2
Framing the Approach
Some Background and Context
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative and Narrative Theory
Researchers have pointed to a “narrative turn” unfolding across multiple fields of inquiry over the past several decades. If, as Barthes suggested, stories are omnipresent and transcultural, by the same token the study of narrative in all of its many guises may be able to unite scholars from across the arts and sciences. The present volume emerges from and also seeks to contribute to this cross-disciplinary concern with stories and storytelling.
In his contribution to a volume titled The Travelling Concept of Narrative, Matti Hyvärinen traces the extent of the recent diffusion or spread of narrative across disciplinary boundaries, suggesting that “the concept of narrative has become such a contested concept over the last thirty years in response to what is often called the ‘narrative turn’ in social sciences....The concept has successfully travelled to psychology, education, social sciences, political thought and policy analysis, health research, law, theology and cognitive science” (Hyvärinen 2006: 20). The “narrative turn,” to use the term that Hyvärinen adopts from Martin Kreiswirth (2005), has also shaped humanistic fields in recent decades, thanks in part to the development of structuralist theories of narrative in France in the mid to late 1960s.
Thus, around the same time that William Labov and Joshua Waletzky (1967) developed their model for the analysis of personal experience narratives told in face-to-face interaction, thereby establishing a key precedent for scholars of narrative working in the fields mentioned by Hyvärinen, the literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov coined the term “la narratologie” (= “narratology”) to designate what he and other structuralist theorists (e.g., Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette, and A. J. Greimas) conceived of as a science of narrative modeled after the “pilot-science” of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics.1 As I discuss in greater detail below, the structuralists drew not only on Saussure’s ideas but also on the work of Russian Formalist literary theorists, who studied prose narratives of all sorts, from Tolstoi’s historically panoramic novels to tightly plotted detective novels to (Russian) fairy tales. This broad investigative focus helped initiate the narrative turn, uncoupling theories of narrative from theories of the novel, and shifting scholarly attention from a particular genre of literary writing to all discourse (or, in an even wider interpretation, all semiotic activities) that can be interpreted as narratively organized. That same shift helps explain why the present volume is titled Basic Elements of Narrative rather than Basic Elements of the Novel – even though I use narrative fiction as a key source of illustrative examples, written fictional texts being a highly developed form of storytelling across the world’s literatures.
Taking their cue from the Formalists, and noting that stories can be presented in a wide variety of textual formats, media, and genres, structuralists such as Barthes ([1957] 1972, [1966] 1977) argued explicitly for an integrative approach to the analysis of narrative – an approach in which stories can be viewed as supporting many cognitive and communicative activities, from spontaneous conversations and historiographic writing to visual art, dance, and mythic and literary traditions. Only after the heyday of structuralism, however, did such an approach to narrative begin to emerge. Although more needs to be done to promote genuine dialogue and exchange among story analysts working in different fields (Hyvärinen 2006), it is undeniable that the past decade in particular has seen an exponential growth of cross-disciplinary research and teaching activity centering around narrative. International in scope, this activity has also spawned book series and journals in which scholarship on narrative figures importantly.2 Other manifestations of the way narrative cuts across disciplinary boundaries include initiatives such as the Centre for Interdisciplinary Narratology at the University of Hamburg (<http://www.icn.uni-hamburg.de>); the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London (<http://www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/>); Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine (<http://www.narrativemedicine.org/>), which aims “to fortify medicine with ways of knowing about singular persons available through a study of humanities, especially literary studies and creative writing”; and Project Narrative at Ohio State University (<http://projectnarrative.osu.edu>), which brings together folklorists, scholars of language and literature, theorists of storytelling in film, digital media, and comics and graphic novels, and researchers in other fields concerned with narrative. During the same period, a number of conferences and symposia have been convened to explore the potential of narrative to bridge disciplines, in ways that may in turn throw new light on narrative itself.3 The present book, which explores basic elements of narrative and examines how those elements manifest themselves in various kinds of storytelling media and communicative situations, can be seen as an outgrowth of this same trend toward interdisciplinarity (and transmediality) in narrative research (cf. Herman 2004).
