This chapter teases out key developments in discourse studies that have involved a radical rethinking of how stories and identities are being conceptualized and studied. First, we focus on how the role of the teller has been rethought by discussing the shift to interactional approaches to identities (cf. identities-in-interaction), including positioning analysis and small stories research. We then discuss how the personal story and story ownership have been reconceptualized with a focus on the uses and mobilization of stories in public arenas, especially politics. Third, we move to the reexamining of the role of space in the constitution of identities in stories, by focusing on work on mobile and migrant populations and on chronotopes as a concept increasingly employed for exploring the contextualization of stories. Finally, we discuss the implications of digital environments and media affordances, including the actual design and “curation” of stories, for how we tell stories and present ourselves online.

Preface

Writing this book has been a wonderful, even though somewhat humbling experience. The idea for the volume was born out of a need for a language and discourse-oriented introduction to the field that we had identified as scholars and, more importantly, as teachers of narrative. We both felt that, although scholars from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, social and discursive psychology, just to name some of the fields covered in this book, had produced a vast body of research and theoretical reflection on narrative, a comprehensive and critical evaluation of their work was lacking. This was in stark contrast to the proliferation of textbooks and resource books that present sociological, cultural studies and literary approaches to narrative. Our aim was to redress the balance by highlighting the specificities of a language and discourse-focused perspective on narrative but also its important place within the narrative turn in the social sciences.

The journey of writing this book involved a great deal of discussion, reflection and rethinking as we navigated our way within a body of research that tends to be fragmented and dispersed and as, in the process, we had to make difficult decisions of selection, representation and even “construction” of coherence. Most of our transatlantic exchanges were made possible by the affordances of new technologies (with skyping playing a major role!), but this distance factor made the occasional face-to-face interactions even more rewarding and hugely anticipated. In the process of this intense intellectual engagement, not only did we need to rethink issues and questions posed by the book’s organization, but we also needed to explore meeting points in terms of our dissimilar “narrative” experiences and backgrounds, which had shaped our views about how to conceive of and analyze narratives. At the end of this process, we feel we have fundamentally grown together.

Introduction

The study of narratives in a wide range of everyday contexts has led researchers to challenge the focus of post-Labovian research on monologic teller-led stories that were recounted to compliant and mostly silent audiences in interviews and instead to emphasize the complexity and variability of storytelling formats, their dependence on the local context of interaction, and the important role played by participant structures in their production and reception. In this chapter, we focus on stories as interactional achievements, and we therefore stress the significance of participation structure and of the conversational work done in the moment-by-moment unfolding of a story’s telling. Our aim is to show how studies of storytelling have gradually moved from tellers to tellership and from story as a product to storytelling as a process. We will discuss ways in which storytellers launch, sustain and end narratives in interaction, and illustrate the role of storytellers and audiences in the unfolding of stories. In particular, we will analyze the kinds of problems that storytelling poses to tellers and audiences, the many ways in which reactions from an audience may affect storytelling, and the variability in roles that can be taken up by participants in a storytelling event.

To this effect, we will engage with research that has unpacked simple notions of teller and audience, demonstrating the existence of much more complex participation frameworks in narrative events. We will also discuss the notion of telling rights as central to an understanding of different participant configurations in specific storytelling contexts. In the second part of the chapter, we will illustrate how looking at storytelling as an interactional phenomenon necessarily leads to a recognition of the variability in storytelling formats. We will therefore discuss different story types that depart from the structure of the prototypical narrative, and we will review small stories research as an attempt to unify efforts at broadening the scope of narrative analysis. As we will see, the questions that form the core of this chapter have been investigated mostly within the domain of conversational narratives. That said, scholars studying elicited narratives have also recognized the need to take into account their interactional characteristics (e.g. Baker and Johnson 2000; Mishler 1986; Riessman 1991) and therefore to problematize the sharp division between conversational and interview stories.