Narrative Theory and Stories that Speak to Us - by Cynthia L. Selfe and the DALN Consortium
As the germinal work of Labov (1972) suggests, this dimension of evaluation often reveals an issue at center of the narrative, allowing the teller to identify the “point of the narrative, its raison d’etre: why it was told, and what the narrator is getting at” (1967, p. 366). Evaluation, Labov (1967) adds, represents “that part of the narrative which reveals the attitude of the narrator towards the narrative by emphasizing the relative importance of some narrative units as compared to others” (p. 37). (For an example of such evaluative discourse in the DALN, see Marilyn Valentino’s “‘Being Hit on the Head’: My Mom's Punishment for Reading” and Kristen Moore’s “Writing as Punishment.”) Evaluation in narratives is also tied explicitly both to positioning and to the polyphonous discourses of others, as Gwyn (2000) suggests.
We should also note, further, that relational identifications are dynamic and complexly rendered rather than unified, coherent, or singular. As Bucholtz and Hall (2005) contend, discursive “identity exceeds the individual self” (p. 605). Brandt et al. (2001) and others (cf. Davies and Harre, 1990; Jarvinen, 2004; de Peuter, 1998) suggest, for instance, that the selves constructed in narratives change over time, are continually negotiated (Jarvenin, 2004; Linde, 1993), and are continually “constituted and reconstituted” (Davies and Harre, 1990, p. 46) by interactions with others.
This active voicing is one element of a kind of ‘layering’ in which the basic narrative (as well as third party accounts) of described events are interspersed with further reported speech, direct quotation, meta-commentary on described events (either using the speaker’s voice or the voice of another person present at the time of the described action), reported speech attributed to third parties once removed and so on, in theory at least, indefinitely. Narratives thus present a collage of many voices, ventriloquised through the voice of the speaker.
(Gwyn, 2000, p. 317)
…evaluation is an interactive and constantly shifting process and that (b) within this process, polyphony becomes a means towards objectifying personal experience. This type of polyphony extends into the narrative encounter, where, it will be observed, evaluations are co-constructed between listener and speaker….[T]he process of ‘evaluation’, dialogically constructed, serves as a continuous and shifting marker for a speaker’s presentation of self.”
(Gwyn, 2000, p. 315-16)