Narratives in Action

Wortham, S. (2001). Narratives in Action. NY: Teachers College Press.

Telling a story about oneself can sometimes transform that self. Sitting with friends and describing recent experiences, a narrator often reinforces and sometimes recreates what sort of person she is. Sitting with a therapist and narrating a life's experiences, a client can sometimes realize who he is and who he wants to be. Noting such transformative acts of narration, many have proposed that autobiographical stories do more than describe a pre-existing self. Sometimes narrators can change who they are, in part, by telling stories about themselves.

But how does this narrative self-construction happen? Most explanations rely on the representational function of autobiographical discourse. That is, most accounts claim that an autobiographical narrative can shape the self of the narrator by describing him or her as a particular type of person. When talking with friends, a therapist or another audience, autobiographical narrators represent themselves as particular sorts of people -- as people who engage in characteristic activities and relate to others in characteristic ways. By describing past events in which she overcomes exploitation and takes control of her life, for instance, a narrator can reinforce or even create a more active, competent self. If this narrator had, instead, consistently represented herself as passive and victimized in telling her story, she might have become a more passive, victimized person.

While this representational account of narrative self-construction may be plausible, it is also incomplete. Autobiographical narratives have interactional as well as representational functions. That is, autobiographical narrators act like particular types of people while they tell their stories, and they relate to their audiences in characteristic ways as they tell those stories. This book shows in detail how narrator and audience can position themselves interactionally through the telling of an autobiographical narrative. While representing herself as overcoming exploitation, for instance, a narrator might also act active and competent with respect to the audience in the storytelling event. The book argues that this sort of interactional positioning helps explain how autobiographical narration can construct the self. While telling their stories autobiographical narrators often enact a characteristic type of self, and through such performances they can become that type of self.

A few other analyses of autobiographical narrative have touched on its interactional functions. Most of these merely mention interactional functions in the midst of an account that focuses on the representational aspects of autobiographical narrative. No existing book provides a convincing, systematic account of how autobiographical discourse can position narrator and audience in the interactional event of storytelling. No existing book describes how the self represented in an autobiographical narrative and the self enacted in the same narrative interrelate. This book describes in detail how autobiographical speech functions to position the narrator interactionally and how this positioning can systematically interrelate with the representations of self found in autobiographical narrative. An adequate account of narrative self-construction must attend both to the representations of self and to the positioning of self in autobiographical discourse.

The book develops a systematic account of how narrative speech can simultaneously represent the self and position the narrator interactionally. Speech in general, and autobiographical speech in particular, contain types of linguistic constructions that systematically carry information about the interactional positions of the speaker and the audience. This book provides a detailed account of how autobiographical discourse positions people, both in order to substantiate the theoretical claim that interactional positioning in autobiography can shape the self and in order to provide a method others can use to study such interactional positioning.

Thus the book has two main purposes: To argue that the self can be partly constructed through the interrelationship of interactional and representational functions of autobiographical narrative, as narrators enact characteristic interactional positions while telling their stories. And To flesh out this argument with a systematic account of how narrative discourse can simultaneously represent the self and accomplish interactional positioning.

Chapter One