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Chapter TWO Telling Stories

Chapter TWO Telling Stories. Introduction: What's narrative?.

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Chapter TWO Telling Stories

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  1. Chapter TWOTelling Stories

  2. Introduction: What's narrative? • Narrative or story is a ‘core’ structuring form, found in major literary genres, such as novels and short stories, folk tales, fairy tales and epics, as well as in other art forms, both verbal and non-verbal, such as pictures and film, ballet and mime, etc. • Basically, we use narratives to capture and encapsulate two connected scenes or situations: (a) a state, and (b) a significant change of that state.

  3. In any narrative there are always implicitat least two connected scenes, even if the earlier scene has to be inferred or reconstructed from the depiction of the later one. A slightly fuller characterization of narrative might be: A narrative is an account of a sequence of events that are perceived to be non-randomly connected, typically involving one or more humans or other participants. • We use stories to entertain each other, to explain ourselves to others and to ourselves, to distance ourselves from some people and to get closer to others . Thus storytelling is directly connected to our making and remaking of our identity and our relationships. They are also fashioned and arranged, selecting certain events and representing these from a particular perspective. Therefore, everyday storytelling is a creative activity.

  4. 1 How spoken narratives work

  5. The most natural and commonest narratives are those we produce orally , without need of any technology, about ourselves and our associates, in the course of everyday conversation. • Concerning the structure of spoken narratives, it is worth emphasizing they are associated with plurality. • The first thing William Labov emphasizes is that conversational personal narratives tend to report actions or events strictly in the order in which the events occurred.

  6. One of Labov’s key claims is that oral narratives of personal experience can have up to six basic parts: 1 Abstract: What, in a nutshell, is this story about? 2 Orientation: Who was involved, when and where was this, what had happened or was happening 3Complicatingaction:What new thing happened and then what happened after this (recurring)? 4 Evaluation: So what? How or why is this interesting? 5 Resolution: So what was the final thing that happened? 6 Coda: How does this story ‘connect’ with the speaker, or all of us, here and now?

  7. Not all of the above six elements appear in every conversational narrative, and many narratives do without one or more element without being in any way incomplete. In the stories William Labov analyzed, the one obligatory element is the complicating action , i.e. a report of something having happened. • Least required, and frequently absent, are the two, usually smaller, sections that top and tail stories, the abstract or a pre-story ‘trailer’ of what is to come, and the coda , i.e. a summing-up of the ‘moral’, of what the incident taught the teller.

  8. 2 Functions of conversational stories: art, affiliation, and identity

  9. This section investigates why a story is told, and what multiple effects a narrative story and its telling may have on both the teller and the addressees. • Implicit and explicit parts of the story. For example, a man who begins his narrative with ‘I was doing the weekly shopping with my teenage kids’ is arguably implying and performing his identity as a middle-aged parent . If you assume some contrastive identities for the speaker, i.e. elderly male, or male aged 20, the given wording is at best implausible.

  10. Narrators • The issue of identity in conversational stories is a matter of the underlying picture of the teller, their co-participants in the narrative, and their listeners, that a narrative conveys or implies. • The act and way of telling can prompt us to pay as much attention to the character or identity of the narrator as to the story itself. Often, though not always, it seems crucial to ask not just whether the narrator is reliable or not, but whether they are male or female, of one nationality or cultural background rather than another, optimist or cynic, and so on.

  11. Purposes • According to N. Real Norrick, stories may get told for purposes of very ‘local’ identity construction: to build rapport, and to show shared values. • Uniting all such re-tellings is a focus on interpersonal relations, affect or affiliation, and just how each participant’s self or identity ‘stands’ in comparison with that of other participants. Like Norrick, Schiffrin (1996) believes our narrative texts provide ‘a resource for the display of self and identity’. Consider Zelda’s story below

  12. Zelda’s story • 1 DEBBY: What does your uh daughter-in-law call you? 2 ZELDA: Well, that’s a sore spot. DEBBY: [hhhh3 ZELDA: My older daughter-in-law does call me Mom. = DEBBY: Uh huh. 4 Zelda: = My younger daughter-in-law right now is up to nothing. 5 She had said- DEBBY: Oh 6 ZELDA: We had quite a discussion about it. 7 We did bring it out in the open. 8 She said that urn ... that she — just — right now, she’s: — it’ll take her time. 9 Now they’re marrie:d, it’s gonna be uh ... I think eh five years, = • DEBBY: Uhm hmm. • 10 ZELDA: = that they’ll be married.

