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5 - Rethinking Narrative: Tellers, Tales and Identities in Contemporary Worlds

from Part I - (Con)Textualizing Discourses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2020

By
Anna De Fina  and
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Edited by
Anna De Fina  and
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Anna De Fina
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

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

Keywords

Breaking newseventsidentities-in-interactionchronotopesnarrative stancetakingmigrantsmobilitypolitical identitiespositioningselfiessmall stories researchspace
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies , pp. 91 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Further Reading

This special issue brings together work on narrative and identities by scholars from a variety of areas, including social psychology, anthropology, sociolinguistics and narratology.

This is a comprehensive volume on main issues and trends in narrative studies, with several chapters following a discourse analytical approach.

This volume brings together sociolinguistic and discourse analytic work on stories and identities in digital environments.

This volume presents a flexible, context-sensitive definition of storytelling premised on a dimensional approach to it, which is widely applied in research on narratives and identities.

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Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001). Living Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

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