Narrative Inquiry - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2008

This article builds on contemporary understandings that identity is accomplished interactionally and discursively through storyteller/interviewer engagement inside the telling of the story. It introduces a new notion of narrative inquiry through the concept of “transactional positioning” to achieve an imagined interaction between a listener outside the institutional interview context and a tale told in an interview narrative some time ago. Texts are arranged by a select listener in a pre-thought out way to imaginatively fill gaps between what the narrator said and what he could have said during the interview but did not. The intertextual activity on the part of the listener aims to expand, retrospectively, the positioning of the interviewee so as to make more visible his ideological dilemma, uncovered through conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis of an interview narrative about the social trauma of being an Italian-Australian interned during World War II.

Drawing on interviews I conducted with women about their sisters, I identify three narrative types: small-n narratives, big-N Narratives and Master Narratives. Small-n narratives are accounts of specific events or interactions that speakers said had occurred with their sisters. Big-N Narratives are the themes speakers developed in telling me about their sisters, and in support of which they told the small-n narratives. Master Narratives are culture-wide ideologies shaping the big-N Narratives. In my sister interviews, an unstated Master Narrative is the assumption that sisters are expected to be close and similar. This Master Narrative explains why nearly all the American women I interviewed organized their discourse around big-N Narratives by which they told me whether, how and why they are close to their sisters or not, and whether, how and why they and their sisters are similar or different. In exploring the interrelationship among these three narrative types, I examine closely the small-n narratives told by two women, with particular attention to the ways that the involvement strategies repetition, dialogue, and details work together to create scenes. Scenes, moreover, anchor the small-n narratives, helping them support the big-N Narratives which are motivated in turn by the culturally-driven Master Narrative.

Book reading appears to be a highly revered and widely practiced home and school routine within and across literate western cultures. This study examined the relationship between home practices and expected children’s production. We assumed the contribution of home literacy patterns such as storytelling to have a predictive value on the development of children’s narrative productions as one facet of children’s literacy development. To this end, we set out to investigate similarities and differences in the profile of parental narrative input and children’s narrative productions. We first looked at the structural and organizational characteristics of adult-child and child-adult narratives and the relationship between the two in terms of its narrative forms and functions. Then we analyzed the interaction during narratives to — and by- children to other adults. The participants of this study were 64 parent-child dyads recruited into three age groups. Parents were asked to tell their child a picture-book story and the children were asked to tell the same story to an adult experimenter. The stories were recorded and transcribed. The data were coded into structural and interactive categories and analyzed between parent and children productions and across the three age groups. The results showed a complex relationship between parental narrative input and child-adult output. While parental narrative input resembles child narrative input, this resemblance grows stronger as the child gets older. Yet the differences between parental and child narrative input may be motivated by the child’s linguistic, narrative and social development.

The study explores troubled Israeli telephone talk to explain the functions of figurative clusters (FCs) produced in callers’ stories. Espousing a theoretical framework comprising discourse-oriented institutional conversation analysis, narrative inquiry and discursive psychology, as well as a model of narrative positioning that probes narrators’ co-construction of meaning, we show that FCs were generated at certain junctions in the interaction when callers defended their side of the story. In their attempt to sound accountable, they resorted to FCs, remedial linguistic devices that enabled them to redefine their positioning in relation to others in the narrated world and present it to other interlocutors in the ongoing interaction. This finding provides further empirical evidence linking narrative and figurative construction of meaning in troubled talk

Recently, Labov (2006) described a process of narrative pre-construction that must occur during the short period of time between a conversationalist’s question, “Where should I begin?,” and the start of a narrative of personal experience. The present article is concerned with the microgenesis of narrative pre-construction in elicited third-person retellings. The central proposal is that the microgenesis of anticipatory goal statements — summaries of characters’ motivations for their actions, feelings and beliefs — relies on processes of increasing discourse cohesion that are learned, practiced and automatized in earlier ontogenetic development. In the proposed account these form a trajectory from extra- to intralinguistic (anaphoric) reference, and from sequenced descriptions of events to cataphoric summaries that are generalizations of original, perceived experiences. Analyses of narrative change across an intermediate, mesodevelopmental span of time — the repeated retellings of a story — provide insight into how change may occur in microgenesis. The proposal extends to the level of discourse Vygotsky’s (1987) account of the role of the social word in advancing thought from heaps to complexes to concepts.