My next section briefly outlines the (ongoing) development of frameworks for analyzing stories, and concludes with an overview of approaches to studying narrative in contexts of face-to-face interaction. In general I mean to provide a sense of how different concepts and nomenclatures have grown up around different modes of narrative practice, and to underscore the advantages of greater cooperation among scholars focusing on different kinds of storytelling situations. Granted, it may not be possible (or desirable) to transfer all the tools developed by students of cinematic narratives, say, to research on narratives told in contexts of face-to-face interaction or vice versa; attempting a wholesale transfer of this sort might focus attention on what the two storytelling media have in common, at the expense of finer-grained analyses of their specific constraints and affordances. Arguably, however, a more open dialogue among practitioners in the many fields concerned with stories and storytelling can help throw into relief the relative distinctiveness of narrative practices across various contexts, and clarify the extent to which concepts and methods used to investigate one kind of narrative practice can be brought to bear on another.
Major Trends in Recent Scholarship on Narrative
One way to map out recent developments in the study of narrative is to point to a shift from “classical” to “postclassical” approaches. Rooted in Russian Formalist literary theory, classical approaches were extended by structuralist narratologists starting in the mid-1960s, and refined and systematized up through the early 1980s by scholars such as Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman, Wallace Martin, Gerald Prince, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and others. Further, some of the scholars working in the Anglo-American tradition of scholarship on fictional narrative were influenced by and in turn influenced this Formalist-structuralist tradition.4 Postclassical approaches, meanwhile, build on the classical tradition but supplement it with concepts and methods that were unavailable to story analysts such as Barthes, Genette, Greimas, and Todorov during the heyday of structuralism. These ideas stem from fields ranging from gender theory and philosophical ethics, to post-Saussurean linguistics, philosophy of language, and cognitive science, to comparative media studies and critical theory. In short, postclassical narratology, which should not be conflated with post-structuralist theories of narrative, contains classical narratology as one of its “moments” but also includes more recent perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative.5
During the same period research on narratives told in face-to-face communication has undergone an analogous shift in scope and sophistication, in recent years cross-pollinating with work by scholars interested in bridging the divide between the study of written, literary narratives and analysis of everyday storytelling.
From Russian Formalism to structuralist narratology
The Russian Formalists authored a number of pathbreaking studies that have served as foundations for later research on narrative. For example, in distinguishing between “bound” (or plot-relevant) and “free” (or non-plot-relevant) motifs, Boris Tomashevskii ([1925] 1965) provided the basis for Barthes’s distinction between “nuclei” and “catalyzers” in his “Introduction” ([1966] 1977: 93–4). Renamed kernels and satellites by Seymour Chatman (1978: 53–6), these terms refer to core and peripheral elements of story-content, respectively. Delete or add to the kernel events of a story and you no longer have the same story; delete or add to the satellites and you have the same story told in a different way. Related to Tomashevskii’s work on free versus bound motifs, Viktor Shklovskii’s ([1929 [1990]) early work on plot as a structuring device established one of the grounding assumptions of structuralist narratology: namely, the fabula/sjuzhet or story/discourse distinction, that is, the distinction between the what and the how, or what is being told versus the manner in which it is told.
Another important Formalist precedent for modern narrative theory was furnished by Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, whose first English translation appeared in 1958. Propp distinguished between variable and invariant components of the corpus of Russian folktales that he studied; more specifically, he drew a contrast between changing dramatis personae and the unvarying plot functions performed by them (act of villainy, punishment of the villain, etc.). In all, Propp abstracted 31 functions, or character actions defined in terms of their significance for the plot, from his corpus of tales; he also specified rules for their distribution in a given tale. Harking back to Aristotle’s subordination of character to plot, Propp’s approach constituted the basis for structuralist theories of characters as “actants,” or general roles fulfilled by specific characters. Thus, extrapolating from what Propp had termed “spheres of action,” Greimas sought to create a typology of actantial roles to which the (indefinitely many) particularized actors in narratives could be reduced. Greimas initially identified a total of six actants to which he thought all particularized narrative actors could be reduced: Subject, Object, Sender, Receiver, Helper, and Opponent. Commenting on this model, Greimas remarked “[i]ts simplicity lies in the fact that it is entirely centred on the object of desire aimed at by the subject and situated, as object of communication, between the sender and the receiver – the desire of the subject being, in its part, modulated in projections from the helper and opponent” ([1966] 1983: 207).
