Textbuilding Conventions and Personal Style in Oral Courtship Narrative.

The argument is made that in order to describe a single text, one must detail the narrative conventions within which a speaker chooses. This study begins with the oral courtship narrative of one speaker, Mrs. Blum, and reactions to it by those who do not share her cultural norms. In order to define her personal style, we are required to document the narrative conventions within which Mrs. Blum makes her narrative choices. Only then can we define her individual style: The systematic character of those choices, and her personal "ticks." Drawing on the work of Bruno Bettelheim, narrative conventions are documented for fairy tales as an example of conventionalized romance, and as the first courtship stories that children hear. In order to document storytelling conventions along the parameters of gender, generation, and family, courtship stories were elicited, as part of oral history interviews, from all members of two multi-generational families. The families are similar in terms of socioeconomic class, geography, and educational background. One family is white Anglo-Saxon Protestant; the other is Jewish. Comparing and contrasting their stories, we suggest the existence of storytelling conventions along the parameters of gender, generation, and family, and posit narrative conventions rooted in the different traditions from which these families draw. It is suggested that Mrs. Blum makes her narrative choices from among these conventions. Further, listener reaction to Mrs. Blum's story seems to turn on the extent to which one shares demographic characteristics with Mrs. Blum and hence shares storytelling conventions. The dissertation ends with a close reading of Mrs. Blum's text and a delineation of her personal style.PhDLinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159277/1/8304594.pd