Narrative Matters: Roundtable

Interactive construction of storytelling in the management of young male identities

Small Stories: boring, fake, and about nothing

 Organizer: Michael Bamberg, PhD

The three presentations are reports from our ‘Small-Story Lab’ on male identity formation in 10 to15-year-old boys. For the last four years, we are working with story-data that stem from interviews, group discussions, and free (non adult-guided) conversations of 10 to 15-year-old male adolescents. The three presentations discuss ‘borderline stories’, i.e., narratives that are low in tellability, highly embedded in previous and subsequent turn-taking activities, and co-constructed by more than one teller. Barcinski will start out with an interaction  segment of four 10-year-olds and an adult moderator that hardly can be called a story. Although there seems to be an attempt to launch a story by one of the boys, the subsequent talk is about ‘nothing’: a list of names that nevertheless seems to be purposeful for the participants. Kalia follows up with a interaction sequence between four 13-year-olds in which one of the participants pulls out a boring story from another participant: a tree had fallen in the pool – which is evaluated by all as cool and interesting. Finally, Moissinac presents a segment from the group interactions between four different 13-year-olds, who boats with the fact that their teachers tried to hit on their mothers. The particular story that emerges in this interaction only makes sense in its situational embeddedness, and most likely is totally made up.

All three presentations start from the premise that storytelling is a local, interactional process within which tellers and audiences negotiate details and evaluative stances at all stages of the tale (Ochs & Capps, 2001). We explore these narrative co-construction practices in terms of how the adolescent participants position each other and themselves in these types of interactions (Bamberg, 1997), and, in doing so, practice particular routines and repertoires that contribute to their emerging sense of masculine identities.

Identity Management in “Ill-Bred Stories”

Mariana Barcinski

In what Ochs and Capps (2001) call “the Dimensional Approach to Narratives”, they define a typical narrative as one involving one active teller, a highly tellable account that is given from a rather detached perspective, with a linear temporal and causal organization, and a constant moral stance. However, they also focus their analysis on atypical narratives, often characterized by multiple active co-tellers and a moderately tellable account. In terms of tellability, “personal narratives vary in their quality as tellable accounts, in the extent to which they convey a sequence of reportable events and make a point in a rhetorically effective manner” (Ochs & Capps, p. 33). Tellability refers not only to the content of a narrative, but also to the contextual relevancy of the story for the participants involved.    

The segment I will analyze in my paper was taken from a group discussion with four 10 year-old boys and an adult moderator. Previous to the segment, the boys talked about how girls can be aggressive towards boys, always kicking and chasing them.

The account is not a story, not even a minimal story. However, and this is the interesting part of this conversational piece, there are some cues that point to what Ochs and Capps call “launching a narrative” (2001, pp, 113ff.). The moderator seems to be taking up on these cues and works within the frame of a typical story. In other words, he pushes the speaker toward ‘following through with his story’, while the other participants seem to be engaged in the construction of a list of names, that is not in the activity of story-telling. As a result, we have something we could call “an unsuccessful unfolding of a story”, but a successful interaction among the adolescent boys. From the boys’ perspective, there is some interactional work going on, some activity that the moderator does not take part in. The reference points they mention (the names in the list) seem to be meaningful just for them, at the exclusion of the adult moderator. There seem to be some story-like elements behind the names in the list, something that makes it tellable, at least from the perspective of the adolescent boys, and that contributes to build intimacy among them. 

The conversation begins with a perfect story-preface (“in the third grade, me and my friend Richard Brown”), giving the time and place coordinates as well as the potential main characters, signaling the unfolding of a typical story. The adult moderator seems to read this cue within this structural frame, anticipating subsequent references to actions and a plot, while the boys seem to stop within the preface and orientation of what could have become a potential story. Apparently, the boys enjoy the joint reminiscing that seems to be going on while they construct the list of names, and do not engage in laying out the story introduced by one of the boys.   

  In a broad sense, the excerpt shows nicely how tellability is co-constructed by the teller and the listeners. Addressing the tellability of the narrative is a joint construction of the interlocutors. Listeners signal to the teller – by laughing, attending closely to the topic, nodding, and engaging in silence - that the account is a tellable one.

Central to the analysis is the use of details in accounts. For Tannen (1989), narrative is a genre particularly given to the use of details, since it is by definition devoted to describing events in scenes. According to her, the addition of details in a story can result in the story being considered authentic.

In the excerpt that I will discuss in detail one can make the argument that the boys’ use of details is a way to build intimacy and establish rapport. In contrast, the moderator takes the details to be detrimental to the story that he expects to have been launched. Throughout the whole segment, the moderator tries to elicit something that could count as a true story, something that moves away from the ‘excessive telling of details’ to the development of a typical story. 

In terms of the positioning strategies at work in this segment, I will try to put forth the argument that the moderator is working with what could be called ‘an adult positioning strategy – one that takes the cuing for narrative literally and expects the participants to follow through with them. The young boys, however, employ a discursive strategy that positions them in a more child-like or adolescent-like setting: they ‘just want to have fun’ and are not taking story-telling as such a serious genre. In a broader sense then, I am taking this excerpt to imply that even in cases of ill-bred stories, where the participants are not sure whether they actually are having a story-contract, they are thoroughly engulfed in identity management.