I have already begun to discuss how the structuralist narratologists built on Russian Formalist ideas to help consolidate what I am referring to as the classical tradition of research on narrative. Founding narratology as a subdomain of structuralist inquiry, researchers like Barthes and Greimas followed Saussure’s distinction between la langue (= language viewed as system) and la parole (= individual utterances produced and interpreted on that basis); they construed particular stories as individual narrative messages supported by a shared semiotic system. And just as Saussurean linguistics privileged la langue over la parole, focusing on the structural constituents and combinatory principles of the semiotic framework of language, the narratologists privileged the study of narrative in general over the interpretation of individual narratives. Already in his 1957 book Mythologies, Barthes had analyzed diverse forms of cultural expression (advertisements, photographs, museum exhibits, wrestling matches) as rule-governed signifying practices or “languages” in their own right (Barthes [1957] 1972; cf. Culler 1975). Barthes extended this general approach in his 1966 “Introduction”; instead of offering interpretations of individual narrative texts, Barthes sought to capture elements of the supra- or transtextual code in terms of which people are able to identify narratively organized discourse and interpret it as such.
Indeed, the use of (Saussurean) linguistics as a pilot-science shaped the object, methods, and overall aims of structuralist narratology as an investigative framework. Narratology’s basic premise is that a common, more or less implicit model of narrative explains people’s ability to understand communicative performances and types of artifacts as stories. In turn, just as (some) linguists have set themselves the goal of identifying the ingredients of linguistic competence, the goal of narratology is to develop an explicit characterization of the model underlying people’s intuitive knowledge about stories, in effect providing an account of what constitutes humans’ narrative competence. To be sure, the example of linguistics provided narratology with a productive vantage-point on stories, affording terms and categories that generated significant new research questions. Barthes, for example, used the concept of “levels of description” to develop a hierarchical model of narrative as clusters of “functions” that are subsumed under the level of characters’ actions, which are in turn subsumed under the level of narration (Barthes [1966] 1977: 85–8). Genette ([1972] 1980) for his part drew on the traditional grammatical concepts of tense, mood, and voice to explore types of temporal sequence, manipulations of viewpoint, and modes of narration. Yet narratology was also limited by the linguistic models it treated as exemplary. Ironically, the narratologists embraced structuralist linguistics as their pilot-science just when its deficiencies were becoming apparent in the domain of linguistic theory itself. The limitations of the Saussurean paradigm were thrown into relief, on the one hand, by emergent formal models for analyzing language structure – for example, those proposed by Chomsky under the auspices of generative grammar. On the other hand, powerful tools were being developed in the wake of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, H. P. Grice, John Searle, and other post-Saussurean language theorists interested in how contexts of language use bear on the production and interpretation of socially situated utterances. In general, the attempt by later narrative scholars to incorporate ideas about language and communication that postdate structuralist research – ideas discussed in my next chapter – has been a major factor in the advent of postclassical models for research on stories and storytelling.6
Anglo-American contributions
I have yet to discuss how Anglo-American scholarship on narrative fiction has contributed to the classical tradition of research on stories. An important figure in this tradition is Percy Lubbock ([1921] 1957), who took his inspiration from Henry James’s novelistic practice as well as his theory of fiction. Lubbock made the issue of “point of view” the cornerstone of his account – to an extent not necessarily warranted by James’s own approach (see Booth [1961] 1983: 24–5; Miller 1972: 1). In doing so, Lubbock appropriated James’s ideas to produce a markedly prescriptive framework. His drew an invidious distinction between showing (“dramatizing” events) and telling (“describing” or “picturing” events), suggesting that description is inferior to dramatization, picturing to scene-making, telling to showing. As Lubbock put it, “other things being equal, the more dramatic way is better than the less. It is indirect, as a method; but it places the thing itself in view, instead of recalling and reflecting and picturing it” ([1921] 1957: 149–50). But although he may have been guilty of transforming into hard and fast prescriptions ideas that James himself proposed much more tentatively in his own critical writings, Lubbock also drew attention to specific methods or procedures that are at the heart of the craft of fiction.
