Abstracts
Abstract
Telling counter-narratives has sometimes been exclusively reserved for marginal and minority groups. This article asks, instead, whether such elite group members as veteran parliamentarians will also tell counter-narratives in their oral history interviews. When the telling of counter-narratives is understood as a communicative strategy, open to various actors, the decisive question concerns about how to recognize these narratives. Previous literature provides such criteria as the stance toward some other narratives and illocutionary intent, which are helpful but not yet decisive. This article suggests that the limits of counter-narrative are and will remain negotiable since there is no easily recognizable participant orientation or speech act of telling a counter-narrative. This article proceeds to study empirically the possible markers of narrative countering.
Keywords:
- counter-narrative,
- politics,
- oral history,
- vicarious voices,
- illocutionary intent,
- evaluation
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Appendices
Biographical note
Matti Hyvärinen, PhD, is a Research Director at the TampereUniversity in Finland. As a sociologist and political scientist byeducation, he has studied the conceptual history of narrative, master andcounter narratives, and the narrative turns. He is the co-editor of thevolumes The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (Benjamins 2013), andBeyond Narrative Coherence, (Benjamins 2010). He serves as anEditorial Board member on Narrative Inquiry and Narrative Works.
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