1. Students will appreciate various forms of communication shaped by different socio-cultural norms.
2. Students will gain a critical understanding of how language, communication, and culture are intricately intertwined.
3. Students will learn how to closely examine a wide range of social contexts to discern the narrative strategies that we share and that make social interaction possible.
4. Students will develop a capacity for analysis of scholarship on issues related to narrative and talk-in-interaction more broadly.

1. Students will appreciate various forms of communication shaped by different socio-cultural norms.
2. Students will gain a critical understanding of how language, communication, and culture are intricately intertwined.
3. Students will learn how to closely examine a wide range of social contexts to discern the narrative strategies that we share and that make social interaction possible.
4. Students will develop a capacity for analysis of scholarship on issues related to narrative and talk-in-interaction more broadly.

This seminar explores how language, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology inform each other in relation to narrative and social interaction. This class examines how people use talk and embodied interaction in a variety of situated activities to share their lives through storytelling. Each week we will read articles by linguists, linguistic anthropologists, and conversation analysts that provide a general theoretical framing for the week’s topic in conjunction with specific ethnographic case studies that illustrate use of particular narrative practices. These practices include: narrative sense-making in response to complaints, displaying affective alignments, constructing accounts, remembering through narrative, policing moral order, and other practices through which the social life of local groups is achieved.

This seminar explores how language, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology inform each other in relation to narrative and social interaction. This class examines how people use talk and embodied interaction in a variety of situated interaction activities to share their lives through storytelling. Each week we will read articles by linguists, linguistic anthropologists, and conversation analysts that provide a general theoretical framing for the week’s topic in conjunction with specific ethnographic case studies that illustrate use of particular narrative practices. These practices include: narrative sense-making in response to complaints, displaying affective alignments, constructing accounts, remembering through narrative, policing moral order, and other practices through which the social life of local groups is achieved.

Ochs, Elinor and Lisa Capps. 2002. Living Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Additional reading materials will be provided in the Moodle system.

Ochs, Elinor and Lisa Capps. 2002. Living Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Additional reading materials will be provided in the Moodle system.