Narrative Inquiry - Online First

The digitalization of oral history (OH) has resulted in the availability of multiple interviews conducted with the same narrator under different circumstances. To explore the comparability of such materials, we analyze interviews with a Holocaust survivor from the Fortunoff Video Archive (1979) and the Visual History Archive (1997), focusing on instances in which she tells the “same” episode. We demonstrate that life-story segments before and after the episode provide clues for sense-making and reflexively constitute the narrative environment. The specific interactional features of OH as a situated practice contribute to the story’s recognizability and discursive alteration. Similarities and differences are detectable due to the coherence established by the social setting of OH, including its availability in a digital archive, which guarantees comparability and incorporates a broader chronology. The main contribution of our paper is methodological, as it outlines an apparatus for the comparative analysis of OH across multiple databases.

This study explores the discourse expressivity of Chinese JFL (Japanese as a foreign language) learners’ Japanese narratives in terms of the variety and use of evaluative strategies, and analyzes how the evaluation system in their first language (L1) may be evident in their second language (L2) performance. For this reason, using the wordless picture book Frog, where are you?, we examined the oral narratives produced by adult Japanese native speakers, adult Chinese native speakers, and Chinese JFL learners. The findings suggest that the absence of “utterance attitudes” in the Chinese-language narratives is evident in the Japanese-language narratives of the Chinese JFL learners; thus, the evaluation of JFL stories is somewhat more direct, and the stories are easier to understand than those of adult JNS. However, the evaluations of the Chinese JFL learners’ narratives also diverged from those of the adult CNS in the direction of the target language’s norms.

We study co-constructed narrative exchange in online storytelling. Our test case is the Finnish YouTuber Niilo22, an unemployed person who broadcasts frequent video clips of his everyday activities while chatting on stock issues and interacting with his followers. Followers engage in lively commentary and team up to make evaluative interpretations of Niilo22’s life on the go. The interpretive frames imposed draw on pre-existing story templates rooted in culturally shared actor categories. We propose the concept of storybaiting to denote the two-way dynamic between Niilo22 and his followers whereby responses triggered by the clips produce further input in the narration, resulting in shared and circularly progressive authorship. This action blurs the ownership of the story and dilutes the teller’s privileges. Life storying in online platforms turns into interactive storybaiting where everybody involved gives and takes cues to evaluate the social media personality and position him in regard to repeated story templates.

Thus far, few studies have investigated the evaluative points narrators may convey through the sequential features of reported exchanges in their stories. In this article, we conduct a micro-oriented narrative analysis on how epistemic and deontic status-stance relations are depicted by narrators in sequences of reported turns. We thus uncover how hierarchies and potential transgressions between the characters in the storyworld are “shown” rather than “told” to the story recipients, who are in this way equipped to evaluate the story as a whole and the story characters’ accountability for their interactional behavior in particular. Furthermore, we argue that the narrators’ discursive set-up of epistemic and deontic relations in these reported exchanges also displays their emic perspective to them. Therefore we believe that our approach can pave the way for a novel approach to epistemics and deontics, complementing the insights gained in the conversation-analytic examination of these phenomena in situ.

This study contributes to a methodological debate within narrative studies, emerging from the specific context of narrative criminology. It examines the evolution of storytelling styles, focusing on how the narrative selection process shapes a narrative, thereby revealing both the origins of narratives and their capacity to offer critical insights into the narrator’s perspective. This research specifically investigates the change of how narratives about the same events or topics, as recounted by two different individuals, change over time in terms of their narrative construction. Focusing on crime narratives provided by two participants – a drug dealer and a gangmaster – first in 2019 and again in 2023, the study demonstrates how these narratives not only evolve in structural complexity but also incorporate more sophisticated elements that highlight the narrators’ agency, rationalize or justify their criminal actions, or depict complex criminal identities. The findings underscore the potent methodological contributions this approach can make to narrative criminology, offering new insights into criminal behavior and dynamics that might not be as apparent in single-time-point interviews. This approach thus enriches the broader narrative studies discourse by applying its techniques and insights to the unique challenges and structures of criminal narratives.