Narrative Inquiry - Volume 23, Issue 2, 2013

By analyzing the constitutive role of tour guides narratives, this article addresses the recruitment of tourism as a means of forging transnational ties between diasporans and their ethnic homeland. Combining theoretical frameworks from linguistic anthropology and the sociology of tourism, it examines the narratives told to American Jewish youth at three graves at a military cemetery in Israel and analyzes the discursive, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in the narratives, including stancetaking, reported speech, and pronominal usage. Attending to the growing phenomenon of diaspora homeland tourism, it analyzes how tour guide narratives about the past work as a form of social action in constituting present day transnational identifications.

The aim of the article is to problematise and discuss the usefulness of the chronological I as a new analytical approach for studying the doing of identity in storytelling. The chronological I can be both a rhetorical resource for narrators and a new analytical tool for studying the process of doing identity. The article suggests that the chronological I adds a new analytical dimension to different types of narrative analysis. The article takes its point of departure in the understanding of the narrator as using time as a rhetorical resource for telling or doing identity in ongoing interactions. In this discursive narrative approach, narratives are viewed as socially situated actions in a context in which the narrator has to relate to culturally accepted agreements about responsibility and agency. The data for this article is based on interviews with twelve individuals exposed to workplace bullying. As this topic is sensitive, there is a need for narrators to manage their accountability when asked to account for their agency or non agency in the reported events.

Using conversational data from an ethnographic study of a quilting guild, this article examines the way narratives are used to situate quilted objects and techniques by indexing particular alignment frames for the viewer recipient. As a community of practice, the quilting guild provides an excellent interactional context to explore how narratives are used to construct and reinforce community practices. Working within the framework of conversation analysis, the study found that quilters utilized narratives argumentatively to support specific characterizations of quilted objects and quilting techniques. In the data, situating narratives initiate an interactional sequence consisting of two parts: the narrative and an expansion and integration sequence. Quilters make use of different syntactic and story elements in order to signal the appropriate alignment frames. Further, the expansion and integration segments provide space for the women to negotiate and integrate individual and group meanings for the quilting practices presented in the narrative.

Stories of personal experience have been a staple of research on narrative, while stories of vicarious experience have remained largely ignored, though they offer special insights into issues of epistemic authority and telling rights, coherence and evaluation, contextualization and stance-taking. This article investigates the largely unexplored matters of why conversationalists tell stories about other people, how they establish their authority to tell these stories, how they relate these stories to their current conversational context, and how they participant design these stories and shape them for purposes of identity construction in interaction. Speeches by Barack Obama provide a rich resource for investigating narratives of vicarious experience, illustrating a wide range of forms contextualized in complex ways, and told for a variety of purposes.

For many Americans work plays a prominent role in the construction of one’s identity. However, experiencing job loss or unemployment disrupts a normal progress to living a successful life as outlined by the master narrative of the American Dream. In the present study I explore disruptions to personal identities and cultural narratives by conducting a narrative thematic analysis of stories told by unemployed individuals in online settings. The findings reveal five prominent identities including: (a) victim, (b) redeemed, (c) hopeless, (d) bitter, and (e) entitled and dumbfounded. The individuals performed these identities through telling stories of their disruptions that worked to reflect, construct, disrupt, and counter the master narrative of the American Dream. In this analysis I discuss avenues for exploring how constructions of individual identities disrupt cultural narratives, and the resulting implications for narrative theory.

In this article, I approach day care centers as stages upon which various small stories are constructed and performed by young children and other interlocutors. The aim of the article is two-fold. Methodologically, the paper is a tentative application of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective onto narrative research with children. Empirically, the aim is to explore day care centers as narrative environments that constitute children’s lives and identities. I anchor my analysis and interpretation of research material, collected in two groups of children, in three perspectives. Firstly, I focus on the spatial practices of the day care centers, framing the construction of small stories. Secondly, I deal with the production of small stories between cultural routines and active reconstruction. Finally, I draw attention to children’s identity construction as a continuous process influenced by a variety of individual, material, contextual, cultural, and interactional factors.

This paper presents a comparative analysis structure and frequency of discourse markers in two kinds of oral narratives: objective, emotionally neutral ones on the one side, and highly emotional, spontaneous ones on the other. The results prove that emotionality plays a crucial role in the structuring of oral narratives as well as in the type of discourse markers employed in them. Objective oral narratives show a higher number of discourse markers, whereas highly emotional ones present a higher variety of discourse markers, as well as a higher frequency of other pragmatic markers, in order to guide the listener through the multiplicity of side stories and the broken structure they show. In short, this work highlights the relationship between linguistic activity (language in context or use) and linguistic form.

Twentieth-century study of narrative featured many successes and one grave failure. Narratology taught us the basics of how to study the structure of narrative, but proves to be a dead end in the study of texts. This was clear soon after Gérard Genette’s groundbreaking studies, but later works such as Paul Ricoeur’s fail to get beyond narratology. This paper therefore claims that narrative theory has not changed since its inception several decades ago, even though the need for such a change is broadly supported. Attention has been paid to expanding narrative methods to other fields like medicine and education rather than further developing the theory. I advocate a more serious consideration of contemporary literature to renew narrative theory.

The presentation of speech-in-text is an inherently meta-linguistic practice. When children bring speech into their writing, they are necessarily attending to speech as such. Constructing reported speech requires them to use language reflexively and may be a critical component of the development of an authorial voice. We examined 3495 occasions of reported speech or talk about speech in 689 personal narratives by 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in two inner-city schools. We found grade-related increases in the use of reported speech, in the variety of forms of reported speech used, and in the strategic alignment of reported speech form with plot. We also found a relationship between the use of reported speech and explicitly meta-narrative comments. We argue that as children begin to perform Bahktin’s ‘layering of voices’ in their stories, they are developing a meta-awareness of stories-as-stories. This meta-awareness, we propose, co-evolves with children’s use of reported speech forms, reveals itself in their strategic use of these forms, and gives us a glimpse of an emerging self-conscious narrator. As they become more conscious of themselves as authors in middle childhood, their stories begin to demonstrate qualities of literariness–the qualities of an authorial voice.

Our research team documented the experiences of Russian Mennonite immigrants who settled on Pelee Island in the province of Ontario, Canada, between 1925 and 1950. We collected more than 200 historic photographs from over 60 former islanders or their families; interviewed 8 former residents of the Pelee Mennonite community; and synthesized selected photographs and stories into a virtual museum exhibit. Our experience of asking participants to respond to photographs of the Pelee Mennonite community prompted the provisional framework described in this article. This framework offers 8 possibilities for categorizing the stories that emerge when researchers bring photographs (or other visuals) into the inquiry. This article demonstrates the framework using stories from our Pelee Mennonite inquiry. The framework is a starting point for other researchers to use or further develop as the attention given to the visual in narrative inquiry continues to grow.