KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER

Over the course of the last three chapters, we have looked in some detail at modal-worlds in their various forms. We have seen that these worlds occur for one of three reasons in discourse. Firstly, the use of boulomaic modality, including any description of wishes, desires or fantasies, will generate a boulomaic modal-world in the minds of the discourse participants. Secondly, the expression of any degree of obligation, from permission through to requirement, will generate a deontic modal-world. Finally, epistemic modal-worlds occur whenever some form of epistemic commitment is expressed in discourse. In Chapter 7, we saw that this category of modal-worlds includes any articulation of personal belief or knowledge, the representation of the thoughts and beliefs of others, hypothetical constructions and conditionality. We have also seen how various factors influence the extent to which each type of modal-world can be understood by the discourse-world participants to exist at a greater or lesser conceptual distance from his or her reality. Chapter 7 concluded with an analysis of the conditional structures operating across an entire political speech. In the next two chapters, this broad view is maintained and the means by which text-worlds are managed over the duration of extended discourses are explored in more depth. The main analyses in this chapter concentrate on prototypical narrative discourse: literary fiction. Two extracts from two examples of contemporary prose fiction are examined and the discussion then extends into an exploration of the manipulation of certain narrative structures for particular effects in both literary and non-literary contexts.

KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER

The dynamism of Text World Theory is already continuing beyond the pages of this book, with new applications to diverse discourses being readily undertaken by the next generation of text-world researchers. The version of Text World Theory which has been presented over the course of the preceding chapters is by no means conclusive or absolute. I have introduced the basic mechanics of the text-world framework and reported some of the results of my own journey of discovery so far, but that journey is in no way at an end. The directions in which the exploration of human mental representation will advance have yet to be determined; the final boundaries of Text World Theory have yet to be drawn. This chapter presents just some of the possibilities for the further refinement of the text-world approach. It raises a series of questions which have occurred to me during my own explorations of Text World Theory and offers suggestions for how these questions might be addressed in future work through the analysis of particular texts or types of text. Unlike those which have preceded it, this chapter does not contain separate Further investigation and Further reading sections. Instead, proposals for independent research are made throughout the coming sections and pointers to helpful texts are given as they become relevant.

The chapters that form the closing part of this volume analyze narrative data produced by people who have gone through fundamental and, in certain cases, deeply traumatic changes in their life. De Fina and Baynham look at immigrant discourse, while Schiff and Noy study the life story of a Holocaust survivor. As noted by Baynham in the introduction to his chapter, the experience of change and of physical or moral displacement leads people to revisit and question their past inventory of identities in order to rebuild a sense of self. In this regard, the types of narratives analyzed in this section are an ideal locus to study the discursive construction and negotiation of identity. The three chapters deal with interview data and in all of them interviewers and interviewees are shown grappling with the need to understand and give meaning to complex past experiences that led narrators to claim their present identities, but also to establish common ground or differences and confront each other on the adequacy of categories socially established to describe human experience. In this process, the analysts, who were also interviewers, rediscover the importance of looking at identity as something that is done on the basis of both, the stable and the innovative, the known and the unknown.

Thus a common thread running through the three chapters is an interrogation on the nature of the relationship between individual and collective identities, creative expression and social mould, and therefore also a reflection on social constructionism as a frame of reference.

Introduction

Narratives of migration and settlement are narratives in which, almost by definition, settled and stable senses of self are unsettled and challenged. Thus, they confront the discourse analyst and cultural theorist with the task of finding new ways of understanding traditional categories of identity and voice. In this chapter, I use the concepts of speaking position and performance to analyze, in narrative, this unsettling of identities characteristic of migration and diaspora, and I show how narrative has a crucial role in the discursive “bringing-in” of meaning through which the sense of a life is continually made and re-made. The narrative speaking position is necessarily retrospective: to transpose Bauman's words, the narrative of wandering transforms it into discourse, through it speakers articulate retrospectively both their journeys and the senses that can be made of them. Less obviously, the narrative speaking position is also both current and prospective: through narratives speakers construct versions of themselves in current and projected future time.

Food in history and culture

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, human identity was generally viewed rather simply. It was assumed that identity achieved its final form in the course of childhood and adolescence, culminating in the famous Eriksonian “identity crisis,” the successful resolution of which ushered in a competent adulthood. While experts disputed just when and how the larger aspects of individual identity congealed – gender identity for instance – and argued as well about the relationship between individual and group identity, identity was not seen as something adults actively worked on or typically experienced conflict over.

In recent years, prodded by feminist and queer theorists, students of identity have radically changed their views. Increasingly they see human identity as a continual work in progress, constructed and altered by the totality of life experience. While much of the work in support of this belief concentrates on the larger aspects of identity – especially gender, ethnicity, and sexual preference – in fact human identity involves many other categories. Identity is constructed in complex ways, more or less consciously and overtly. Some aspects of identity, in particular those listed above, are applicable both to individual identity and a person's identification as a member of a cohesive and coherent group.

Other aspects of individual identity are more subtle, perhaps less prone to being problematized, and not linked to group membership in any obvious way.

The chapters in Part I, Overview: theory, method and analysis, present broad (and sometimes challenging) perspectives on several issues pursued and relied upon in many analyses of discourse and identity, including those in the chapters in this volume. Mishler opens Part I by taking sharp and critical aim at the presumption – and privileging – of linear time in the structure of narrative and the formation of identity. Mishler points out that research on narrative and identity is dominated by a “clock/chronological” model of time that has consequences for identity theory. If we assume that a sequence of events provides a causal chain of “what happened,” then the development of identity through narrative should mirror that process: early identities would provide the basic material out of which later identities develop. Mishler argues, however, that our stories do not represent temporal and causal chains leading toward the present. Rather, stories represent more recent (or possibly current) reflections that throw a different light on what happened. Events and plots have actually been selected from many possible configurations at each point in time. Thus the only way we know what events will serve as a beginning or middle of a story is by looking backwards from the end of the story. Likewise, our constructions of identity through narrative flow recurrently between the present and the past.

