives and biographical accounts, rather than subjecting them to systematic analysis. In the same way, we suggest that the contemporary fashion for ‘autoethnography’ too often leads to unreflective uses of personal accounts.