Analysis

In turn (1) Victor presents what could be taken to be a close-to-perfect preface to a story. He orients the audience to the particulars of the story, introducing its time (“in the third grade”) and its characters (“me and my friend Richard Brown”). By the end of this potential preface, Victor makes sure that the audience is following the story, by asking ‘right’? The term ‘right’ here also functions as a place holder, as a device to assure that Victor still has the floor to continue the potential story he had just introduced and assures his story-telling right.

As Ochs and Capps (2001) argue, “the first and most fundamental step in successfully launching a narrative is to establish shared attention on the story to be told” (p. 114). Mathew, in turn (2) provides the support Victor needs in order to follow through with the story. He seems to know the character referred to, Richard Brown and displays support. At this point Victor seems to be in full control of the floor.   

If turn (1) is taken to be the preface, giving the setting, turn (3) is the first mention of an action that characterizes the beginning of a potential event sequence (“run around”). But what comes next is not the development of this action. Instead of following up with a next temporally bounded event, he introduces new characters (“this group of girls”), apparently adding elements to the previous orientation in turn (1). Victor makes use of another place holder (“remember”) and again is supported by Mathew (4). He then follows up with one of the names that constituted the group of girls he mentioned in turn (3).

From turn (6) to (16) the boys engage in what we can interpret as the reconstruction of ‘a shared memory’. They all participate in the interaction, by adding names to the list that, supposedly, they all know about. One could say that the boys are performing solidarity (Coates, 2001) or possibly better: they engage in ‘intimacy building’. For the sake of the storytelling, we can also interpret Victor’s move as an attempt to build veracity to his account. The list of names provides a sense of concreteness to what was before just a general statement (“this group of girls”, in line 3). By actually naming the girls, the story gains in reliability.

The first contribution from the moderator, in turn (18) can be taken to be his first attempt to elicit “more than that”, namely a ‘real story’. What on the one hand can count as ratification to the previous account, is simultaneously signaling impatience with the non-telling of a story. The tone here changes the whole meaning of a typical term of support (‘ok’). The moderator tries to move forward to the central action involving the characters. Victor story has a preface, has an orientation, and characters. However, from the moderator’s point of view, the main action is still missing.

Besides the structural characteristics of this particular account, what seems most relevant is the fact that the moderator is the only participant not satisfied with its unfolding. To the boys, the list of names, which the moderator does not consider as story elements, is highly tellable. This is particularly interesting since we are making the case that tellability is interactionally defined. There seem to be something behind the names that makes this list tellable and enjoyable.

In turn (19), Victor seems to signal the conclusion of the list of girls (“and one more” – supposedly the last of the list). In turn (21) the moderator, in another bid to elicit the actual story, overlaps  with Bill’s bid,  who apparently continues with more names to the girls’ list. The moderator’s attempt is more direct, when he implicitly asks Victor what the list of girls has to do with the story he introduced in turn 1. But the course of the account is not changed by the moderator’s request. What follows is not only the addition of new names, but a more elaborate focus on one of the girls in the group. Victor and Bill engage in the co-construction of a new character, Britney Eye. In turn (24) the moderator again tries to position the characters mentioned into the open ‘story frame’.

The moderator’s question in turn (33) (“what did they do?”) orients openly and directly to the (implicit) need of action in the constitution of a typical story. In the next turn, Victor is interrupted, before he can answer the moderator. He is seemingly trying to reproduce the preface of his original story in turn (1): ‘me and my friend Richard Brown’, which he ends up doing in turn (36). But before that Mathew provides a direct answer to the moderator’s question, saying that the girls used to tease them. His answer can be interpreted as a general answer regarding the list of girls. Maybe this is exactly what their list of girls consisted of: all the girls who used to tease them (the boys). In terms of their male identities, one could argue that detailing the girls’ actions would have been potentially challengeable to the boys’ masculinities.     

Finally in turn (36) Victor introduces the main action of the story (‘used to run them out’). Raising his intonation, the moderator in turn (37) seems to show interest and provides support for Victor’s story. The main action is again mentioned in turn (38), and again surrounded by contextual detail. Victor seems to be providing motives to justify why he used to run around and pull a girl’s hair down. Amanda is someone who has a crush on him, who wears a pony tail, and who uses to kick the boys. Apparently reasons enough to justify Victor pulling her hair down. The details of the story are now materialized in a series of motives, in a similar way they did before with the list of girls.

Although this is not the main focus of the present analysis, it is interesting to notice how Victor most definitely slips into doing identity work here in characterizing the relational positions between himself as a boy and Amanda as a girl. He seems to have to justify his actions – of pulling a girl’s hair down – making use of the typical discourse of young boys: “we don’t hit or use physical force vis-à-vis girls. However, the fact that this girl has a crush on me requires that I (as a boy) defend myself.

