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 attention 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 account for narrative structure. We will study how tellers manage narratives in interaction and how the use of linguistic elements and structures (such as tense, detail, and reported speech) affects 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, and 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.