Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life

by Schiffrin, Deborah; De Fina, Anna; Nylund, Anastasia

• ISBN13: 9781589016293
• ISBN10: 1589016297
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-03-15
• Publisher: Georgetown Univ Pr

Summary

Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history. In Telling Stories leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, interaction, society, and culture; and they investigate various settings such as therapeutic and medical encounters, educational environments, politics, media, marketing, and public relations. They analyze a variety of topics from the narrative construction of self and identity to the telling of stories in different media and the roles that small and big life stories play in everyday social interactions and institutions. These new reflections on the theory and analysis of narrative offer the latest tools to researchers in the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

Author Biography

Deborah Schiffrin is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is the author of In Other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative. Anna De Fina is ah associate professor in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. She is the author of Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse. Anastasia Nylund is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Where Should I Begin?	p. 7
The Remediation of Storytelling: Narrative Performance on Early Commercial Sound Recordings	p. 23
Narrative, Culture, and Mind	p. 45
Positioning as a Metagrammar for Discursive Story Lines	p. 51
“Ay Ay Vienen Estos Juareños”: On the Positioning of Selves through Code Switching by Second-Generation Immigrant College Students	p. 57
A Tripartite Self-Construction Model of Identity	p. 69
Narratives of Reputation: Layerings of Social and Spatial Identities	p. 83
Identity Building through Narratives on a Tulu Call-in TV Show	p. 95
Blank Check for Biography? Openness and Ingenuity in the Management of the “Who-Am-I Question” and What Life Stories Actually May Not Be Good For	p. 109
Reflection and Self-Disclosure from the Small Stories Perspective: A Study of Identity Claims in Interview and Conversational Data	p. 123
Negotiating Deviance: Identity, Trajectories, and Norms in a Graffitist's Interview Narrative	p. 135
Interaction and Narrative Structure in Dementia	p. 149
Concurrent and intervening Actions during Storytelling in Family “Ceremonial” Dinners	p. 161
Truth and Authorship in Textual Trajectories	p. 173
Legitimation and the Heteroglossic Nature of Closing Arguments	p. 181
Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives	p. 195
The Role of Style Shifting in the Functions and Purposes of Storytelling: Detective Stories in Anime	p. 209
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