In turn (39) the moderator can be understood as finally getting “his story” accomplished: all his work seems to be finally paying off. He is not only supporting the story but simultaneously challenging Victor about his actions. The last interpretation, however, fits nicely with Victor’s move in the next turn. According to him, the girls used to kick them ‘all the time’. The use of the extreme case formulation contributes to letting the audience arrive a certain conclusion, namely that the girls they are dealing with are aggressive, that they are aggressive all the time, and finally that Victor pulling their hair was something absolutely legitimate given these circumstances.

As with the list of girls’ names, all the boys contribute to Victor’s account and evaluation. From turn (41) to (45), Brian, Mathew, and Victor tell their experiences with girls kicking them. And again, as with the list of girls, the moderator takes these details to be detrimental to the original story. In turn (46) he reproduces the preface of Victor’s story introduction from turn (36), the way it was opened up in turn (1). Finally, with turn (48) Victor tells a real story, one that was introduced twice before in this excerpt but superceded by the discursively putting together a list – instead of a narrative.      

Conclusion

The present analysis shows the power of the structural approach to narratives. From a Labovian perspective, a typical narrative is organized in terms of a predictable structure, involving an abstract, orientation, a complicating action, a resolution, and a coda, with the option of an evaluation right before the highpoint.

In Victor’s account the complicating action – and all the other narrative components that follow – is missing. A clause of complicating action is a sequential clause that reports a next event in response to a potential question: “and what happened then?” The moderator’s involvement in the storytelling can be summarized as the attempt to get to it, to get to the main action characterizing the story. For the moderator, an account that involves an abstract and several orientation clauses does not count as a tellable story. Throughout the whole interaction, the moderator is trying to get to the real story, to the complicating action following the orientation provided by Victor.

However Victor’s story is not a typical one, in the sense that it does not involve one active teller or a linear temporal and causal organization. Even the tellability of his account can easily be questioned. And the moderator does precisely this; he questions the tellability of what’s being said by trying to elicit something that resembles a typical story.

In terms of positioning analysis, the boys position themselves in opposition to the moderator. During the whole interaction, the boys are engaged in the co-construction of this list of names. Broadly speaking, they seem to be engaged in the co-construction of something that resembles closely “shared memories”. What is considered by the moderator as simple details, detrimental to the real story, seems to function as reference points to the boys. The fact that the list is considered highly tellable makes us believe that there might be something like a story structure behind it. While the moderator gets stuck in the traditional story structure, the boys are building intimacy. In research terms, one can say that the moderator is caught into conversational agenda that are more abstract and typically adult, i.e., to elicit a true story, while the boys engage in doing local relational work.  

In terms of their male identities, the bigger frame in which this analysis is situated, it is interesting to see how the boys position themselves as a heterosexual group. They are constantly teased and chased by a group of girls. However, the construction of their masculinity is carefully done, with the boys constantly fending off against the possibility of being interpreted as weak and afraid of the girls.

References

 Coates, J. (2001) “My mind is with you”: story sequences in the talk of males friends. Narrative Inquiry,11 (1),  81-101.

Labov, W. (1997) Some further steps in narrative analysis. The Journal of Narrative and Life History

Ochs, E. & Capps, L. (2001) Living Narrative: Creating Lives in everyday Storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.     

Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collaborative elicitation of a narrative from a reluctant story teller

Vrinda Kalia

Researchers have often had conflicting perspective on story telling rights in groups depending primarily on what their research goals have been. For example Tannen (1993) has looked at floor taking rights from the perspective of understanding power relations between the genders. At the other extreme would be someone like Norrick (2001) who has looked at story telling rights in familial group interactions for what they can reveal about the fostering of group values and beliefs. While these and other researchers have looked at collaborative story telling where the storyteller already has the floor and is supported by others in telling the tale, this paper attempts to explore the collaboration that takes place in giving the floor to the teller. Working from this slightly different perspective the intention of this paper is to show the collaboration that takes place in a group of young males when eliciting a narrative from a story teller who appears to be reluctant to tell his story.

Literature on story telling has always viewed competition as an inherent part of group interaction amongst men. Barbara Johnstone (1993) claims that men’s stories tend to be about contest be it physical or social where power comes from the individual acting in opposition to another. Part of her argument is also that men’s stories usually have a single protagonist alone and the outcome of the story is positive which is indicative of the fact that men like to not have to collaborate. Coates (2001) makes the claim that men do collaborate with one another and the lens of analysis needs to lend itself to perceiving it. According to her the dichotomy that exists in the literature between the listener and teller only adds to the myth of the competition for floor rights. While it is true that men tell overt stories of competition, it is also just as true that they listen to one another, provide one another the space to talk and align themselves with the other’s ideas. All of which Coates, sees as ways of collaborating in interactions.

Positioning analysis has been developed by Michael Bamberg out of a reconciling of two contradicting ideas. One is that of positioning which according to Hollway are either given or taken depending on pre-existing forms of social communication. The other is the performative perspective on identity taken by social constructionist and constructivist researchers like Butler. Positioning analysis takes place at three levels. At level one, for researchers who are particularly interested in the microgenesis of development the analysis of narratives in interaction can provide a view of the speaker as agentively positioning herself vis-à-vis the master narratives that position her. At level two, the analysis can serve to show what function the narrative serves in the interaction. At level three, researchers can be provided access to the way in which speakers and narrators position themselves vis-à-vis normative social and cultural positions.