Introduction

One of the fundamental tasks of talk is to refer to something in the world – a person, place, thing – in a way that will not only capture our own sense of what that something is, but will also allow our hearers to adequately recognize what we are talking about. So central is this task that Brown (1995: 62) assigns reference priority in understanding language: “the most crucial feature of each utterance, the feature which a listener must minimally grasp in order to begin to understand the utterance, is the expression used to identify what the speaker is talking about.”

The linguistic form through which we convey what we are talking about is the noun phrase, either a full noun phrase (e.g. the boy, a new family on the block, my high school friends, her house) or a pronoun (e.g. he, they, we, it). Often what we are talking about are people, especially specific people with whom we have had some personal experience. When we do so, our nouns and pronouns do more than just refer to an entity that is “human” and “animate”: they display characters who go on to reveal complex attributes, take specific actions, and form social relationships with other characters within a textual world that varies over time and across space. These very same characters, however, emerge within another site of social action and interaction: a concrete social world that forms its own microcosmic and fleeting world.

Introduction

In everyday conversation, participants continuously negotiate what is being said and done – how they are defining the situation and how they mean what they say. This social and conversational work conveys how participants frame interaction as they speak and are framed by others as well. This chapter discusses different framing processes in a telephone conversation between two brothers. It investigates the construction and performance of social and discursive identities in the delivery and reception of difficult news. While the brothers display alliance towards each other through their talk, tension is caused by the younger brother's responses. When the younger brother questions the validity of the older brother's report, a set of common premises needs to be established to avoid misunderstandings.

As a conceptual tool, frame analysis (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974, 1981; Tannen 1986, 1993a) is particularly suited for understanding how people construct meaning from moment to moment. Interactants jointly signal their definition of a situation through framing. That is, as people speak and act, they signal to each other what they believe they are doing (e.g. what activity they are performing or what speech act they are producing) and in what way they want their words and gestures to be understood. The intricate ways in which framing is accomplished in verbal interaction is captured through Goffman's (1981) notion of footing, or the alignment that speakers and hearers take toward each other and toward the content of their talk.

Introduction

The last decade has seen a growing interdisciplinary interest in the formation, negotiation, and development of identities. This new focus on identity is, at least partially, the product of the intensified contact between different communities brought about in post-modern societies by such social processes as globalization and massive migrations. The multiplication of the occasions for contact with the other has brought with it a problematization of the concept of identity itself and an effort to understand the relationship between people's sense of membership in a community, the beliefs and social practices that define that sense of membership, and its expression and manifestation in social behavior.

For discourse analysts and sociolinguists the challenge has been to show not only the centrality of the role of language in the construction and transmission of identities, but also the concrete forms in which and through which language practices index such identities.

In this chapter, I focus on how group identity is represented and negotiated in narratives. I argue that narrators build shared representations about who they are by creating story-worlds in which identities are characterized in common ways and routinely related to specific actions or reactions. The analysis of how narrators build relationships between identities and actions affords us knowledge on the nature of group self-representations, because it allows the investigation of traits that are seen as salient in descriptions of self and others and of the consequences that category membership has for social action.

Introduction

Research on identities in narrative increasingly shares with the rest of discourse studies the view that identities are not given entities, static properties, or finished projects. Instead, they are practical accomplishments that are constructed – and even deconstructed – online in the “everyday flow of verbal interaction” (Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995: 218). Emphasis on the emergence of identities in discourse, particularly in interactional sites, where they can present a multiplicity of meanings, brings together approaches to discourse as diverse as social constructionism and conversation analysis (Widdicombe and Antaki 1998: 201). Nonetheless, there is less convergence on how the discourse constructions of identities relate to factors that are external to a specific interactional situation (sic. exogenous). In studies of identity constructions through narrative, the dominant view seems to be that pre-existent, socioculturally available – capital D – discourses are drawn upon and employed by tellers in the course of narratives in order to construct, justify, and explicate a sense of ‘self’ and, when applicable, ‘other’ (e.g. see Kerby 1991). In this process, narrative is seen as a privileged mode for self-construction and a unique point of entry into trans-situational features of the self and identity as those emerge in a person's (ongoing) life story (for a discussion see Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann 2000: 201). In view of this exigency, the type of narrative that has monopolized identity analysis is that of autobiography. As a rule, (natural) autobiographical narratives or life stories occur in research interviews.

Introduction

The theme of identity can be seen as one of the most popular topics in the media and in the Human Sciences today. This interest may be due in part to an effort to understand the social, cultural, technological and political changes that are affecting the way we live our everyday lives, in most parts of the world. These changes have led us to question traditional views of, for example, gender, sexuality and family life, in view of a new panorama in which to live social life. The ever-increasing presence of women in the job market, women's feminist consciousness and human reproduction technology, to name just three of these changes, have altered our perception of how families are organized, of what sexuality means and, consequently, of how the genders are performed.

On the other hand, the centrality of the theme of identity also seems to be motivated by the way the structures of power within which we live have been affected, in most parts of the world, by the so-called liberation movements, which began in the middle of last century (although in different degrees in different parts of the world), as well as by the intense migration from the old colonies of the southern hemisphere to the old colonies or to the rich countries of the northern hemisphere, in the so-called post-colonial world.