This study conducts a comparative discourse analysis of narrative interaction strategies employed by Chinese and American time-honored brands, based on data drawn from their official websites. Grounded in discursive interaction theory and brand narrative theory, the research develops a three-dimensional analytical framework to examine cross-cultural narrative construction across three phases: (1) the text-generation mechanism in narrative production, (2) the management strategies in narrative distribution, and (3) the audience construction process in narrative consumption. Through this framework, the study reveals how narrative discourses are dynamically shaped by, and in turn shape, distinct cultural and institutional logics. Finally, the paper proposes a set of optimized narrative interaction strategies, offering a theoretical pathway toward the development of a "culturally commensurable" narrative framework for Chinese brands seeking to navigate global discourse environments.
Abstract The capacity of narratives to reflect broader ideologies has been well documented (e.g., Tannen, 2008 ), but the role of narrative evaluation ( Labov, 1972 ) in this process has received less attention. This study showcases how narrative evaluation can serve as a central arena for ideological work. I examined personal stories about the issue of native language maintenance in the next generation offered by three multilingual caregivers from former Soviet states residing in the United States. This examination illustrates how the caregiver-narrators effectively employed all three narrative evaluation types ( internal, embedded , and external ) to surface a range of beliefs about the issue and to favor belief in parental agency as the key to maintaining a native language in the next generation. This favoring, in turn, reflects a broader blaming culture , according to which mothers must be agentive to meet unrealistic expectations of idealized motherhood with the goal of avoiding societal blame.
This article uses Critical Race Theory to analyze personal narratives of police violence contained in NAACP correspondence from 1937 to 1965, focusing on how African American victims and their communities used storytelling to challenge dominant narratives of police legitimacy. Through thematic analysis of 93 cases drawn from NAACP archival records, three primary narrative practices are identified: bearing witness to state-sanctioned violence, naming perpetrators to assert agency, and constructing corrective stories that challenge dominant racialized narratives. These narratives document individual experiences while also reflecting broader patterns of violence, institutional non-response, and community-based resistance strategies. Personal testimonies function as counter-narratives that preserve collective memory, expose systemic abuse, and contest official accounts of policing. These findings underscore the power of narrative as both a historical record and an ongoing tool in struggles for police accountability.
The narrative structure of Japanese and Western European folktales were compared. Using a folktale popularity index, 21 Brothers Grimm fairy tales and 19 Japanese folktales were selected for analysis. One shared pattern and three culture-specific patterns were predicted and observed. A "moral lesson" pattern of rewarding good and punishing evil appeared in both samples. A "hero's adventurous journey with happy ending" pattern appeared only in the Grimms' tales. A "wondrous events with happy ending" pattern and a "wondrous events with return-to-baseline ending" pattern appeared only in Japanese tales. Japanese folktales also were shorter. Links to other genres within each culture's narrative ecology, such as life stories, are discussed.
Contributing to recent work on reflexivity and metapragmatics in stand-up comedy as well as recent studies of offensive humor, this article places narratives at the center of inquiry, by focusing on four popular anglophone stand-up comedians' performed stories about audiences that were offended by their humor. While revealing a range of different narrative types, the analysis of stories told by both "safe" and "edgy" comedians alike illustrates recurring themes such as: the ahistorical construction of offense-taking in response to comedy material as a recent phenomenon, portrayals of offended audience members as humorless, and the attribution of responsibility to mass media as well as bloggers and social media users, who are represented as fomenting exaggerated reactions of audience outrage. Through these performed narratives, all four comedians embed reflections on reception to their own work within their sets.
This paper introduces a conceptual framework for analyzing social media narratives as socio-technologically situated, multi-authored, and interactionally co-constructed phenomena. While narrative analyses of platforms like YouTube often isolate videos as self-contained stories, we argue that narratives on social media unfold across dynamic webs of interaction involving creators, commenters, viewers, and platform affordances and algorithms. Our framework expands what counts as a narrative on social media by tracing how stories are edited, framed, responded to, and algorithmically shaped across time. Focusing on a YouTube video of an Uber ride posted by a Turkish social media influencer in the US, we demonstrate how multiple co-tellers introduce new interpretations of the recorded events and reshape the narrative for subsequent viewers. By identifying co-tellers and tracing the trajectories of narratives, this framework allows analysts to better examine how narratives, thus discourses and ideologies, evolve, circulate, and impact audiences.
