Narrative Inquiry - Volume 22, Issue 2, 2012

This single story investigation explores the ontological framework for analyzing how personal stories emerge. This analysis delineates a story told by Emma in a fashion to resemble that of audience members listening to a story for the first time. This article breaks apart the traditional narrative research approach of beginning, middle, and end facilitating a renewed focus on the role of orator and audience’s involvement. The purpose of this paper demonstrates how Emma as the orator builds a narrative while involving the audience and forces the listeners to consider the multiple paths she may experience. Showcasing Emma’s story evolution simultaneously demonstrates a theoretical understanding of how small and big stories intersect with antenarratives and narratives. The multiple paths encourage readers to interactively reinterpret their understanding of the narrative and experience antenarrative. This exploration addresses a gap in narrative research and scrutinizes antenarrative analysis applicability through a singular oral story performance.

In this study, I investigate how one museum storyteller engaged her audience at different stages of producing a narrative and how museum exhibits were incorporated into her narrative in the process. The analysis focuses on the interplay among various verbal, vocal and visual features emanating from the teller at different storytelling moments and the audience’s outward responses. The study extends our understanding of the ways museum storytelling can enhance the audience’s interest in the displayed artefacts as well as in the life and culture of the people associated with these artefacts.

This article refocuses the discussion of identity in narrative and practice by looking at structuring-in-practice and beyond to the discourse functions of identity. The narrative of an Ethiopian Israeli female college student is analyzed, wherein she tells about changing elementary schools — a context mirroring the immediate situation in her new academic setting. The analysis identifies and labels the partial, microgenetic elicitation of identity-attributable imagery in each utterance and then consolidates the accumulation of those images into the various groupings relevant in the narrative. In the particular narrative studied here all consolidated images contrast against the one identity-attributable image that is interactionally advantageous. This result, found in all 28 prototypical narratives in my corpus of 46, is evidence of a poetic identity structuring of narrative serving two discourse functions: (1) metasemantic- the contrastive identity work creates and indexes the narrative’s Complication and its subsequent Resolution; (2) metapragmatic- the contrastive identity work creates and indexes the identity for impression management. The contrastive basis of the poetic identity structure of narrative is indicative of much Western identity and narrative construction. Thus, identity and narrative are shown to stand in reflexive relation one to the other, where identity is an ‘indexical icon’, a map of itself drawn in the very narrative from which it emerges.

Particular attention has been paid in recent years to the functional embedding of narrative within sociocultural practices (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008) and to the role narrative plays in the construction of identity (Bamberg, 2011). Narrative practices, though, are still equated with narrating activities, with “a form of action, of performance” (Blommaert, 2006) at a given moment in discursive time. This article argues that when narrative is embedded in particularly complex sociocultural practices such as the adversarial trial, it is not sufficient to consider activities of narrating and their immediate discursive environment. For while participants orient to narrative in a context such as the trial, the infrequency of identifiable narrative discourse can give the analytical impression that narrative is peripheral to the overall practice. The model of Narrative Navigation outlined here is the first systematic attempt to make salient the fundamentally dynamic, multifaceted and rhetorical nature of narrative in adversarial jury trial. The model should provide a more holistic picture of narrativity in such contexts and should enhance language-based discourse analytic approaches to narrative.

The present paper concentrates on the narrative management of the teacher-student relationship. Focusing on students’ identities, the present study draws upon the social constructionism paradigm, thus considering identities as social constructs via discourse. The analysis of representative narrative extracts shows how students construct themselves as powerful enough to challenge teachers’ authority which is expressed in the Initiation–Response–Feedback structure. Their resistance is indicative of their will to free themselves from their teachers’ expectations, even if this can only take place during their conversations with their peers. In this context, narratives allow them to achieve interactional goals which may not always be fulfilled in class.

Past studies on narratives have identified two main dimensions of narrative production: the story-related narrative quality, which relates to the narrative structure and evaluations, and the language-related quality, which relates to the appropriate use of linguistic devices that contribute to the overall discourse cohesion. Although studies on the language development of monolinguals and bilinguals have demonstrated the developmental nature of the two different narrative dimensions, little attention has been paid to the potential relationship between them. Thus, this study aimed to identify the interrelationship between the two main narrative quality skills and explored the role of cross-language facilitations for performance on each of these narrative dimensions. Oral Frog Story narratives produced by 70 six-year-old Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners were analyzed. The findings indicated that the two narrative sub-dimensions play facilitative roles for each other within English (L2), and that there are cross-language contributions for only the linguistic quality of narratives. The findings are discussed in relation to the bilingual children’s language proficiency and the degree of differences in narrative conventions across the two languages.