I am going to analyze the data I am showing you at various levels to pull together the theoretical background that I have provided.

• I am going to analyze the data to show you how the boys collaborate with one another to elicit a story from a teller who appears reluctant to tell the story
• I will do a detailed microanalysis on the interaction wherein I will be looking at the various identity positions that the boys take in the interaction and the function it serves for them. I will show you how the boys negotiate their identity positions in the interaction so that the reluctant story teller is encouraged to tell his story.

Analysis

Tree in the pool

1. B1: hows your cat?
2. B2: ha ha (laughter)
3. (pause)
4. B3: what is that about?
5. B4: i (.) i don’t know. he’s (.) that’s just him. i don’t know.
6. B3: what? did you set it on fire or something?
7. B4: NO!
8. B1: ((he loves his cat))
9. B2: SO YOU ACTUALLY got the tree out of your pool?
10. B4: huh?
11. B2: you got the tree out of your pool?
12. B4: yea:h (cautious)
13. B2: i’m surprised you did
14. B4: yeah me too! well=
15. B3: =you got a tree in your pool?
16. B4: well (.) you know the last day (.) you know the last week of school? (.) you know that thunderstorm?
17. B3: oh yeah
18. B4: it knocked down a tree. it fell over my garage and into my pool
19. B3: WOW! that’s cool
20. (background laughter)
21. B4: there was a ho-(.) well there still is a hole over my garage so
22. B2: aha ha (laughter)
23. M: that’s a pretty good story to tell also
24. B3: yeah that’s pretty cool.

In turn 1, the question asked by boy 1 can be seen as a request for a story which does not elicit the preferred response, which would be telling the story according to Gegorgakopoulou (in press), in either turn 2 or turn 3. The break in norm is picked up by boy 3 who requests clarification and collaborates with boy one in requesting for storytelling. Once more boy 4 does not oblige. He chooses to display ignorance by stating that he does not know what boy one is referring to. Boy 4 continues to display reluctance even after being questioned by boy 3 in turn 6 when he asks ‘what? did you set it on fire or something?’

In turn 9, boy 2 makes a second attempt at eliciting a story from boy 4. He asks him a question in turn 9 which also contains what looks like the preface or the orientation to the story that he wishes boy 4 to tell. It is not a normative request for a story which generally has ‘tell them the story about’. While normative elicitations of stories also contain orientations they make the intention of the person eliciting the story clear because of the word story in the elicitation. In this statement, ‘so you actually got the tree out of the pool’ the question could also be seen as a request for clarification and not story telling by the teller. Which is exactly how boy 4 appears to perceive it initially when asked the particular by boy 2 in turn 12. It is the question asked by boy 3 in turn 15 that makes it clear that the audience is expecting a story and boy 4 responds normatively by telling the story in the following turns. The fact that the boys are collaborating with one another in eliciting the story from boy 4 becomes clear when boy 3 supports boy 2’s attempts to request the narrative from boy 4. Notice how not only does boy 3 indicate that he is interested in the story that boy 2 is attempting to elicit, he does by aligning his method of eliciting the narrative with boy 2’s. That is of asking questions that appear to request elaboration. This alignment with one another’s ideas and ways of interacting is what Coates is referring to when she claims that men are collaborating with one another.

Positioning analysis at the level of the micro structure of talk allows researchers to explore the identity positions that the participants are taking and defending in the interaction. In the data that I have shown you I will present two levels of positioning analysis that shows how the boys negotiate their identities with one another in complex ways that eventually leads to a successful interaction. To begin with I will look at the data at positioning analysis level one.

In turn 1, when boy 1 introduces the topic of the cat by asking boy 4 ‘how’s your cat’, he elicits a non-normative response from boy 2 and boy 4. Boy 2 laughs and boy 4 ignores the question which is indicated by the pause in turn 3 where boy 4 does not come through with a response. Looking at turns 2 and 3 it becomes clear that boy 4 feels challenged by the question boy 1 has asked and has positioned boy 1 as the challenger. Hence when boy 3 asks the question in turn 4 requesting for clarification, boy 4 positions himself as ignorant. This display uncertainty and ignorance can be seen as a subversion to the attempt to give him the floor. The bid by boy 1 to topicalize the cat fails as boy 4 displays reluctance to tell the story that is behind the question. Boy 3 appears to take on the position of the challenger in turn 6 with the question, ‘ what? did you set it on fire or something?’  The use of the extreme case formulation of setting the cat on fire works as an implicit challenge. In turn 7 boy 4 responds to the question but does not orient to the challenge that boy 3 poses. Boy 4 appears to be clearly indicating that he is not willing to follow through with conversation about the cat any further. In turn 9 boy 2 orients to the unwillingness displayed by boy 4 and makes an attempt to shift the topic of the conversation by asking him a question about the tree in his pool. In turn 12, boy 4 responds to the question with a cautious yeah that implicitly requests more information that boy 2 does not orient to in turn 13 when he says, I’m surprised you did. In turn 14, boy 4 appears to be less reluctant to tell his story and readily agrees with boy 2, ‘yeah. Me too.’  In fact, he appears to be beginning to elaborate in turn 14 when he says well only to be interrupted by boy 3 in turn 15 who asks him a question, you got a tree in your pool? Besides being an interesting attempt to be part of the interaction it also succeeds in eliciting the narrative out of boy 4. Boy 4 launches into his story in turn 16. Notice how in turn 17 and 19 boy 3 provides positive evaluations to the story, he could be seen as positioning himself as the perfect audience for whom the story is being told. The other two boys collaborate to provide positive evaluations for the story by laughing in turn 20 and turn 22. The moderator also aligns himself with the boys in turn 23 when he agrees with their evaluation that it s a pretty cool story to tell. Now I will explore the data at positioning analysis level two.

