Narrative Inquiry - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2010

In recent years, narrative analysis has experienced what can be identified as a small stories turn. Specifically, some researchers, especially Bamberg (2004, 2006), Georgakopoulou (2006, 2007), Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008), have argued that the analysis of small stories that have been previously overlooked in favor of large-scale autobiographical narratives presents a valuable contribution to our understanding of identity construction and display. This paper builds on and extends the discussion of small stories as sites for identity construction by demonstrating how various small stories — retellings, hypothetical narratives, near-narrative structures as well as short past-oriented narratives — all construct a coherent family identity that includes pets as members. While a number of previous studies considered narrative as a key site for exploring how family members construct social identities, they primarily focused on individual family members and centered their analyses on traditional past-oriented narratives often limiting their settings to dinner-table conversations or interviews. In contrast, this study, drawing on prior studies of discursive construction of a shared family identity (Gordon, 2007) and pets as family members (Tannen, 2004), demonstrates how a shared family identity that includes pets emerges in diverse small stories that are embedded in on-going conversations and occur in a variety of places: a car, a dining room, a living room. This paper also shows how small stories about pets simultaneously create a shared family identity that includes pets and situate this family within a larger social discourse, or Discourse (Gee, 1996, 1999), of treating pets as family members.

Using perspectives from interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman, 1956; Gumperz, 1982, 1992; Schiffrin, 1996; Tannen, 2005) and discursive psychology (Bamberg, 1997, Davies & Harré, 1999, Wortham, 2001) this analysis demonstrates how three sisters reveal their very different personalities, styles, and stances in the collaborative narrative process, and yet come together in the end to affirm the common family ethos. The sisters’ roles in the family system are played out both in the story world and also in the interactional context of the storytelling. A distinction is made between apparently intentional self-disclosure as part of a positioning strategy of explicit evaluation, and inadvertent self-disclosure in the enactment whereby the relationships within the family system are revealed. The data will be of interest to students of narrative because (1) the context in which the data was recorded highlights the idea of a family as a community of practice; (2) the “family” consists of three unmarried sisters who had lived together for 60 years; (3) the discourse data is triangulated with ethnographic background knowledge and letters written by the siblings; (4) the shaping power of context is revealed through an immediate revision of the story by the narrator; and (5) the data provides an example of a story “abstract” being treated in two ways by the same narrator: as a “result” for which an explanation must be provided, and as a “complicating action” for which a result must be supplied.

This paper sets out to (a) Theorize teacher identity as fluid, dynamic, interactionally emergent in situ, (b) Operationalize a dialogic narrative approach for the study of teacher identity on these terms, and (c) Account for the locally unfolding process of teacher identity, over short periods of time, in relation to curricular content. We pursue the inquiry through multi-layered small story analysis of a narrative, “My Worst Mistake,” told by a veteran English language arts teacher in the Midwestern United States.

In everyday conversation, narratives are used as rhetorical tools for managing identities, allowing participants to carve out identity positions in moment-to-moment interactions. An interesting, yet understudied, focus of these narratives involves exploring the links between the discourse identities (or narrative participation roles) and larger, social identities of participants in the narrative interactions (e.g., Georgakopoulou, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007). In this paper, I build on this work by looking specifically at the relevance of narrative ratifications for the emergent discourse and social identities of those offering the ratifications. Following Bamberg’s (1997, 2003) analytical framework for examining narratives in talk-in-interaction, I examine how participants are positioned with respect to whose contributions they choose to ratify and how their ratifications (or lack thereof) make available certain discourse identities, which may then point to larger, social identities. Findings not only demonstrate the relevance of ratifications for identity work in narrative interactions, but also advance our understanding of certain aspects of narrative structure, in particular, sequences of narrative openings in talk-in-interaction.

This article examines a group of ‘fitting in’ narratives told by students with different migrant backgrounds in focus group interviews. These narratives indicate shared experiences of adaptation and transformation among these students in Madrid’s multilingual/multicultural schools and Spanish society . I argue that these narratives were told in interaction and constrained by the moderators’ development of the topic-talk at hand, emerging only as answers to questions related to personal experiences of social exclusion in and outside school, as well as those related to group relations at school. They presented a pervasive use of ethnic categorization, which is analyzed in relation to narrators, the problematic event, and the moral order displayed in these narratives. As an interactional device, ethnic categorization served different purposes: (1) to index intragroup solidarity (‘we’ versus ‘other’); (2) to signal opposition and comparison among students with different migrant backgrounds (‘them’ versus ‘them’ or ‘them’ versus ‘us’); (3) to attribute different degrees of moral agency to narrative protagonists. All in all, these narratives display the moral order of school integration and open a window of understanding to the challenges faced by immigrant origin students in Spanish society.

