“Let me tell you about something that happened to me,” one friend tells another as they walk through the park. “So, how did your school day go?” asks a family member at the dinner table. “Did you see last night’s episode on television? Let me tell you what happened,” a worker says to a colleague during their coffee break. “Once upon a time,” intones a pre-school teacher to a group of children. “I would like to tell you my version of what is going on,” a petitioner states at a town meeting. “You’ll never guess what happened today,” begins the...

These few phrases open Marie’s story, which we title “We’ll See You Next Year,” and illustrate the daily experience of listening to and telling stories. Whatever its significance for the participants, as a communication event it is unremarkable, a common occurrence. How shall we understand what is happening here? In this chapter, we exploreperforming narrativeas a communication practice. To do so, we bring together two research traditions: a speech act or semiotic tradition of studying symbolic activity, or what is communication; and a phenomenological tradition of studying conscious experience, or what is human. The combination of these traditions...

The study of family storytelling is particularly salient at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the family is the subject of moral panic: in decline, under duress, and everywhere debated in terms of “family values.” Discussions usually begin with the divorce rate (holding steady at about 50%) and continue with a host of political, legal, economic, and ethical controversies: no-fault divorce, custody rights, family leave, welfare and workfare, assisted reproduction, child care quality and options, the rights of biological parents and adopted children, domestic violence, the care of aging parents, globalization and immigrant families, and many others. To take...

What is a family story and what stories do families tell about themselves? Stone (1988) provides a useful starting point with her definition of a family story: “almost any bit of lore about a family member, living or dead, qualifies as a family story—as long as it’s significant, as long as it’s worked its way into the family canon to be told and retold” (p. 5). Stories may be oral genealogies, life histories, or fully developed Labovian narratives, but would as characteristically include kernels, fragments, and remnants as well as coded family myths and shrouded family secrets.¹ In the...

We have situated family storytelling in relation to the moral panic in the new millennium over the changing family and the fear of losing “family values.” Today’s families have witnessed change more profound than at any other time in history. Twentieth-century family elders lived through technological innovations propelling them from horse and buggy to automobiles and airplanes and into space and cyberspace. The global and local contexts in which families now live have been rapidly reshaped as political, cultural, and social transformations extend notions of individual worth and human rights to democratize the family and alter relations among the young...

On a daily basis, families “get a life” by producing and consuming narratives about themselves. Put another way, a person gets a family (life) by daily performances of telling and listening to its stories. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1996) elaborate that “this telling and consuming of autobiographical stories, this announcing, performing, composing of identity becomes a defining condition of postmodernity in America” (p. 7; italics in original). In this chapter we examine family storytelling for its capacity to order group and personal identities: how American families get a life and how a person gets a family life through performing...

We now turn to consider three case studies of performing narrative: storytelling in a weblog, breast cancer storytelling in a conversational interview, and a staged performance of storytelling. We take up these three cases after the extended analysis of family storytelling in order to disrupt analytic traditions that would explain communication as the action of individuals or as the result of self-expression. Family storytelling, taken as a research model, has the advantage of emphasizing the strategic distribution of knowledge and power in performing narrative. In the previous three chapters, we analyzed family storytelling as a communication practice, that is, as...

In his essay on the figure of the storyteller, first published in 1936, Benjamin (1969) argues that the storyteller in her or his “living immediacy” is no longer a present force but an increasingly remote and distant one. Benjamin attributes this change to the growing isolation of storyteller and audience from each other and to the devaluing of experience. If Benjamin was concerned about the isolation of storyteller and audience during the first part of the twentieth century when the explosive growth of technology transformed “a generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar” (p. 84), then it...

Cultural history authorizes narrative practices. Before the latter half of the twentieth century, illness narratives, or pathographies, as they have been called in their written form, were rare.¹ As part of life, illness in itself did not warrant narrative performance; stories of disease were interruptions in life narratives or enveloped within other narrative frames. After 1950, and in ensemble with several other kinds of survivor stories, the illness narrative emerged, proliferated, and evolved to a genre of storytelling, of which breast cancer storytelling may be considered a subgenre. In this cultural shift, the speaking subject is interesting—that is, the...

The possibility of performing narrative on stage brings us to the third and final case study. While it may appear counterintuitive to wait until the end of a book onperformingnarrative to discuss staged performances of storytelling, we have deferred discussion until this point for three related reasons. First, we deferred this discussion in order to emphasize that staged performances are one permutation of storytelling in daily life, along with storytelling in families, in conversations between friends, in weblogs, in therapeutic dialogues, and in the discourses of organizations and institutions. We want to avoid making performance on stage into...