16.3039, Review: Discourse: Quasthoff & Becker (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3039. Fri Oct 21 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3039, Review: Discourse: Quasthoff & Becker (2005)

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1)
Date: 19-Oct-2005
From: Olga Levitski < levitski at yorku.ca >
Subject: Narrative Interaction 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:48:56
From: Olga Levitski < levitski at yorku.ca >
Subject: Narrative Interaction 
 

EDITORS: Quasthoff, Uta M.; Becker, Tabea
TITLE: Narrative Interaction
SERIES: Studies in Narrative 5
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins 
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-864.html 

Olga Levitski, Department of Linguistics, York University, Toronto, Canada.

PURPOSE

This book comprises studies on narrative as a prototypical form of human 
communication. The book introduces various approaches to narratives. It 
deals with both theoretical and empirical issues. The book is a valuable 
addition to the constantly growing body of narrative research. The volume 
offers a multidimensional approach to the narrative in its diversity, 
created by interactional reality in the various languages and contexts. 
The volume focuses on narration as a contextualized and contextualizing 
activity, which allocates to the participants the roles of a narrator, co-
narrator, and listener. The presented articles are oriented towards 
functional and interactive perspectives on oral narrating in face-to-face 
interaction, which should be distinguished from written or literary story-
telling. While most of the research is focused on the prototype narrative, 
the present collection emphasizes the fact that this type of narrative is 
not very frequent in everyday conversation. The value of this volume is in 
that the data come from both everyday and institutional interactions.

CONTENT

The book is organized in three parts. Following a brief introductory 
chapter, Part I, Acquiring the world through narrative interaction, 
consists of four chapters that explore the various aspects of narrative 
interactions among young children and adolescents. Part II, The co-
construction of narratives, consists of three chapters that investigate 
the role the narratives play in construction and representation of 
personal and professional experience, focusing on their collaborative 
dimension. Part III, Retold stories, consists of four chapters, which 
examine shared narratives that shape and transform collective experiences 
and memories in both personal and institutional domains.

Chapter 1. Introduction: Tabea Becker and Uta M. Quasthoff, Different 
dimensions in the field of narrative interaction, pp. 1-11.
This chapter introduces the aims of the presented studies, their 
theoretical and methodological background, and theoretical framework. It 
can serve as a starting point to anyone interested in narrative 
interaction, providing a thorough review of the recent literature on 
narratives, its critical evaluation, and outline for prospective studies. 
This chapter is theoretical in focus. The authors attempt to systematize 
the field of narrative research by proposing a model that differentiates 
between the various concepts of narrative. The proposed model reconciles 
micro- and macro-structural approaches to narratives, and demonstrates the 
importance of considering both approaches in conjunction and not in 
dichotomy. The authors point out that most of the narrative research is 
shifted towards one of the extremes of their model, focussing on either 
basic research into narrative or its cultural semiotic extension. However, 
the authors argue that two concepts of narratives are intertwined, and the 
micro-structural research on narratives can shed light on macro-structural 
societal mechanisms and processes.

Part I. Acquiring the world through narrative interaction
Chapter 2. Friederike Kern and Uta M. Quasthoff, Fantasy stories and 
conversational narratives of personal experience: Genre-specific, 
interactional and developmental perspectives, pp. 15-56.
This chapter contrasts different narrative genres in child-adult 
interaction, showing how both narrator and listener follow genre-specific 
narrative patterns. It explores the process of acquisition of narrative 
skills by children. It shows how the adults provide dialogic support, 
helping children acquire the skills required for successful completion of 
a story-telling task. The results of the study can be interpreted from a 
genre-specific and interactional point of view, which are mutually 
related. The genre-specific requirements lead to particular interactional 
moves by the participants. Sequential organization of a narrative 
interaction based on a personal experience is similar to that based on the 
fantasy stories only when listeners play an active role in the 
interaction. Without the listener's interactive support, there are clear 
differences in the two narrative genres.

Chapter 3. Richard Sohmer and Sarah Michaels, The "Two-Puppies" Story: 
The role of narrative in teaching and learning science, pp. 57-91.
This chapter is applied in focus. It studies narratives from the didactic 
perspective. The authors show how the narratives used in a classroom help 
students reorganize perception and develop a scientific approach to the 
subjects they narrate about. The narratives help students mediate between 
the everyday reality and the abstract physical concepts, transforming the
mysterious world of physics into the realm of familiar experience. 
Students, who otherwise have difficulty in understanding complex concepts, 
get a better grasp of science through narrating stories.

