De Fina & Georgakopoulou's Analyzing narrative is a treasure trove and must-read for sociolinguistic researchers and more advanced students interested in narrative research. The authors ably address the significance of a language and discourse perspective on narrative and the advantages it offers within the social turn in the social sciences. This is an admirable book that engages readers with the function of narratives not merely as texts but as complicated communicative practices inseparable from social life.
Ch. 1 discusses narratives as a type of text and narratives as mode, epistemology, and method. It takes readers from the traditional structural and monologic views on narrative to the more recent social turn in narrative studies, which considers narrative as a mode or frame for understanding reality. Ch. 2 focuses on the systematic elucidation of the formal features that identify narrative as genre and critiques Labov's model for the analysis of narratives of personal experience, as well as ethnopoetics and conversation analysis. The contributions of the three approaches are discussed, but they are also criticized for their drawbacks. William Labov's model is critiqued for its disregard of interactional dynamics, its coding categories, and its difficulty to apply. Ethnopoetics' lack of applicability to social life is regarded as its weak point. And conversation analysis is criticized for having its nose in the data and its disregard for the in-between part of a story as opposed to its beginning and ending.
Ch. 3 highlights research that showcases the connections between narrative and context and the situatedness of narrative in social life. It outlines approaches that conceptualize the relationship between narrative and culture in relation to contexts of narrative activity, values, and communicative styles. Cultural specificity in narrative is directly related not solely to the content but also to the conventional methods of storytelling and the narrative events' performance (83). Ch. 4 underscores narrative as talk in interaction and presents research that moves away from static teller-led stories and instead stresses the significance of participation structures and the moment-by-moment unfolding of a story's telling. Tools for examining audience participation are given, and the authors demonstrate how participants' roles and positions as tellers, co-tellers, and knowing recipients can mould the storytelling event. Ch. 5 brings to the fore the relationship between narratives and power. Issues of narrative power, authority, and truth in institutional and interpersonal contexts are discussed. The major notions about how stories can contribute to struggles and social inequality are considered. Narratives are regarded as sites where people who are familiar with dominant discourse use certain forms to dominate those who are novices or less familiar with the dominant forms and norms of the social communities. Ch. 6 turns to the multifarious relationships between narrative and identity. Discussing concepts such as positioning, categorization, self-presentation, and indexicality, the authors argue that to better understand identity, it is best to bring the macro and micro perspectives together.
