Abstract
The analysis of narrative at the level of discourse, that is, relationships among words, can be contrasted and related to the analysis of narrative at the level of interaction, that is, relationships arrong participants in the storytelling occasion. Both analyses are concerned with aspects of the Storyrealm. Such an approach to narrative analysis moves away from performance theory to develop a systemic model out of interaction theory. Arrangements by storytellers in conversation to take an extended turn at talk in order to tell a story have been supposed to result in continuous narration by a single narrator. Hence, the attraction of the performance model. However, it turns out that narration is not continuous nor are narrators singular. Instead, a story transfix at the level of discourse holds across the story1s mutual construction at the level of interaction.
A version of this paper was given at the 1977 American Folklore Society Meetings in Detroit, Michigan. I would like to thank Dell Hymes for an acute critical reading of that version which helped me re-see and re-write it, and at the same time to absolve him of responsibility for the result. The paper was published in Cahiers de Litterature Orale 15 (1984).
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References
Richard Bauman, in “Context in Contemporary Folklore”, Unpublished Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: 1978) calls texts the “thin and partial record of deeply situated human behavior.”
For a close description, see Emmanuel Schegloff and Harvey Sacks, “Opening up Closings”, Ethnomethodology, ed. Roy Turner (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1974), p. 236.
Also Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turntaking in Conversation,” Language 50 (1974), pp. 696–735.
William Labov, “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax”, Language in the Inner City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), p. 360: “With this conception of narrative, we can define a minimi narrative as a sequence of two clauses which are temporally ordered: that is, a change in their order will result in a change in the temporal sequence of the original semantic interpretation.”
Harvey Sacks, Uhpublished Lectures (Irvine: Spring, 1970) Lecture Two.
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 438.
Labov, with Joshua Vfeletzky, “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience”, Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. June Helm (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1967); Labov, Language in the Inner City; and Labov and David Fanshel, Therapeutic Discourse (New York, San Francisco, London: Academic Press, 1977). Labov’s intention to elicit the ordinary language of a given speaker skewed his original collection of narratives so that the analysis then devised for them retains some of the flaws of the elicitation procedure. Specifically, he preferred discrete texts by single narrators.
See Charles Goodwin, “The Interactive Construction of the Sentence Within the Turn at Talk in Natural Conversation”, given at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in San Francisco (December, 1975), for an exquisite dissection of the influence of other participants on the speaker’s utterance.
Ray Birdwhistell, Kinesics and Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), p. 98.
Edward T. Hall, Handbook for Proxemic Research (Washington, D.C.: Society for the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 1974), p. 103.
Robert Georges, “Toward an Understanding of Storytelling Events”, Journal of American Folklore 82 (1969), p. 322.
Roger Abrahams, “The Play of Worlds in Story and Storytelling,” Unpublished Manuscript (University of Texas, Austin: 1977) pp. 24 and 25.
See also Harvey Sacks, Unpublished Lectures on Storytelling in Conversation, Lecture VIII (Irvine, California: 4 June 1970), p. 1: “Now it will radically mis-formulate what happens in stories to not appreciate both the fact that listeners do talk up in stories and that they may talk up in stories.” Also Sacks, Lecture VII, part 2 (1970), p. 8: “that people interrupt in a story, make comments, make sarcastic possibilities, make queries about the thing, etc., are not evidence of their trying into heckle down a story; they’re evidence of the fact that they1re listening.”
Goffman, p. 502.
Goffman, p. 509.
Goffrran, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), p. 28.
Sacks, Lecture VI (1966), p. 16. According to Emanuel Schegloff, chime-ins are one of a class a phenomena more commonly referred to by Sacks (and others) as “collaborative productions” or just “collaboratives” (sometimes also as “joint productions”). As with the term “collaborative narration,” these usages presuppose something about the intention of the producer which is called into question here. Personal Communication (1984).
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Personal Communication (Philadelphia: 1978).
Labov and Waletzky, p. 37.
Labov, p. 369.
Labov and Waletzky, p. 21.
Amy Shuman, Personal Communication (Philadelphia: 1979).
Sacks, “An Analysis of the Course of a Joke’s Telling in Conversation,” Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, Richard Baumen and Joel Sherzer, eds. (London and New York: Cartridge University Press, 1977), pp. 337–353, pp. 340–341.
Labov, p. 363.
Labov and Waletzky, p. 41.
Labov, pp. 365–366.
Labov, p. 365.
Sacks, Lecture VII (1970), p. 10: “What we have is a sense of context being employed by the teller, which involves fitting into the story, in carefully located places, information that will permit the appreciation of what was transpiring which is not information which involves events in the story sequence at that point.”
Labov and Waletzky, p. 32.
See Labov and Waletzky, p. 21.
Sacks, Lecture VII (1970), p. 26: “Three people are locked together; one can leave to be sure, and the conversation continue, but that one can’t go into another conversation, and can’t get another conversation off of that one. So the problem of speakers to keep a third party in is less than in a four-party conversation which, if it turns into a two-party conversation permits the others to drop out, so that some amount of talk is designed to keep people who are not talking, in.
Sacks, Lecture VII (1970), p. 25: “three couples could still be something like a three-party conversation if a rule which assigns women the job of laughing and not talking were preserved.”
Sacks, Lecture VI (1967), p. 10: “It’s if you can’t decide what sequentially relevant next action is being done, that you can’t make a move.”
For an account of serial storying see Chapter Two.
Sacks, “Everyone has to Lie”, Lecture (1967), p. 17: “If greetings do occur, they occur at the beginning of a conversation.”
Goffman, Frame Analysis, p. 508: “Effective performance requires first hearings, not first tellings.”
Sacks, Lecture IV (1970).
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett introduced the study of collaborative narrative in “Personal Experience Narrative as a Primary Form,” given at the American Folklore Society Meetings in New Orleans (1975).
Labov, pp. 360 and 361.
Sacks, Lecture VII (1966), p. 16, “what we have is something produced which by itself is not a sentence which, what it does is, its user makes his piece of talk a dependent clause and makes the prior piece of talk an independent clause and not a sentence. I.e, he hooks his statement onto the previous one.”
Sacks, “On the Analyzability of Stories by Children,” in Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, John Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), pp. 325–245, p. 342.
Goffman, Frame Analysis, p. 127.
Sacks, Lecture VI (1966), p. 15: “Now there’s an obvious thing that such a production might be seen to do, is of course it’s perhaps as neat a conceivable means as you could have for showing the new guy that this is a group. “
Dell Hymes, Personal Communication (Philadelphia: 1979). Hymes suggested that if the two storytellers make a group, so, in another way, do the three conversationalists.
Schegloff and Sacks, “Opening up Closings.”
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Young, K.G. (1987). Joint Storytelling. In: Taleworlds and Storyrealms. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3511-2_5
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