Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T10:33:48.982Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Chronotopes of story and storytelling event in interviews

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2011

Sabina Perrino
Sabina Perrino
Affiliation:
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 812 East Washington St., 4108 MLB, Box 1275, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Narratives in interviews involve the alignment of two chronotopes (Bakhtin's term, literally ‘time-space’) or what has traditionally been termed the narrated and narrating events. While narrators are expected to separate the there-and-then narrated-event chronotope from the here-and-now narrating-event chronotope, tropic forms of coeval alignment exist that erase or blur the line between the two events, as if they were occurring in the same time and place. In this article I argue for the need to map these shifting alignments in interviews. This article begins with, but then moves beyond, the familiar case of the “historical present,” where narrators shift into using nonpast temporal deixis for past events. Drawing first on an oral narrative from Italy, I show how resources besides the historical present can produce similar alignment effects. In order to demonstrate more extreme forms of coeval alignment, I then compare these data with those from a Senegalese narrator in Dakar who transposes participants “into” his stories. Through this comparison I illustrate how cross-chronotope alignment reveals the way narrators manage the relationship between story and event in interviews. Mapping these shifting alignments can help illuminate the emergent relations between interviewer and interviewee and hence show how stories reflect and shape the interview context in which they occur. (Narrative, interview, chronotope, historical present, Italian, Senegal)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 40 , Special Issue 1: Narratives in interviews, Interviews in narrative studies , February 2011 , pp. 91 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bauman, Richard (1986). Story, performance, and event: Contextual studies of oral narrative. (Cambridge studies in oral and literate culture 10.) New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Briggs, Charles L. (1986). Learning how to ask: A sociolinguistic appraisal of the role of the interview in social science research. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bühler, Karl (1990). Theory of language: The representational function of language, vol. 25. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie H. (1997). Towards families of stories in context. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7(1–4):107–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanks, William F. (1990). Referential practice: Language and lived space among the Maya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Haviland, John B. (1996). Projections, transpositions, and relativity. In Gumperz, John J. & Levinson, Stephen C. (eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity, 271–323. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman (1957). Shifters and verbal categories. In Waugh, Linda R. & Monville-Burston, Monique (eds.), On language: Roman Jakobson, 386–92. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lempert, Michael, & Perrino, Sabina. (2007). Introduction: Entextualization and the ends of temporality. Language and Communication 27(3):205–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor, & Capps, Lisa (2001). Living narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor; Gonzales, Patrick; & Jacoby, Sally (1996). “When I come down I'm in the domain state”: Grammar and graphic representation in the interpretive activity of physicists. In Schegloff, Emanuel A. & Thompson, Sandra A. (eds.), Interaction and grammar, 328–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M. (2005). Participant transposition in Senegalese oral narrative. Narrative Inquiry 15(2):345–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M. (2007). Cross-chronotope alignment in Senegalese oral narrative. Language and Communication 27(3):227–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1997). “Narrative analysis” thirty years later. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7(1–4):97–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (2006). In other words: Variation in reference and narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (1997). The improvisational performance of culture in realtime discursive practice. In Sawyer, Robert Keith (ed.), Creativity in performance, 265–312. Greenwich, CT: Ablex.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2005). Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):6–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfson, Nessa (1982). Conversational historical present in American English narrative. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wortham, Stanton E. F. (1994). Acting out participant examples in the classroom. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wortham, Stanton E. F. (1996). Mapping participant deictics: A technique for discovering speakers's footing. Journal of Pragmatics 25:331–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wortham, Stanton E. F. (2000). Interactional positioning and narrative self-construction. Narrative Inquiry 10:1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wortham, Stanton E. F. (2001). Narratives in action. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.Google Scholar
Wortham, Stanton E. F. (2006). Learning identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar