Chapter 13. Narrative inquiry

Abstract

This chapter describes how narratives can be useful analytical and methodological tools through a close analysis of two narrative excerpts that I collected in Senegal and Northern Italy. Both examples examine how certain interactional patterns, such as participant transposition and the co-construction of individuals’ identities and stances, are enacted and sustained in storytelling practices. These patterns would not emerge if narratives were not considered as situated speech events in which speech participants’ interactional moves (“interactional text”) are as important as the narrative content (“denotational text”). It is thanks to this narratives-as-practices approach, versus the more traditional narratives-as-texts approach, that scholars are able to unveil participants’ interactional dynamics. The two case studies, moreover, are fully contextualized and situated.