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- Volume 18, Issue, 2008
Narrative Inquiry - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2008
Volume 18, Issue 1, 2008
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Two lives, two times: Life-writing after Shoah
Author(s): Bertram J. Cohlerpp.: 1–28 (28)More LessLife stories such as memoirs reflect the interplay of autobiographical reasoning, and collective remembrance at a time and in a place where memoirs are written. Using this perspective for understanding life-writing, I discuss memoirs written by two women who were formerly internees in the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olga Lengyel (1909–2001) lost her entire family in the camp and wrote her memoir in Paris just after the war. Her account describes the atrocities that she observed with few reflections on her own experiences. Mira Ryczke Kimmelman, (1923–) wrote her memoir more than half a century later as an emigre to the United States after the war where she and her husband raised their children and where she is presently an active participant in the survivor community. Her memoir is written as what Tomkins and McAdams have portrayed as a characteristic American redemptive account of successfully overcoming adversity. Following a happy childhood and suffering through the Shoah, Mira Kimmelman is a generative mentor who lectures on her experiences and leads tours for young people back to her homeland. She is concerned that the next generation be spared the suffering of the Shoah.
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From one woman to everyman: Reportability and credibility in publicly performed narratives
Author(s): Erica Rosenfeld Halversonpp.: 29–52 (24)More LessIn this article, I extend Labov’s narrative analysis of personal experience (Labov, 1972, 1997; Labov & Waletzky, 1967/1997) to demonstrate how personal narratives that are taken up and transformed into pieces for public performance work within a reportability continuum that balances the individual storyteller’s perspective while incorporating the voices of the community to which these individuals belong. I use the case of the About Face Youth Theatre, a Chicago-based theatre company that engages lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning youth in the dramaturgical process, to demonstrate how narratives are transformed from highly reportable, personal narratives, to highly credible, generic adaptations, to performances that result in the construction of positive, public identities that expose normalness without sacrificing particularity. This process can provide adolescents who experience stigma in public contexts with the opportunity to understand how they see themselves, how others see them, and how they fit into their communities and to fit these perspectives together into a more coherent sense of self.
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Narrative as snapshot: Glimpses into the past in Alzheimer’s discourse
Author(s): Heidi E. Hamiltonpp.: 53–82 (30)More LessSociolinguists and discursive psychologists interested in the construction of identity in discourse have focused their attention on how people recount their life events, arguing that narrative choices can reveal much about how narrators see themselves and how they wish to be seen by those listening to their stories. What happens, though, when severe memory loss interferes with this process? In this article, I examine the intersection of narrative, identity and memory by revisiting five (total of 2 hours and 39 minutes) tape-recorded conversations I had over 4½ years with a woman, Elsie, in her 80s at the moderately severe stage of Alzheimer’s disease (Hamilton, 1994). Focusing on a set of 204 clauses spoken by Elsie that contain past references within these conversations, I differentiate those clauses that are part of conversational narratives (56 or 27%) from independent clauses I term ‘narrative traces’ (148 or 73%). I then identify and examine in greater detail the linguistic construction of the storyworld within fifteen short narratives comprising the 56 narrative clauses. Special attention is given to nominal, verbal, spatial and temporal reference. I identify problems in orientation that have consequences for the coherence of the narrative as a text, as well as for the discursive construction of the narrator’s identity. I close with thoughts about how identity construction can be understood in the (near) absence of coherent reconstructions of the past. Possible useful approaches include Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of word “flavors,” Agha’s (2005) work on enregistered voices, and discourse strategies anchored in the interactional here-and-now, such as “small” talk and politeness work (Brown & Levinson, 1987).
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Telling good stories in different languages: Bilingual children’s styles of story construction and their linguistic and educational implications
Author(s): Masahiko Minamipp.: 83–110 (28)More LessThere are many ways to tell a story, but whether a story is good or bad depends on whether or not the listener/reader can comprehend all that the speaker/writer wants to convey in his or her story. This study examines the characteristics of stories that native speakers of given languages consider to be good. Forty English-Japanese bilingual children ages six to twelve were asked to narrate a picture storybook in both English and Japanese. Also involved in the study were 16 adult native Japanese speakers and 16 adult native English speakers who evaluated the stories produced by the bilingual children. An analysis of narratives receiving high ratings from evaluators shows that most stories considered good in English or Japanese should be lengthy stories with a large and varied vocabulary, and should be told in the past tense. In addition to those similarities in effective stories told in the two languages, we also found dissimilarities between “good” stories in English and “good” stories in Japanese. English evaluators felt that relating a series of events in chronological order is only one part of a good story. Providing evaluative comments (i.e., statements or words that tell the listener/reader what the narrator thinks about a person, place, thing, or event) is an indispensable part of telling good stories. So, in stories in English, aside from the standard expectation of a sequential series of events, providing the listener with emotional information is considered equally important. On the other hand, Japanese speakers accepted stories that emphasize a temporal sequence of action with less emphasis on nonsequential information, especially evaluative descriptions, and which effectively use passive forms and subject-referencing markers to enable a clear chronological sequence of events. Because the standards of what makes a good story may differ in the home and school languages/cultures, and because of the complex nature of such differences as shown in this study, it seems advisable that schools intervene and support the development of bilingual children’s skills in the use of the mainstream culture’s standards.
