Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Sociolinguistics, and Co-Director of the Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication, King's College London. In joint (with Michael Bamberg) and solo work that stretches back to mid-2000s, she developed small stories research as a paradigm for the analysis of everyday life stories and identities.

Korina Giaxoglou is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics & English Language at The Open University, UK. She is the author of the research monograph A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning: Small Stories and Affective Positioning by Routledge.

Sylvie Patron is Associate Professor and Research Supervisor, and Head of the Paris Centre for Narrative Matters, Université Paris Cité, France. She was Vice-President, then President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative from 2017 to 2020.

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Contributors

Introduction

ALEX GEORGAKOPOULOU, KORINA GIAXOGLOU, SYLVIE PATRON

Part I Small Stories and Big Stories: Beyond Binaries

• The narrative structure of small stories

MONIKA FLUDERNIK

• Dialogue, Small Stories, and Exile Identities in Mario Benedetti's Historias de París

SYLVIE PATRON

• Valérie Mréjen: Small Stories 'Out of Order'

CÉCILE DE BARY

• Are Small Stories Another Category of Narrating?

BRIAN SCHIFF

• Reimagining Personal Stories on Social Media

ANA GARNER

Part II Ways of Telling: Genres and Resources

• World Attending in the Urban Landscape: Noticings as Small Stories

LEOR COHEN

• Moving Through a Moving (Storied) World: Small Stories and their Contribution to Ethnographic Studies of Place

WILLIAM KELLEHER

• "That Was Rude": Metapragmatic Impoliteness Evaluations in Breaking News Small Stories

VASILIKI SALOUSTROU

• Storying Taken-for-Granted Futureworlds in Hair-Salon 'Future Busy Stories'

RACHEL HEINRICHSMEIER

• Projective Small Stories Invoking Policy Paths in Parliamentary Debates: Narrating

Outcome, Performance, and Responsibilities

HANNA RAUTOJOKI, MARI HATAVARA & MATTI HYVÄRINEN

Part III: Participation & Positioning

• Small Stories in Mass Media: Coalescent Themes and Tactics in Trump's Twitter Pesidency

MICHAEL HUMPHREY

• Telling the Small, Fragmented and "In-Complete" About Experiences with Sexual Violations: Narrative Stancetaking in Feminist Hashtag Storytelling Practices on Twitter in Sweden

FREDRIK EKLUND

• Small Stories in Oral Histories: Multimodal Analyses of Narratives about Extreme Sensory Experiences

PHILIPP FREYBURGER

• Stories (Not) to Be Told: A Glimpse At Resistance Toward 'Hot Topics' in Psychotherapy

CHRISTOPHER KOPPERMAN

• Telling-By-Doing Life As A mother in YouTube Vlogs

MIKKA PERS LENE

This collection showcases the diversity and disciplinary breadth of small stories research, highlighting the growing critical mass of scholarship on small stories and its reach beyond discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives.
The volume both takes stock of and seeks to advance the development of small stories research by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Bamberg, as a counterpoint to conventional models in narrative studies, one which has accounted for "atypical" yet salient activities in everyday life, such as fragmentation and open-endedness, anchoring onto the present, and co-constructive dimensions in stories and identities. With data from different languages and contexts, emphasis is placed on the analytical aspects of the paradigm toward producing models for the analysis of structures, textual and interactional choices, and genres of small stories. Chapters on the role and commodification of small stories in digital environments reflect on the paradigm's recent extension to the analysis of social media communication.
This book will appeal to scholars interested in narrative inquiry and narrative analysis, in such fields as sociolinguistics, literary studies, communication studies, and biographical studies.