Date: 06-Feb-2006
From: Don Walicek <walicekalumni.utexas.net>
Subject: The Sociolinguistics of Narrative
EDITORS: Thornborrow, Joanna; Coates, Jennifer TITLE: The Sociolinguistics of Narrative SERIES: Studies in Narrative PUBLISHER: John Benjamins Publishing Company YEAR: 2005 Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2002.html
Don E. Walicek, The University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras
DESCRIPTION:
This edited volume is the sixth work in a series on narrative published by John Benjamins. It builds on existing scholarship indicating that narrative is central to social interaction. Exploring the ''pervasive role of narrative in our everyday life,'' the book includes thirteen chapters that discuss the structure and function of storytelling from a sociolinguistic perspective. In addition to addressing theoretical and cultural issues, this text examines oral narratives associated with the media, the court room, educational institutions, and the workplace.
SYNOPSIS:
The first chapter is entitled 'The Sociolinguistics of Narrative: Identity, Performance and Culture.' Written by the editors, it addresses some of the questions ''left implicit whenever stories are brought within the analytic frame of sociolinguistics'' (1). These concern: the meaning of story, the use of narrative as a descriptive term, how context affects the production and shape of stories, the core elements of narrative as a discursive unit / interactional resource, and the relationship between situated narrative discourse and the construction of cultural identities. Thornborrow and Coates draw attention to two themes that tie together the book's contents: the tellability of stories and the differences between individual and community-based approaches to narrative. In addition, this chapter refers to seminal theoretical work in the study of narrative, reviewing key concepts from Labov and Waletzky (1967) and Labov (1972).
Chapter 2, 'Narrative as a Resource in Accounts of the Experience of Illness' by Jenny Cheshire and Sue Ziebland, examines the life story in the context of narratives. The chapter focuses on the testimonies of two individuals who see their struggles with hypertension very differently. One considers herself a typical patient and notes that her illness tends to affect ''someone like myself;'' the other considers herself atypical, pointing out that the condition in question does not affect ''the real me.'' Comparing these points of view leads the authors to see them as ''an important resource for people who have to adjust to living with a chronic condition, helping to reinforce the strategies they have developed in order to cope with the everyday demands of the condition'' (40).
Chapter 3 presents 'Storying East-German Pasts: Memory Discourses and Narratives of Readjustment on the German / Polish and former German / German Border' by Heidi Armbruster and Ulrike H. Meinhof. In order to explore the communication strategies of people who endure major political and historical change (in this case, in Guben on the Polish-German border and a cluster of villages in Thuringia), the researchers used symbolically significant photographs as ''communication triggers'' in interviews conducted between 1999 and 2000. The authors interpret their data in terms of models of identity which postulate that crucial aspects of self-experience are constituted not outside, but within narrative. Armbruster and Meinhof argue that practices of self-representation are practices of memory, that narratives are simultaneously a means of reflecting on and reshaping the past.
Chapter 4, written by Nikolas Coupland, Peter Garrett, and Angie Williams, discusses narratives of personal experience that teenage boys shared in classrooms in Wales. The essay achieves two main goals: first, it demonstrates why researchers' commentaries should be integrated alongside evaluative data from the community studied; and second, it shows that the successful telling of stories depends on locally operative norms of production and interpretation. This work contains a valuable theoretical section that expounds the distinction between 'talk' and 'performance.' Referring to Bauman (1992), the authors formulate a list of seven criteria that define performance as a ''focusing of communicative events.'' They draw attention to processes by which stories are ''entextualised'' (put into text at the time told) and ''decontextualised'' (in a sense ''packaged'' as ''to go'' items), turning to Bauman and Briggs (1990).
The next chapter is 'Masculinity, Collaborative Narration and the Heterosexual Couple' by Jennifer Coates. The subject here is co- narration, collaboratively produced conversation, for which Coates identifies three key features: repetition, joint utterance construction, and overlapping speech. Based on her observation that male speakers in single-sex groups prefer solo narration, the author differentiates men who participate in collaborative narrative from ''new men;'' she describes the former as speakers who perform heterosexuality and ''(hegemonic) masculinity'' (105).
