Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling

Extract

Elinor Ochs & Lisa Capps, Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xii, 352. Pb. $20.50.

Imagine a book on conversational narrative that draws from the fields of linguistics, psychology, literary theory, and anthropology. Now, imagine this book as compelling as a favorite novel and as convincing as a well-designed research report. The nexus of these fields and the artful marriage of these vastly varying genres can be found in the profoundly interdisciplinary and genuinely collaborative book Living narrative. In this volume, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist, and Lisa Capps, a developmental psychologist, speak both to those who come to narrative with literary concerns, and to those discourse-analytic minded social scientists who understand spoken, personal narrative as a means to link linguistic phenomena to development of culture and society. Through the course of the book, the authors illustrate how these literary and social concerns need not be dichotomous. Living narrative instills a simultaneous appreciation for the aesthetic and the political aspects of everyday conversational narrative.