Narrative Inquiry - Volume 27, Issue 2, 2017

New parodic genres have emerged across diverse forms of digital media. Sometimes these parodies take the form of mock “narratives of personal experience,” with authors drawing on a range of discursive resources to perform particular identities and in doing so, to create texts written from imagined perspectives. In this article, I focus on parodies of user-generated product reviews on Amazon. For over a decade, Amazon users have contributed thousands of parodies of reviews written about real products. This analysis focuses on a sample from a data set of 100 parodic Amazon reviews written about five different products (which have become the targets of a large number of parody reviews), and demonstrates how authors perform self-disclosure to construct fictional personae. I demonstrate how these discursively-constructed narrative identities are central to the ensuing and improbable narrative events represented in the parodic texts.

The retelling and sharing of stories is not a new phenomenon. Many narrative analysts have devoted research to these processes. But the culture of participation ( Jenkins 2006 ) in the digital world has brought sharing to a completely new level by allowing users not only to broadcast their opinions and evaluations of a story but also to reappropriate it and recontextualize it in infinite recursions. We focus on such process of transformation of a narrative in different media and social media outlets through the analysis of the viral spread of a story posted by an individual Twitter user in 2015. Specifically, we illustrate how participation frameworks change from one retelling to another and how the original story becomes "nested" into a new meta-story centered on the twitter user as a character and on the viral spread of the story.

When stories (re)appear in YouTube videos, they are recontextualized not only by their titling and editing, but especially by chains of online comments. This article explores how a Northern Italian politician’s racialized story, which was first recontextualized by a TV news reporter on a YouTube video, is further recontextualized for different ends by commenters on that video. I show how these commenters negotiate and reframe the racial aspects of digital discourse and its sociocultural meanings through their various responses and across different temporal and spatial scales. By applying linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic theories and narrative analytical tools to digital storytelling, this study emphasizes how racialized language is neither stable nor unidirectional, but is rather constantly negotiated discursively among various groups of virtual audience members. Besides investigating the pragmatics of narrative interaction in the digital realm, this article speaks to methodological challenges that surround the study of online storytelling.

This article combines the study of online narratives as social practices and the linguistic anthropological study of imagined communities, to examine a set of non-canonical narrative practices in a Facebook group for the Portuguese diaspora in France. Instead of reports of individual members’ past experiences, these narratives function as invitations to other group members to co-tell typical, shared experiences. Specifically, we investigate how group members share vacation trips to Portugal with each other in ways that produce a sense of collective and simultaneous experience. They accomplish this through deictically-based narrative strategies that shift the social, spatial, and temporal perspectives of narrating and narrated frames in ways that link the following: individual I’s with collective we’s, one-time events with timeless event types, and co-presence online with co-presence on vacation. Through these strategies, participants connect Facebook narrations of vacations to the larger social project of diasporic longing for and return to Portugal.

Sharing the moment live, a built-in logic of many social networking sites, is, I claim, an invitation for creating plots, which has led to systematic practices. I single out taking a narrative stance on Facebook as such a practice and show the interplay between key-norms and evolving media affordances for pre-selection of story ingredients, localization, visualization of the experience, and audience selection. These contribute to showing the moment as opposed to telling it, with selected friends serving as knowing co-narrators and with story-linking allowing for allusive, transmedia links. I review these practices in the context of increased story facilities that notably bring together several social media apps. I argue that although this curation promises a move beyond the moment, it ultimately serves to consolidate sharing-lives-in-the-moment. I reflect on the implications of this for the direction of travel in relation to stories on many social media platforms.

The study focuses on how preadolescent girls in instances of adult-children talk within the institutional setting of a girl group discussion forum construct joint stories that challenge a master narrative of school bullying. The unfolding of one such multi-party storytelling event on the topic of victimization is analyzed; primarily highlighting the participants’ interactional management of diverse moral concerns, blame allocations, and issues of responsibility. All in all, the study highlights how the girls’ collaborative storytelling comes to redefine moral concepts and test the institutional borders of tellability in ways that also raise questions about the institutional foundations of school bullying interventions.

The paper presents findings from narrative analyses of interviews with 16 Gujarati women caring for a child with an intellectual disability in a midsized city in India. Participants’ mothering narratives articulate the multiple selves (or identities) they have constructed in the context of their child’s disability. In efforts to align with the cultural discourse on good mothering, women in this study sometimes narrate themselves as knowledge bearers and as agents, as people who labor and triumph over difficult circumstances, but at other times vulnerable and victimized as they navigate both their daily responsibilities and the social expectations and discourses regarding mothering. The identity narratives educate the audience of what mothering a child with an intellectual disability means in this unique sociocultural context.

In Denmark, the Adult Education Centres have a “sweeper” function for young adults who need to recommence education. This study explores two L2 (Danish as Second Language) students and how their educational narratives confirm or counter the master narratives of adult education. Students at the centres are commonly identified as adults with social and personal challenges, but their educational narratives and experiences are far more complex. As the edifying institutional narratives of the Adult Centres encompass both professionalism and care, the vernacular narratives characterise the centres as hang-outs for problematic adults without the ability to make a persistent effort in their own life. Students at the centres have to navigate and position themselves in relation to these conflicting stories by giving voice to educational struggles, social relations and agency in their own educational narratives.

This paper presents the analysis of a series of workshops conducted in Italian multicultural classrooms, involving children aged 9–12. The workshops were based on the collection of photos representing the children’s memory and were designed to enhance dialogic facilitation of narratives in the classroom. Starting from the collected photos, a facilitator promoted the interactional production of narratives of memory and identity. The workshops were entirely video-recorded for purposes of analysis. First of all, the paper presents the theoretical background of the analysis, including the concepts of narratives, memory, social use of photography, facilitation of children’s agency, and intercultural communication. Secondly, it includes one example of the analysis conducted on the basis of the transcripts of the video-recorded workshops showing the ways in which narratives of children’s memory have been facilitated during the workshops.