Telling Tales

Abstract

This paper presents a progressive understanding of the shifting power relations that are constructed in the telling of a courtship and marriage narrative by an Australian-Italian couple who have been married for well over thirty years. The focus on relations of power is pursued through attention to aspects of the sequenced talk to show how the couple work together to tell the interviewer a newsworthy story that is "old news" to each other. The use of two analytical frames derived from different combinations of narrative analysis (NA), conversational analysis (CA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) facilitates two readings of the same data. The two frames provide different means of showing how the story tellers negotiate and happily survive specific threats to produce a congenially delivered story in the end. The use of first, a "bottom-up" approach to the data followed by a "top-down" approach enables power relations first at the local level between husband and wife to be inserted later into a wider ideological and discursive context. Overall the paper shows how the application of multiple perspectives to narrative analysis can deepen our understanding of storytelling practices. (Narrative analysis, Conversation analysis, Critical discourse analysis) Courtship and marriage are significant cultural institutions in every society, and people exhibit an intense interest in telling and hearing such narratives. Much of the analytical work with narratives has treated them as life histories that profile personal and psychological development in the past. Working specifically within the area of marriage experiences, Veroff, Chadiha, Leber & Sutherland (1993) focused on affective and interactional aspects of black and white newlyweds couples' storytelling so as to arrive at an understanding of their experiences in early marriage. This work fits within the general domain Requests for further information should be directed to

Subjectivity in psychological science: From problem to prospect.

“…In this approach, participant narratives are not taken at face value since individuals are considered to be subjected to forces (e.g., unconscious desires, ideological regimes) beyond their awareness or which they simply take for granted (see Johnson, 1999).…”