Eventyr

Labovian Analysis

The work of Labov and Waletzky (1967) and Labov (1972) was the starting point for many researchers in the field.  It has become paradigmatic, and has, to some extent, functioned normatively, in Narrative Research.

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How does Labov describe an event narrative?

The Labovian approach treats personal narrative as story text and produces structural analyses of specific oral personal event narratives.  It is event centred and text centred as it is considered a text which presents temporally or causally ordered events. 

A minimal narrative is “a sequence of two clauses which are temporally ordered”

Six part model:

1. Abstract (A) - What the story is about
2. Orientation (O) - Who, When Where, etc.
3. Complicating Action (CA) - What happened then.
4. Evaluation (E) - What this means
5. Result (R) - What finally happened
6. Coda (C) - Summary, return to floor (optional)

There are three main types of evaluation (Labov, 1972):

• External Evaluation – Overt, narrator stands outside the action
• Embedded Evaluation – Narrator describes feelings at the time, thus staying within narrative
• Evaluative Action – Report actions which reveal emotions

These also include different types of device, such as intensifiers, comparators, and explicatives.

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What are the advantages and limitations of this approach?

Advantages:

• Detailed and rigorous approach.
• Excellent starting point for analysing different types of text – allows for comparison across amount of evaluation, type and differences in evaluation, changes in event narratives or evaluation over time or circumstance, changes across audience.
• Allows structural comparison
• Allows analysis of narrator perspective – As Mishler (1986:243) said “everything said functions to express, confirm and validate the claimed identity.”
• Particularly suited to event-narrative research around `sex, death and moral injury’.
• Personal event narratives are important, and can be used to tell us something about differences between times and situations.
• Labov’s views have shifted over time to include the concept of reportability: “Pointless stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder, `So what?’” (Labov, 1972:366).

Difficulties:

• Often difficult to divide speech into Labovian categories – the temporal sequencing and the evaluation elements can cause problems.
• L&W define a specific speech act as narrative which appears to exclude what we would want to also call narratives (such as habitual narratives, future narratives, co-constructed stories). 
• The personal narrative is a monologue, audience and co-construction is considered irrelevant, and the speech act is considered in isolation. 
• There is also no allowance for the partial and constructed nature of accounts of past events.
• Some people may tell Labovian ‘event stories’ more often than others depending on culture, gender, class.

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Riessman (1993) reconceptualises the Labovian approach to allow for the limitations of Labov’s criteria by taking ‘narrative’ to refer to both the entire response to an interview (if it contained sequential, thematic and structural integrity) and the smaller Labovian narrative segments.  This allowed her to: “come close to seeing into [the narrator’s] subjective experience – what ‘life’ means to her at the moment of telling” and identify tensions between “the real and the wished for, the story and the dream” (Riessman, 1993:52).  The latter expresses what to me is the major flaw in the Labovian approach – it presumes a correlation between event and reality and leaves no room for the wished for or imagined.

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Notes from:

Wendy Patterson (Forthcoming). 'Narratives of Events: Labovian Narrative Analysis and its Limitations'  In M. Andrews, C. Squire and M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing Narrative Research.  London, Sage:  Forthcoming.
and
William Labov (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular.  Oxford: Blackwell.

Fish Tales - Written and Spoken

The below story is of a memorable incident from when I was younger involving my mother, a fish and a suntan cream bottle. It is a story I have previously told in relation to vegetarianism and as a story about my mother. There were differences between the story I have written above and the one I told. The told story used more expressive pausing, and was supported by tone, gesture and facial expression. I was able to work more with humour.  I also told a supporting side story in more depth as I was not limited by concerns about length. The written story was fixed and had been written with stylistic concerns and therefore didn’t incorporate pauses and ums errs etc. as part of the story. With the spoken story when the listener looked like they could use more information I elaborated – thus the listener had an impact on the story. In addition this story was changed slightly, as listener knew certain background information about characters, which changed the tone, impact and ending evaluation.

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So, I was sixteen; full of life, beliefs and determination. I was attempting to be a vegetarian. It was not working, and had not been working for about a year. My mother had had difficulties with the concept, so we came to an agreement. I could be vegetarian during the week as long as I ate Sunday Lunch and whatever I was given if we were visiting relatives. It was my only option at that age, so I became an off-peak vegetarian.

That summer I was on holiday with my parents and staying with relatives in their summer house in Øyerhavn on Varaldsøy.

I had already had the memorable `lamb-stew/reindeer’ incident, and was trying to put it behind me, when my parents decided to go trail-line fishing. Mostly for the exercise, I think, as they certainly did not expect to catch anything.

So, I held onto the trailing line while my mother and father rowed around the fjord.

There was a tugging at the line.

"Mum! I think we may have caught something!"
"No. Don't worry, it is probably just caught on a bit of seaweed. You keep hold of it."

