Narrative Inquiry - Volume 9, Issue 1, 1999

This paper presents a progressive understanding of the shifting power relations that are constructed in the telling of a courtship and marriage narrative by an Australian-Italian couple who have been married for well over thirty years. The focus on relations of power is pursued through attention to aspects of the sequenced talk to show how the couple work together to tell the interviewer a newsworthy story that is "old news" to each other. The use of two analytical frames derived from different combinations of narrative analysis (NA), conversational analysis (CA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) facilitates two readings of the same data. The two frames provide different means of showing how the story tellers negotiate and happily survive specific threats to produce a congenially delivered story in the end. The use of first, a "bottom-up" approach to the data followed by a "top-down" approach enables power relations first at the local level between husband and wife to be inserted later into a wider ideological and discursive context. Overall the paper shows how the application of multiple perspectives to narrative analysis can deepen our understanding of storytelling practices. (Narrative analysis, Conversation analysis, Critical discourse analysis)

It has often been pointed out that narratives (of personal experience, specifically) are ordinarily told with the prime intent of revealing the narrator's meritous qualities (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972; Møler, 1996; Quasthoff & Nikolaus, 1982). Although this claim has often been criticized, the debate on this issue is still remarkably peripheral. The hypothesis of this paper is that the function of self-aggrandizement is always at work in the process of storytelling, even if this doesn't seem to be the case. In an attempt to test this hypothesis, two narratives told in Portuguese by different Brazilian speakers are analyzed using a discourse analytic approach.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways a Jewish woman uses different genres in telling her life story. Setting the narrative within its cultural and social contexts enables an examination of narrative as a life story, as well as a mode of creating and expressing changes in women's roles. In her story, the narrator chooses to present herself as a disciple of a religious male leader (a rabbi), a position which allows her to use traditionally male genres of narration. Treating the interactions between reported and authored speech, and the multiplicity of dialogues the narrative maintains, provides an understanding of the methods for implicitly challenging gender construction by contesting genre distribution. {Personal narrative, Genre, Gender, Israeli women, Change)

Over the past few years, the concept of coherence as it applies to people's storied accounts of their lives has become an increasingly popular topic. However, theories of coherence have been slow to appear, and a comprehensive definition of the construct has yet to be presented by researchers. Moreover, almost no work has been done relating the concept of coherence to the particular form of the life story. Thus, the aims of the present study were twofold: first, to investigate whether it is possible to construct a reliable coding scheme for life story coherence, and second, to examine the relationships between life story coherence and mental health. The results of the study indicate that the life story coherence coding system is a reliable measure, and that the coherence construct is therefore amenable to quantitative analysis. The most important finding of this study was that, as predicted, life story coherence demonstrated a statistically significant relationship to psychological well-being. This finding thus lends statistical credibility to the claims of narrative psychologists, who argue that mental well-being is related to, if not the result of, a well-integrated and coherent life story.

This work represents the development of two lines of interest, one in the study of social practices of remembering and the other concerning issues of identity in the care of people with profound learning difficulties. We examine of the way life story work is used as a resource in providing for continuities in the experience of people with profound learning difficulties when moved from hospital to community based care. Our concern is the way carers attend to issues of identity in their relationships with people who are unable to speak on their own behalf. We discuss how identities are accomplished as part of the social practice of remembering in the construction of life story books designed to resource continuities of identities across changes in the provision of care. Identities are not examined in terms of some subjective representation of coherence across time and space. We examine the way social organisation of remembering in life story work makes visible identities in terms of continuities of participation in the social practices that make up the conditions of living of the recipients of care and the working practices of those who provide it.

This paper reports on a study of now-adult children who grew up in families headed by a parent or parents with learning difficulties. The study set out to use narrative techniques to capture something of their experience through the stories they told about their past and present lives. Narrative researchers invariably find themselves trapped between the richness of their material and the space for writing it up. This paper addresses this conundrum by arguing for the use of composite stories or stereotypes as a methodological device for trying to convey lives "in the round" through the synthesizing function of emplotment.

Narrative has been analyzed as a way of recounting the memory of the past and negotiating current group membership. But in an institutional context, it crucially functions to project the future, in constructing a record which can serve as an institutional memory available in case of possible challenges. Using as data an extended oral narrative from a social service agency about an incident of violence by a client, this study shows that the strongest structural constraints on the discourse and syntactic structure of the narrative are the requirements for a bureaucratically adequate written record. This analysis serves as a case study of how the larger social structure of legal requirements for adequate records serves to shape the structure of oral narrative, as well as a demonstration of the work oral narrative does in producing and reproducing institutional memory. (Discourse, Narrative, Memory, Bureaucratic Language, Language of Violence)