Narrative Inquiry - Current Issue

In the last few decades, the analytical scope of narrative studies has widened from a sole focus on “prototypical” narratives of personal experience to a wide variety of narrative genres. However interesting this may be, there are also some problems with these genres as there is not only sometimes considerable overlap between different genres, but there are also differences within these genres. Furthermore, real-life stories often consist of a mix of various genres, which makes applying genre-labels to these narratives problematic. Hence, instead of making such genre classifications, I propose an abstract “Narrative Dimensions Model” to tease out the relevant characteristics of and differences between various types of narratives. This model consists of two three-dimensional clusters, viz., one revolving around the narrator and containing the dimensions of ownership, authorship and tellership, and one revolving around the narrated events, containing the dimensions of frequency, time and evaluation. I illustrate this by a theoretical exploration of various narrative genres and I conclude by sketching the advantages of conceptualizing and scrutinizing narratives by means of this model.

My contribution traces the evolving notion of tellability in the study of narrative over the last thirty-odd years: Tellability was initially seen as an objective property of textual content, but research on narrative in real contexts of talk has increasingly recognized the various ways interactional factors can override content as grounds for relating a story. I advance a set of research strategies based on investigation of the discourse structures that accompany the negotiation of tellability in context and the syntactic markers of tellability, specifically requests for stories like “tell me” and “tell her,” correlating with features of recipient design in narration. This will reveal distinctions in presuppositions about who knows a story already, who else should be included, and who may conarrate, demonstrating how tellability varies from one participant to another even in the same context.

In this paper I lay out some of the main theoretical methodological principles that underlie a narratives-as-practices approach and discuss three foci that emerge from current research and pave the way for future investigations. In particular, I focus on mobility, connectivity, time/space anchoring and chronotopicity as both characteristics of narrative and research areas which allow for an integration of the focus of interactional approaches on emergence with a consideration of the historical and social embedding of narratives into practices. I review recent research that has contributed to this trend in narrative studies and discuss some of the limitations of current work and areas that need further investigation. I advocate for an expansion of research on a wider variety of practices, attention to the characteristics of narrative genres, and in general a stronger critical engagement with ways in which narratives participate in social processes involving power and inequality.

Humans are prone to tell stories when they interact with each other. Knowing how many stories we tell in a day could be a difficult endeavor, especially because what counts as “a story” varies across disciplines and cultures. Narratives have always been primary modes in human communication and engagement across cultures, however, and have been used as key analytical tools across numerous disciplines in the social sciences and beyond. While defining narratives has been a daunting task in narratological studies, it is important to appreciate that narratives have also been studied for their pragmatic effects in the here-and-now of speech participants’ interactions and across various spatiotemporal configurations. Through an analysis of a set of narrative practices that I collected in Senegal (West Africa) and in Northern Italy in interview settings, I demonstrate that narratives are also performative interactional events in which their sociocultural surrounding is always fluid and can influence the story in unpredictable ways as it unfolds in interaction.

Narrative studies have witnessed a growing interest towards positioning analyses and the analysis of master and counter-narratives. While the former tends to prefer a small story approach and to draw on Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis, the latter engages in a variety of methodological approaches and works with narratives of several sizes, often within institutional and political contexts. Counter-narrative is a positional category by name, and it has recently been brought together with positioning analysis in the study of oral narratives. However, the narrative nature of master narratives, as well as their conceptual distinction from dominant discourses, remains largely unaddressed. This article aims at placing master narratives within narrative theory. To that end, we consider the three analytical levels of narrative positioning in terms of master and counter-narratives. By analysing an interview with a 92-year-old Finnish woman, we argue for the empirical relevance of master and counter-narratives within positioning analysis.

This article presents some of the theoretical-epistemological assumptions and methods which underpin Narrative Analysis in Brazil. In the niche we have carved out for ourselves, we combine (auto)ethnographic techniques with analytical tools which draw on both narrative analysis and sociolinguistics, as well as discourse analysis more widely speaking. In this paper, we especially seek to address what we consider the symbiotic relationship between the aforementioned field of study and contemporary transdisciplinary social research. This is done by showcasing examples of narrative research carried out in Brazil, particularly those motivated by sociopolitical concerns. Moreover, we aim to contribute to the debate ignited in post-truth times by the performative view we take of language, and so to speak narrative, by contemplating the practical repercussions of innovations stemming from the current state of affairs within the context of our own investigations.