Narrative research has not traditionally examined the intergenerational transmission and reverberation of narratives within ethnic communities, and yet it is through the chain of generations that voices of the past reverberate and testimonies endure which fuel and form present day notions of the past. This article is a call for and an example of the importance ethnographic investigation into communities of memories, for it is through community storytelling that records are set straight as a memorial for victims and survivors. This line of inquiry is pertinent to various communities throughout the world, as we come to see the role of language, and in particular, narrative in the formation of ideas and conflicts, as scholars such as Slyomovics, (1998) have pointed out. This research takes as its point of departure narrative renditions of the Armenian genocide recounted in both public and private venues by the great-grandchildren of genocide survivors in an ethnic enclave in Central California. In this diasporic community we see how communities of memory are formed in a space of mediation which links the new generation with the old, the present with its past as well as with its imagined communities (Anderson, 1983). Through examination of the linguistic reverberations of this historical and familial narrative, I ask what becomes of authorship when collected stories are salient enough to be included in one’s own personal history, and how these narrativizations contribute to one’s sense of self? These questions are answered both by linguistic analysis of pronouns and deixis, as well as through analysis of prevalent themes. The results of this research lend into the historical progression of memory through time by those who did not experience the trauma, but rather were witnesses by listening to the trauma of others.

This paper will draw from recent work in the study of counter-narratives and will apply a sociologically informed perspective to the empirical analysis of discourse. By focusing on the Black Nationalist group The Nation of Islam (NOI) this article will introduce the counter-narrative strategy of “narrative inversion.” Based on discursive analysis of textual materials from early NOI speeches, recordings, and writings, we hope to show how the NOI employed a specific framing tactic of inverting American and Judeo-Christian master narratives to create a powerful ideological schema for attracting potential members. Our analysis demonstrates that early organizers of the NOI created counter-narratives by positioning themselves in direct opposition to the pervasive master narrative of white superiority. We will compare the NOI’s countering strategy to that of Martin Luther King’s moderate civil rights movement and show how the NOI was also able to capitalize on the more restrained messages of racial integration, non-violent protest, and racial reconciliation emanating from the moderate civil rights movement. The discursive process of inverting more moderate messages explains, to a great extent, the movement’s early success as a radical alternative to the mainstream civil rights movement.

This paper shows that story is an English cultural keyword and a key interpretive tool of modern Anglo culture and that it is linked with a family of concepts which have no semantic equivalents in other languages and are unique conceptual artefacts of Anglo culture. It argues that if we can pinpoint these concepts we can also pinpoint the shared values and assumptions reflected in them. It shows that this can be done with the help of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) methodology developed over many years by the author and her colleague Cliff Goddard — a methodology which has been previously applied effectively to many other semantic domains, across a wide range of languages. Further, the paper argues that because the uniqueness and centrality of the English story has until now gone unnoticed, many semantic components associated with it have been projected onto other languages, which has lead to the positing of spurious human universals and to claims such as “story is a basic principle of mind”. The paper draws attention to the fact that a unique English cultural keyword (story) has played a significant role in the “narrative turn” in the humanities and social sciences, and discusses some of the implications of this fact.

Evaluation constitutes a central feature of personal stories in conversation. Storytellers introduce evaluation into their narratives in various ways, including cases of appropriating assessments offered by their listeners. A storyteller may orient to the content of listener assessments and respond to them in various (positive or negative) ways, suspending the narrative in progress to comment or altering its direction. Shared assessments can lead to higher involvement and increased rapport with consequences for subsequent interaction between the participants. Rejections of listener assessments are much less frequent than ratifications: rejection of a listener assessment expresses the teller’s refusal to have it count as part of the overall evaluation of the story in progress.

As a result of the popularization of the narrative idea and the considerable diversity existing among narrative studies, a rather “all included” conception has arisen, in which the framework of narrative inquiry has been significantly blurred. For narrative inquiry to persist as a unique mode of investigation into human nature, a complementary dialogue is required that aims at outlining its core, alongside the emphasis given in the literature on diversity as its hallmark. As a possible reference point for this debate, recognizing the narrative paradigm that has crystallized since the “narrative turn” is suggested. The narrative paradigm is discussed in light of six major dimensions — ontology, epistemology, methodology, inquiry aim, inquirer posture and participant/narrator posture — indicating that it coincides with other interpretive paradigms in certain aspects yet proffers a unique philosophical infrastructure that gives rise to particular methodological principles and methods. Considering the narrative paradigm as the essence of narrative inquiry asserts that the latter is not confined to a methodology, as often implied. Rather it constitutes a full-fledged research Weltanschauung that intimately connects the “hows” of investigation to the “whats”, namely premises about the nature of reality and our relationships with it.