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    27 Narrative Analysis Alexandra Georgakopoulou 27.1 INTRODUCTION ‘The current fascination with oral (cf. vernacular, non-literary) narrative spans a wide range of social science disciplines, e.g, sociology, psychol- ‘ogy, social anthropology, etc., and is frequently referred to as the ‘narrative tum’ (see papers in Bamberg, 2006; Brockmeier and Carbaugh, 2001; Daiute and Lightfoot, 2004; and De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg, 2006). In these disciplines, narrative is seen as an atchetypal, fundamental mode for making sense of the world and, as such, as a privileged structure, system, or mode for tapping into the teller’s social identities and sense of self. The significance of narrative for identity analysis does not however mean that there is con- sensus oa the definitions and views of narrative as an object of inquiry. In fact, narrative remains a particularly elusive, contested and indeterminate in meaning concept. It is variously used not only as an epistemology, a quintessentially qualitative ‘method, but also as a fundamental communication mode, an archetypal or supra-genre, It is also sometimes used as ant all-encompassing term — in a sort of “everything is narrative’ way ~ defined so broadly as to be equated with experience, time, history and life itself. On the other hand, itis also viewed more specifically as a kind of discourse or text-type with conventionalized textual features (see Georgakopoulou and Goutsos, 2000: 64-8).! The downsides to this diversity have been fre- quently noted (e.g, Josselson, 2006) and there is concern that it often breeds an interpretative vacuum, thus leaving the area exposed to impres- sionistic work that does not contribute to the crea~ tion of a critical mass. A related issue is the narrative turn which has celebrated narrative as a ‘way of doing research that privileges the experien- tial, and as a welcome antidote to the traditional positivist-based science that was dominant for a long time, well into the 1970s and 1980s (¢f. Bruner, 1997: 62). This has often resulted in the idealization and essentialization of narrative. Tn tum, a5 we will see below, it has hampered empirical research on the numerous genres and situated micro instances of stories (Cf, Georgakopoutou and Goutsos, 2000) In the light of the above, to talk about well- defined and delimited schools of narrative analy- sis necessitates @ crude process of abstraction which does not do justice to the many different strands of existing work. Bearing this in mind, 1 will propose here that within sociolinguistic research on narrative, we can talk about two dis- tinct ways of doing narrative analysis: one inspired by a conventional and largely canonical paradigm; the other based on a social interactional view of narrative (for a detailed discussion see De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008a). ‘The former is traceable to Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) founda- Gonal model of narrative analysis, but is also informed by the narrative tum in the social sciences, Social interactional approaches on the other hand stress variously the role of context in the shaping of narrative tellings and see them as being intimately linked with the production of social life. In this chapter, I focus more on the social inter- actional approaches and register their latest advances. This i, in part, a conscious attempt to redress the balance. Until recently, ample time and space have been devoted to the ‘Labovian’ model and its importance has been duly acknowledged (not least in my own work; for example, see Georgakopoulou, 1997; Georgakopoulou and Goutsos, 2004; see also Toolan, 1988). As of late, however, sociolinguistic approaches to narrative have been making a decisive shift towards social NARRATIVE ANALYSIS 397 interactional approaches, which we have described as the shift from narrative as text to narrative as social practices (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008a, 2008). 27.2 THE LABOVIAN MODEL AS THE CONVENTIONAL PARADIGM In 1997, the then Journal of Narrative anid Life History (ow Narrative Inguiry) produced substantial Special Issue (also published as a book) entitled “Oral versions of personal experi- ence: three decades of narrative analysis’ (ed, by ‘Michael Bamberg). The dozens of contributions by a galaxy of names in the area confirmed two things: first, the undeniably profound ~ and for some, surprising? influence that Labov’s modet hhas had within sociolinguistics to the point that narrative analysis has, until recently, been synony- mous with it, In addition, those contributions gistered the fierce critique that the model has ‘been on the receiving end of, sometimes from allies’ sources: ie. from scholars whe had more or less taken the model on board and who showed in their empirical studies that it did not quite work or that it needed further systematization. As already suggested, a full account of the model is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I will single out ‘what I see as its key elements, By examining oral narratives of personal, past experience in inter- view settings, Labov and Waletzky (1967), and later Labov working alone (1972), showed that there is structure and systematicity in the story- telling of ordinary people of a kind that was expected to be found in artful forms of narrative. ‘They defined narrative in functional terms as ‘one verbal technique for recapitulating past experi- ence, in particular @ technique of constructing narrative units which match the temporal sequence of that experience’ (Labov and Waletzky, 1967: 13). Their analysis resulted in the description of a fully-formed (or classic) narrative which “begins with an orientation, proceeds to the complicating action, is suspended at the focus of evaluation before the resolution, concludes with the resolu- tion and returns the listener to the present time with the coda’ (p. 369)2 Of these structural components, evaluation (i. the expression of the narrator's point of view of the events) has been the most influential and at the ‘same time controversial one. With its addition, the model was instrumental in incorporating into nanrative structure what least lent itself t0 that: namely, the affective, emotive, subjective and experiential aspects of narrative. This was done by ‘means of postulating evaluation both as a separate structural unit and as a micro-level mechanism that can apply to the entire narrative. In later writings, and in tesponse to critics, Laboy rephrased his definition of narrative in the follow- ing terms: ‘A narrative of personal experience is a report of a sequence of events that have entered into the biography of the speaker by a sequence of clauses that correspond to the original events’ (1997; 393). Labov’s revisions did no more than emphasize and reinforce some of the most heavily-contested aspects of his model: for instance, the fact that it privileges stories of past, personal experience events, at the expense of a wide range of different types of stories that abound in conversational settings, also, that the credibility of a story, ie. the way a teller shields their telling against accusations of lying, is pre- sented as a “universal” need and value. The rote of credibility is intimately linked with Labov sub- scribing to what is often referred to as the minimal definitional criterion of narrative ~ namely, that of the temporal ordering of events.