Synopses & Reviews
This volume focuses on emerging themes in the linguistic study of narrative, especially as it has developed within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, challenge or support moral order, and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. This book makes connections among language, narrative, and social life to illuminate central issues shaping individual identity, society, and culture.Among the new and developing themes that the distinguished contributors probe are the contributions of narratives in the construction of moral order and of individual and societal identities, remediation through public media, multidimensional conceptions of identity, the importance of context, the roles of truth and deception in varying social practices, and uses of narrative in new media. This volume developed out of the 2008 GURT.
Synopsis
Papers based on those presented at the 2008 Georgetown University Round Table On Languages and Linguistics (GURT).
Synopsis
Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history.
In Telling Stories leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, interaction, society, and culture; and they investigate various settings such as therapeutic and medical encounters, educational environments, politics, media, marketing, and public relations. They analyze a variety of topics from the narrative construction of self and identity to the telling of stories in different media and the roles that small and big life stories play in everyday social interactions and institutions. These new reflections on the theory and analysis of narrative offer the latest tools to researchers in the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.