Narrative Genre Analysis

Narrative has been studied extensively in the social sciences as a privileged communication mode by means of which social actors make sense of their self and the world around them. This focus has implicated a longstanding inquiry into personal experience (i.e., autobiographical) narratives of nonshared past events (i.e., either in the form of life stories or of key-events stories) that are normally elicited in research interviews. In the light of this history, the questions and methods of narrative genre analyses have been shaped by the use of such a type of narrative as a point of entry into tellers' identities. For instance, the emphasis has been on what a well-formed structure or a rupture of structure in a telling may mean with regard to the teller's sense of self.

Overall, the dominant view of the narrative genre's main characteristics can be summed up as follows: a coherent and well-structured telling with a beginning, middle, and an end that grants the teller strong telling rights. This telling is about a series of temporally ordered events that build up to a complicating action that is normally resolved. The teller employs a variety of linguistic and other semiotic means to show the significance (i.e., tellability) of the events and the emotional impact they have had on him or her.

Underlying the above view is a tradition of essentializing and homogenizing narrative as one archetypal genre. The move to the exploration of narrative variability has thus been slower than in other genre analyses. The scrutiny of the different types of stories people tell in a variety of ordinary and institutional contexts can mostly be found within socially minded linguistic studies. These studies have demonstrated that the kinds of stories told and the ways they are told depend both on the local context (e.g., who tells a story to whom and why) and on the larger social and cultural contexts. This context-specificity involves the types and degrees of co-construction between teller and audience, the kinds of events narrated, how (much) a story is embedded into its surrounding discursive context, the emphasis placed on presenting the events as factual and authentic, and so on. Genre analysis has also shown that variations from the narrative prototype of personal past events are frequent outside the narrative interview. For instance, stories of shared (or known) events and of future or hypothetical events abound in conversational contexts. Thus, the importance of including these and other types of stories in narrative genre analysis not just as atypical but as stories in their own right that serve specific purposes in specific contexts is becoming increasingly recognized.

On a final note, narrative genre analysis has moved away from an earlier emphasis on prototypical text features to an exploration of narrative genres as social practices: as routine and socioculturally ways of acting in ways that link with and produce social life.