Two contributions address the notion of context. The sixth chapter, 'Contextualizing and Recontextualizing Interlaced Stories in Conversation,' is written by Neal R. Norrick. The author examines two interlaced stories, which he sees as examples of a type of narrative sequencing and co-narration in which participants speak of interrelated events. Focusing on ''... the contextualization and subsequent recontextualization in the telling of these stories...,'' (109) he situates this sub-genre in terms of his previous work on humour in these same stories (Norrick 2005) and ''story-telling rights'' (Shuman 1986, Blum-Kulka 1993). Next, in 'Hearing Voices,' Dick Leith discusses evasion and self-disclosure in an individual's narratives of alcohol addiction. The discussion centers largely on two transcribed narratives, but also integrates elements of ethnography and autobiography. Leith argues that listeners ''... as well as narrators, have biographies, and that the issue of identity for both is a fluid and multi-layered one'' (143).
The following two essays deal with the stories preschoolers tell. Chapter 8 is 'Modes of Meaning Making in Young Children's Conversation Storytelling' by Shoshana Blum-Kulka. It describes narratives recorded in a preschool in Jerusalem. The author argues that peer talk should be understood as a ''double opportunity space'' (150) in which talk functions simultaneously in two distinct spaces: in this case the first (''socio-cultural arena'') is a space unique to the culture of youth, while the second (''discursive arena'') is a testing ground of sorts through which children eventually acquire adult-like uses of language that include narrative conventions. Chapter 9 is written by Amy Sheldon and Heidi Engstrom. Entitled 'Two Systems of Mutual Engagement,' it describes the co-construction of gendered narrative styles among Midwestern North American four and five year olds. The authors focus on ''unsupervised spontaneous pretend play'' (174) among two same-sex groups, one female and one male. Sheldon and Engstrom point to differences in examples of performance, but argue against the idea that these gendered processes are mutually exclusive and correlate with a single gender.
Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra present their study of workplace narratives in Chapter 10. Probing the ideological significance of talk, their work contextualizes six anecdotes alongside a discussion of the professional identities of two managers. Holmes and Marra find that these anecdotes ''... often complexify and humanise the standard professional identity constructed by workplace managers, ... providing a more personal perspective than the standard institutional discourse allows'' (210). They describe these data, which contrast with more focused ''business talk,'' as relatively unique, comparatively compressed, and structurally minimal.
Sandra Harris leads readers to the courtroom in Chapter 11, 'Telling stories and giving evidence.' The author examines narrative and narrative structure in a 1997 sexual assault trial. Special attention is given to: ''the intermingling of narrative and non-narrative modes of discourse'' and the pressure (e.g., pressure on prosecuting lawyers) ''to construct witness narratives as a powerful and persuasive way of achieving a measure of discourse coherence'' in light of the anti-narrative mode of much trial language (217). Harris reviews previous work on narrative and points to ways in which different participants characterize narrative differently (e.g., judges vs. witnesses).
The topic of Chapter 12 is television news. In it Martin Montgomery identifies a number of problems that arise when this discourse genre is analyzed within a narrative framework. Discussing concepts such as tense, textual cohesion, and principles of intelligibility, he holds that television news only intermittently relies on narrative. Montgomery argues that a large amount of news reporters' discourse should be classified as 'commentary.' An appendix includes transcripts of data, most of which are from BBC broadcasts.
Chapter 13 by Terry Threadgold juxtaposes an overview of the previous chapters with a discussion of questions that arise when they are considered as a whole. Pulling from the work of Bourdieu (1990) in assessing the collection, he writes that telling stories ''seems to be an important part of the way in which the habitus is negotiated and thus of the way in which the social is embodied, enacted and remade'' (263). This concluding essay includes provocative commentary on performativity, genre, the significance of micro-level analysis, as well as an engaging account of Threadgold's work on refugee and asylum issues in Great Britain. The author's research on the later topic includes: the organization of a group to monitor the media's representation of asylum / refugee issues and the establishment of a creative writing and media literacy classroom project. These two examples show that narrative can be ''used for radical interventions of a kind which do not just analyse narratives in particular social contexts but also rewrite them in order to change the dominant kinds of social realities and selves (habitus) which they produce'' (264).
