ABSTRACT

This collection showcases the diversity and disciplinary breadth of small stories research, highlighting the growing critical mass of scholarship on small stories and its reach beyond discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives.

The volume both takes stock of and seeks to advance the development of small stories research by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Bamberg, as a counterpoint to conventional models in narrative studies, one which has accounted for "atypical" yet salient activities in everyday life, such as fragmentation and open-endedness, anchoring onto the present, and co-constructive dimensions in stories and identities. With data from different languages and contexts, emphasis is placed on the analytical aspects of the paradigm toward producing models for the analysis of structures, textual and interactional choices, and genres of small stories. Chapters on the role and commodification of small stories in digital environments reflect on the paradigm’s recent extension to the analysis of social media communication.

This book will appeal to scholars interested in narrative inquiry and narrative analysis, in such fields as sociolinguistics, literary studies, communication studies, and biographical studies.

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Contributors

Introduction

ALEX GEORGAKOPOULOU, KORINA GIAXOGLOU, SYLVIA PATRON

Part I Small stories and big stories: Beyond binaries 

  1. The narrative structure of small stories
  2. MONIKA FLUDERNIK

  3. Dialogue, Small Stories, and Exile Identities in Mario Benedetti's Historias de París
  4. SYLVIE PATRON

  5. Valérie Mréjen: Small stories ‘out of order’
  6. CÉCILE DE BARY

  7. Are small stories another category of narrating?
  8. BRIAN SCHIFF

  9. Reimagining personal stories on social media
  10. ANA GARNER

    Part II Ways of telling: Genres and resources 

  11. World attending in the urban landscape: noticings as small stories
  12. LEOR COHEN

  13. Moving through a moving (storied) world: small stories and their contribution to ethnographic studies of place
  14. WILLIAM KELLEHER

  15. "That was rude": metapragmatic impoliteness evaluations in breaking news small stories
  16. VASILIKI SALOUSTROU

  17. Storying taken-for-granted futureworlds in hair-salon ‘future busy stories’
  18. RACHEL HEINRICHSMEIER

  19. Projective small stories invoking policy paths in parliamentary debates: Narrating
  20. outcome, performance, and responsibilities

    HANNA RAUTOJOKI, MARI HATAVARA & MATTI HYVÄRINEN

    Part III: Participation & Positioning 

  21. Small Stories in mass media: Coalescent themes and tactics in Trump’s Twitter presidency
  22. MICHAEL HUMPHREY

  23. Telling the small, fragmented and "in-complete" about experiences with sexual violations: Narrative stancetaking in feminist hashtag storytelling practices on Twitter in Sweden
  24. FREDRIK EKLUND

  25. Small Stories in Oral Histories: Multimodal Analyses of Narratives about Extreme Sensory Experiences
  26. PHILIPP FREYBURGER

  27. Stories (not) to be told: a glimpse at resistance toward ‘hot topics’ in psychotherapy
  28. CHRISTOPHER KOPPERMAN

  29. Telling-by-doing life as a mother in YouTube vlogs

MIKKA PERS LENE