ITAL-4480 Discourse Analysis:Narrative 

Course Description

Narratives have been studied by many different disciplines: literary theory, psychology (clinical, cognitive, social, developmental), folklore, anthropology, sociology and linguistics. The focus of this course is the sociolinguistic study of narrative through qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis. Our main atten-tion is spontaneous oral narratives told during conversations (natural or focused) or informal interviews that you will collect. After discussing some key frameworks for the sociolinguistic/discourse study of narrative, and collecting and transcribing narratives for our own analyses, we will use our class corpus to analyze different aspects of storytelling. We will apply different models of narrative analysis to compare ways in which they ac-count for narrative structure, we will study how tellers manage narratives in interaction, how the use of linguistic elements and structures (such as tense, detail and reported speech) affect the way stories are told . We will also look at storytelling as a practice that both constructs and reflects different facets of meaning and context, e.g. identity, relationships, culture, ideology, power, conflict. Along with the spoken stories you collect, we will also discuss small stories,digital narratives and stories in institutional contexts, for example in the press or in court.