* In addition, cred- ‘bility goes hand in hand with a referential and realist view of the relationship between a story's events and real-world events. In contrast, con- structionist views of this relationship, which are nowadays in wide currency, stress that there is no such thing as a one-to-one mapping between what really happened and what is recounted as having happened. Instead, what is presented and how it is presented in a telling are ultimately shaped by the here and now of the story’s telling and the teller’s ccurtent perspective on the past AS sustained critique of Labov's model has shown (e.g. see contributions in Bamberg 1997a), one of the model's main problems is that it sees narrative as a detached, autonomous and self- contained unit with clearly identifiable parts. ‘Many scholars have pointed out that, as stories in Labov's data occurred in research interviews and 8 responses to an interviewer's questions, they tended to be well-organized, with a beginning, middle and an end, and largely monological, In this respect, the teller appeared to be the main producer of meaning. Since then, conversational stories in ordinary environments have been found to be highly collaborative (e.g. Goodwin 1990), More generally, the context-sensitivity of the forms that the telling of a story can take has, by now, been amply demonstrated by, amongst others, studies that were inspired in the first place by Labov's model. This substantial line of inguiry consists of numerous empirically-based projects® in a wide range of settings that have documented: the culturally-based expectations about what sto- ries are about and how they are told (e.g. Chafe, 1980; Polanyi, 1985; Tannen, 1978); the sociocul- tural and situational variability of narrative struc ‘ure, in particular evaluation (e.g. Linde, 1993); the dispensability of certain structural components TT 398 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS (particularly the abstract and the coda) and the infrequent occurrence of other factors (e.g. evaluation as a separate component); and the context-specific degrees of audience participation during the telling of a story (e.g. Cedeborg and Aronsson, 1994; Goodwin, 1984). Labov’s model coincided with and surely benefited from the insights of the narrative tum in the social sciences. As we will discuss below, these two influential trends have, together, based their insights on the study of narratives about the teller’s past experi- ences that are told in research interviews, 27.3 THE SOCIAL INTERACTIONAL APPROACHES Narrative as talk-in-interaction Some of the biggest challenges to Labov have originated in research on conversational storytell- ing, much of which broadly aligns itself with the sotiologically-informed school of analysing con- versational data called conversation analysis (henceforth CA). CA advocates attention to the details of the sequential management of any interaction and, in the case of narrative, this means that where a story occurs, the ‘how and why” and ‘what local actions it performs would be of para- ‘mount importance for the analysis. Narrative in any context is therefore seen as talk-in-interaction, as an embedded unit, enmeshed in local business. not free-standing or detached. From the CA point of view, viewing narratives as mote of less self- contained texts that can be abstracted from their original context of occumence misses out on the fact that both the telling of a story and the ways in which it is told are shaped by previous talk and action. Stories occur in some kind of discourse environment, before and afier other discourse activities, and are thus enmeshed in its local sur- roundings. Stories are also sequentially managed; their tellings unfold online, moment by moment in the here and now of interactions. As such, they can be expected to raise different types of action and tasks for different interlocutors (Goodwin, 1984), In his critique of Labov’s model, one of the most influential CA proponents, Emmanuel Schegloft, argues that it is to this view of narrative as a sequence, in itself part of a sequentially-ordered ‘event, that subsequent work on narrative “should be redirected’ in order for us to get ‘toward a Gifferently targeted and more compelling grasp of vernacular storytelling’ (1997: 101), A view of narrative as unfolding sequentially, as outlined above, goes hand in hand with @ view of it as emergent. In this sense, its tellings ‘emerge in specific interactional contexts as a joint venture and as the outcome of negotiation by interlocutors. Put differently, we cannot talk about universal narrative structure, as Labov did, a priori of specific contexts of storytelling where the analysis of narrative ‘opens up rather than closes off the investigation of talk’s. business’ (Edwards, 1997; 142). Narrative tellings are thus seen as irreducibly situational and locally occa- sioned: ‘a good part of [their] meaning is 10 be found in the occasion of their production, in the local state of affairs that was operative ‘at that exact moment of interactional time’ (Antaki and Widdicombe, 1998: 4), CA advocates attention to the details of their sequential management in spegific kinds of interaction: where they occur, how and why; what local actions they perform. ‘The CA View of narrative as talk-in-interaction resents important implications not only for the analysis of narrative but also for the processes and methods of data collection and transcription. In contrast to the conventional paradigm, the narrative data that form the mainstay of research arise naturally in conversations (be they in every- day, informal or institutional contexts). There is thus a clear privileging of conversational sites as the main event under scrutiny and in that respect narrative is not seen a priori as a special ot unique mode of communication but simply as ‘another format of telling’ (Edwards, 1997) within that event, By extension, itis recognized that narrative interviews are ultimately interactional data in which the researcher is very much part of the nacrative (telling, and that their role should be recorded as faithfully as possible in the transcrip- tion process. This means that any verbal or non- verbal contributions on the researcher’s part should be included in the transeript. As Potter and Hepburn have argued in relation to interview data in general, “they should be transcribed to a level that allows interactional features to be appreciated ven if interactional features are not the topic of study’ (2005: 295). ‘Conversation analysts have been successful and influential in documenting stories as sequentially- ordered activities (e.g, see Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974) by paying attention to the ways in which they are introduced into the local context of @ conversation and subsequently exited from (eg, Jefferson 1978, Sacks 1974). However, as Thave argued elsewhere (Georgakopoulow, 2007: 61-87), there is stil much scope for study of the part that comes between a story's opening and a story's ending. In this respect, whether structural components of a Labovian kind, e.g. complicating action or evaluation, are generally accepted (even if redefined) by CA is not altogether clear, hor is what would replace them if they were dismissed.’ Furthermore, the stories analysed within CA are by and large of the ‘prototypical’ NARRATIVE ANALYSIS, 399 kind — ite. involving personal experience past events ~ and, in that respect, not to0 dissimilar to Labov's data, even if the approach has been differ- ent. AS we will see in Section 27.4, narrative analysis is currently moving away from this long- standing emphasis towards the study of more atypical stories. Generally speaking, CA as its name suggests, privileges conversation as the main unit of social order from the outset and, in that respect, neither historically nor epistemologically does it share ‘with narrative analysis the commitment to study- ing narrative in its own right. This fundamental difference in outlook has perhaps hampered cross- fertilization between the two. More than that, within socially-mminded linguistics, CA has become implicated in a larger debate about the role of context in the analysis of interaction in general (e.g, see the dialogue between Wetherell, 1998, and Schegloff, 1998). This debate is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worth noting that CA has generally come under fire as being a too nose-to-data approach that does not easily abstract itself from local contexts, and that does not pro- vide a way for forging links between local instances of interactions and larger contexts and processes pertaining above and beyond single ‘communicative events.