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- Volume 33, Issue 1, 2023
Narrative Inquiry - Volume 33, Issue 1, 2023
Volume 33, Issue 1, 2023
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“I AM HERE AND I MATTER”
Author(s): Lauren Zentzpp.: 1–26 (26)More LessAbstractIn this article I operationalize the term “virtue signaling”, a term generally pejoratively used towards people’s assertions of values on social media platforms, as “moral-political stancetaking”, an activity that is actually quite common on- and offline and that works to exert peer pressure toward onlookers and addressees so that they will adopt certain values. Using analytical frameworks of small stories and stance, I examine a narrative sequence from one political activist, demonstrating how she situates long-term aspects of her biography in relation to present moral-political crises in order to make assertions that culminate in the construction of a moral-political framework for the progressive grassroots organizations that she leads. Through this analysis I assert that the notion of virtue signaling, while new to the social media era, fits well within repertoires of communicative behavior that long pre-date the rise of social media.
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Older adults’ conversations and the emergence of “narrative crystals”
Author(s): Annette Gerstenberg and Heidi E. Hamiltonpp.: 27–60 (34)More LessAbstractEnergized by seminal scholarship within narrative studies; communication studies of aging and dementia; and formulaic language, we examined a wide range of stories told multiple times within two different longitudinal collections of verbal interactions involving two women in their 80s (one US American; one French). Based on multifaceted analyses of these longitudinal series of stories, we identified a new type of narrative, the “narrative crystal”. We characterize the internal formal architecture of two illustrative crystals (one from each corpus) before illuminating how such crystals function for their speakers as reassuring interactional “stepping stones” within their larger discourse surroundings. Our findings sketch a possible developmental process regarding how meaningful personal experiences come to be transformed over the lifespan: from the inchoate qualities of first-time tellings shaped by the interaction, through incrementally increased stability over the course of many tellings, to reach the highly durable nature of narrative crystals.
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Storytalk and complex constructions of nonhuman agency
Author(s): Heidi Toivonen and Marco Caracciolopp.: 61–90 (30)More LessAbstractRecent work in environmental philosophy has uncoupled the notion of agency from the human domain, arguing that the efficacy of nonhuman entities and processes can also be construed as a form of “agency.” In this paper, we study discursive constructions of nonhuman agency as they appear in a set of interviews revolving around fictional narratives. The participants were asked to read microfiction engaging with the nonhuman perspectives of entities such as a melting glacier or an endangered tree species. The analysis of the interviews centers on “complex” attributions of nonhuman agency – that is, attributions that involve a combination of agencies attributed to the nonhuman. We show that these complex attributions emerge more frequently in discussing the story (what we call the “storytalk”) than elsewhere in the interviews. We also explore the way in which such complex constructions of nonhuman agency challenge widespread assumptions about the natural world.
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Psychologizing childhood in the reality show Biggest Loser
Author(s): Magnus Kilgerpp.: 91–111 (21)More LessAbstractObesity and overweight are central issues in contemporary western societies, and the public debates in media are extensive. This paper investigates stories from participants in the reality TV-show Biggest Loser, and how the participants invoke temporal identity changes and childhood traumas to produce discursively accepted narratives about the causes for being obese. This study analyses personal stories about being overweight, and narratives of living a life of obesity. The findings illustrate narrative trajectories in personal stories used to explain overweight within a contemporary therapeutic discourse, and how the participants use chronology and childhood as narrative resources to explain their obesity. These narratives do not only produce preferred explanatory narrative elements, but also highlight that a number of psychologized explanatory storylines must be used in order to produce a culturally valid and discursively accepted personal obesity-narrative.
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Culture and storytelling in literature
Author(s): Qi Wang and Jenny Chun-I Yangpp.: 112–122 (11)More LessAbstractThe present study compared ways of storytelling in Western and Asian literature. Content analysis was performed on Amazon.com and New York Times best-selling fictions and memoirs (N = 102) by Western and Asian authors. Although authors of the two cultural groups described similar numbers of event episodes per chapter, Western authors depicted the episodes in greater detail than Asian authors in both fictions and memoirs. Asian authors, on the other hand, described more frequently repeated events than Western authors in fictions. These findings highlight the important role of literature in reflecting as well as perpetuating cultural ways of storytelling.
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The psychophysiology of narrating distressing experiences
Author(s): Monisha Pasupathi, Cecilia Wainryb, Stacia Bourne and Cade Mansfieldpp.: 123–152 (30)More LessAbstractWe examined patterns of psychophysiological arousal related to remembering and narrating distressing events, as compared to arousal while engaged in positive and neutral recall tasks. Narrating distressing events entailed increased arousal relative to remembering those events. Analyses of combined data showed that aggregate arousal during narration was related to post-narration reports of distress and self-perceptions. These results support conceptions of narration as an effortful form of regulation, and suggest insights about the process through which narrative construction may promote psychological and physiological benefits.