This contribution traces which aspects of narrative acquisition have been emphasized in 30 years of Narrative Inquiry. It then uses this synopsis as a starting-point to present a theoretical and empirical framework which can be characterized by some of the aspects that have attracted less attention in the journal so far. The summary of this consistent interactive approach and some of the results of about 40 years of respective research, based on different corpora, should support the idea that taking up these aspects is worthwhile. Investigating a broad range of age-groups and comparing a variety of contexts, including peer-interaction and classrooms, as well as different genres such as conversational narratives of personal experience and fantasy stories, with a perspective on inter-individual differences, not only expand our knowledge about narrative acquisition, but lead to a new coherent resource-based explication of central concepts such as narration, competence and acquisition.

We review three decades of literature across multiple disciplines that demonstrate the efficacy of narrative story stem methodologies (NSSM) to elicit responses that are projective of mental processes and to reveal what would otherwise be too complex or sensitive to communicate. The review synthesizes evidence for the extensive and diverse utility of NSSM. To accomplish this, we provide theoretical framing and historical background, describe assessment methods, resulting data and analytic approaches, and chart the empirical work of the past decade that relates story stem narratives to a range of developmental outcomes, and meaning-making processes. This synthesis of cross-disciplinary research provides the first comprehensive review of a truly innovative narrative methodology and includes work across periods of development, representing research that has primarily focused on children with increasing emphasis on adolescents and adults.

Over the past 30 years we have seen a welcome growth in the understanding of narrative as a complex and broadly defined set of concepts. While the complexity of children’s narrative development has been brought to light by researchers and theorists across multiple fields of study, reflecting this growth by comprehensively analyzing narrative complexity still remains a challenge. One reason for this ongoing challenge is the isolated, disparate focus of the approaches, either in analyzing solely story structure, content, or function. Few approaches combine these disparate dimensions to comprehensively analyze children’s narratives. In response, we build on research from the past 30 years to develop the Two-Lens Approach, a holistic theoretical framework for analyzing the form, content, and context of children’s narratives. This paper presents and applies this approach in an effort to start closing the gaps among the field of narrative analysis and narrative theory.

This paper addresses issues related to narrative, cognition, and culture within the framework of foreign- or second-language (L2) narrative discourse, using a methodology of connecting the story- and language-related qualities of narrative discourse. The term “coherence” refers to whether or not a text makes sense at a global level, whereas “cohesion” describes the linguistic relationships among clauses in a narrative, such as how its surface linguistic elements are linked together at a local level. The paper (1) examines oral narratives, (2) reveals how both coherence and cohesion serve as the twin engines of narrative, and (3) emphasizes the significance of noting not only the narrative content/structure but also the appropriate use of linguistic devices, to identify language-specific ways of expressing affective elements in narrative. That is, the paper suggests the importance of developing conceptual understanding of L2 forms (e.g., grammatical variables) and their stylistic significance.

This study uses a form of narrative analysis to examine a sample of sexual abuse survivors’ impact statements (n = 117) given in court at the sentencing of the former USA Gymnastics Olympic team doctor, Larry Nassar. Narrative analysis allows for prioritization of the victim’s perspective. Statements are analyzed using themes of agency and communion (McAdams et al., 1996) and ineffectiveness and alienation (McCabe & Dinh, 2016). Inclusion of ineffectiveness and alienation extends the work of McAdams, which began in the 1990s. Findings show that ineffectiveness and communion are positively correlated, as are ineffectiveness and alienation. Age and agency are also positively correlated such that older victims readily express themes of personal power and achievement. Agency and alienation are significantly more common in the statements than ineffectiveness. These findings suggest that participants’ sense of communion is particularly harmed by their victimization, and that impact statements have agentic-based and communion-based functions.