The interaction appears to have begun with boy 1 positioning his request for the narrative from boy 4 as a bid to topicalize the cat. The bid fails and instead the interaction becomes a competitive arena where the boys collaborate with one another to challenge boy 4 in what appears to be overt attempts to elicit a narrative from him that he is unwilling to tell.  Boy 4 remains firm in the interaction in his reluctance to tell the story about his cat. The bid by boy 2 to elicit a second story from boy 4 about the tree in his pool succeeds. Boy 4 appears much less reluctant to tell this particular story. It is this narrative that functions to bring the boys to a place where they begin collaborating with the teller as well as with one another. The strategy of challenging the teller to elicit the narrative appears to be abandoned in favor of providing support and positive evaluation.  The boys begin collaborating with one another in different way which appears to be more successful in eliciting the narrative. Whereas the teller initially appears to have been excluded and challenged is supported and positively evaluated by the participants. Hence the narrative in the interaction functions to support the new strategy positive collaboration and evaluation adopted by the boys in their interaction.

Discussion

The two different strands of thought, narrative analysis and positioning analysis that have been used to interpret the data to better understand the complexity and richness of the interaction. Both the forms of analysis on the data have supported the idea of collaboration being an essential component of a successful interaction amongst groups of adolescent boys. While traditional literature claims that men normatively compete with one another in interaction, I have attempted to show in different ways that the analytic lens is sometimes insensitive to the collaboration that men do when interacting in groups. The boys in the group collaborate with one another by using linguistic strategies like questions that could be interpreted as prefaces in order to elicit the story from a reluctant story teller. Positioning analysis has been used to show how the boys negotiate their identities in interaction around the goal of eliciting the narrative from a teller who is displaying reluctance. In the beginning of the interaction the boys take on identities of challengers attempting to provoke the teller to provide an account. When the bid to get the teller to tell the story fails, the boys change their strategy and take on identities that are supportive and collaborative which is successful in eliciting the narrative from the teller.

• Interaction in groups of young men has traditionally been perceived as being competitive and as being full of ritualistic insults, homophobic banter and sexist conversation.
• The attempt in this paper is to show the ways in which adolescent boys collaborate with one another and the function that this collaboration serves.
• The data has been analyzed using narrative analysis where the structure of the narrative in the interaction and the context of the narrative have been analyzed to show that the boys collaborated with one another to elicit a narrative
• Using positioning analysis, in the interaction presented to you, the group of boys collaborate with one another to elicit a narrative from a teller who appears to be displaying reluctance. The collaboration succeeds in eliciting the story from the teller. The boys support the teller’s attempts to tell the story by providing positive evaluations to the story.

References

Coates, J (2003) Men Talk: stories in the making of masculinities Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Georgakopoulou, A (2004) Same old story? : On the interactional dynamics of shared narratives

Johnstone, B (1993) Community and Contest: Midwestern Men and Women Creating Their Worlds in Conversational Storytelling in Deborah Tannen (Ed.) Gender and Conversational Interaction Oxford University Press

Norrick, N (1997) Twice-told tales: Collaborative narration of familiar stories Language and Society, 29, 199-220

Norrick, N (2000) Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in everyday talk Amsterdam John Benjamins

Norrick, N (2004) Interaction in the telling and retelling of interlaced stories: The co-construction of humorous narratives

Tannen, D (1993) The Relativity of linguistic Strategies: Rethinking Power and Solidarity in Gender and Dominance in Deborah Tannen (Ed.) Gender and Conversational Interaction Oxford University Press

“Mr. Lanoe hit on my mom”: Reestablishment of believability in

sequential narratives by adolescent boys

Luke Moissinac

Coates (2003, p.78) has claimed that “conversational narrative is our chief means of constructing the fictions of our lives and of getting others to collude in them.” But what if we are not believed and treated as an unreliable narrator? Then our stories remain on the plane of fiction according to Fludernik (2001). The excerpt that I will present involves the narrative repair of challenges to an adolescent narrator’s believability. My orientation to “small” stories in conversation is derived from Ochs & Capps (2001) and the analytical tools that I use are a combination of Bamberg’s (1997) positioning analysis and a version of discursive psychology influenced by conversation analysis (see Bamberg, in press; Korobov & Bamberg, in press). In consonance with the work of the lab, identity is taken as constituted in performance (Butler, 1990), emergent in talk (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998), and negotiated in communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). 