This article argues for rethinking and reorientation in the study of narrative coherence and its development in young children. The most influential model guiding current research in this area (a) tends to equate narrative coherence with causal linkages between events and (b) suggests that the primary (or exclusive) strategy used by children to achieve coherence is to embed causally-connected event sequences in the goal-directed actions of a single major protagonist. Despite its undoubted contributions, this approach is misleadingly narrow in several respects, and it has not been able to reconstruct the actual dynamics and trajectories of young children’s narrative development. A first step toward overcoming these limitations is to undertake the foundational work of reconstructing and examining the range of actual modes and strategies of narrative coherence used by children, beginning with young children, which must include delineating the different narrative purposes and intentions these embody and the distinctive ways that they integrate events and event structures with the depiction and coordination of characters and relations between characters. I offer some theoretical and methodological proposals along these lines, illustrated with empirical examples.

This article explores how tellers, more specifically life writers, embed small stories within larger narratives of significant episodes in their lives. I analyze the way in which a life writer, Ayun Halliday, embeds two smaller stories about ordinary experiences from her own childhood into a lengthier narrative about her daughter’s first case of head lice. The data set includes two versions of the lice narrative: one version appears in the writer’s motherhood memoir (The Big Rumpus) published by Seal Press in 2002, and a later version appears in the writer’s self-published perzine (The East Village Inky) in 2004. I analyze how the embedded story-worlds are presented differently in each context by focusing on openings and closings and level of detail in referrals and event clauses. Studying changes in retellings is one way of unpacking the role of embedded stories in the construction of larger ones. Ultimately, I make the point that both embedded stories play a role in Ayun’s larger discursive move in the lice narrative to share the burden of her daughter’s stigma by positioning herself both within a set of mother figures from her family biography and against a broader cultural backdrop of big “D” discourses (Gee, 1999) about good (or bad) parenting.

This study investigates the narrative skill of school-aged children with language impairment in Taiwan. Twelve children, 6 children with language impairment (LI) and 6 children with typical language development (TLD), aged from 8;0 to 9;5 participated in this study. They were asked to tell three personally experienced stories and the longest one was selected and coded along four dimensions, i.e., narrative structure, conjunction, referential strategies, and discourse context. The revision of the Chinese Narrative Assessment Profile (NAP) was also used to score children’s narrative performance. Results show that the children with LI had more difficulties in producing clear, coherent narratives. In comparison with the stories narrated by children with TLD, the stories produced by children with LI exhibited fewer narrative components, evaluation devices, and connectives, but more ambiguous referencing information was evident in their narratives. The narrative profile of each child with LI, however, varied. Limitations of this study and suggestions for further research on narrative skill in children with LI were provided.

Motherhood is under review. What counts as a ‘good mother’ is receiving attention in both popular and academic contexts (Arendell, 2000; Hays, 1996). The mothers we spoke with are judged not to be ‘good’ mothers by medical professionals, teachers, friends and family, because they do not have ‘good’ children. Their children are disorderly, disorganised and disruptive, they have ADHD. We extend current debates to explore these mothers’ ransoming to the narrative of ‘the way things should be’ in terms of Bourdieu’s (1990) concepts of habitus, misrecognition and symbolic violence. Importantly, we examine how these women talk back to the cultural narratives that malign and disregard them and their children. They trouble those narratives. However, in speaking out, in being always vigilant to their child’s interests, women often find they are considered not only troublesome, but themselves troubled. Rather than hearing them this way, we hear their stories as challenges to the cultural narratives that constrain them. We hear their voices as important activism in reformulating motherhood.

In recent years, a change in narrative and identity analysis, which Georgakopoulou has called “a ‘new’ narrative turn” (2006, p. 129), has been observed. This term refers to a shift of focus from the traditional “big stories”, i.e., narratives as a well-defined and delineated genre with an identifiable structure, towards non-canonical “small stories” (Bamberg, 2004). In this article, I will discuss a “small story” in terms of identity negotiation. The data are taken from a larger ethnographic conversation-analytical study of a group of German adolescent girls, who interactively negotiate and construe group and gender identity through their categorization and disaffiliation from various out-groups. I will illustrate this phenomenon by drawing on concepts such as positioning analysis (Davies & Harré, 1990), identities-in-interaction (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998), and membership categorization (Sacks, 1992). Besides discussing content-related aspects of the sequence the small story is embedded in, I will analyze the structure of it employing elements of traditional narrative models such as that proposed by Labov and Waletzky (1967) and combine them with elements that belong exclusively to the interactive construction of “small stories”. At the end of my analysis, I will draw on Quasthoff’s model of narratives-in-interaction (2001) to argue that in close-knit groups of friends, small stories at times only minimally deviate from the ongoing turn-by-turn-talk.