Exploring the dialectic relation between narrative and context from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective: The case of World War II-testimonies

This project scrutinizes the relation between the way narrators construct their stories and identities in relation to the dominant discourses circulating in the global context. Only recently have interactional sociolinguists increasingly examined this dialectic relation between the local interactional level of narrative and the surrounding socio-cultural context and its 'big D'-discourses (Gee 1999). This is also thanks to positioning analysis (Bamberg 1997a), which links 'local' levels 1 and 2 - the storyworld and storytelling world - to a more 'globally' oriented level 3 - the construction of the narrator's' identities in respect to 'big D'-discourses. Thus, level 3 is concerned with the interplay between 'little d'- and 'big D'-discourses (Gee 1999), but has not yet been fully theoretically elaborated. The theoretical elaboration of positioning level 3 is at the core of this study. In line with research by De Fina (2013) and Georgakopoulou (2013), I will explore narratives from various members of a community in order to discern repeated patterns in their stories and the identities they construct. To this end, a dataset of testimonies will be compiled about a historically relevant and complicated topic, namely World War II (WW II). The memory of WW II offers a myriad of dominant discourses, since the Belgian state failed to create one homogeneous patriotic narrative in the post-War period. Instead, fragmented master narratives emerged and these were quite diversified in the Flemish versus the Walloon language communities on the one hand and the group of Jewish survivors versus former political prisoner groups on the other hand. A selection of 40 testimonies (in Dutch and French) will be made, consisting of pairs of testimonies. Each pair will contain one oral and one written testimony, by the same narrator. Since the narratives were repeated at different times, they are also situated in and related to different global contexts and allow us to tap into the way changing dominant discourses influence - and are influenced by - the local construction of stories and identities. Thematic foci (e.g. the narrator's arrest and deportation) will be selected, since the dataset is rather large to carry out a qualitative, micro-analysis. The selected narratives will then be analysed on the three levels of positioning. For level 1 and 2 the method proposed by Deppermann (2013) was applied. To study positioning level 3, I will draw on Bamberg's description of this level as the construction of 'a (local) answer to the question: 'Who am I?' '(Bamberg 1997b: 337). Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) and the principle of indexicality will be used to carry out discursive analyses of the narrators' identity work. A new approach will also be added to the existing research methods, by firstly hypothesizing that choosing a topic other disciplines have studied extensively, like WW II, the sociolinguistic researcher can use those studies to gain insight in the potential dominant discourses that circulate about this topic (Van De Mieroop 2011). For this reason, an extensive historical literature review will be conducted, to use as a critical touchstone for the sociolinguistic analyses. Secondly, it was hypothesized that by integrating comparative dimensions into the corpus, a deeper insight into the multi-layeredness of the interaction between text and context will be provided. Hence, the 'repeated narratives' will be subjected to analysis on a mode of narrating dimension, a social group dimension and a diachronic dimension. In conclusion, the project aims to gain insight into new ways of scrutinizing the dialectic relation between the discursive construction of stories and of identities on the one hand, and 'big D'-discourses on the other hand. References Bamberg, M. (1997a) 'Positioning between structure and performance', Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7: 335-342. - - (1997b) 'Language, concepts and emotions: the role of language in the construction of emotions', Language sciences, 19(4): 309-340. De Fina, A. (2013) 'Positioning level 3: Connecting local identity displays to macro social processes', Narrative Inquiry, 23(1): 40-61. Deppermann, A. (2013) 'Editorial: Positioning in narrative interaction', Narrative Inquiry, 23(1): 1-15. Gee, J.P. (1999) An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method, London / New York: Routledge. Georgakopoulou, A. (2013) 'Building iterativity into positioning analysis: A practice-based approach to small stories and self', Narrative Inquiry, 23(1): 89-110. Van De Mieroop, D. (2011) 'Identity negotiations in narrative accounts about poverty', Discourse & Society, 22(5): 565-591.

Publication year:2020

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