            Although earlier work on the tactical use of stories in conversation by adolescent boys is scant, Goodwin (1993) has documented incidences of how African American boys aged 9-14 years are able to expand the participation framework of a dispute by introducing a narrative. The story allows members of the audience to contribute to the dispute by interjecting themselves as witnesses or providing evaluative alignments with either side. The work reported here parallels this research but differs from it in that the introduced story does not open up participation frameworks for hearers. Rather, the story is so well crafted that it singularly defuses the dispute and realigns the teller with the group.

            On a more general level, the conversation style of boys was originally shown by Maltz  & Borker (1982) to be hierarchical and competitive. However, recent work by Coates (2003, 2001) on the characteristics of sequential narratives in the conversations of men and Depperman’s (in press) analysis of the conversational practices of older adolescent boys aged 15-17 years  has highlighted how the generation and maintenance of group solidarity is an important aspect of these interactions. The data to be considered here demonstrate how the two opposing styles are not mutually exclusive but can co-occur in a relatively short stretch of talk. The narratives are termed sequential because they occur close to each other and share a topical link (Coates, 2003).

            Coates’s (2003), work on sequential stories told by men demonstrated that they were achieved collaboratively by the co-participants and were oriented to the dominant discourses of hegemonic masculinity such as heroism and laddishness. In the sequential stories told here by adolescent boys we can observe a similar co-production of storying that relates to the management of young male identities. Through the overriding theme of the bad behavior of teachers, the boys position themselves with, and against, each other as well as vis-à-vis master narratives of masculinity. In doing so, they come off as knowing, mature and superior to these teachers.        

The transcript deals with four European American boys aged 13-14 talking about teachers and grades in a group discussion, which was moderated by an adult. Note that this interaction takes place with minimal input from the moderator.

Before the start of the segment, the boys have been comparing the lowest grades that they had obtained in different school years. In broad sweep, Ben initially steers the talk in the direction of depicting teachers as adversarial and unfair by telling a story about a teacher who gave him a zero on a day late project and another who left him in detention and went home.  Vic seizes this as an opportunity to sensationalize the negative positioning tone by asserting that the latter teacher had made sexual advances to his mother, announcing, “Dude, that dude hit on my mom.” Kev then tries to follow suit by saying “Mr. Lanoe hit on my mom,” but has his veracity immediately challenged by Vic and Art. After a number of weak attempts to stave off these challenges, Kev successfully uses a number of discursive devices in elaborating a story of the incident to establish its verisimilitude.             Detailed Analysis

In the first turn, Art starts to trump the discussion of bad grades by using the extreme case formulation of getting a zero for the minor transgression of forgetting to pass up his homework. Ben displays immediate recognition of the teacher on just this one instance of extreme strictness and starts to align himself with Art by naming the teacher that Art had not been named before and launching a story preface "I remember that…"

Instead of yielding the floor to Ben, Vic cuts him off by strongly asserting that the teacher in question, Miss Brown was the coolest. Ben reciprocally does not display any uptake of this assertion  but continues his narrative, picking up directly where he was cut off by repeating his last two syllables. In his narrative he strongly aligns himself with Art by mirroring the details of Art's zero grade episode: his project was also late and it was given a zero too. He uses repetition of the temporal phrase "one day late" to emphasize the unfairness of the teacher's action.

Having provided a detailed positioning of one teacher as unfair and adversarial, Ben supplements and supports this positioning by recounting the action of another male teacher, Mr. Collins, who punished him with a personalized detention which was all the more inappropriate because the teacher left the detention class without informing the student.

In the immediate next turn (8) Vic asserts with strong emphasis that the teacher had hit on his mother. His formulation "Dude, that dude hit on my mom" is extremely rich in its indexical properties. With one word of address "dude," Vic conjures up a world of laidback, academically challenged, California-surfer-guy, sexually promiscuous camaraderie as exemplified by the movie “Dude, where’s my car?” As a term of address it usually marks solidarity or an attempt to recruit collusion/cooperation. The application of ‘dude’ as a term of reference for the teacher is very interesting. Obviously, Vic is not trying to describe Mr. Collins as a co-conspirator. Rather, he is alleging that the teacher had engaged in behavior that can be construed as morally suspect. This assertion comes in the context of preceding talk about teachers as adversaries in general, and Mr. Collins’s unreasonable variation on the detention theme in particular. It should then be taken as additional criticism of Mr. Collins’s actions. However, the criticism is mitigated and made entertaining by the frivolous worldview that ‘dude’ indexes. This can be observed by the immediate response to Vic’s utterance, which is a knowing chuckle by Ben who had just been criticizing Mr. Collins.              