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“She discriminated against her own race”: Voicing and identity in a story of discrimination
Author(s): Mércia Santana Flannerypp.: 111–130 (20)More LessCurrent studies within narrative analysis and sociolinguistics have shown that identities are emergent and negotiated in current talk and, thus, not pre-existing the now and then of a given interaction. This article presents the analysis of a story told by a black Brazilian woman describing an episode of racial discrimination between two black characters in which prejudice was transmitted through the voice of a white figure. While the storyteller articulates the multi-layered voicing in her story, she also portrays relationships and makes identity claims for herself while also drawing on, and sometimes contradicting, prevailing ideologies of race and racism in her culture. I analyze the linguistic means through which the narrator constructs different positioning levels (Bamberg, 1997) while the roles of author, figure and principal (Goffman, 1981) shift to represent the actions performed in the story world by its different characters. The narrator’s main strategies are the lamination of the characters’ speech through constructed dialogue and references to skin color, which enable her to interpret the episode of discrimination toward an individual of the same race.
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Negotiating the reception of stories in conversation: Teller strategies for modulating response
Author(s): Neal R. Norrickpp.: 131–151 (21)More LessIn this article, I explore strategies storytellers use to increase listener response to their performances, such as (1) repeating a salient phrase, particularly a piece of dialogue; (2) adding an explanation of the point of a story; (3) drawing out some consequence of the story; and particularly (4) the unobtrusive strategy of producing a minimal response to draw out a more extensive reaction from listeners. This last strategy came to light in a large-scale corpus-based search. Instead of working from a set of narratives, I begin by looking at a linguistic element, namely items from the class of discourse markers like so and y’know in all kinds of contexts in a very large corpus, and slowly narrowed my focus to narrative passages within the whole array of examples. In the process, I discovered distributions and functions for items, which have not been described in previous research on conversational narrative.
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Variation in storytelling style amongst New Zealand schoolchildren
Author(s): Ruth Pagepp.: 152–179 (28)More LessThe relationship between emergent narrative skills, gender and ethnicity continues to be an important area of debate, with significant socio-political consequences. This paper explores the ways in which these variables intersect in a cross-cultural, longitudinal study of children’s storytelling, focusing on data taken from a multicultural school in Auckland, NZ. Differences in storytelling style reflected the characteristics of Maori English and Pakeha English conversational narratives, but also varied according to age and gender, where the variation was most marked for the 10-year-old children, and was most polarised between the narratives of the Pakeha girls and Maori boys. A longitudinal comparison indicated that these differences were by no means fixed, and that over time the older Maori boys’ storytelling altered in line with the literacy demands to conform to the dominant westernised pattern being imposed in this pedagogic context. This study thus points to the ongoing importance of analysing the shifting ways in which gender and cultural identity are renegotiated in educational contexts, suggesting that there is more scope for questioning and potentially changing dominant literacy practices in this part of New Zealand.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 34 (2024)
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Volume 33 (2023)
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Volume 32 (2022)
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Volume 31 (2021)
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Volume 30 (2020)
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Volume 29 (2019)
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Volume 28 (2018)
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Volume 27 (2017)
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Volume 26 (2016)
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Volume 25 (2015)
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Volume 24 (2014)
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Volume 23 (2013)
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Volume 22 (2012)
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Volume 21 (2011)
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Volume 20 (2010)
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Volume 19 (2009)
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Volume 18 (2008)
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Volume 17 (2007)
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Volume 16 (2006)
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Volume 15 (2005)
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Volume 14 (2004)
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Volume 13 (2003)
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Volume 12 (2002)
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Volume 11 (2001)
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Volume 10 (2000)
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Volume 9 (1999)
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Volume 8 (1998)
Most Read This Month
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Autobiographical Time
Author(s): Jens Brockmeier
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