Anna De Fina – The Handbook of Narrative Analysis

Автор: Anna De Fina
Название книги: The Handbook of Narrative Analysis
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Лингвистика
Страницы: 467
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, The Handbook of Narrative Analysis is the first comprehensive collection of sociolinguistic scholarship on narrative analysis to be published.

Organized thematically to provide an accessible guide for how to engage with narrative without prescribing a rigid analytic framework
Represents established modes of narrative analysis juxtaposed with innovative new methods for conducting narrative research
Includes coverage of the latest advances in narrative analysis, from work on social media to small stories research
Introduces and exemplifies a practice-based approach to narrative analysis that separates narrative from text so as to broaden the field beyond the printed page

About a decade ago, in our transatlantic exchanges, we discovered that we shared a
common experience as teachers and scholars of narrative who worked within a
linguistic framework: there was a frustrating lack of state‐of‐the‐art resources that
would bring together existing sociolinguistic and discourse/micro‐analytic research
on everyday conversational storytelling while also reflecting on the latest advances in
this body of work and its wider contribution to the study of narrative. It is now a truism
that narrative
studies constitute a rich and varied field that has been shaped by
numerous disciplinary traditions. Nonetheless, it is also a fact that certain traditions
have been better represented than others. Narratology, traditionally involving the
study of literary narrative, can boast several state‐of‐the‐art collections, including, for
example, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Herman, Jahn, and Ryan 2005).
As a result, classical and post‐classical narratological texts are well established and
widely known. Narrative psychology is another illustrative case of an area with a
more or less agreed‐upon history
of foundational texts in narrative (see, e.g., Sarbin
1986; Crossley 2000). In both these fields, the formation of a critical mass has been
premised
on the longstanding privileging of specific types of narrative: fiction in
the former and life‐stories elicited in research interviews in the latter. In a similar vein,
the term “narrative inquiry,” often employed as an umbrella term for studies of (nonliterary)
autobiographical narrative in the social sciences (e.g., Clandinin and
Connelly 2000), has not traditionally included in its remit linguistically‐minded
research on stories told by ordinary people in diverse environments. The study of
such stories is frequently described as “narrative analysis” and tends to be subsumed
under broader linguistic fields, as the inclusion of chapters on narrative analysis in
sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis handbooks (Wodak, Johnstone,
and Kersville 2010; Tannen, Hamilton, and Schiffrin, in press) shows. However undeniable the cross‐fertilization of narrative analysis with a wide array of linguistic
areas is, it is also important to recognize that there are specific concerns within narrative
analysis that are on occasion better served with dedicated publications, forums,
and other scholarly activities. This move toward a consolidation of a critical mass is
not aimed at homogenizing narrative analysis or constructing a false consensus. On
the contrary, our aim is to showcase the multiplicity of traditions and influences –
both within and outside linguistics – in the current forms and practices of narrative
analysis. So far, the discussions of narrative analysis always in connection with
a “broader” area of linguistics may have inadvertently privileged specific works,
such as Labov’s admittedly foundational study of narrative within sociolinguistics,
at the expense of the more comprehensive coverage that dedicated collections
inevitably
produce.
Our first joint endeavor toward bringing together seemingly disparate works on
narrative
analysis and celebrating the critical mass created by them was to produce
an introductory overview, Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives
(De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012). The present Handbook felt like the natural next
step. For readers of Analyzing Narrative, it provides a deeper, multi‐strand engagement
with specific topics that our earlier volume could not have developed more
fully, such as time and space, embodiment, reflexivity. At the same time, for readers
of this Handbook, Analyzing Narrative can provide a back‐to‐the‐basics experience of
specific issues, particularly regarding micro‐analytical aspects. Of course, the
Handbook is meant as an independent resource, too – one that can serve as a point of
departure for focused readings of foundational works, through the tasters that its
chapters provide to a wide array of issues. In its entirety, the Handbook can also
serve as a barometer of the latest advances, including the decisive move of narrative
analysis to concerns traditionally
viewed as typical of “narrative inquiry” – for
instance,
the construction of subjectivities and experientiality through stories, the
intimate link between narrative and modes of self‐ and other‐understanding, and
the epistemological place of narrative research in the wide range of qualitative microperspectives
on people’s identities.
In the absence of a body of publications that have crystallized both the key foundational
works and the current trends in narrative analysis, this Handbook is inevitably,
even if not unquestionably, serving in the role of a collective output that has had to
select and push to the forefront certain approaches and not others. We are very mindful
as editors of creating biases of all sorts, and our efforts not to become too wedded
to specific standpoints have led us to a thematic organization. By singling out themes
and issues that seem to have preoccupied narrative scholars in general, and by teasing
out some of the ways of studying those themes as they have developed within narrative
analysis, we are offering a set of guidelines for analytical engagement rather than
prescriptions for specific frameworks of analysis. That said, several of our chapters
showcase modes of analytical engagement that are compatible with a view of stories
not just as texts, amenable to a purely formal analysis, but as socioculturally shaped
practices, interactionally drafted in specific local contexts. We will discuss this in more
detail below.