Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life (Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics series) - Softcover

Every chapter in the book raises interesting and critical issues about how theorists and researchers are to identify, understand and delimit the complex, transactional event(s) they purport to study and report on. Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life is an extremely engaging collection of diverse papers that I would highly recommend to anyone doing or considering doing research involving narrative, discourse analysis or text anaylsis. The individual chapters in this book are fully worth reading independently, and taken as a collection interconnected by the three underlying themes, the book itself is a valuable contribution to the field of narrative research and discourse analysis. Discourse Studies

This volume focuses on emerging themes in the linguistic study of narrative, especially as it has developed within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, challenge or support moral order, and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. This book makes connections among language, narrative, and social life to illuminate central issues shaping individual identity, society, and culture. Among the new and developing themes that the distinguished contributors probe are the contributions of narratives in the construction of moral order and of individual and societal identities, remediation through public media, multidimensional conceptions of identity, the importance of context, the roles of truth and deception in varying social practices, and uses of narrative in new media. This volume developed out of the 2008 GURT.