Narrative Theory and Stories that Speak to Us - by Cynthia L. Selfe and the DALN Consortium
In this sense, relational positioning in narratives, like other kinds of sociolinguistic exchange, can be understood as a type of discursive agency, what Jerome Bruner might describe as “the initiation of relatively autonomous acts governed by our intentional states—our wishes, desires, beliefs, and expectancies” (1994, p. 41). Such a characterization, howevever, as Buckholtz and Hall (2005) remind us, should not suggest that social action is either always intentional, especially within the context of literacy narratives, or autonomous, especially within the context of complex socio-cultural situations.
We can also add that personal narratives, generally, and the relational positioning within such stories, more specifically, are “inherently evaluative” (Miller, 1994, p. 161), that these acts involve identifying moral stances within the indexical identity systems that they reference. Storytellers accomplish this work by choosing words and diction that praises others or casts them in a less than positive light, quoting speech and anecdotes (often by mimicking the voices of the other characters in the story), identifying themselves explicitly as members of one group or resistant to the members of another, and introducing other cues that perform similar work (cf. Wortham, 2000; Bamberg,1997; Du Bois, 2002; Hunston and Thompson, 2000).
...the very use of language is itself an act of agency (Duranti, 2004). Under this definition, identity is one kind of social action that agency can accomplish.
[S]uch a definition of agency does not require that social action be intentional, but it allows for that possibility; habitual actions accomplished below the level of conscious awareness act upon the world no less than those carried out deliberately. Likewise, agency may be the result of individual action, but it may also be distributed among several social actors and hence intersubjective.
(Bucholtz and Hall, 2005, p. 606)