Vic’s utterance is interesting in many other respects. First, it is enunciated with strong emphasis which can be taken as both sensationalizing the bad behavior of Mr. Collins in particular, and teachers in general, as well as a strong claim that he his presenting an abstract of a story that is  tellable. Next, the content of the utterance is one involving adult sexual politics. To hit on someone is to make sexual advances which are either unexpected, undesired or both by the recipient. And for a teacher to do that to a middle school student’s mother is usually seen as morally reprehensible. Most of the time, adolescents cannot even conceive of their own parents having sex without expressing revulsion. But things are not that simple. There exists in American culture a strong pressure to be sexually attractive and to keep this up throughout one’s lifetime. Having sexual advances made to oneself is taken as an indication of one’s measure of success in living up to this dominant discourse. Woe to the person who is never hit on. In light of this, Vic’s assertion that Mr. Collins hit on his mother entails the implicit assertion that his mother is worth hitting on. Is this a reasonable interpretation? The uptake of the utterance demonstrates that it is. Ben chuckles in appreciation of the morally dilemmatic scenario which was also reframed as youthfully entertaining by the use of the term ‘dude.’ Kev’s immediate uptake, which overlaps with Ben’s laughter, orients even more to this implicit desirability of being hit on. Kev states that another teacher, Mr. Lanoe, hit on his mother with emphasis on “my,” which is hearable as asserting that his mother is equally worth hitting on.Vic can thus be seen as making identity claims that center around a knowledge of adult sexual politics and their dilemmatic moral tensions in combination with a culturally available way to mitigate his criticism. 

             Instead of orienting to the negative moral implications of a teacher hitting on a fellow student’s mother, Kev appears to be indicating that it is not only Vic’s mother who has been hit on by a teacher. A Mr. Lanoe had hit on Kev’s mother. Kev immediately follows this statement by providing details that situate Mr. Lanoe in Kev’s more recent sphere of experience, distinct from the other two teachers about whom the boys as a group were reminiscing. He states that Mr. Lanoe teaches at his school and then self-repairs that to mean his summer school. In doing so, he is hearable as trying to start a second story related to Vic’s abstract as well as being somewhat unsure of how his story will be responded to. His provision of these initial details about Mr. Lanoe can also be interpreted as an attempt to pre-empt a challenge to his believability because he knows that Mr. Lanoe is not familiar to the other boys in the group since he was not at the elementary school that they all had attended together. However, his attempt at staving of a challenge is unsuccessful. 

Vic immediately challenges the reliability of Kev’s story beginning with his emphasized ‘WHO?’ in turn 11. This challenge has more than one implication: Vic can be either challenging Kev’s veracity per se or he can also be challenging Kev’s attempt to usurp the story that should follow from his abstract or both. It is conceivable that Vic was motivated to mount such a strong challenge because not only was Mr. Lanoe unfamiliar but also because his story telling rights were being infringed upon (Shuman, 1986). The sequence of next five turns (12-16) evidences Kev’s initial attempts to ward of Vic’s challenge. In turn 12, Kev displays lack of confidence by stuttering and repeating the assertion that Mr. Lanoe is a teacher in his school. This does not satisfy Vic who not only repeats his one word question ‘who?’ but rapidly adds to it by asking for the name of the teacher.

Turn 14 is interesting in the way Kev over pronounces and stretches out the syllables of the name, in effect producing an effect of exasperated patience, as if he were talking down to individuals who have difficulty hearing or understanding. This tactic does not work as Art now chimes in to support Vic and affirm that Kev’s earlier enunciations of the teacher’s name were not clear mistakable for another name “Rabado” which seems to be also familiar to Vic since in turn 16 Vic reciprocally supports Art in constructing something humorous about the mix-up between the names. What Vic says is unfortunately not clear. Kev does not wait for this collaborative challenge to his reliability to further escalate since he launches into a story (turn 17) in which he uses multiple discursive devices to re-establish his reliability as a narrator and the veracity of the narrated event. In doing so, he also re-establishes rapport with the group.

These discursive devices include the following:

1.      Discourse markers

2.      Use of detail to provide a sense of authenticity

3.      Use of extreme case formulations and iterative form

4.      Use of quoted speech to portray a sense of immediacy

5.      Restyling the voices in the quoted speech to achieve an inverted power positioning between self and teacher

1.      Discourse markers

To begin the story, Kev uses the discourse marker ‘anyway’ which is usually a marker of a topic or thematic shift. Appropriately, he uses it to effect the switch away from Art and Vic’s collusive challenge to elaborated story. In addition, his use of ‘anyway’ in overlap with Vic’s talk employs it has a dismissive device. In effect he is telling Vic that his objections are unfounded and that what is coming up will neutralize them. Using ‘anyway’ here positions Kev as in control of the situation.

A discourse marker that is particularly salient in Kev’s story is ‘you know’ which is used four times in the course of a very short story. Although this marker is usually taken to be an indicator of uncertainty, it has also been described as expressing a speaker’s appeal for agreement (see Eckert, 2003). In Kev’s case, it appears that the function of ‘you know’ starts of mainly as a marker of uncertainty/nervousness (especially when he makes an error in the story and has to repair it) but shades into a recruiter of agreement by its use the fourth time around. 

2.      Use of detail

Tannen (1989, p. 140 ff) has described how supplying details in a story can result in the story being considered authentic. The way Kev starts off his story is in line with this: he provides orienting information that locates the situation as a regular summer school scenario. Parents coming in to “look around the school” is nothing out of the ordinary. However, in the process of providing this detail Kev displays a measure of haste and anxiety by making a mistake about who was to inspect the school premises, self-repairing the mistake and using hedges such as ‘you know’ and ‘whatever.’

3.      Extreme case formulations and iterative verb form

When Kev gets to the main point of interest of his story, i.e., Mr. Lanoe’s actions that he construes as hitting on his mother, he uses the extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986) “ev’ry” and “everytime” to indicate that this teacher’s behavior was not a one time occurrence but rather happened repeatedly and without exception. In this use of extreme case formulations, Kev presents the behavior of the teacher as so consistent that he insulates it from challenges. He backs this up by using the iterative verb form “kept going” to describe the teacher’s inquiries about his mother. This positions the teacher as persistent and desperate.

4.      Use of direct quoted speech

Kev vivifies his story with a sense of immediacy and unassailability by providing direct quoted speech of the interaction between the teacher and himself concerning his mother. This is an extremely potent device that portrays the events in a story as if it were “a play peopled by characters who take on life and breath” (Tannen, 1989, p. 103). The construction of such vividness further insulates Kev’s recounting from challenges and contributes in large measure to his desired positioning as a reliable storyteller.

5.      Restyling the voices in the quoted speech

Kev restyles the teacher’s and his own voice in the quoted speech. The teacher is portrayed as seeking information from Kev, information that he seems desperate to have because he seeks it repeatedly: “Kev, uh your mom coming tomorrow?” Kev also imbues the teacher’s voice with juvenile intonation. By contrast, he voices himself as the didactic party in the interaction: he slows down his intonation and uses deliberate pronunciation such that he makes his response to the teacher sound like a version of motherese or child directed speech: “no Mr. Lanoe uh the thing (.) is in 2 weeks.” He also shows how impatient and ignorant the teacher is through his correction that the parent-visit to the school is not the next day but in two weeks’ time. Here, he constructs the teacher as not knowing the schedule of the school, instead he has to be reminded of it by the student. Further, it can be heard as if the teacher’s desperate desire to meet Kev’s mother distracts his attention from school matters.

Kev’s construction of Mr. Lanoe’s response to his didactic voicing is also illustrative of a denigration of the teacher’s professional position through the use of careless pronunciation for ‘alright’. The response is also hearable as a meek acceptance of the student’s condescending correction of the teacher’s hopes. In this way, Kev successfully turns the tables on the teacher, inverting the power relationship between himself and Mr. Lanoe. He positions himself as superior, knowledgeable of the schedule of school events, and patient with the shortcomings of the teacher. The teacher is positioned as ignorant of the school schedule and by extension irresponsible, impatiently pursuing his personal inclinations, and therefore displaced to an inferior position.

By doing so, Kev is re-positioning himself in alignment with his interlocutors. His reliability as a narrator should not be challenged because the events are constructed in vivid detail; interest in his mother did not occur once but repeatedly. His story positions himself as knowledgeable of heterosexist politics.  More than that, the teacher is positioned as a desperately importunate, effectively a figure of fun.

That this positioning is a successful one is depicted by the joint laughter evinced from Vic and Ben in response to the story in turns 18 and 19. There is no return to the questioning of the veracity of Kev’s assertion that his mother had been hit on. Instead, in turn 20 Kev attempts to provide a softening of his arguably harsh positioning of the teacher by hazarding an explanation for his behavior. He begins to say that Mr. Lanoe liked his mother, has difficulty with saying this, and has to resort to hedges (‘you know,’ ‘yeah’). By doing so he positions himself as reasonable and open to understanding the teacher’s behavior in more positive terms. However, he displays an inability to include his mother explicitly in this more sober formulation, which is hearable as his difficulty in negotiating the dilemma inherent in the teacher’s actions.

Summary and conclusions

            The small narratives in this sequence are related through a common positioning of teachers as adversarial. They are all about the unreasonable behavior of teachers. Initially (turn 1-10) it appears that the boys are performing solidarity (Coates, 2001, 2003) but a breach appears when Kev’s believability is challenged by Vic with support from Art (turn 11-16). It is through the telling of a more detailed story that Kev reestablishes himself as a reliable narrator and simultaneously restores a sense of solidarity within the group. In doing so, Kev employs a number of illustrative finely tuned positionings as follows:

Vis-à-vis his interlocutors

-         My experiences are equivalent to yours

-         We share solidarity against badly behaved teachers

Vis-à-vis master narratives of heterosexuality and adulthood

-         We can identify and criticize undesirable, desperate forms of adult sexual conduct

-         We can turn the tables on adults, appearing superior to them and mature

I hope to have demonstrated that these positions were not arbitrary but rather shaped by Kev’s interactions with his interlocutors. In establishing these positions Kev was successful in achieving the social goal of re-aligning with the group, providing an example that narratives told in conversation are potent tools for achieving social actions (Mandelbaum, 2003). More importantly, Kev employed a “small” narrative to fend off a threat to his identity as a reliable storyteller while demonstrating familiarity with, and evaluation of, adult heterosexual interactions. Indeed, in the co-production of these stories all the boys can be described to be managing their identities as young males vis-à-vis masculine dominant discourses. This points to the worth of analyzing the “small” stories that are told in everyday conversations as a window into the emergence of social identities on a microgenetic level.

 Acknowledgement

The author’s participation at Narrative Matters is made possible by Clark University’s Hiatt Travel Funding for Conference Participation.

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