Book review: ALEXANDRA GEORGAKOPOULOU, Small Stories,401 Citations (original) (raw)

Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices

Text & Talk - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies, 2000

The point of departure for this special issue is the recent shift within discourse and sociolinguistic narrative analysis from a long-standing conception of (oral, cf. natural, nonliterary) narrative as a well-defined and delineated genre with an identifiable structure toward the exploration of the multiplicity, fragmentation, and irreducible situatedness of its forms and functions in a wide range of social arenas. We can refer to this shift as a move away from narrative as text (i.e., defined on the basis of textual criteria and primarily studied for its textual make-up) to narrative as practice within social interaction. For a lot of the work here, context remains a key concept and although there is an undeniably long-standing tradition of contextualized studies of narrative (e.g., ethnography of communication in studies such as Bauman 1986 and Hymes 1981, among others) there are distinct elements in this latest shift that in our view qualify it as a 'new' turn to narrative:

Selves and identities in narrative and discourse

Journal of Pragmatics, 2009

The present volume comprises several contributions to the study of 'self' and 'identity', two notions that in the last decade have become central in many research areas. In Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse three different orientations are represented: the first is rooted in sociolinguistics, the second is ethnomethodologically informed, and the third one draws explicitly on narratives. Despite working in different traditions, the contributions to the volume share the view that self and identity are not essential properties of the individual person but are constituted in talk and social practice. The volume contains an introduction, in which the editors explicate the three different orientations, 13 chapters, and a subject index. According to the editors, in the sociolinguistic tradition, with the exception of Hymes and maybe Labov, narratives were not, until recently, acknowledged as a special genre for identity analysis. Rather, identity was considered to be the result of repeated choices in language use-as the work of Tabouret-Keller and Gumperz demonstrates. In the ethnomethodological tradition, the issue of identity is variously treated. More specifically, Sacks' approach to ''category bound activities'' uses membership categorization analysis (MCA) to explore identities; on the other hand, Critical Discourse Analysis views identities as aspects of larger political and ideological contexts, while conversation analysis (CA) examines identities as locally and situationally occasioned. Finally, narrative approaches take narratives to be the privileged genre for the study of selves and identities and the ordering principle that gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless life. What unifies the chapters of the volume is, according to the editors, the view of narratives as territories where ''identity ontologies'' can be questioned and the conviction that the discursive and narrative processes generating identities are parts of interactive and ''communal'' practices. Amanda Minks' chapter ('Goblins like to hear stories: Miskitu children's narratives of spirit encounters') examines interactive stories told by Miskitu children on Corn Island. Minks focuses on the poetic features, the rhetorical organization, and the social effects of the narratives, suggesting that the children's co-constructed narratives articulate a sense of emplacement in the natural/social/cosmological world. By telling stories and interweaving spirits, landscapes, and known social networks Miskitu children position themselves in a social world that is their own. The second contribution ('Storying as becoming: identity through the telling of conversion') by Cecilia Castillo Ayometzi investigates how Mexicans of an immigrant community come to appropriate and sustain an alternative identity-a ''Christian identity''-brought about through their active participation in a Baptist mission. The tool available for the maintenance of this new identity is a story of conversion, through which tellers reorganize their conception of self and are led into the construction of a collective identity that offers a desirable standing in the community. Catherine Evans Davies ('Language and identity in discourse in the American South: sociolinguistic repertoire as expressive resource in the presentation of self') uses an interactional sociolinguistic methodology to study the style shifting of self-defined ''bidialectal'' speakers of Southern American English. Davies explores the ''reflectivity'' (a cover term for consciousness and awareness) of speakers, demonstrating that there are differing degrees of awareness and differing degrees of ability to shift styles out of context. She also examines the agency of speakers, indicating that differences can be found not only in shifting styles for the presentation of self, but also in crafting a style on the basis of ideological beliefs about Southern English. Isabella Paoletti and Greer Cavallaro Johnson, in their chapter 'Doing being ordinary in an interview narrative with a second generation Italian-Australian woman', combine narrative analysis with a CA approach. The researchers www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma