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Crossing boundaries: The nexus of time, space, person, and place in narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN
DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, ICC 480, Georgetown University, Washington D.C. 20057, USA, [email protected].
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Abstract

Recent research on narrative has widened the scope of analysis, suggesting the value of reexamining the canonical Labovian view of the structure and function of personal-experience narrative. This article suggests that narrative is not simply a way of evoking and shaping experience in time. Rather, narrative can evoke and shape cultural “chronotopes” (Bakhtin 1981) or nexuses of time, space, and identity. To illustrate this, I analyze a narrative from an oral history related in 1972 by a young woman whose volunteer work in the mid-1960s led to the rehabilitation of a small African American enclave in a middle-class White suburb. Analysis of clause types, constructed dialogue, existential there, deixis, verb chains, and referring expressions shows that the narrative is a blend of genres evoking place as well as personal identity linked to complex coordinates of time and space, and dependent intertextually on other parts of a larger story. (Narrative, oral history, chronotope, space, place, identity, genre)*

Type
Research Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , September 2009 , pp. 421 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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