Five minutes later:
"Muuuuum. I really don't think it is seaweed!"
"No. It just feels as if there is something on the end, but there isn't really."
"Mum. I really don't like this."
"OK. Let's reel it in so we can see what it is wrong."

So, we reeled in the line.

At the end of the line, there was, a fish.

A real living fish.

A real living fish caught by one of the barbs on the line.

A real living fish, caught through one set of gills, by one of the barbs on the line.

I had had enough. I was a teenage vegetarian and wanted none of this. I watched as my parents tried to deal with it.

They really had not expected to catch anything.

"OK. So we need to lift it into the boat."
"We didn't bring a net."
"OK. So we hope that the line is strong enough."

And so, they did.

The fish was lifted, by the barb through its gills, into the boat. It almost tore, but was just strong enough to get it into the rowing boat.

I was not at all impressed. In fact, I was appalled.

But worse was to come.

"OK. So we need to kill it quickly."
"We didn't bring a knife."
"OK. I'll find something to hit it with."

I watched as my mother picked up a bottle of Nivea Suntan Cream, and proceeded to bash the fish with it. She hit it with all her strength.

It died quickly. (Whether from lack of oxygen, confusion, damage to its gill, or suntan-cream attack, I cannot say.)

I sat there, in the boat, as I was rowed back to the bay. I could not believe what had just happened.

But, there was the fish and there was my mum and there was the bottle of suntan cream next to her.

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That evening, we had fish for dinner. I had to eat it. After all, we were visiting relatives, and I did not get a say in the matter.

After staring at it for a long time, I ate.

It was the best tasting fish in the world.

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Since that day I have never tried to be a vegetarian. I do not have it in me. I just cannot justify it.

 

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What is the difference between a written and a spoken story?

• Expanded in the telling.
• Depending on the audience some things may not need to be mentioned or referred to, they can be taken as presumed. The reverse can also be true.
• Style and structure are important in written work, whereas pauses, tone and laughter are important in spoken stories.
• Written stories can be revisited but are fixed, whereas told stories are mutable – each telling is different and each retelling is a new version.
• The audience may also interact with you while telling to help shape or co-construct the narrative.

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I felt it was quite a shame that I did not have a copy transcribed of my spoken version of this story.  It would have been very interesting to note the differences between the two; such as the differences between categories used (more expected to be present in the written story – and indeed they were all present), amount of repetition (although plenty was use in the written, more could be expected in the spoken), performative aspects, and the effect of co-construction. 

My creative writing style mimics that of a spoken story in several respects as I prefer to show not tell.  This was interesting as it meant that much of the evaluation in my story (about my memories of my mother killing a fish) was Evaluative Action, rather than External or Embedded Evaluation. 

The Labovian approach does provide a usefully prescriptive way to approach an event story, but I am convinced that limiting the concept of narrative to that which fits this schema is prohibitively restrictive.  This is very true for my research where I also gather habitual and co-constructed stories for analysis.

NR Course Notes - Week One

What is a narrative?

Key feature of a narrative:

• Involves time, or causal sequence. Often defined as also involving transformation. Some emphasise the personal nature and particularity of narratives. Often used to refer to broader structures than stories, but sometimes theorists use the reverse.

Key feature of a story:

• Involves time, or causal sequence. Often defined as also involving transformation. Some emphasise the personal nature and particularity of stories. Often used to refer to ‘little’ narratives – but sometimes theorists use the reverse.

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Why is narrative account valuable?

Reasons include:

• Apparent universality
• Interdisciplinarity
• Bridges theory and practice
• Is academic yet accessible
• Lies between modernism and postmodernism
• Offers different levels of analysis, from microstructure, through content, to large scale context.
• Allows some relationship to politics

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What are the difficulties of narrative research?

Reasons include:

• Theoretical and methodological diversity of approaches
• Theoretical and methodological incompatibility of approaches
• Implications, if any, of narrative findings, at personal, social and political level

How I got here

As written as an introduction to the Narrative Research group E-Seminar:

I'm a PhD student and associate tutor at the University of Sussex looking at communication and group process in software development. 

I got here by a somewhat erratic path. 

I started off studying philosophy for my undergraduate degree (I was, and still am, smitten by the subject).  While studying I specifically focussed on philosophy of language and cognitive linguistics, as I realised I had a particular interest in how language related to the world.  I continued to look at language representation in computer systems and programming for my MSc (in Intelligent Systems), but I soon realised that I was more interested in how people worked with computers than in computers themselves. 

After some years working as a researcher in algorithms and adaptive systems I decided I had a particular interest I wanted to follow for PhD research - which was in relation to a recent shift in the view of how best to develop software.  The change was from a view where software development involved programmers working on their own to one where they actually needed to work together and communicate with each other to produce good work.  Verbal communication between programmers is seen as vital for developing software. This fascinated me and led to my current research.  I am particularly interested in programmer language and storytelling in this instance - where programmers are working closely together - especially in relation to programmer identity negotiation through technical and social stories.