* Narrative in context As [ argued above, a view of narrative as talk- in-interaction allows us to explore narrative as a socially-meaningful and orderly activity. It affords an intimate view of what is going on in the here and now of any narrative interaction, firmly locat- ing us in the flow of everyday lived experience. It does, however, diverge from the tradition of contextualized approaches to language that set out to navigate between the here and now of interac- tions and the discourses impacting on them, recognizing that any strip of activity is configured ‘on _momentary-quotidian-biographical-historical frames and across socio-spatial arenas. In the case of narrative, this forging of relationships between local and global contexts has been attempted by, broadly speaking, post-Labovian work on the ‘one hand and the ethnography of communication studies on the other. ‘To take each separately, in post-Labovian work, evaluation appeared to be the most appealing of the structural components: not only did the model allow for different positions and different types of evaluation but also evaluation was the component that rested on the intersection between narrative organization and narrative affectivity. Evaluation did not just bind a story together, it also showed what the story's point or moral. Consequently, itis 1no accident that there have been various attempts to expand on the scope of evaluation and further systematize it on the one hand (e.g. see Polanyi, 1985)’ and, on the other hand, to develop concepts that present various degrees of more or less explicitly acknowledged affiliation with evalua- tion, such as that of involvement (Tannen, 1989).! As suggested above, there is indeed a volume of work which has documented the culture-specificity of evaluation, particularly in relation to the following questions: © Who is entitled to tell whose stories? © Whatis the attitude of audiences to telling, tales and tellers? * How do cultures vaty in the relative support granted by recipients to tellers, tellings and tales? (Blum-Kulka, 1997) * What is the role of fact and fiction in storytelling? '* What culture-specific values are attached to each? ‘+ How do stories invoke and re-inscribe the physical and social space familiar to the tellers and audience? A case in point is Jobnstone’s study of story- telling in a Middle American community, Fort Wayne (1990), The study brought to the fore fargely monologic and teller-led tellings that placed emphasis on situating the stories locally, mainly by means of the (over)use of details about place. In the same spirit as Tannen, Johnstone viewed details as involvement strategies that invite audience participation in meaning-making She also attributed their use to the prevailing cultural attitades to factuality Specifically, as Johnstone stated, “for Fort Waynets, personal experience stories are taken to be iconic representations of events, as the events, were experienced by the teller. They cannot appear to be fictions. Or else they will count as lies" (1990: 101). Fort Wayners thus valued good stories as opposed to good storytellers. Within this coltural bias towards factually-verifiable events, details in stories acted as a conventional mechanism for enhancing the ‘reality’ and ‘actuality” of stories, by precisely locating them in time and space. Post-Labovian work on the context-sensitivity of storytelling has contributed rich insights into, to ‘borrow Schiffrin’s terms, how stories are situated locally, in the here and now of their tellings, but also globally too, in their sociocultural contexts, by means of invoking cultural knowledge and norms (1996: 168). Nonetheless, at the time that these studies were conducted, there was still a strong lingering of social, psychological and anthropological approaches that defined culture as a unifying, homogeneous, static and a priori Caen 400 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS : defined set of values, beliefs and behaviours that are invoked in communication (e.g. Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989). It is fair to say that many of the sociolinguistic studies of storytelling in context were thus informed by these views and invoked them as their interpreta- tive framework. This is evident in the fact that ‘there was a preoccupation with uncovering certain communication styles in storytelling that, in tara, provided evidence for or wete interpreted in the light of ‘core’ cultural values (e.g. sociability, solidarity), In some cases, these values were more of less directly traceable to the distinction Detween individualist and interdependent cultures (eg, Polanyi, 1985). Since then, views of culture that prioritize fluidity and heterogeneity have ‘become increasingly accepted and there has been a decisive shift away from earlier normative accounts of culture. At the linguistic level, there is also nowadays @ reluctance to form one-to-one conceptual links between linguistic forms and social meanings. Similarly, attributing singular functions {0 linguistic devices is widely recog- nized as a complex enterprise."! ‘In parallel with what [have broadly called here post-Labovian studies, another tradition of study- ing language in general and storytelling in particu- lar in context was developing in the 1970s and 1980s that has set beacons for the current study of narrative in social life. This tradition can. be broadly classified as being linguistic-anthropolog- ical in nature, but some ofits main proponents are, ‘more specifically, ethnographers of communica- tion, as we will see below. The main foci of inquiry in this research are: the linguistic means ‘by which cultural meanings are encoded in narra- tive; the social situations in which narratives occur and how these shape narrative tellings; and the cculturally-shaped communicative functions ful- filled by narratives and their role in socialization within communities. The data that have mainly been studied in this respect come from tradi- tional storytelling in non-Western communities. However, as we will see below, more recent work, inspired by earlier studies, has tuned attention to narratives in institutional contexts and has exam- ined their role in the formation and transmission of institutional values and norms as well as in the exclusion of certain social groups (eg. see Jacquemet, 2005, and chapters in Briggs, 1996, and in Mumby, 1993) ‘What brings together work with this focus is the recognition that narrative tellings are shaped by, as well as being instrumental in, shaping the ‘macro processes that constitute them. There is ‘constant navigation between the fine-grained analysis of narrative data and the study of socio- cultural processes. This rests on the notions of social practice, genre and performance as being central to the understanding of narrative. These ideas have been instrumental in precipitating shift in the study of narratives from types of texts to types of events, with aa emphasis on the social spaces, in which stories occur and are habitually associated with, their local functions in those spaces and the participants’ roles and relations. Increasingly then, as we will see below, this line of inguiry has moved from earlier views of context as a surrounding frame, a list of situational and cultural elements that determine narrative tellings, to a dynamic notion of contextualization This captures both the irreducible contingency of narrative tellings and their active role in (re) shaping their contexts, In a similar vein, viewing narratives as practices and not just as texts has meant that there is an emphasis on both the habituality and regularity of tellings (in the sense of recurrent evolving responses to given sitna- tions) and their emergence and situational contin- gency. This is in tune with the recent re-theorizing of genres away from formal classifications as the basis for text-distinctions, and with an emphasis ‘on members’ conventionalized expectations about the activities they are engaged in, the roles and relationships typically involved and the organiza- tional systems of those activities. In this way, more than a ‘constellation of systematically related, co-occurring formal features’ (Bauman, 2004: 3), genre becomes a ‘primary means for dealing with recurrent social exigencies ... a routinized vehicle for encoding and expressing particular orders of knowledge and