CRITICAL EVALUATION
Unmistakably, this text makes an impressive and significant contribution to the study of narrative. Each of the book's well-written chapters strikes an impressive balance between the need to support research with empirical data and the importance of relating an argument to relevant theoretical concerns. Those interested in the analysis of narrative will be undoubtedly delighted by this publication. The volume identifies a number of ways in which the study of narrative relates to research in other fields (e.g., linguistic anthropology, gender studies, critical discourse analysis, history). Cheshire and Ziebland, for example, illuminate connections between narratives about the body and work in the health field. Accordingly, this study will be of wide appeal, attracting readers with interests in areas such as sociolinguistics, forensic linguistics, and theories of identity and performance.
With respect to technical matters, the book's index does not do justice to the rich content found between its covers. While adequate as a subject index, the names of researchers mentioned in the text are completely absent from it, even those whose work receives substantial emphasis (e.g., William Labov, Judith Butler, Roland Barthes). An index that included authors' names would make information easier to locate and identify areas of overlap between chapters. In addition, the works by Hayden White and Herrnstein Smith that Threadgold refers to are missing from the bibliography (261). On a more positive note, the book has few typographical errors and is written in a clear and concise manner that makes it appropriate for those new to the field as well as for more seasoned scholars.
As I reread the first chapter several times, a certain statement jumps out at me, ''... the issues that seem to us to be central to work on narrative at this time are issues that are highly salient in sociolinguistics in general'' (14). This may be fair as an overview of some of the work in these two fields; however, as has been noted by Rickford (2001), assumptions about what count as relevant and how researchers study language depend significantly on how the enterprise or goal of sociolinguistics is interpreted. In his words, ''Labovian, Hymesian, and Couplandian conceptions of this are different'' (221).
An example of one place that this might be of relevance is Chapter 5's discussion of the co-construction of stories. Referring to her data, Coates tells us the ''[m]ixed conversations are full of collaborative narration, involving heterosexual couples, male and female friends, fathers and daughters, mothers and male family members, as well as mothers and daughters, sisters, female friends'' (105). She observes that her data do not reveal examples of men collaborating with other men to produce a narrative. According to the author, ''Heterosexuality is at the heart of dominant versions of masculinity, so when male speakers perform the heterosexual couple through co-narration with a female partner, they are also performing hegemonic masculinity.'' She argues that these speakers perform a hegemonic masculinity which has heterosexuality, and possibly the fear of being identified as gay, at its heart (105).
As I understand it, Coates suggests that the absence of a certain pattern of interaction (i.e., men telling stories together in the presence of women) is best accounted for by a subset of data (i.e., collaborative narratives among heterosexual couples) and its links to hegemonic interpretations of masculinity. Might a wider discussion of collaboration, one that included a discussion of duetting in male- female non-couples and in all male groups, be insightful here? Moreover, a discussion of ''hierarchies of precedence among components'' (Hymes 1972) could address how factors such as setting, participants, and topic inform the phenomenon of collaborative narration, perhaps even leading to insight on instances in which norms for collaboration and performing gender are resisted, forgotten, or altogether ignored. I sense in the volume a general reluctance to juxtapose sharply different points of view within individual chapters (one exception is Montgomery's Chapter 12).
In addition, it seems that the assessment of the interface between sociolinguistics and narrative studies gives little attention to a number of arguably devastating critiques of sociolinguistic theories and methodologies (Cameron 1990, Harris 1980, 1981, Romaine 1984, Singh 1996). While metacritique in sociolinguistics goes unmentioned in a number of recent overviews of work in sociolinguistics, I consider it ''highly salient'' and believe that they have much to do with the topic of this exciting text. Note that Threadgold writes that research on narrative has contributed to ''... rewriting the theories themselves, especially linguistic theory, because these two came to be seen as ''narratives which told only part of the story'' (267).