  13. 11 And she said that eh it was very hard t’s: — call • someone else Mom beside her mother. 12 So I had said to her, ‘That’s okay!’ 13 I said, ‘If you — if you can’t say Mom, just call me • by my first name! DEBBY: [Urnhm14 ZELDA: So, we had quite a discussion about it. 15 It was a little heated rat one time. = DEBBY: [Yeh] 16 ZELDA: She said, ‘All right,’ she’ll call me Zelda. 17 But she still can’t bring herself to say Zelda, 18 so she calls me nothing! (Adapted from Schiffrin, 1996, p. 181)

  14. Identity • To name is to characterize and to propose an identity: the daughter-in-law saying Mom proposes ‘As a first priority in our relative identities, you are my Mom and I am your daughter’; • Schiffrin [ 1999]suggests that the daughter-in-law’s resistance over naming is ‘the threat posed by someone who has already become an “insider” ... but refuses in naming behavior to act like one. Furthermore, in calling her mother-in- law by no name, the daughter creates what Schiffrin calls ‘a symbolic vacuum’ (1996, p. 190).

  15. 3 Stories as representations of experience

  16. Narratives can be seen as representations of experience; in telling stories narrators necessarily represent themselves, others, and the events they narrate, in certain ways. This is more obviously the case in narrative fiction, where writers weave a story, construct a plot and people it with characters. This is not to suggest that conversational narratives are fictions or fabrications, but that they always and necessarily present certain versions of events. Evaluation, in Labov’s sense of the term, is an important part of this process: both internal evaluation (i.e. evaluation woven into the core narrative clauses) and external evaluation (where the narrator steps outside the flow of the narrative to give an evaluation). A further type of evaluation is ‘embedded evaluation’, which occurs where a sentiment is expressed by a character in the narrative, as when a character is directly quoted (e.g. She said ‘Come over here!).

  17. Direct speech in narratives Basically, Speech representationplays an important part in literary narration, where dialogue allows readers to infer something about the characters and their perspectives on events. Something similar occurs when people’s speech is quoted. • Does direct speech contribute towards evaluation in the story? Consider the extract below [ Reading B, P.84]? • Stanza 1 (Arrival at the scene) (Orientation) 1 The police lifted the cordon 2 and we were kept back. 3 They lifted the cordon 4 and they withdrew. 5 The crowd was fairly hostile, but peaceful • 6 and I looked around 7 and the most obvious place to find eyewitnesses seemed to be in the Dairy Belle hostel, 8 because it was overlooking the actual scene, • [ Mary Bock]

  18. Mary Bock draws on Labov’s narrative structure, but follows J.P Gee in dividing the narratives into stanzas. She uses Labov’s notion of evaluation in identifying narrators’ perspectives, alongside Gee’s notion of themes that run through the narratives. • Mary Bock’s way of transcribing and representing the narratives is useful , and grouping the transcription into stanzas highlights the structure of the overarching narrative as well as the existence of internal ‘mini-narratives’ that can be analyzed in their own terms. • Considering narratives as variant representations should remind us that ‘closure’, like the truth, the facts, always turns out to be local and temporary rather than absolute: every story can be re-opened, with the facts amended or seen and interpreted differently, creating a different and more truthful and satisfying account..