experience’ (p. 6). As orienting frameworks of conventional- ized expectations, genres force the analytical attention to routine and socioculturally shaped “ways of telling’ (Hymes, 1996) in specific settings and for specific purposes. What this means for the study of narrative is that instead of treating it as a macro genre with fixed structural characteristics (je. invariant and inflexible structural units), emphasis is placed on narrative forms as dynamic and evolving responses to recurring rhetorical situations and as resources, more or less strategically drawn upon, negotiated and reconstructed anew in local contexts. AS Thave argued in detail elsewhere (Georgakopoulou, 2007: 12-29}, the move to such a practice- oriented view of narrative genres also requires that we firmly locate them in place and time and scrutinize the social and discourse activities they are habitually associated with, In particular, it focuses our attention on the ‘social values of space as inscribed upon the practices’ (Hanks, 1996: 246) that take place within narrative tellings, Many of the above recent advances in the study of narrative are traceable to insights gained from the influential work of Dell Hymes (e.g. 1981) NARRATIVE ANALYSIS 401 who studied narrative organization in Native American communities, ‘To capture the ways in which narrative forms are both shaped by and (re) ‘create cultural knowledge and norms, Hymes developed ethnopoeties, a painstaking and fairly (echnical modus operandi involving intense and repeated listening of recorded data. Its basic units ‘of analysis (e.g. line, verse, stanzas, scenes and acts) were identified with a combination of into- national, thematic, lexical and syntactic criteria Despite the lack of convergence on the number and definition of such units in subsequent studies (e.g, see Gee, 1986), what is important to note is how, with their introduction to the study of narra- tive, the poetic organization of oral narratives was recognized, visually displayed (in the form of stanza-like segments) and respected in the tran- scripts. Furthermore, it was shown that this organ- ization embodied a ‘rhetoric of action, that is, an implicit schema for the organization of experi- ence’ (Hymes, 1996: 121) that was culturally- specific and revolved around numbers of cultural importance, For instance, Chinookan narratives ‘were found to be organized in patterns of two and four.” This organization was reflected in the stories’ units (ie. lines, verses, stanzas, scenes), In other words, Chinookan stories routinely presented two-line verses, stanzas made up of two ‘or four verses, and so on. Ethnopoetic analysis has had little application to narratives that are produced outside oral cul- tures.” Gee (1986) further documented its value as @ tool for uncovering oral culture influences in narrative form with his analysis of the stories told by a black girl during sharing-time at a school that had been previously studied by Michaels (1981). Gee uncovered a host of rhythmical patterns characteristic of oral cultures. In his study, as in more recent work (e.g. Blommeert and Maryns, 2001), the visually-poetic display of narrative organization becomes an epistemologi- cal statement on how narrative units more or less subtly point to sociocultural forces at work. In this Way, @ model of narrative structure becomes something more than a sophisticated apparatus for segmenting text: it actually serves to document social inequalities and differential access to differ- centially-valued storytelling styles. Another strand of inguiry within linguistic anthropology, espousing comparable ideas about the pairing of text-context but without employing ethnopoetics, is that of performance studies of narrative. AS the name suggests, the central concept here is that of performance, defined within Bauman’s influential study of tales of dog- trading in Texas (1986) as an assumption of responsibility on the part of the performer for the display of communicative skill and competence and an acceptance that such a display is going to be evaluated by the audience (ef. Gottman, 1981), In this sense, exactly like narrative organization in Hymes, performance is a culturally-shaped way of speaking, and ‘just as speaking itself as a cultural system (or as part of cultural systems defined in other terms) will vary from speech community to speech community, so too will the nature and extent of performance and verbal art” (Bauman, 1969; 13), As Bauman has repeatedly stressed, the devices that mark narrative tellings a5 perform- ances are expected to vary cross-culturally and need to be discovered empirically. In contrast to earlier anthropological studies of verbal art, Bauman saw performance as a site where tradition (in the-sense of adherence 10 performance norms) and innovation (in the sense of individual improvisation and situational conti gency) are interwoven, Narrative performance is thus the complex outcome of the interrelation- ships between the narrative event (ie. the here and now of a narrative telling), the narrated event (the reported world of events and characters), and the text (the actual language and stylistic choices for telling the story) Insights from the ethnography of communica tion and pesformance studies of narrative have found their way into a critical analysis of stories as a vehicle for power and ideologies in vari ous institutions ranging from interviews to assess asylum-secking applications (Maryns. and Blommaert, 2001) to courtroom cases (Trinch and Berk-Selingson)."° Such studies have seriously problematized the earlier optimism about narra- tive as an empowering mode of lay experience and voices. Instead, they have shown that there are serious issues of narrative inequality to be found in, among others, the tellers’ access to ownership and control of the resources required for shaping their stories 50 as-to be tellable and acceptable in the contexts in which they occur. They have also documented the ways in which institutionally powerful social actors can control storytelling by, for example, interrupting, reformulating it or pushing it in certain directions. Let us look at one particular study that illus- trates some ofthe above foci more closely. Ehrlich (2001) has shown in her study of sexual assault trials in Canada how the version of events that may emerge in a trial can be determined by the type of questions the lawyers ask of witnesses; also, how these questions control the topic or selectively reformulate witnesses’ responses. Ehrlich’s stady has thus provided further evidence for the ways in which ‘the institutionally sanc- tioned, pre-allocated role of lawyer as questioner and witness as answerer has significant implica- tions for the co-constructed nature of courtroom narratives” (2007: 455). In her analysis of three trials on the same sexual assault case (2007),!¢ 402 ‘THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS Ehrlich showed how the norms of cultural intelli- ibility about gender in operation in each case Were instrumental in the co-construction of versions of events between the complainant and the Crown Attomey. Specifically, in the tials that acquitted the accused, the complainant and the Crown Attomey co-constructed a narrative in which the sexual activity was presented as consen- sual. In contrast, as Ehrlich shows, the same events and facts of the case ‘were interpreted by the Supreme Court in a way which was compati- bble with the complainant's version of events’ (2007: 472) and thus presented the sexual activity as coerced and not as consensual. A widespread strategy used to negotiate the interpretation of a narrative or parts of it was that of re-contextuali zation (ef. Bernstein, 1996), ie. the creation of a new context of interpretation of aspects of the story that was being told. In sum, the study of narrative in social practice has increasingly moved to densely contextualized approaches that call for attention to the particu- Tarities and exigencies of specific data in specific contexts atthe same time as shedding light on how wider social relations of power and control shape narrative tellings. Such situated analyses look at sociocultural phenomena close up, ie. in the ‘moment-to-moment unfolding of communication. AS such, their analytic point of entry is specific interactional events in which stories occur, The focus has thus shifted from asking what is culture- specific about narrative tellings to how cultural resources may be drawn upon and reconciled but also contested in the contingencies of situated activity, In addition, with the latest turn of narra- tive analysis to identities within sociolinguistics, which we will discuss below, culture is no longer ‘examined in isolation and as a distinguishable attribute that can be singled out and kept apart from other identity aspects, but in its interaction with other aspects of identity (e.g. gender, age, social class), Finally, the ethnographic perspective that these studies normally take currently presents a dramatic difference in scale: the exploration of the sociocultural roles of narrative in whole com- munities has gradually given way to the study of shrunk-down and much more manageable groups ‘of people and their micro cultures."” 