Chapter 4. Tabea Becker, The role of narrative interaction in narrative 
development, pp. 93-111.
This chapter focuses on the development of textual structures. There are 
several stages in the process of developing narrative structures, in which 
only certain narrative genre, namely personal experience, is tied to an 
interactional development, while others are not. The study uses the genres 
of picture story, retold narrative, fantasy story and personal narrative. 
It demonstrates that the different narrative genres reflect different 
patterns and processes of acquisition. The study results in the model of 
the developmental process of structuring personal experience. Since 
children narrate personal experience in the context of conversations, they 
rely on interactional resources. This process is different from narrating 
fantasy stories, in which the participants draw on the previously known 
narrative texts. Therefore, in studying the narrative development, it is 
important to differentiate between the narrative genres.

Chapter 5. Rebecca Branner, Humorous disaster and success stories among 
female adolescents in Germany, pp. 113-147.
This chapter examines humorous strategies and sociolinguistic functions of 
girls' disaster and success stories. It shows how humour is linguistically 
produced, and supports the view that it shapes the group culture. The data 
presented in this chapter confirm the previous findings: similarly to the 
adult women, adolescent girls frequently transform their misfortunes into 
humorous narratives. Such psychologically difficult events as embarrassing 
and dramatic episodes are retold in a humorous manner, which helps 
distance the narrator and the listeners from the negative experience. 
Similarly to the previous studies, the author finds that success stories 
occur in conversations of female adolescents very infrequently.

Part II. The co-construction of narratives. 
Chapter 6. Eszter Beran and Zsolt Unoka, Construction of self-narrative in 
a psychotherapeutic setting: An analysis of the mutual determination of 
narrative perspective taken by patient and therapist, pp. 151-167.
This chapter uses narratives for therapeutic purposes, showing how self-
identity is constructed through narratives in patient-therapist 
interactions. The narratives here are used to unfold the patient's 
biographical memory. This approach can be especially helpful while 
treating patients with multiple personality disorders. Narrative 
perspective in psychoanalytic sessions helps reveal the fact that the 
various isolated self-states are constructed interactively, and are tied 
to certain interacting partners. The use of the narrative perspective 
during psychoanalytical sessions helps the patients unite their isolated 
self-narratives, and to shift their self-perception.

Chapter 7. Vera John-Steiner, Christopher Shank and Teresa Meehan, The 
role of metaphor in the narrative co-construction of collaborative 
experience, pp. 169-195.
The authors of this chapter use a broader socio-semiotic approach to 
narratives in studying professional and academic collaborative 
experiences. Their analysis of discourse patterns and metaphors reveals 
the dominance of conceptual schemas related to motion and journey. The 
authors find gender differences in representation patterns in terms of 
type, frequency, and distribution of metaphors used in conversations about 
collaborative experiences. This analysis provides insights into the 
visual, kinesthetic, and verbal modes of thought, showing how 
collaborators progress with their thinking and develop ideas. The study 
shows how inner thoughts become more substantial when they are 
communicated to the research partners in the shared working space.

Chapter 8. Chiara Monzoni, The use of interjections in Italian 
conversation: The participation of the audience in narratives, pp. 197-220.
This chapter is focused on how narratives are co-constructed by 
interactants in spontaneous conversations. The author uses the 
Conversation Analysis approach in order to study the distribution of 
interactional roles: teller, co-teller, and recipient. The study shows 
that these roles can change from those established at the beginning of the 
telling, because they are constantly negotiated during the narrative 
process. Story-telling is an activity in which all the interactants 
equally participate and take active stances through the use of 
interventions. The original text can be co-authored because the narrative 
activity is collaborative. Therefore, in studying narratives, it is 
important to take into account the speakers' roles in conversation.

Part III. Retold Stories.
Chapter 9. Alexandra Georgakopoulos, Same old story? On the interactional 
dynamics of shared narratives, pp. 223-241.
This chapter deals with shared and familiar narratives found in informal 
context in Greece. The author argues that the shared stories are different 
from the prototypical personal story of past events in floor-bidding and 
floor-holding arrangements. Three ways of initiating shared stories are 
identified: elicitation, preface, and reference. They implicate three 
points of the continuum, from a full retelling to a mini-telling and quick 
allusion. The choice of way of initiating the shared narrative depends on 
the participants, who range from unknowing to those actively involved in 
the local interactional reality. Narrating shared stories relates to the 
local contexts, and suits local purposes. As such, the shared narratives 
can be a source for studying the shared assumptions, a process of 
appropriation of collective experiences, and stylization.