  19. 4 Stories, mind and culture

  20. Since stories are representations of experience, stories can be not just tales of people and events found by the teller, but representations of people and events made by the teller. We see the world in large degree by means of the narratives we make and find and share. • Philosophers and scientists acknowledge the centrality of storytelling to what we refer to as mind, intelligence, and self-understanding (Damasio, 2000; Schank, 1995; Dennett, 1991).

  21. Implicatures / implicultures • Storytelling or narrativizing may be the key species-distinctive thing we do, the chief means by which we adapt and change, over the course of our own lifetime and as a species across the millennia. • Here Bhaya Nair underlines the universal centrality of storytelling to mind, intelligence and self-understanding, suggesting that our mental model of stories must include rules of inferencing [drawing conclusion] to make full cultural sense of the narratives we encounter. • Grice refers to underlying our interpretations of conversation : conversational implicature). But we additionally draw on rich networks of cultural assumptions-impliculturewithout which we wouldn’t see the point, get the joke or feel the resonance of very many of our everyday stories.

  22. Conversational implicature • Essential features of conversation: • ‘cooperative principle’. Speakers do this by attending to four ‘maxims’, These are known as the maxims of Quality (‘be truthful’), Quantity (‘be adequately informative’: say neither too much nor too little), Relation (‘be relevant’), and Manner (‘be brief and orderly’). The ‘all other things permitting’ qualification is important, because in many conversational situations we may want to depart from the bald, brief reply — as perhaps when a friend asks us what we think of their expensive and, to us, hideous new outfit.

  23. Violation or exploitation? • Metaphorical remarks, irony, understatement, white lies, patently oblique or tangential replies all seem to disregard Grice’s cooperative conversational maxims. However, they are better seen not as disregard for the maxims but as creative exploitations of them: the addressee knows that the speaker knows that they aren’t conforming to the Quantity (or Relation, etc.) maxim straightforwardly, and the addressee can then figure out what the speaker means, by being indirect in that way.

  24. For instance, if A says to B ‘Do you want to see that new film?’ and B responds ‘Mike’s in London this evening’, the response does not seem relevant — it flouts the Relation’ maxim’ — but it’s likely that A will be able to draw on knowledge of B’s circumstances to understand the response, say that Mike is B’s partner who would normally look after their children but can’t that evening.

  25. Tales and stories • With Bhaya Nair’s reading we have returned from the detail of Labovian formal analysis to recognising anew that narrative is a valued coping and enabling strategy for all humankind. Narratives are lamps as well as mirrors, not merely representations of one’s self and identity but explanatory representations of the world — of what is the case, and how things are. Bhaya Nair suggests that stories may be seen as ‘memes’, passing on cultural ideas and understandings, and also that they are ‘central to [our] being’, helping to produce a unified sense of self.

  26. Conclusion

  27. In this chapter I have introduced a Labovian analysis of narratives of personal experience, highlighting how such conversational stories recurrently fit an implicit structure — with orientation, complicating action, and resolution as formally and semantically distinct core elements — over which evaluation material is laid so as to dramatise and intensify the story, underlining its point or tellability.

  28. We have seen that stories need not be new and that they may have a range of interactional functions, such as affirming shared values or solidarity (Norrick). Bhaya Nair reminds us: If you are not a member of the particular culture from which a story emerges, you should be careful not to assume you frilly grasp a story’s resonances. Besides filling in a story’s verbal gaps (‘implicature’), we need to know its explanatory cultural background (‘impliculture’), so culturally deep that it may get lost in translation.

  29. In terms of the distinction made in Chapter 1 between textual and contextual approaches to the study of creativity in language, Labov’s analysis is textual, looking at narrative structure, or the formal properties of stories. The perspectives of different narrators and how these are shaped by social and political contexts. Norrick and Schiffrin consider how stories are told and how they may be understood in particular family settings. Bhaya Nair extends the notion of context to take into account the broader relationship between narrative and culture.

  30. Creative language use is deep at the core of our language uses and is not just an exceptional decoration; it is a means by which we adjust and adapt to changing circumstances, meet new challenges and needs, and make renewed sense of our lives.

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