Narrative Inquiry - Volume 8, Issue 2, 1998

Personal memories increasingly have been implicated in the process of identity-making, but systematic study of stability and change in memory telling is rare. Comparisons of relationship memories told by 46 young adults during two interviews separated by about 6 months found moderate thematic consistency across the two sets of memories. The similarity obtained despite a high turnover in the specific events that were selected for telling each time. These findings, paired with ancillary data indicating a similarly high turnover for earliest memories, high points, and low points, suggest that relationship memories for young adults serve more as examples of enduring concerns than as essential landmarks for the life story. Twice-told tales showed quite stable storylines, and were most dense for memories of intimate encounters in late adolescence, suggesting the centrality of this period for the development of relationship identity. {Development, Narrative, Memory, Identity)

The study of repeated tellings of the same experience by the same speaker has been a neglected source of insights into the human mind. The content of the mind (here termed underlying experience) cannot be equated with any particular verbalization of it. Language, mental imagery, and emotions provide different windows on it, but the very fact that repeated tellings differ shows that language is not in any one-to-one relation with it. The comparison of such tellings can, however, allow us to zero in on the nature of underlying experience by showing what is constant and what variable. Such comparisons suggest that experience is stored in terms of relatively large topics and relatively small foci that are activated, one at a time, as a topic is scanned. They suggest, too, that decisions regarding sentence boundaries are made as one is talking, so that sentences appear not to reflect units of memory. Whereas ideas of events and their participants show stability, the orientations to such ideas that are expressed by the inflectional elements of language are free to vary. The relative importance of ideas may be inferred from their constancy across repetitions. Chronology appears to be important when it is a relevant relation between ideas, but when it is not relevant there is room for random ordering. These points will be illustrated with a comparison of two tellings that were produced fifteen months apart. (Narrative Structure, Memory)

Two types of conversational narratives are examined in a corpus of interviews with Salvadoran immigrants who live in Washington, D.C. On the one hand, narrative sequences of counterfactual or hypothetical events position the virtual as opposed to or in comparison with the actual and, in doing so, they convey the narrator's commentary and perspective. On the other hand, narrative sequences of repeated or habitual events create the effect of a static, self-contained picture of the past and can be used to present experience as generalized and common. Both types of sequences are characterized as resources for argumentation. It is shown how recourse to irreality takes place to back a claim and how looking at the past from the past makes the storyteller's perspective relatively immune to challenge. The sociohistorical conditions of the events recounted in the data provide the basis for the view of the immigration and integration experiences presented in this paper. (Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Anthropology)

This study is intended as a step towards the full uncovery of the textual and contextual, cross-cultural and particularistic aspects of the contested notion of oral performances. The data comprise conversational storytelling performances from Greece. To capture the interplay between conventional resources and contextual contingencies involved in any performance, the study employs the three dimensions of narrativity, teller-tale-telling (Blum-Kulka, 1997), as the loci of performances. With respect to the tale, Greek stories range from mini-performances to full-fledged or sustained performances. The choice of one or the other is interrelated to a story's episodic structuring, topic, and purposes of telling. A constellation of devices (keys) form the hallmarks of Greek performances; these are classified as poetic or theatrical. With regard to the stories' telling, it is argued that the teller-audience interactional norms are geared towards granting strong floor-holding rights and upholding full-fledged, single-teller performances which call attention to the teller's skill and autonomy. Finally, the locus of teller is proposed as the main site for the emergent properties of performance events. It is also argued that the relationship between these properties and the teller can be best explored with reference to the concept of positioning (Bamberg, 1997). This allows us to shed light on how performance devices, in their individualized and local uses, act as indexes of personal and sociocultural identities. The study's findings point to avenues for future research and suggest analytical ways of pursuing it. Specifically, the classification of performance keys as poetic or theatrical could be useful for the exploration of cross-cultural aspects of performance styles. In addition, the "Greek" performance devices reinforce the assumption that there is a certain set of devices typical of verbal art cross-culturally; this needs to be further documented. Overall, the study aims at demonstrating the validity and necessity of exploring the pragmatic work which performance keys accomplish in interactional contexts.{Narrative performance, Emergence, Teller-tale-telling, Positioning)

Frames are not only universal cognitive categories to explain the narrator's consciousness, they are also a socioculturally determined concept. Using verse/stanza analysis, which is widely accepted as an effective means of analyzing narrative structure, this study examines how narrative discourse markers and linguistic strategies contribute to the culturally specific framing of Japanese oral personal narratives. Japanese adult narrators were found to employ particular linguistic markers: (1) the formal verb-ending patterns that are often pointed out as politeness markers indicating the insider-outsider distinction, and (2) psychological complements that are generally assumed to express a greater degree of hesitation and softness. It was found, however, that in narrative contexts, these two markers are more likely to appear at the end of a stanza than in any other position. In other words, in contrast to the general belief that these markers serve as devices to show politeness, when investigated from the viewpoint of narrative discourse, they have turned out to possess multiple functions, such as a psychologically effective means for cultural and contextual framing. These findings also call for an awareness on the part of Japanese language instructors to emphasize such multiple functions in the class-room, so that they may help prevent learners from making subtle but potentially critical mistakes.