This study examines how migrants' narrative form changes over time when the host society is treated as an external object of evaluation. Two interview waves with five West African migrants in Southern Italy (2018; 2023-2024) are analyzed across three domains: Economic-Political, Socio-Cultural, and Environmental-Geographical. Paired comparisons are reported only where within-speaker narratives were comparable across waves. Using the crafting-styles framework, the analysis shows a shift from more stable, closure-oriented tellings in 2018 to more reversal-driven, deconstructive tellings in 2023-2024. This form drift tracks changes in evaluation, agency attribution, and the narratability of the host society as a setting for future planning. Methodologically, the study shows how narrative selection and crafting-style patterns support parsimonious longitudinal comparison and strengthen within-case temporal inference beyond content-focused readings, while also clarifying how coherence and closure become harder to sustain under prolonged institutional contact and precarity.
This article explores how narratives of geographical place are constructed and negotiated in interpreter-mediated asylum interviews in Sweden. Drawing on a case study of one asylum seeker's account, it examines how negotiations of place function as narrative resources under institutional constraints. Combining concepts of polycentricity, orders of indexicality, and interactional positioning, the analysis shows how narratives about place are co-constructed, contested, and evaluated in interaction. The data consists of two recorded interviews conducted by the Swedish Migration Agency. The study demonstrates how place is narrated relationally and experientially by the asylum seeker, yet institutionally interpreted through a narrow, cartographic lens, often via interpreter-mediated formulations. The analysis highlights the narrative consequences of this disjuncture, showing how credibility is negotiated, undermined, or reconfigured as participants engage in ongoing interactional and indexical work. In doing so, the article contributes to our understanding of narrative as shaped by institutional interaction and competing spatial frameworks.
This paper investigates instances of narrativised health advice exchanges between Nigerian doctors and laypersons on X/Twitter, Naija . Based on 144 story tweets, the analysis focuses on how advice exchanges manifest as acts of narrative identity positioning. With Bamberg’s (1997) three-level model of positioning, interactional pragmatics, and membership categorisation analysis, the study examines the emergence and co-construction of tale-world, interactional, and ideological dimensions of identity in the context of health communication. The findings reveal that advice-giving interactions, as acts of identity positioning, manifest as cautionary tales, the evaluated biographical selves of storytellers, the management of institutional roles, and as a concession to oppositional pressures, acquiescence to, or mostly resistance to, hegemonic subject positions. The paper concludes that health advice-giving practices should be understood as discursive sites where power and identity are negotiated. Therefore, practitioners should aim to co-construct advice interactions that minimise asymmetry and foster collaborative meaning-making rather than reproducing hierarchical relations.
This article discusses the use of so-called "family narratives" in political discourse by analysing critically the way opposition leaders have resorted to this type of narratives in the United Kingdom. It is argued that family narratives represent a discursive gateway out of the political wilderness and back into contention for national leadership. They enable politicians to convey positive values that serve a three-fold process: the elaboration of a powerful ethos, the modernisation of their party and the rebranding of their party as a caring political organisation. Within a CDA framework, we analyse the relevance of family narratives in political communication and how they help opposition leaders reconnect emotionally with voters, after long spells in the wilderness. This is why we focus specifically on Tony Blair, David Cameron and Keir Starmer. The article also reveals how those narratives are instrumental in a new conception of masculinity and leadership in the UK.
This study explores the multimodal nature of metaphorical thought in coming out narratives, with a focus on the interplay between speech and gestures in the Polish language. Drawing on the metaphors knowing is seeing and secrets are objects, the paper examines how gestures embody and complement verbal expressions of revealing one's sexual orientation. Using a qualitative approach, the study analyzes a set of gestures from a coming out narrative, identifying systematic patterns expressed in image schemas (e.g., object, containment) and their role in shaping the coming out frame and the emerging metaphorical scenarios. The findings reveal that gestures not only align with verbal content but also add layers of meaning, enhancing the narrative's conceptual complexity over time. This research contributes to the understanding of multimodal communication in personal and culturally sensitive narratives, offering insights into metaphorical embodiment and narrative coherence.
