Telling Stories

Language, Narrative, and Social Life

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

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781589016293
• eBook ISBN: 9781589016743
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Where Should I Begin?
• Chapter 2. The Remediation of Storytelling: Narrative Performance on Early Commercial Sound Recordings
• Chapter 3. Narrative, Culture, and Mind
• Chapter 4. Positioning as a Metagrammar for Discursive Story Lines
• Chapter 5. “Ay Ay Vienen Estos Juareños”: On the Positioning of Selves through Code Switching by Second-Generation Immigrant College Students
• Chapter 6. A Tripartite Self-Construction Model of Identity
• Chapter 7. Narratives of Reputation: Layerings of Social and Spatial Identities
• Chapter 8. Identity Building through Narratives on a Tulu Call-in TV Show
• Chapter 9. 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
• Chapter 10. Reflection and Self-Disclosure from the Small Stories Perspective: A Study of Identity Claims in Interview and Conversational Data
• Chapter 11. Negotiating Deviance: Identity, Trajectories, and Norms in a Graffitist’s Interview Narrative
• Chapter 12. Interaction and Narrative Structure in Dementia
• Chapter 13. Concurrent and Intervening Actions during Storytelling in Family “Ceremonial” Dinners
• Chapter 14. Truth and Authorship in Textual Trajectories
• Chapter 15. Legitimation and the Heteroglossic Nature of Closing Arguments
• Chapter 16. Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives
• Chapter 17. The Role of Style Shifting in the Functions and Purposes of Storytelling: Detective Stories in Anime