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Migrant doctors’ narratives about patients
Author(s): Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar and Olga Zaytspp.: 153–175 (23)More LessAbstractNarratives of personal and vicarious experience are part and parcel of being a doctor, as doctors routinely (re)interpret and (re)tell patients’ narratives when reflecting on clinical cases. Taking an interest in migrant doctors’ self-initiated narratives about patients in doctor-researcher interviews about cultural transitions, this study examines over thirty hours of audio-recordings of forty semi-structured interviews conducted as part of a collaborative project in Chile and Hong Kong. The study explores how migrant doctors construct their professional ‘self’ through narratives about patients, and how these narratives help migrant doctors legitimise their arguments and professional stance in criticizing cultural and societal attitudes towards health and illness, and the professional practices of local doctors. Finally, the paper reflects on the ways in which migrant doctors’ identity positionings provide space for the creation of a “symbolic territory” in which the practices of migrant doctors co-exist within the boundaries of the practices of local doctors in the host culture.
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Incremental validity of narrative identity in predicting psychological well-being
Author(s): Sun W. Park, Soul Kim, Hyun Moon and Hyunjin Chapp.: 176–191 (16)More LessAbstractThe goal of the present study was to replicate and extend previous research that demonstrated the incremental validity of narrative identity in predicting psychological well-being among Korean adults. We recruited 147 Korean adults living in South Korea who completed a battery of questionnaires that assessed the Big Five traits, extrinsic value orientation, self-concept clarity, and psychological well-being. Participants then wrote a story about how they had become the persons they were, which was subsequently coded in terms of agency. We found that psychological well-being was positively related to extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and self-concept clarity, but negatively to neuroticism and extrinsic value orientation. The positive relation between agency, coded from narratives, and psychological well-being was significant both with and without controlling for the other variables. These results showed that narrative identity has incremental validity in predicting well-being among individuals who live in a culture where collectivism and individualism coexist.
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The other-granted self of Korean “comfort women”
Author(s): Hanwool Choepp.: 192–221 (30)More LessAbstractBringing together “identity as agency” (Schiffrin, 1996; De Fina, 2003), Bamberg’s (1997) three-level positioning, and Tannen’s (2008) narrative types, I analyze three interview narratives of Korean women coerced into the Japanese military’s sexual slavery during World War II, commonly known as “comfort women”. Through an eye toward “others” – e.g., Japanese soldiers, “comfort station” managers, interviewers, and sociocultural and sociopolitical forces – I investigate the manipulation of the women’s agency with their identities positioned as victims, rather than survivors. Meaning-making strategies, such as “constructed dialogue” (Tannen, 2007[1989]), repetition, deixis, and third turns, present the ways in which various others objectify and marginalize the women as well as control their stories. These illuminate how the women’s identities are granted and defined by others. This other-granted identity work reinforces aspects of language ideologies and ideologies of being silenced.
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When it’s “now or never”
Author(s): Ignacio Sattipp.: 222–253 (32)More LessAbstractIndividuals who share knowledge of past events may encounter different practical problems when engaging in the co-telling of those events. Drawing upon conversation analysis, this article investigates how co-tellers manage interpolated opportunities to initiate other-repair in collaborative storytelling. The analysis focuses on the placement of different repair operations on the story-in-progress and shows that co-tellers monitor the progressivity of the storytelling activity to identify proper places to initiate repair. Repairs that are initiated out of place can be oriented to as inappropriate and require more interactional work from participants. When tellers project the continuation of the story beyond a proper place, co-tellers display urgency for halting the story’s current trajectory, which shows their orientation to this moment as a last opportunity to initiate repair. This last possible point to repair the story-in-progress is what I call a “now or never” moment. Data stem from video-recorded collaboratively told stories in Spanish.
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Review of Bell, Browse, Gibbons & Peplow (2021): Style and Reader Response: Minds, Media, Methods
Author(s): Chloe Harrisonpp.: 254–257 (4)More LessThis article reviews Style and Reader Response: Minds, Media, Methods
Volumes & issues
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Volume 34 (2024)
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Volume 33 (2023)
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Volume 32 (2022)
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Volume 31 (2021)
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Volume 30 (2020)
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Volume 29 (2019)
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Volume 28 (2018)
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Volume 27 (2017)
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Volume 26 (2016)
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Volume 25 (2015)
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Volume 24 (2014)
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Volume 23 (2013)
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Volume 22 (2012)
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Volume 21 (2011)
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Volume 20 (2010)
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Volume 19 (2009)
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Volume 18 (2008)
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Volume 17 (2007)
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Volume 16 (2006)
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Volume 15 (2005)
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Volume 14 (2004)
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Volume 13 (2003)
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Volume 12 (2002)
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Volume 11 (2001)
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Volume 10 (2000)
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Volume 9 (1999)
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Volume 8 (1998)
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