27.4 NARRATIVE AND IDENTITIES As already suggested, outside sociolinguisties, narrative has served as a major methodological tool for researching people’s identities. It is important, however, to emphasize that only a par- ticular type of narrative has mainly served as the object of this inquiry, namely that of a life story, and less frequently the so-called short-range stories of landmark events (e.g. stories of preg- nancy, marriage, divorce, illness, etc.). The latter are reminiscent of Labov’s stories which were collected a3 a response to the question, “Were you ever in danger of dying?". Common to both types of stories is that they are routinely elicited in research interviews. Also, both involve personal experience past events that the teller has sufficient distance from, and thus is able to reflect ‘on. Such stories have been employed as heuristics for the inguiry into tellers’ representations of past events, and how the tellers make sense of themselves in the light of these past events. The guiding assumption here is that the telling of stories allows the teller to bring the coordinates of time, space and personhood into a unitary frame so that the sources “behind” these represen tations can be made empirically visible for further analytical scrutiny in the form of ‘identity analysis" Th tune with this approach, there has been a Tong-standing tradition of investigating how pre-existent, socioculturally available, capital D-discourses (variously called ‘meta-narratives’, “master-narratives’, ‘scenarios’, etc.) are drawn upon by tellers in order to make sense of them- selves over time and of the defining events that happened to them (e.g. see Kerby, 1991). What these discourses are is decided by the analysts, sometimes before the actual data collection and analysis, Selves and identities are thus viewed as the product of such prevailing discourses. A con- ‘cept that has informed numerous studies of narra- tive and identity with this focus is that of positioning. In Davies and Harré’s (1990) seminal paper, positioning was defined as ‘the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversa tions as observably’ and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines” (p. 48). Following on from that study, which tellingly employed made-up examples of narratives, ‘work on positioning tends to postulate culturally- available subject positions a priori of specific data and subsequently ‘look’ for how they impact on specific narratives. This kind of work does not seem to be tuned into the emergence of position- ing processes through details intrinsic to an interaction. and bas shied away from an explora- tion of the fleetingness and contingency of positionings in local contexts (for a critique see Bamberg, 1997b: 335-42; Lucius-Hoene and Depperman, 2000; Wortham, 2000: 164-166). Bamberg's (1997b) attempt to re-define position- ing so as to be suited to an interactional approach {0 narrative resulted in the postulation of three levels of analysis, which have often been employed NARRATIVE ANALYSIS 403 by analysts as heuristics for the ways in which tellers ‘do" self in nasrative tellings."® tis fair to say that research on narrative and identity within biographical studies has privileged both a certain kind of subjectivity and certain Kinds of identities, More specifically, there has been a focus on the project of ‘storying’ oneself as intrinsically-oriented towards coherence and authenticity. In this respect, the volume of studies hhas focused on how, even through a dynamic process, tellers gradually move to a unified and rather stable account of self that is interwoven into their life story (e.g. Brockmeier and Carbaugh, 2001; Daiute and Lightfoot, 2004). Self and narra~ tive are thus typically brought together in ways that emphasize the ideas of autonomy, integration and coherence over those of a fragmented, relational self. Fragmented in this case would refer to being self-discursively constructed as different things on different occasions that can ncither be automatically reduced to a singular and coherent entity, nor easily abstracted from local contexts. A relational self on the other hand would derive its capacity for self-perception and self- definition through relations with others and in interactional negotiations with others. Both these ideas have met with resistance within biographical narrative analysis, In Roberts’ terms, there is a danger in the area that ‘narrative is used too restrictively to refer to a version of life given at a particular moment as expressing the given story as consistent and sequencing experi- ence as lived, and even, if only momentarily either the self as a consistent surface expression or an inner constant entity’ (2004: 270). In this way, Roberts continues, linearity remains dominant even if implicit in the use of story and in tum ‘life as stories’ becomes itself a restrictive metaphor emphasizing consistency while overlooking the deficiencies and inconsistencies of speech (idem). In similar vein, Parker alerts us to the risk of prescribing a certain kind of subjectivity through the analysis of narrative. He notes that personal narrative seems to be presented as a model of how we should configure ourselves as selves striving for a purposeful and convincing whole (Parker, 2003: 314), To many, this is a Western type of, ideal encompassing neo-Cartesian individualist views of personhood and privileging unity and the integration of a singular and ‘authentic’ self through the piecing together of a well- structured and orderly life story (e.g, see De Peuter, 1998: 32-4). ‘To sum up, narrative identity in the sense of the ‘storied self” is a well-established paradigm across a wide array of disciplines. This emphasis on the construction of self has meant that relational and dialogical processes of making sense of self have been under-represented.”” Furthermore, narrative and identity analysis in the social sciences has mainly relied on a specific type of narrative elicited in interviews. It has also been slow to move away from representational accounts of the self (i.e, accounts of the type of person that a life story presents its teller to be) that treat stories as more or less authentic, transparent and unmedi- ated records (for a discussion see Atkinson and Delamore, 2006) to interactional views of identity construction and the ways in which narrators per- form and locally occasion themselves through their stories. In contrast, such interactional approaches to identities have become increasingly mainstream within sociolinguistics. Research on the commu- nicative how of identities in talk has been flourish- ing and recently there has been a proliferation of sociolinguistic studies of narrative and identities (e.g. De Fina, 2003; chapters in De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2007). Before this systematic turn to identities, one of the first domains to capture the sociolinguists’ atten- tion was the ways in which tellers presented aspects of their self by making the most of the possibilities that the separation between the here ‘and now of narrative telling and the there and then