In response, maintaining a focus on issues of narrative technique, but seeking to restore the complexities evident in James’s original statement of his theory (as well as in his novelistic practice), Wayne C. Booth ([1961] 1983) inverted the terms of Lubbock’s argument, thereby laying the groundwork for a range of rhetorical approaches to narrative.7 Instead of privileging showing over telling, Booth accorded telling pride of place – making it the general narratorial condition of which “showing” is a localized effect. Indeed, Booth’s brilliant account revealed difficulties with the very premise of the telling-versus-showing debate. He characterized showing as an effect promoted by certain deliberately structured kinds of tellings, organized in such a way that a narrator’s mediation (though inescapably present) remains more or less covert. Booth also suggested that an emphasis on showing over telling has costs as well as benefits, cataloguing important rhetorical effects that explicit narratorial commentary can be used to accomplish – for example, relating particulars to norms established elsewhere in the text, heightening the significance of events, or manipulating mood.
Furthermore, Booth’s wide-ranging discussion of narrative types, ranging from Boccaccio’s Decameron to ancient Greek epics to novels and short fictions by authors as diverse as Cervantes, Hemingway, and Céline, encouraged subsequent theorists in the Anglo-American tradition to explore various kinds of narratives rather than focusing solely on the novel. This uncoupling of narrative theory from novel theory – a process that had been initiated independently by the Russian Formalists some 40 years earlier – culminated in works as broad in scope as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg’s study, The Nature of Narrative. Significantly, Scholes and Kellogg’s book was published in 1966, the same year that saw the publication of the special issue of the journal Communications devoted to “Structural Analysis of Narrative” – an issue that effectively launched the project of structuralist narratology in France.
Postclassical approaches
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review the full range of post-classical approaches to narrative inquiry that build on the foundational work just described as well as on other early scholarship on stories.8 Rather, the book as a whole is intended to demonstrate how concepts developed during the classical, structuralist period of narratological research can be enriched with ideas from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, social and cognitive psychology, the philosophy of mind, and other domains. Let me nonetheless provide at least a brief sketch of some broad trends in the field.
One major trend is to continue the exploration of aspects of narrative already identified by earlier theorists, such as narration and plot, time and space, character, dialogue and thought representation, and point of view or perspective (now commonly discussed by narratologists under the rubric of “focalization”), but to extend and refine concepts outlined in the pioneering work of the Russian Formalists, structuralist narratologists, and Anglo-American theorists of fiction. Hence, for example, Michael Toolan’s ([1988] 2001) updating of narratological theories with ideas from linguistics and stylistics and H. Porter Abbott’s (2005, 2007, [2002] 2008) re-analysis of key ideas concerning narration, or the process by which information about storyworlds is conveyed. Another trend involves expanding the corpus of stories being studied, as well as investigating the constraints and affordances of different storytelling media (cf. Herman 2004; Ryan 2004). For example, Ryan’s (2001a, 2006) work on computer-mediated narratives reflects an emergent concern with how medium-specific properties of stories may require the development of investigative tools not provided by classical theories. Likewise the focus and methods of the present book can be contrasted with Bremond’s 1964 assumption that the story-level of a narrative – the what of a story versus the way it is presented – can be transposed without loss or alteration into different semiotic media. A third trend is in a sense the synthesis of the first two. It involves bringing into dialogue with established traditions of narrative scholarship ideas from fields that were not incorporated into earlier work on stories, in order to identify new frontiers of research that the structuralist narratologists, for example, could not have envisioned. This, too, is a path that I follow in the present study, and it also one described by Fludernik (2005) in her recent survey of work in narrative theory from structuralism to the present. Fludernik (2005: 44–51) notes how, during a time when the narrative turn has made stories a focal concern in many disciplines, conversely narrative specialists have added to their theoretical toolkits concepts and methods from research on conversational storytelling, feminist theory and gender studies, modes of ideology critique stemming from Marxist theory as well as research on postcolonial literature, philosophical ethics, psychoanalysis, legal studies, and linguistics and cognitive science. Examples of this third strand of research in narrative theory include the multifaceted work of Uri Margolin on character (Margolin 1990a, 1990b, 2005a, 2007), the powerful new model of plot outlined by Hilary Dannenberg (2008), Manfred Jahn’s (1996, 1997, 1999, 2005, 2007) ongoing use of ideas from cognitive science to propose new ways of understanding perspective or focalization, and the feminist-narratological research pioneered by Susan S. Lanser (1992) and Robyn Warhol (1989, 2003) and recently extended by Ruth Page (2006).
