Narrative Interaction: (5 Studies in Narrative)

Telling stories in conversations is intricately interwoven with the interactive and local functions of story telling. Telling stories demands a certain kind of context and in itself establishes a particular interactive reality. Thus, narration is a specific kind of verbal interaction, governed by contextualizing devices, genre-specific cooperative regularities and corresponding verbal features. It plays an important role in institutional as well as in private modes of communication. The volume focuses on narration as a contextualized and contextualizing activity, which allocates specific structural tasks to the participants in the narrative process (narrator, co-narrator, listener). Thus, the research questions are oriented towards story telling under a functional and interactive perspective. The contributions analyze recordings of authentic narrations in different functions using different kinds of qualitative reconstructive methods. The data come from everyday as well as institutional settings and the languages covered are English, German, Greek, Hungarian, and Italian.

Table of Contents:
1. 1. Introduction: Different dimensions in the field of narrative interaction (by Becker, Tabea); 2. Part I: Acquiring the world through narrative interaction; 3. 2. Fantasy stories and conversational narratives of personal experience: Genre-specific, interactional and developmental perspectives (by Kern, Friederike); 4. 3. The "Two-Puppies" Story: The role of narrative in teaching and learning science (by Sohmer, Richard); 5. 4. The role of narrative interaction in narrative development (by Becker, Tabea); 6. 5. Humorous disaster and success stories among female adolescents in Germany (by Branner, Rebecca); 7. Part II: The co-construction of narratives; 8. 6. Construction of self-narrative in a psychotherapeutic setting: An analysis of the mutual determination of narrative perspective taken by patient and therapist (by Beran, Eszter); 9. 7. The role of metaphor in the narrative co-construction of collaborative experience (by John-Steiner, Vera); 10. 8. The use of interjections in Italian conversation: The participation of the audience in narratives (by Monzoni, Chiara M.); 11. Part III: Retold Stories; 12. 9. Same old story?: On the interactional dynamics of shared narratives (by Georgakopoulou, Alexandra); 13. 10. Institutional memories: the narrative retelling of a professionel life (by Cook-Gumperz, Jenny); 14. 11. Interaction in the telling and retelling of interlaced stories: The co-construction of humorous narratives (by Norrick, Neal R.); 15. 12. Narrative reconstruction of past experiences: Adjustments and modifications in the process of recontextualizing a past experience (by Gunthner, Susanne); 16. Index