of the taleworld (cf. told, narrated events) afforded them. As Schifitin’s oft-quoted study showed (1990), this separation allows tellers to manipulate different aspects of ‘self’, as defined by Goffman (1974). For example, tellers can appear both as narrators and as characters in the taleworld. Or, they can appear to be the animator (the aspect of self that physically produces the story) but not the author (Je. the aspect of self responsible for the content of talk). They can do this with the use of various devices, such as quoting what characters in the taleworld said or thought. This play with who tells, who is responsible for the content of talk and who is committed to what is being said allows storytellers to control their self-presentation, ‘They may diffuse their agency or responsibility in the social field, ereate a widened base of support for their views and beliefs, cast positive Tight on them, increase the validity of their claims and so ‘on (cf. Hill, 1995) More recently, however, there has been a shift towards exploring ways of connecting narrative tellings with larger social identities (e.g. see Wagner and Wodak, 2006; Wodak and De Cillia, 2007). This inquiry involves scrutinizing the genres that narrative telings present, and their specific language and interactional choices for how they more or less subtly and indirectly point to (ef. index) aspects of the teller’s identities, such as ethnicity, gender, age, etc. For example, in De Fina’s study of the personal experience 404 ‘THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS narratives of border crossings of Mexican immigrants in the USA, identity construction in narrative is related to three levels (2003: 19): 1. The tellers’ adherence to cultural ways of telling (e.g, involving specific linguistic and thetorical resources) that identify them as members of specific communities. 2 The ‘enactment, reflection or negation’ (idern) of personal social roles and relationships in the actual story world. 3. The ‘expression, discussion and negotiation of membership into communities’ (idem) normally realized in the categorization of self and others {cf, Georgakopoulou, 2008). This line of inquiry has come a long way in forg- ing links that are by no means presented as deter- ministic between narrative and identities through a focus on the action properties of language in narrative and away from the representational accounts of narrative studies in the social sciences. However, as I have argued elsewhere (Georgakopoulou, 2006a), there is much scope here for cross-fertlization with CA, and T have pointed to one strand that merits systematic atten- tion — namely, the sequential management of stories as a point of entry into the teller’s as well as the other storytelling participant’s local roles. More specifically, I have drawn on Ziromerman’s (1998) study of how local participation roles or discourse identities, tied with the sequence of adjaceney pairs such as questioner-answerer and speaker-recipient, provide a platform for larger, icc, extra-situational or ‘portable’, social identities (eg. spouse, parent, layperson, expert, etc.) ‘One question that tantalizes current sociotin- uistic work on narrative and identities is ow we can move from the locally-performed and on-the- spot constructed identities that are marked by inxeducible contingency, to being able to show some kind of continuity in these identities, i.e. aspects that would seem to hold above and beyond local contexts as part of a ‘rehearsed’ set. This question is, however, being posed in different methodological ways and with different data to those of biographical approaches. It is out of this problem space within narrative and identities- interaction work that the small stories paradigm has grown, as I will explain below. The turn to small stories In recent work, we have proposed small stories (Bamberg, 2004; Georgakopoulou, 2006b, 2006c; 2007; 2008; Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008) as an alternative (0 canonical narrative studies, ‘new? narrative turn that sets out to include certain, under-tepresented activities in the focal concerns of nartative and identity analysis. The initial moti- vation came from seeing how the assumptions of the biographical approaches to the analysis of nat- ratives in combination with Labov's model have filtered down to analytic work on conversational (of. non-elicited) narratives. As a result, they have informed analysts’ definitions of what constitutes atellable story and/or a story that can be used as a point of entry into identity analysis, Despite humerous studies of conversational storytelling that have, over the years, brought to the fore stories that depart from personal, past experience stories, as Ochs and Capps have rightly pointed out (2001), stories that depart from this narrative canon remain under-explored. Thus, our aims were: to document the forms and contexts of these atypical stories which we have collectively called ‘small stories’; to put forth analytical tools that are appropriate for them; and last but not least, to argue for their importance in narrative and identity research, “Small stories’ is thus an umbrella term that captures a gamut of frequent and salient narrative activities in conversational contexts, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared or known events, also allusions to previous tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell. These tellings are typically small when compared to the pages and pages of transcripts of interview narratives. On a metaphorical level, the term locates a level and even an aesthetic for the identification and analysis of narrative: the small- ness of talk, where fleeting moments of narrative orientation to the world (Hymes, 1996) can be easily missed out on by an analytical lens which only takes fully-fledged stories as the prototype from where the analytic vocabulary is supposed to emerge. Small stories can be about very recent (@g. yesterday, this moming) or still unfolding events, thus immediately reworking slices of experience and arising out of a need to share what hhas just happened, For instance, as I have shown elsewhere (Georgakopoulou, 2007), it is common jn email correspondence between friends for an ‘event that has just happened to be communicated straight away (normally in the subject heading of the message) with a brief telling and the promise of a further update by email or for a fuller telling jn a near-future face-to-face meeting between the friends. I have tried to capture the topicality of such stories" events and the urgency with which they are communicated with the term ‘breaking news" Small stories can also be quickly and ellipti- cally told to back up or elaborate on an argumen- tative point occurring in an ongoing conversation. Certain small stories may fulfil prototypical definitional criteria such as the temporal ordering NARRATIVE ANALYSIS 405 of events but others do not (for a detailed discus- sion of the definition of small stories see Georgakopoulou, 2007: 31-40), In all cases, the identification of small stories does not rest exclt- sively on prototypical textual criteria* Instead, small stories are seen as discourse engagements that integrally connect with what gets done on particular occasions and in particular settings. ‘The claim is that recognizing ‘narrativity’ or a ‘narrative orientation’ in certain activities shows regard for situated understandings.”