I turn now to what began as a separate tradition of narrative inquiry from the ones just described but has more recently begun to interact with these postclassical approaches. At issue are frameworks developed for the study of stories told in face-to-face interaction.
The study of stories in face-to-face communication: a brief overview
One year after the publication of Barthes’s “Introduction” William Labov and Joshua Waletzky published a groundbreaking article that sketched out a sociolinguistic approach to analyzing stories told in contexts of face-to-face interaction. This approach derived from and fed back into traditions of linguistic research with which the structuralist narratologists were barely familiar. Centering on narratives of personal experience, Labov and Waletzky’s model spawned a program for research still being pursued by a variety of investigators (see Bamberg 1997a for an overview). Labov and Waletzky’s 1967 article (along with the follow-up article on “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax” published in 1972 by Labov) established a vocabulary for labeling the components of personal-experience narratives (abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, coda; see the Glossary for definitions of these terms). It also identified clause- and sentence-level structures tending to surface in each of these components, suggesting that story-recipients monitor the discourse for signs enabling them to “chunk” what is said into units-in-a-narrative-pattern. For example, clauses with past-tense verbs in the indicative mood are likely to occur in (i.e., be a reliable indicator of) the complicating action of the narrative, whereas storytellers’ evaluations depart from this baseline syntax, their marked status serving to indicate the point of the narrative, the reason for its telling. More generally, Labov’s model laid the groundwork for further inquiry into both the linguistic and the interactional profile of narratives told during face-to-face encounters. Conversational narratives do consist of clause-, sentence-, and discourse-level features; yet, as I discuss in my next chapter, they are also anchored in contexts where their tellers have to have a (recognizable) point or else be ignored, shouted down, or worse (cf. Goodwin 1990: 239–57).
Note that, in founding the field of narratology, structuralist theorists had focused mainly on literary narratives as opposed to instances of everyday storytelling. Barthes drew on Fleming’s James Bond novels in his “Introduction”; Genette, Greimas, and Todorov used Proust, Maupassant, and Boccaccio as their tutor-texts. Ironically, however, one of the foundational documents for structuralist narratology was Vladimir Propp’s investigation of folktales rooted in oral traditions. But the structuralists neglected to consider (let alone mark off) the limits of applicability of Propp’s ideas, trying to extend to all narratives, including complicated literary texts, tools designed for a restricted corpus of folktales. The result was an approach that championed the study of narratives of all sorts, irrespective of origin, medium, theme, reputation, or genre, but lacked the conceptual and methodological resources to substantiate its own claims to generalizability.
But though it was firmly anchored in empirical models for studying natural-language data, the sociolinguistic approach pioneered by Labov and Waletzky also lacked generalizability. Originally designed for narratives elicited during interviews, the model was manifestly incapable of describing and explaining the more complex structures found in written narratives, especially literary ones. For one thing, as Genette showed so skillfully in his brilliant discussion of Proust in Narrative Discourse (Genette [1972] 1980), literary narratives characteristically rely on flashbacks, flashforwards, pauses, ellipses, iterations, compressions, and other time-bending strategies not captured by Labov’s definition of narrative as “one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred” (1972: 370). Further, noting the rise of simultaneous and prospective narration in contemporary literary works, Uri Margolin (1999) has revealed retrospective narration to be just one option within a larger system of narrative possibilities. The result is that, in literary contexts, it would be diffi-cult to maintain that clauses with past-tense indicative verbs are the unmarked unit of narration, the baseline against which marked, i.e., evaluative or point-indicating, syntax could be measured (cf. Herman 1999b). For that matter, some avant-garde literary narratives make a point of emphasizing their apparent pointlessness, throwing up obstacles in the way of readers struggling to discern a reason for the telling. Whereas generally speaking the onus of evaluation is on storytellers in contexts of face-to-face interaction, in experimental literary fictions the burden quite often seems to shift from teller to interpreter (but see Pratt 1977: 116 and my next chapter).
