Studies in Narrative

In this book, members of the ChiLPA Project explore the children’s literature of several different cultures, ranging from ancient India, nineteenth century Russia, and the Soviet Union, to twentieth century Britain, America, Australia, Sweden, and Finland. The research covers not only the form and content of books for children, but also their potential social functions, especially within education. These two perspectives are brought together within a theory of children’s literature as one among other forms of communication, an approach that sees the role of literary scholars, critics and teachers as one of mediation. Part I deals with the way children’s writers and picturebook-makers draw on a culture’s available resources of orality, literacy, intertextuality, and image. Part II examines their negotiation of major issues such as the child adult distinction, gender, politics, and the Holocaust. Part III discusses children’s books as used within language education programmes, with particular attention to young readers’ pragmatic processing of differences between the context of writing and their own context of reading.

Counter-narratives only make sense in relation to something else, that which they are countering. The very name identifies it as a positional category, in tension with another category. But what is dominant and what is resistant are not, of course, static questions, but rather are forever shifting placements. The discussion of counter-narratives is ultimately a consideration of multiple layers of positioning. The fluidity of these relational categories is what lies at the center of the chapters and commentaries collected in this book. The book comprises six target chapters by leading scholars in the field. Twenty-two commentators discuss these chapters from a number of diverse vantage points, followed by responses from the six original authors. A final chapter by the editor of the book series concludes the book.

Incorporating both interview and workplace data, this book examines the discursive and social challenges that former refugees encounter as they navigate successes and failures in the New Zealand labour market. Over five chapters of microlevel discourse analysis – drawing on Bamberg & Georgakopoulou’s (2008) positioning, and interactional sociolinguistic literature – themes emerge of narrative, social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986), linguistic agency, and wider capital-D Discourses (Gee, 1990) surrounding refugeehood. Of particular interest in this study is the inclusion of a longitudinal study of former refugees’ trajectories in the labour market, and the combination of both interview and authentic workplace interactional data, providing rich insight into the multiple and ongoing challenges new arrivals face in their negotiation of employability. This book will be of interest to those engaged in research around migration (particularly those focused on forced migration), employment, language and identity, and narrative identity.

This volume presents both an analysis of how identities are built, represented and negotiated in narrative, as well as a theoretical reflection on the links between narrative discourse and identity construction. The data for the book are Mexican immigrants' personal experience narratives and chronicles of their border crossings into the United States. Embracing a view of identity as a construct firmly grounded in discourse and interaction, the author examines and illustrates the multiple threads that connect the local expression and negotiation of identity to the wider social contexts that frame the experience of migration, from material conditions of life in the United States to mainstream discourses about race and color. The analysis reveals how identities emerge in discourse through the interplay of different levels of expression, from implicit adherence to narrative styles and ways of telling, to explicit negotiation of membership categories.

This book systematically investigates intercultural experiences of Polish managers and specialists delegated by their multinational company (MNC) on an international assignment to China. The book employs narrative inquiry to explore language, intercultural communication, collaboration, learning, and expatriate adjustment in the MNC. This approach offers new insights into intercultural experiences, communication, and cultural challenges faced by an under-researched group of professionals exposed to intensive collaborations with the local managers and employees. The findings also illustrate how the expatriates learned to better navigate the multicultural and multilingual business context and what factors facilitated and inhibited their learning and adjustment. Encouraging the qualitative, context-sensitive examination of expatriate-local personnel interactions, the book will be an invaluable source for scholars and practitioners interested in, among others, novel approaches to investigating language and intercultural communication in international business, cross-cultural management, qualitative cross-cultural research, as well as for lecturers and students interested in Central Europe and China.

This book is intended for researchers in the field of narrative from post-graduate level onwards. It analyzes the audio-recordings of the narratives of former slaves from the American South which are now publically available on the Library of Congress website: Voices from the days of slavery. More specifically, this book analyses the identity work of these former slaves and considers how these identities are related to master narratives. The novelty of this book is that through using such a temporally diverse and relatively large corpus, we show how master narratives change according to both the zeitgeist of the here-and-now of the interview world and the historical period that is related in the there-and-then of the story world. Moreover, focusing on the active achievement of master narratives as socially-situated co-constructed discursive accomplishments we analyze how different, inherently unstable and even contradictory versions of master narratives are enacted.

How does narrative give shape and meaning to human life? And what special role do narratives play in identifying one as a person in the world? This book explores these questions from the vantage points of various human and cultural sciences, with special attention to the importance of narrative as expression of embodied experience, mode of communication, and form for understanding the world and ultimately ourselves. Presenting a variety of perspectives — from narrative psychology and literary criticism, to discourse, communication and cultural theory — these studies examine the intricacies of narrative identity construction. With contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field, the book highlights the cultural field in which narratives shape forms of life. Using verbal and pictorial, linguistic and performative, oral and written, natural and literary autobiographical texts, the studies demonstrate how the construction of selves, memories, and life-worlds are interwoven in one narrative fabric.

Telling stories in conversations is intricately interwoven with the interactive and local functions of story telling. Telling stories demands a certain kind of context and in itself establishes a particular interactive reality. Thus, narration is a specific kind of verbal interaction, governed by contextualizing devices, genre-specific cooperative regularities and corresponding verbal features. It plays an important role in institutional as well as in private modes of communication. The volume focuses on narration as a contextualized and contextualizing activity, which allocates specific structural tasks to the participants in the narrative process (narrator, co-narrator, listener). Thus, the research questions are oriented towards story telling under a functional and interactive perspective. The contributions analyze recordings of authentic narrations in different functions using different kinds of qualitative reconstructive methods. The data come from everyday as well as institutional settings and the languages covered are English, German, Greek, Hungarian, and Italian.

In recent years, narrative skills have been receiving increasing attention from researchers for their relevance in the development of language, literacy and socio-cognitive abilities. This volume brings together studies focusing on two key issues in the development of children’s narrative skills. The first part of the Volume addresses the issue of the interrelatedness between narrative skills and literacy, language and socio-cognitive development, as well as of the impact of narrative practices on the promotion of these different skills. The second part of the Volume addresses the issue of how early interactional experiences, particular contextual settings and specific intervention procedures, can help children promote their narrative skills.

The studies span a wide age range, from toddlers to late elementary school children, concern different languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew and Italian), and consider narrative skills and practices from a rich variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.

This book analyzes the narratives of urban, North Indian women for the diverse ways in which they construct the impact of their medium of education – Hindi, English, or a combination of both – on varied aspects of their professional and personal lives. It examines how participants reinforce or interrogate firmly entrenched power heirarchies that have long elevated English in India. Adopting a social constructionist perspective, and treating oral narratives as impacted both by local interactional contingencies and by larger social contexts, this book provides an innovative framework for the analysis of narratives told in qualitative research interviews. Stylization, mock languages, similes and metaphors, reported speech, and varied interactional cues are some of the devices used to examine the intersectioanlity of power and identity within participants’ oral narratives.The book will be of interest to scholars and students of narrative analysis, gender and identity studies, postcolonialism, and professional identity constructions of women.