Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history.

In Telling Stories leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, interaction, society, and culture; and they investigate various settings such as therapeutic and medical encounters, educational environments, politics, media, marketing, and public relations. They analyze a variety of topics from the narrative construction of self and identity to the telling of stories in different media and the roles that small and big life stories play in everyday social interactions and institutions. These new reflections on the theory and analysis of narrative offer the latest tools to researchers in the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

Deborah Schiffrin is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is the author of In Other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative.

Anna De Fina is an associate professor in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. She is the author of Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse.

Anastasia Nylund is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University.

IntroductionDeborah Schiffrin and Anna De Fina 1. Where Should I Begin? William Labov, University of Pennsylvania 2. The Remediation of Storytelling: Narrative Performance on Early Commercial Sound RecordingsRichard Bauman, Indiana University

3. Narrative, Culture, and MindJerome Bruner, New York University

4. Positioning as a Metagrammar for Discursive Story LinesRom Harré, London School of Economics and Political Science/Georgetown University

5. “Ay Ay Vienen Estos Juareños”: On the Positioning of Selves through Code Switching by Second-Generation Immigrant College StudentsAlan D. Hansen, Luke Moissinac, Cristal Renteria, and Eliana Razo

6. A Tripartite Self-Construction Model of IdentityLeor Cohen

7. Narratives of Reputation: Layerings of Social and Spatial IdentitiesGabriella Modan and Amy Shuman

8. Identity Building through Narratives on a Tulu Call-in TV ShowMalavika Shetty

9. Blank Check for Biography? Openness and Ingenuity in the Management of the "Who-Am-I-Question" and What Life Stories Actually May Not Be Good For YouMichael Bamberg

10. Reflection and Self-Disclosure from the Small Stories Perspective: A Study of Identity Claims in Interview and Conversational DataAlexandra Georgakopoulou

11. Negotiating Deviance: Identity, Trajectories and Norms in a Graffitist’s Interview NarrativeJarmila Mildorf

12. Interaction and Narrative Structure in DementiaLars Christer Hydén and Linda Örulv

13. Concurrent and Intervening Actions during Storytelling in Family “Ceremonial” DinnersJenny Mandelbaum

14. Truth and Authorship in Textual TrajectoriesIsolda E. Carranza

15. Legitimation and the Heteroglossic Nature of Closing ArgumentsLaura Felton Rosulek

16. Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic NarrativesDavid Herman

17. The Role of Style Shifting in the Functions and Purposes of Storytelling: Detective Stories in AnimeFumiko Nazikian