At the same time, among researchers concerned with face-to-face narrative communication, there has been a shift analogous to the one I have characterized as a transition from classical to postclassical approaches. Precipitating this shift is the recognition that the Labovian model captures one important sub-type of natural-language narratives – namely, stories elicited during interviews – but does not necessarily apply equally well to other storytelling situations, such as informal conversations between peers, he-said-she-said gossip, or conversations among family members at the dinner table. As stressed by narrative researchers working in the tradition of Conversation Analysis (Schegloff 1997), and as underscored both in Georgakopoulou’s (2007) work and in my next chapter, narratives do different things, and assume different forms, in different communicative environments. In the sociolinguistic interviews from which Labov obtained his narrative data, interviewers are seeking to obtain as much (vernacular) speech from informants as possible, in contrast with conversations among peers in which different participants in the conversation may all be trying to capture the floor at once in order to tell their own version of a story under dispute. Such competition for the floor will drastically alter the shape of the stories participants (try to) tell; for example, given the communicative exigencies at work, storytellers are likely to truncate or omit all but the most essential orienting information, and conversely to bolster their efforts to signal the point of their narrative, why they should be heard out rather than interrupted with a competing story. Meanwhile, the narratives told in this context are likely to bear on the social status or “face” of their tellers in ways that they might not in the context of interviews.
Precisely this sort variability in the structure of stories produced during conversational interaction caused Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps (2001: 1–58) to propose the dimensional model of narrative mentioned in my previous chapter; according to this model, stories told in contexts of face-to-face interaction can be situated along the five dimensions of tellership (to what extent is the story told by a single narrator or co-narrated?); tellability (a given narrative may be a rhetorically effective rendition of reportable events, or it may be only a teller’s halting attempt to make sense of a situation with low tellability); embeddedness (is the narrative told in a lengthy turn relatively detached from the surrounding conversational environment, or is it embedded in the flow of the surrounding discourse, conveyed in a turn at talk no longer than those that precede and follow it?); linearity (does the story depict events as part of a single, linear causal-temporal path, or does it rather suggest, in a more open and uncertain way, multiple paths?); and moral stance (to what extent does the teller include an explicit judgment of self and others?). More generally, in suggesting that “mundane conversational narratives of personal experience constitute the prototype of narrative activity rather than the flawed byproduct of more artful and planned narrative discourse” (2001: 3), Ochs and Capps helped set a new course for study of the structure and functions of storytelling in face-to-face interaction. Rather than making autonomous narrative “set-pieces” (like the ones favored in the Labovian tradition) paradigmatic for narrative inquiry, Ochs and Capps shifted the attention to “small stories” (Bamberg 2004b, 2007; Georgakopoulou 2007) and their status as micro-interactional resources for identity construction.9
Although Labov and Waletzky developed their model for the analysis of narratives told in contexts of face-to-face communication just as structuralist narratologists were proposing their key ideas, initially there was little interaction between narratology and (socio)linguistic, social-psychological, and other social-scientific traditions of research on storytelling. But now there is interest in building an integrative theory that can accommodate both the study of written, literary narratives and the analysis of everyday storytelling (see, e.g., Fludernik 1996; Herman 2004). For example, Monika Fludernik’s (1996) argument that conversational storytelling constitutes the primordial narrative situation – the basis for later, written narratives, no matter how elaborate and ludic – harmonizes with Ochs and Capps’ account of mundane conversational stories as the prototype of narrative activity. Other recent research that seeks to integrate narratological concepts with ideas drawn from linguistic and more broadly social-scientific traditions of narrative scholarship includes Herman (1999b, 2000, 2001a, 2003a, 2007b), Hyvärinen (2006), Kraus (2005), Mildorf (2007), Palmer (2004), Sternberg (1990, 1992), Thomas (2002), and Toolan ([1988] 2001).10
Along the same lines, in focusing on what I have characterized as the first basic element of situatedness – the grounding of stories in specific discourse contexts or occasions of telling – my next chapter suggests strategies for synthesizing work on everyday storytelling and research on written, literary narratives. The chapter draws on multiple traditions of scholarship to characterize stories as a form of communicative practice that cuts across the various media for storytelling, even as that form of practice is differently inflected by the constraints and affordances of a given semiotic environment.