The Georgetown University Round Table in Language and Linguistics for 2008 was titled Telling Stories: Building Bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society, and Culture, and 17 of the papers delivered there are collected here. Among their topics are narrative performance on early commercial sound recordings, positioning as a metagrammar for discursive story lines, a tripartite self-construction model of identity, identity claims in interview and conversational data, interaction and narrative structure in dementia, concurrent and intervening actions during storytelling in family ceremonial dinners, multimodal storytelling and identity construction in graphic narrative, and the role of style shifting in the functions and purposes of storytelling as demonstrated by detective stories in anime. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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.