Recent
Publications
Alexandra
Georgakopoulou
Narrative research is frequently described as a diverse
enterprise, yet the kinds of narrative data that it bases
itself on present a striking consensus: they tend to be
autobiographical and elicited in interviews. This book sets
out to carve out a space alongside this narrative canon for
stories that have not made it to the mainstream of narrative
and identity analysis, yet they abound as well as being
crucial sites of subjectivity in everyday interactional
contexts. By labelling those stories as ‘small’, the book
emphasizes their distinctiveness, both interactionally and
as an antidote to the tradition of ‘grand’ narratives
research. Drawing primarily on the audio-recorded small
stories of a group of female adolescents that was studied
ethnographically in a town in Greece, the book follows a
language-focused and practice-based approach in order to
provide fresh answers and perspectives on some of the
perennial questions of narrative analysis: How can we (re)conceptualize
the mainstay concepts of tellership, structure and
evaluation in small stories? How do the participants’
telling identities connect with their larger social
identities? Finally, what does the project of storying self
(and other) mean in small stories and how can it be best
explored?