Interviews have long depended on recordings, but the interview ‘text’ has traditionally been transcribed and published in written form. Scholars therefore hailed the advent of digitization for making recordings available to a broader audience and displaying their orality. Despite this growing interest in the significance of speaking voices, other sonic aspects of interviews are still largely ignored. Set within the frameworks of multimodal research and audionarratology, this article explores the sonic environment of an interview conducted by journalist Heinz Ludwig Arnold with German author Günter Grass in 1970, subsequently published in written form in 1990 and released as an audio recording in 2011. It analyses how voices, background sounds and noises impact on narratives told and on the interview trajectory at large and how they can inform our interpretation of interview materials. The article argues for a more comprehensive approach towards the sonic dimension of audio-recorded interviews and interview narratives.
Approaches to intergenerational memory (IgM) view it as a construct between personal and collective remembering in family stories impacting identity development. This article explores the dynamic construction of moral stance as a narrative dimension within the context of intergenerational perpetrator trauma memory accounts embedded in descendant life history narratives. Four retellings of the same IgM narrative constitute the longitudinal case study to demonstrate the construction of a moral stance by shifting the focus from what had happened to reveal the perspectives in retrospect. In these stories, IgM takes a central space where the family’s moral stance emerges as a continuum. It consolidates the storyteller’s evaluative statements to control possible interpretations, explore existential issues in a broad cultural context, and re-narrate trauma as a choice. We conclude that emphasizing moral stance as a dimension of IgM trauma narrative telling reconciles agency and rewrites the narrative as a tellable family history.
Migration is part of the "global movement potential" (Albrow, 2014, p. 14) that is currently shaping social change worldwide. This article focuses on the narratives and narrative practices of migrants. It is assumed that narrative is an attempt to come to terms with migration experiences. The research interest focuses on the what, how and why of migrant narratives and the role of digital media in everyday storytelling. The empirical basis is the study "Transnational living", in which people from various African, Arab and European countries were included. The research methods are committed to an understanding-interpretative paradigm. Discourses from migration, narration and mediatization research form the theoretical framework of the analysis.
Victimologists observe that telling one’s story can foster healing for survivors of violence. To understand these processes better, victims’ narratives must be understood as situated acts of telling. This paper takes one man’s narration of victimization long past — child abuse and rape — as a case. We examined his interview-derived storytelling with a focus on narrative positioning, narrative discourse modes, and negations. We found that Stefan (a pseudonym) used various discursive modes and narrative positionings to exercise control over the stories and what they mean. His agency was partly achieved by what he recounted not doing or saying, and what he refused to address in the interview situation. Thus, his narratives feature his own defiance and self-empowerment in both the scene and the aftermath of violence. These findings lead us to conclude that narrative strategies of storytelling should be taken into account in any practical interventions that involves testimony about harm.
The digitalization of oral history (OH) has resulted in the availability of multiple interviews conducted with the same narrator under different circumstances. To explore the comparability of such materials, we analyze interviews with a Holocaust survivor from the Fortunoff Video Archive (1979) and the Visual History Archive (1997), focusing on instances in which she tells the “same” episode. We demonstrate that life-story segments before and after the episode provide clues for sense-making and reflexively constitute the narrative environment. The specific interactional features of OH as a situated practice contribute to the story’s recognizability and discursive alteration. Similarities and differences are detectable due to the coherence established by the social setting of OH, including its availability in a digital archive, which guarantees comparability and incorporates a broader chronology. The main contribution of our paper is methodological, as it outlines an apparatus for the comparative analysis of OH across multiple databases.
This paper is the first to address the impact of gendered, cultural and religious discourses on an under-researched subaltern group of infertile Muslim women bloggers. Taking a small story and case study approach, the analysis focuses on interactivity and positioning (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008, Georgakopoulou, 2008) in one woman's stories as she works hard to address normative expectations and dominant discourses which abound in Muslim societies. The paper highlights the stigmatisation and isolation women face, not only in the physical world, but sometimes in the online world too. We argue that Weblogs provide a unique and unexplored space where discourses of gender, sexual, and other identities are resisted and challenged. Simultaneously Weblogs can serve as both supportive and exclusionary sites in which bloggers' rights and duties become regulated. The study opens a window into the world of infertile Muslim women and has important implications for relevant healthcare and policy making.