Using a co-ethnographic approach to focus on one person’s story, we explore how a sense of place may be evident in self constructed Gypsy-Traveller identity and narrative. Mary’s recounting of her experiences of living and growing up in the Caldewgate district of Carlisle (UK) illustrates the place of family relations as a key element of Gypsy-Traveller self identity and suggests, we believe, the centrality of family and internal relationships as a strong feature in the construction of personal notions and narratives of place for Gypsy-Traveller people.

This paper focuses on time, space, and identity relations in narratives of Muslim women in an Islamic student group in Colorado, who use autobiographies of how their faith developed for countering stereotypes of Islam and Muslims in post 9/11 America. In these faith development narratives, these women, who were born and raised in Islam, strive to dispel the often abstract media claims of Muslim women being oppressed by Muslim men and by Islamic doctrines, as well as being behind the times, stagnant in the past, or simply anti-modern, anti-secular, or anti-American. In narrating how they have progressed from unknowing children socialized into Islam to knowledgeable adults, the women decontextualize, and thereby idealize, Islam to stress their agency and individuality. The women resignify Islamic rituals, such as the salat (praying five times a day), sawn (fasting during Ramadan), and hijab (wearing the head scarf), by delinking them from the often criticized materialistic and pure-repetitious nature characteristic of religious rituals of the pre-modern. Instead, they project these rituals as self-disciplining and self-realizing practices very much in line with modern precepts of individuality and female emancipation. In their narratives, they reinforce the media’s binary opposition between America and Islam, reducing them to caricatures of a purely secular, somewhat ignorant, state and a perfect and pure religion, respectively.

Powerful narratives exist about the nature, practice and validity of narrative inquiry. It is storied, for example, as complex, time-consuming and unappreciated by the conservative sociology academe. As a new PhD candidate I planned to undertake a straight thematic analysis. However, it became evident that an alternative approach was required. This paper tells a story about my struggle to comprehend narrative analysis and find the arc of my participant’s stories. Because writing ‘my sexual story’ provided a particular turning point in this journey I also recount this here, in addition to an outline of the analytical framework I developed to interpret my data. I argue that narrative analysis is not easily learned through traditional scholarship: texts, journal articles, supervisors and conferences. Rather, a lingering, challenging — but ultimately highly rewarding journey may be required. It is my hope that this paper will provide insight and assistance to the novice narrative researcher.

A growing body of work charts and explicates the way participants in interactions constitute the context and their respective identities as ‘institutional’ through differences in a number of dimensions to ‘everyday’ talk. The role played by stories, particularly non-canonical or ‘small stories’, in this context-creating and identity-orientating work has been largely overlooked, although there is an expanding collection of studies into the affordances offered by different narrative types in terms of identity performance. Building on and combining existing research into institutional interaction on the one hand and narrative and identity on the other, the research discussed here starts to address the gap identified. Using fine-grained linguistic analysis and drawing on narrative positioning theory in a detailed analysis of two narratives recorded as part of a wider study, this paper aims to explicate the way participants — in this case guides in a working visitor attraction — may use different narrative types to orientate to their institutionally-ascribed identity of ‘guide’. The paper also highlights the benefits in terms of added nuance and depth of interpretation to be gained from using the tools of narrative analysis in investigating institutional contexts and identity.

Corresponding to the “narrative turn” in the human and cultural sciences, this paper advocates a “cognitive turn” in the study of literary narratives. The representation of the self in literary narratives, for example, is in some ways similar to the representation of the self represented in philosophic, psychological, and sociological theory, but the narrative models extend and enrich the understanding of the self. The tradition of literary narrative includes the monadic, dyadic, and triadic models of the self, as well as representations of agent, patient, experiencer, witness, instrumental, and locative selves. Narrative is thus a kind of worldmaking, and the making of complex worlds, such as the worlds of the self, lead towards narrative.