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Article published In:
Narrative Inquiry
Vol. 30:2 (2020) ► pp.211–235

The epistemics of narrative performance in conversation

| Saarland University

This article investigates the flow of information in conversational narrative performance in light of research on the epistemics of talk in interaction and epistemic vigilance on the part of story recipients. Based on examples from a range of corpora, it reassesses the relationship between storytellers and recipients consistent with recipient design, and investigates cases of too little and too much information in narrative. Viewing narrative performance as sharing territories of knowledge provides new insights into the notions of telling rights and tellability as well as teller competence and credibility. The narrative performance may contain gaps and discrepancies along with clusters of copious information from which recipients must pick and choose to construct a dynamic narrative model to be tested against further information. In the communal presentation of family narratives, territories of knowledge merge, shared events are illuminated from separate perspectives, gaps in knowledge are filled, and evaluations are enriched.

Keywords: credibility, epistemics, information, narration, recipient design, storytelling, talk in interaction, territories of knowledge
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Toward narrative epistemics
  • Epistemic vigilance
  • Teller competence
  • Too little information, uncertainty, teller credibility
  • Too much information, paralepsis
  • Co-remembering, conarrating
  • Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 19 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.18095.nor
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