The other side of the story: towards a narrative analysis of narratives-in-interaction

TLDR

The article begins by defining a “narrative canon” of personal‑experience narratives from research interviews that shape the analytic vocabulary, interpretive idiom, and identity‑analysis agenda of conventional narrative analysis. The study aims to amplify fringe stories that fall outside this canon and to revise mainstream narrative‑analysis concepts—such as tellership, tellability, and embeddedness—to better accommodate them, with implications for identity research. The authors illustrate this by documenting interactional features—ongoing‑ness, intertextuality, and recontextualization—in fringe stories drawn from adolescents’ conversations and private email messages.

Abstract

The starting point of this article is what will be identified as the ‘narrative canon’ comprising a specific type of narrative (past events personal experience elicited in research interviews) that mutually feeds into a specific analytic vocabulary, an interpretive idiom, and a research agenda (normally identity analysis) within conventional narrative analysis. The aim here is to give voice to, and advance understanding for, stories that do not fit this canon and are thus in the fringes of narrative research. Examples of such stories are brought in from two communication contexts (adolescents’ conversations - private email messages) and their interactional features of ongoing-ness, intertextuality and recontextualization are documented. The issues that are then addressed on their basis involve the ways in which mainstream conceptualization of narrative analysis (e.g. tellership, tellability, embeddedness) can be revised and stretched to reach out to those cases; also, the implications for narrative cum identity research.