The Sociolinguistics of Narrative

Book excerpt: This book aims to appraise sociolinguistic work devoted to the form and function of storytelling and to examine in detail the ways in which narrative constitutes a fundamental discursive resource across a range of contexts. The chapters presented here bring together some of the most recent work in the theory and practice of narrative analysis from a broad sociolinguistic perspective. They address some of the questions left implicit whenever stories are brought within the analytic frame of sociolinguistics: What exactly do we mean by 'story'?; what kind of social and contextual variations can determine the production and shape of situated stories, and what are the core elements of narrative as a discursive unit and interactional resource?; how is the relationship between narrative discourse and social context articulated in the construction of cultural identities? The data come both from institutional settings such as workplaces, courtrooms, schools, and the media, as well as from informal everyday settings.