* ‘Small stories research has begun to document how attention to everyday instances of storytell- ing, however incomplete, can serve as a window into the micro-genetic processes of identities as ‘in-the-making’ or ‘coming-into-being’. By con- ceptualizing small stories as the sites of engage- ment where identities are continuously practised and tested out, we have begun fo show how these practices ‘compare to the tellers’ engagement in reflexive positions in life stories, that are typically elicited in clinical or research settings (Bamberg and Georgakopoulov, 2008). Such a line of inquiry {nto everyday, interactional stories shows that itis in the everyday narrative practices that identity ‘work is primarily being conducted. Habitual engagement with certain identity positions articu- lated through stories over time ends up becoming the source for a continuous sense of who we are =a sense of us as ‘same’ in spite of continuous change. Put differently, the actual identity work that is being conducted by individuals in interac- tive engagement with stories so to speak, feeds into a sense of self ~ in the form of a continuous process within which this sense comes into exist- ence (emerges). Exactly as in other current social interactional ‘work on narrative and identities, small stories approach the topic of identity construction in nar- ratives in a way that is crucially different to that of Diographical approaches. They accept that ‘doing self? is not all that storytellers do. They also do rhetorical work through storytelling: they put forth arguments, challenge their interlocutors’ views and generally attune their stories (0 various local, interpersonal purposes, sequentially orient- ing them to prior and upcoming talk. It is in and through this type of relational activity that any representations in the form of content, i.e. what the story is about, should be seen. This suggests that the emphasis within narrative interview research on the representational aspects of stories (cf. Atkinson and Delamont, 2006) may be over- stating their role in identity work as well as skew- ing the ways in which they are intimately linked ‘with the interview as talk-in-interaction. This sort of analysis takes us away from documenting self as a finished and static product, Instead, it urges us to scrutinize the inconsistencies, contradictions, moments of trouble and tension, and the tellers’ constant navigation and finessing between differ- ent versions of selfhood in local contexts ‘Small stories research has also shown that iden- tity work in stories among intimates draws irrevo- cably on the participants’ lived and shared experience (Georgekopoulou, 2007). This has been obscured in interview narratives, where primacy is given to the single event and where the researcher tends to be a ‘stranges’ 27.5 CONCLUSIONS ‘This chapter has selectively charted advances in the socially-minded linguistic analysis of narra- tive by focusing on social interactional approaches that have precipitated a shift from narrative as text to narrative as social practice, We have seen that some of the hallmarks of this tine of inguiry involve fine-grained analysis of narrative data, ‘emphasis on the communicative how, and on both the local context of a story and the larger sociocul- tural processes that shape and are shaped by it Similarly, narrative tellings are examined for the ways in which they function as social practices and within other social practices. This necessitates a move from narrative as one undifferentiated ‘and homogeneous mode towards the careful documentation of narrative genres, viewed as interconnections between social expectations about narrative form and emergence of meanings in concrete events. This opening up to variability jn narrative has brought to the fore non-canonical narratives and narrative formats and genres that had traditionally been neglected in conventional narrative analysis. It has also advanced our under- standing of the interactional features of such narratives and the contexts which engender or prohibit their telling. We have seen that small stories research is an important step in this direc- tion: one of its primary aims has been to work through the implications for identity research of including non-canonical stories in the focal con- cems of narrative analysis. This sociolinguistic turn to narrative and identities is the single latest advance within social interactional approaches and it has been made with a view of identities as performed and discursively emergent. ‘Without wishing to box in social interactional work on narrative, we could nonetheless attempt an abstraction and summarize its main foci of interest in terms of three interrelated levels of analysis, which of course different analysts may prioritize differently. ‘As I have explained elsewhere (Georgakopoulow, 2007: 20-23), these three levels of analysis illustrate the constant navigation and multi-layered work involved in this 406 ‘THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS kind of work. They show how the analysts’ main effort is to capture the moment of synthesis of a single communicative event while at the same time not divorcing that moment from sociocul- tural histories and operative timescales. In this way, narratives are studied not only in the here and now but also as texts that get transposed in time and space and that establish intertextual ties with other narratives and other genres. ‘The analytical levels in question can thus be described a5 follows: ways of (storyjtelling cap- ture socioculturally-shaped and conventionalized themes and styles of telling that are, in turn, seen as modes of acting, interacting, producing and dynamically receiving text, the revealing of a thetorical stance and orientation to the world. Sites involve sociocultural spheres and spaces for semiotic activity in real time (cf. site of engage- ‘ment, Scollon and Scollon, 2004) that may be conventionally associated with specific kinds of storytelling, shaping their ways of telling, as well as becoming an integral part of the stories’ plot Finally, tellers is a dynamically-conceived adapta- tion of the lay term employed for social actors within storytelling activities seen as having a complex make-up: personal-autobiographical, social-relational and partaking in both a taleworld (as character with other characters) and in the here and now (as interlocutor). This level includes the interactional history of participants, where appli- cable, the participant roles and relationships, and entitlement issues as well as systems of norms and expectations, ‘As already suggested, social interactional approaches to narrative tend to employ ethno- graphic methods that allow for local, reflexive and situated understandings of narratives as more or less partial and valid accounts within systems of production and articulation. ‘This results in an increased reflexivity on the researcher-researched relationships and ‘a scepticism concerning the dominant view (within the narrative tum) of narrative as a_primary and unique mode for making sense of self and the world, Its, instead, more interesting for social interactional approaches to explore how different situational and sociocul- tural contexts interrelate with narrative genres, and also to employ narrative analysis as part of @ ‘multi-method, in which a particular problem- space for the sociolinguist is explored with various kinds of data and various multi-layered analyses. NOTES 1 In some cases, the two terms ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ are not used interchangeably but, rather, narrative’ fs seen as a super-ordinate term and story’ as an instance. Itis aso cormmon that a piece of data may be characterized as a story but not a8 a narrative. In Kohler Riessman study of divorce narratives for example, accounts of events that happened repeatedly in the past, and not once, were classified as habitual stories but not narratives Within ‘narratology’ (iterary approaches to narra- tive), 2 lot of ink has been spent on what is to be included in the category of narrative and what is to bbe excluded, resulting in, for example, the exclusion of ‘reports’ and ‘chronicles’ (for details, see Fluderaik, 1996), In this chapter, the two terms are used inter” changeably. Furthermore, we will see how, in socio- linguistics, there has been a gradual opening up of narrative analysis to data that depart from the narra- tive canon of stories of personal, past experience and events. 2 As Schegloff has noted, ‘itis striking to what degree features of the 1967 paper have remained characteristic of treatments of narrative’ (1997: 101). In a similar vein, Holmes has talked about not being able to move away from Labov's model “AS | pro- ceeded found that in whichever direction lattempted to develop the analysis, | kept inescapably returning to the need to frst establish the basic stucture of narratives (1997: 95). 