Big and small stories Matti Hyvrinen Pensioner Research
Big and small stories Matti Hyvärinen; Pensioner, Research director, Vice-director, Narrare lecture series 22. 9. 2020
Major trends: • Two major changes over the last 20 years: • (1) From analyzing & interpreting individual narratives to the study of narratives in context, situations, interactions, environments, competitions – talk-in-interaction • (2) From the life story (BIG) focus to everyday interactional storytelling (SMALL): • Ochs and Capps: Living Narrative (2001) • Michael Bamberg & Alexandra Georgakopoulou: Small story research; • Mark Freeman; Dan P. Mc. Adams: life story focus
How big, how small? • Life-stories (BIG) • Labovian oral stories (big) • Less-than-Labovian snippets (SMALL) • Recently; the difference between methodologies; not so much about the size
Big stories? • “…big stories are those narratives, often derived from interviews, clinical encounters, and other such interrogative venues, that entail a significant measure of reflection on either an event or experience, a significant portion of a life, or the whole of it. The most loaded characterization of big stories is the term reflection. Mark Freeman (2006); • The distance from the “real events” • Embellishment, distortion, self-aggrandizement; the perspective of hindsight? • Freeman: distance is often necessary; reflection belongs to life
In defense of big stories: • (1) “I want to question the tendency to equate the immediate, the momentary the sensuous narrative present…with Reality” (MF) -> CA-realism • (2) “I want to question what might be termed the “narrative-reflection-as-inevitable-distortion” thesis. -> • Narrative self-discovery. • Hindsight is not equal to distortion; the lateness of understanding -> • Big stories & interviews & reflection have their genuine point
Small story research • Focus on talk-in-interaction; [‘natural settings’) • “naturally occurring” storytelling (vs. interviews) • “…can be about very recent (‘this morning’, ‘last night’) or still unfolding events (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) • “…can be about small incidents that may actually happened… Small stories can even be about – colloquially speaking – ‘nothing’ • emphasis in these stories “on world-making, i. e. telling of mundane, ordinary, everyday events” (Georgakopoulou, 2015
Small story research 2 • Uses resources from sociolinguistics, CA, DA, MCA; • Empirically & analytically ambitious • Less speculation without exact documentation on “identities” and other claims of big story research; • Breaking news, update, future narrative as genres • No (etic) definition of narrative; the wish to show speakers emically interpret something as narrative; • However: no such markers or traces that would indicate: “this is a story”. Maybe, this is a fatal flaw. Maybe, the limits of narrative have been stretched too far?
Questions about (too ? ) small stories • The temporal shortening of time range to the very recent & simultaneous events problematic as regards ‘narrative’ • If the emphasis is on the ‘world-making’ and not on the ‘world-breaking’, do we also move away from the narrative dynamics? • What do we benefit from naming this talk-about-the normal and usual as narrative? • Talk-in-interaction as a here-and-now system with its own rules (CA, DA etc. ) • Narrative as a specific communicative mode for exceeding the limits of the situation and the here-andnow? (A return to Bruner…)
Sources: • Bamberg, M. (2006). Stories: Big or small - why do we care? Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 139 -147. • Freeman, M. (2006). Life "on holiday"? In defense of big stories. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 131 -138. • Freeman, M. (2010). Hindsight. The promise and peril of looking backward. Oxford: Oxford University Press. • Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Thinking Big with Small Stories in Narrative and Identity Analysis. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 122 -130. • Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small Stories, Interaction and Identities. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. • Georgakopoulou, A. (2015). Small Stories Research. Methods Analysis - Outreach. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds. ), The handbook of Narrative Analysis (pp. 255 -271). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
- Slides: 9