Chapter 12. Narrative inquiry

Abstract

This chapter examines the key role that narratives have in human communication and engagement across cultures and as fertile analytical and methodological tools. Storytelling practices allow researchers to study speech participants’ visible and veiled interactional dynamics. Besides analyzing narratives for their content (“denotational text”), scholars have studied narratives also for their pragmatic effects in the here-and-now of speech participants’ interactions, or their “interactional text,” and across various spatiotemporal configurations. During their tellings, narrators can assume and reverse roles, for example. Moreover, narratives simultaneously shape and are shaped by their surrounding context. In this light, storytelling practices are actual speech events that are (co)created, and developed, and thus need to be studied as such because of their interactional nature.