Chapter 10. Jenny Cook-Gumperz, Institutional memories: the narrative 
retelling of a professional life, pp. 243-261.
This chapter demonstrates how narratives can be used in order to study the 
process of individual positioning towards institutions. Narratives in the 
institutional context prove to be a powerful semiotic and social 
instrument for displaying attitudes and values. Although narrative 
retelling of a professional life reflects the collective institutional 
memory, the narrator selects details and frames the events in a specific 
way. During a narrative interaction, the shared memory is constructed. The 
narrative bears traces of institutional thinking: the narrator's 
classification and evaluation of the way his professional institution 
functions comply with his professional role and identity in this very 
institution. At the same time, the participation and empathy of the 
audience constitute a very important aspect of the narrative interaction.

Chapter 11. Neal R. Norrick, Interaction in the telling and retelling of 
interlaced stories: The co-construction of humorous narratives, pp. 263-
283.
This chapter presents an applied "linguistic" approach to narratives, 
revealing its role in the identity formation. It focuses on the 
interaction of participants during the telling and retelling of interlaced 
stories on marriage proposals. The study offers an opportunity to observe 
how the tellers negotiate their interactive roles in the conversation, how 
they decide where, when, and to which extent their perspective should be 
introduced. The author offers a viewpoint on a process of narrative and 
conversational accommodation of the speakers during the narration 
of "practised" stories. This process is interactive, because the narrators 
reconceptualize the retold events using the inputs they receive from the 
participants.

Chapter 12. Susanne Günthner, Narrative reconstruction of past 
experiences: Adjustments and modifications in the process of 
recontextualizing a past experience, pp. 285-301.
This chapter explores the process of decontextualization of past 
experience from its original perception to the new one, which is produced 
in a communicative context. The analysis of the original interaction and 
its different narrative reconstructions reveals the fact that the speaker 
presents the past events in the different ways, adjusting them to the 
communicative situation, communicative aims, and inputs received from the 
participants. Complaint stories provide a particularly rich material for 
narrative reconstructions, because they recontextualize past experience in 
the socio-communicative present time. Narrating about past experience, 
speakers highlight different details and aspects, and stylize the 
antagonists in different ways. The study shows that narratives found in 
everyday settings are dialogic and multivocal.

EVALUATION

The book offers a unique perspective on narratives, that bridges two 
main approaches: linguistic and cultural-semiotic. The authors see 
narrative as an interactive process, i.e., basic human activity, and its 
product, the actual narrative text. The merit of this book is in combining 
the micro, linguistic, level of analysis of particular narrative texts or 
events, with the macro, socio-semiotic level. Bridging these two 
approaches allows for studying the narratives in their social context, and 
as a cognitive mechanism. In this collection of articles, narratives are 
presented in a variety of forms, from stories told by the children aged 5-
6, to conversations of scientists.

As this collection demonstrates, narrative is an invaluable tool for 
investigating the various social and psychological phenomena. The volume 
shows that the narrative as a cognitive concept and narrative interaction 
are intricately interwoven: studying narratives can shed light on the ways 
the self is negotiated and understood in each particular interaction. As 
shown in the articles by E. Beran & Z. Unoka, J. Cook-Gumperz, R. Branner 
and S. Günthner, the narrative activity helps construct, shape and 
maintain the reality. It also influences self-perception and identity 
formation, because the self is fluid and socially constructed in each 
particular interaction: "Identity is the product rather than the source of 
linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and 
cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon." 
(Bucholtz & Hall 2005: 585)

Narrative is multifunctional, i.e. it may serve as a mechanism for dealing 
with painful episodes, but at the same time, it may reinforce the negative 
past experiences. Therefore, understanding the cognitive mechanism of 
reproducing the past events through talk can be especially helpful for 
therapeutic purposes. In general, the reviewed volume offers a valuable 
insight into the applied field of narrative research, for example, for 
didactic purposes. In the articles by R. Sohmer & S. Michaels, and by V. 
John-Steiner, C. Shank & T. Meehan, the narrative is understood as a mode 
for clarifying meaning (Cazden & Hymes 1978).

Although it is impossible to embrace all the existing approaches to 
narrative in one volume, the collection would have benefited from a 
discourse analytical perspective, because language is a key mechanism of 
cultural reproduction. (Ries 1997)

REFERENCES

Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005) Identity and Interaction: A sociocultural 
linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4-5): 585-614.

Cazden, C. and Hymes, D. (1978) Narrative thinking and story-telling 
rights: a folklorist's clue to a critique of education. Keystone folklore 
22(1-2): 21-35.

Ries, N. (1997) Russian talk: culture and conversation during Perestroika. 
Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Olga Levitski has a MA degree from St-Petersburg State University, where 
she specialized in folklore, and MA in theoretical linguistics from York 
University of Toronto. Her main interests are discourse analysis, 
sociolinguistics, and folklore. At the moment she is working on 
plurilingual codeswitching; this also involves fieldwork conducting 
sociolinguistic interviews (data collection, transcription and analysis).





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