Several chapters direct attention to previously mentioned early work on narrative (Labov 1972, Labov and Waletsky 1967). I appreciate and continue to learn from these examples of research, but I believe that situating this research in terms of critique and refinement of Labovian models would assist readers in better positioning the provocative examples of research this book contains in terms of questions Threadgold poses: What is the relationship among theory, method, and narrative? Why does the study of narrative matter? How can it be used?
For example, in Chapter 2 Cheshire and Ziebland indicate that ''narrative discourse allows them to interweave the objective and subjective aspects of knowledge... '' (40). As I read the accounts of illness the chapter presents, the narratives from Rose and Josephine that the authors share stood out to me as stories belying any order of accounts that preserves a strict division between subject and object. I am partially satisfied with the conclusion that ''narrative provides a way for them to display and construct an identity as patient and to integrate this identity into their sense of a stable, coherent, permanent self'' (40). But as I studied this intriguing chapter I kept thinking of ways to use social theory to further unpack the idea that ''language reflects society'' (Cameron 1990).
In his work on narrative, Bakhtin (1979) speaks of dual moments of aesthetic activity, discussing not only identification and empathy, but also ''extopy.'' Extopic positions relay a watchful listening, an excess of comprehension and knowledge. Bakhtin's comments recognize Rose and Josephine outside and next to the world they tell about: Each of these women is an able storyteller, a being independent of herself, with whom she appears to be on equal footing. According to Bakhtin (1984), the positions from which their stories are told must be oriented in a new way to this new world, ''a world of autonomous subjects, not objects'' (7). I include Bakhtin's commentary not because I think the authors of Chapter 2 should have mentioned it, but because it can serve as a reminder that scientific analysis does not always have to strive for a final, fixed solution to problems such as those the research discussed above strives to answer. The study of narrative reveals science as story and speaks of stories as spaces through which meaning passes. Science and story both emerge as modes of knowing that tolerate and nurture questions and silences.
REFERENCES
Cameron, D. (1990). Demythologizing sociolinguistics: Why language does not reflect society. In J.E. Joseph and T.J. Taylor (Eds.), Ideologies of Language (pp. 79-93). New York: Routledge.
Bakhtin, M. (1979). Estetika Slovesnogo Tvorchestva (The Aesthetics of Verbal Creation). Moscow: S.G. Bocharov.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics. ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bauman, R. (1992). Performance. In R. Bauman (Ed.), Folklore, Culture Performances, and Popular Entertainments (pp. 41-49). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language as social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19, 59-88.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1993). You gotta know how to tell a story: Telling, tales, and tellers in American and Israeli narrative events at dinner. Language in Society 22, 361-402.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harris, R. (1980). The Language Makers. London: Duckworth.
Harris, R. (1981). The Language Myth. London: Duckworth.
Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J.J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (pp. 35-71). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (pp. 354-396). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays in the Verbal and Visual Arts (pp.12-44). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Norrick, N.R. (2005). Interaction in the telling and retelling of interlaced stories: The co-construction of humorous narratives. In U. Quasthoff and T. Beckles (Eds.), Narrative Interaction (pp. 263-283). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rickford, J.R. (2001). Style and stylizing. In J.R. Rickford and P. Eckert (Eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (pp. 220-231). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Romaine, S. (1984). The status of sociological models and categories in linguistic variation, Linguistische Berichte 90, 25-38.
Shuman, A. (1986). Story Telling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Singh, R. K. (Ed.). (1996). Towards a Critical Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Don E. Walicek is a doctoral student in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. His research interests include sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, Pidgin and Creole Studies, and the language-ideology interface. He is the guest editor of the publication 'Creolistics and Caribbean Languages,' Sargasso 2004-2005, I.
|