3 Very briefly described, the abstract is a brief summary statement that encapsulates the point of the story; orientation identifies the time, place, situ- ations and characters, the complicating. action answers the repeated question, “Then what happened?’ resolution marks the end of the events of the complicating action; evaluation comprises the devices by which the narrator indicates the point of @ narrative, Le. why it is worth telling: finally, the coda closes a narrative off, normally by bringing it back to the moment of telling 4. The quest for textualy-defined and universally: applied criteria for defining narrative and narrative structure is part of a long-standing line of inquity ‘that predates Labov. Propp’s (1968) study of folk les and Lévi-Strauss’ (1955, 1966) study of myths are notable examples of such attempts. For alterna~ tive studies of (narrative) structure within linguistics, see Quasthoff (1980) and van Dik (1980). A detailed discussion of this structuralist line of work is beyond the scope of this chapter (For details, sce Johnstone, 2001). 5. While discussing Labov's (2001) quest for teuth in relation to stories told as part of the work of the South-Aftican Truth and Reconciliation Commission IRC), Slembrouck (2003) claims that the kind of ‘forensic’ aparoach represented in his work is mainiy aimed at inferring ‘tesponsiity claims’ and ‘what reaily happened’ irom the study of linguistic structure’ (p. 467). He goes on to contrast this approach to the ‘strand of narrative inquiry ... in ‘which subjective orientations yield an experiential NARRATIVE ANALYSIS 407 truth-fragmented, identity-enabling, _ narrative invested with point of view, subjectifying (idem). See faso Anthonissen and Blornmaert (2007) for analyses Of the TRC; see also Verdoolaege (2008) 6 AS already suggested, the Journal of Narrative and life History (1997), 8 retrospective of Labov and Waletzky 1967, makes reference to several of those. Polanyi (1985) is a notable case, inasrnuch as it was ‘one af the earlier studies to bring into sharp focus the context-specifcity of the model, evaluation in particular. 7 For example, C. Goodwin (1984) takes on board the categories of complicating action and fevaiuation, but shows their negotiability and joint fashioning in conversationat stories (see also M. H. Goodwin, 1997) 8 This is an ongoing debate with more or less moderate positions as well as attempts to reconcile these concerns (e.g. see Myers, 2008) to which | cannot do justice here. 9 Polanyi first broke down Labov’s evaluative devices into a more detailed and elaborate list. She also addressed the question of how exactly we can identify a device as evaluative by claiming that we cannot do s0 a priori of the analysis. Instead, evalua- fion is a scalar rather than a binary category that assigns various degrees of prominence and different ‘weights to various textual elements (1985: 22), and so we can only identify something as evaluative ‘within the environment of spectic storyteling and on ‘ihe basis of how salient it iS in that environment. Finally, Polanyi abstracted from what was frequently evaluated in the stories that she analysed certain core Cultural values which she identified as typical of ‘American’ culture 10. In Tannen’s terms, involvement strategies comprise stylistic devices (e.g. repetition, sound pat- tems, constructed dialogue, details, etc) which convey the teller’s attitudes and feelings towards the events narrated and which shape the audience's engagement in them. Tannen has explored the culture-sensitiity of involvement strategies (1989), claiming for instance that Greek storyteling is based ‘ona high involvement style with the recurrent use of certain involvernent strategies. 11 In an earlier study of mine (Georgakopouiou, 1997), | showed how it was not straightforward to attribute ‘functions’ to the two salient and sustained linguistic devices in Greek conversational storytell- ing ~ namely, narrative present and instances of direct speech. Both had been classified as involve- iment strategies by Tannen (1989) but their use in my Gata presented clear organizational purposes too: they demarcated narrative parts. At the same time, | did not have to look far to find these devices reced- ing and other choices taking their place ~ namely, in stories addressed to children by adults and used for pragmatic socialization purposes. Context-specificity in this case involved what style of narration was deemed appropriate for which context and which purpose, and it thus militated ageinst drawing sweeping generalizations about how ‘Greeks tell storia’ 12. Asimilar perspective on narrative as embody ing modes of social knowledge and social organiza- tion is an underlying theme in Scollon and Scollon’s (1981) ethnography of Athabaskan narrative. For these authors, Athabaskan narrative reflects its fundamental role as the main tool for the acquisition of knowledge in its poetic organization and interac- tional structure, Scollon and Scolion argue that the presentation of action and commentary in narrative discourse also follows patterns characteristic of the culture. 13. The analysis is of highly technical nature requiring stills in phonetics, grammar, syntax and tdscourse and has put off certain analysts (Blommaert 2006: 3ff) In addition, ethnopoetics has often been ctiticized for the high level of subjectivity and poten- tial circularity involved in the actual identification of narrative units. 14 In Michaels’ terms, this narrative style was described 35 topic-associating: it involved frequent shifts in spatiotemporal focus across segments to mark them out, and it valued implicitness in steuc- turing, By contrast, the topic-centred style, character- istic of literate cultures and more specifically of middle-class children in the schoo! that Michaels studied, worked with lexically and grarnmatically- explicit connections and a clear thematic and ‘jemporal progression. These contrastve styles were differentially valued at schools. Specifically, the coral-based oF topic-associating style was not favoured by the literate schooled models, with the result of disadvantaging children from ethnic and socioeco- nomic backgrounds that came to school with this culturally shaped ‘way of speaking’ 15. There is a volume of studies here that cannot bbe done justice to (for a detailed review, see De Fina ‘and Georgakopoulou forthcoming, Ch. 5). The overall emphasis is on oral stories but there is also work on written stories, particularly in the media (e.g. see chapters in Mumby, 1993). Researchers operating within this tradition have done well to document storyteling in public discourse, and in the media as a crucial site for the construction of cultural hegemony and therefore also as a crucial area of investigation into power and inequality. Studies are somewhat polarized between those that opt for macro accounts and are lacking in close textual ‘analysis, and those that focus on the textual organi- zation of stories but fail to pay attention to local practices of meaning-making. “16 The second trial by a Court of Appeal upheld ‘the acquittal of the accused by the frst tral, while the third tial at the Supreme Court of Canada dramatically overturned the acquittal and convicted the accused. 408 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 17, We can see early and defining examples of this in the influential studies of the storytelling prac- tices of female peer groups at school and in the playground, respectively, by Shuman (1986) and Goodwin (1980) 18 The first level explores positioning in the taleworld: how the narrator as character is posi tioned vis~é-vis other characters. The second level looks at positioning as an interactional process, emerging from the ways in which the narrator as teller in the here and now positions himself vis-dvis his interlocutors. Finally, the third level seeks to provide an answer to the question of ‘Who arn I? — the tellers setf a5 a more or less stable entity holding above and beyond the current storytelling situation 19 The issue of how storied self is partly PersonaVautobiographical end partly shaped by

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