Telling the Same Life Story Twice Interaktionale Konstitutionsbedingungen von Stegreiferzählungen im narrativen Interview zwischen Adressierungszwang und „passing stranger“-Effekt

Abstract

With a look at longitudinally repeated biographical-narrative interviews, this article re-flects on the interactional principles to which impromptu narratives are exposed. Highly repetitive phenomena over time raise the question of the stability and changeability of self-narratives. I use different methodological assumptions from research literature as points of reference: Schütze's biographical research is based on the view that narrative processes are primarily characterized by emergent spontaneity and that established nar-ratives undesirably undermine the impromptu principle. In contrast, conversation-analytical positions emphasize the social-interactive context of narrative production, which strongly dominates the narrative through co-construction. Finally, works of retelling research show how highly stable phrases and entire stories can be, independent of emer-gent spontaneity and interactional co-construction. Using six key cases, I show the breadth of the phenomena of autobiographical re-telling and argue that these three paradigms (narrative emergence, talk-in-interaction and pre-formedness) can and must be intertwined in order to do justice to the empirical findings. To this I propose a fourth constraint of narrative (Zugzwänge des Erzählens) (Kallmeyer/Schütze 1977), the constraint to recipient-design (Adressierungszwang). At the same time, I use the concept of passing strangers (Rubin 1974) to explain why such a constraint is generally greatly reduced in the narrative interview. Overall, my work shows how one's own self-narrative arises and re-arises on the fly in the tension between the constraint to recipient-design and the “passing stranger” effect as well as between dynamic emergence and stable pre-formedness.

Leseprobe

Bibliographie: Selbert, Shevek K.: Telling the Same Life Story Twice. Interaktionale Konstitutionsbedingungen von Stegreiferzählungen im narrativen Interview zwischen Adressierungszwang und „passing stranger“-Effekt, BIOS – Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen, 1+2-2024, S. 95-117.