A Cross-Campus View of Story in Teaching, Research, and Outreach

Co-sponsored by The Digital Union, The Office of Faculty and TA Development, The Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning and Research, The Ohio State University Libraries, and Project Narrative

Approaches to stories and storytelling

David Herman

Department of English/Project Narrative (http://projectnarrative.osu.edu)

Two storytelling situations--and what they suggest about the nature of narrative

• Bicycle Wreck*: Story told on-site by JTH, in Snowbird, NC, in May 2002

• Ghost Dogs*: Story told off-site during an interview recorded in January 2002, in JTH’s mother’s house in Robbinsville, NC

*Research on these stories was supported by NSF Grants BCS-0236838 and BCS-9910224

Bicycle Wreck

QuickTime™ and aDV/DVCPRO - NTSC decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Ghost Dogs

QuickTime™ and aDV/DVCPRO - NTSC decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

A dimensional approach to narrative (Ochs and Capps 2001: 20)

Dimensions Possibilities

Tellership One active teller ⇔ Multiple active co-tellers

Tellability High ⇔ Low

Embeddedness Detached ⇔ Embedded

Linearity Closed temporal and causal o rder ⇔ Open temporal and c. order

Moral stance Certain, constan t ⇔ Uncertain, fluid

Another dimension of storytelling: Narrative ways of worldmaking

Simulating worlds Cross-comparing worlds

(Ghost Dogs) (Bicycle Wreck)

- shift to a storyworld removed - ongoing comparison between from the here and now storyworld and the here and now

A working definition of narrative

A story can be characterized as:i. A representation that is situated in—must be interpreted in

light of—a specific discourse context or occasion for telling.ii. The representation, furthermore, cues interpreters to draw

inferences about a structured time-course of particularized events.

iii. In turn, these events are such that they introduce disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving human or human-like agents, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc.

iv. The representation also conveys the experience of living through this storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue.

Acknowledgments

• I am grateful to Neil Hutcheson, Walt Wolfram, and the North Carolina Language and Life Project (http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/ncllp/) for their invaluable assistance with my research on the stories discussed in this talk.