The diachronic evolution of WW II camp survivors' identity work in repeated testimonies

The past-present juxtaposition forms an important part of discursive identity formation, since narrators locally position themselves, both within the storytelling world (present) and storyworld (past), creating a sense of... [ view full abstract ]

The past-present juxtaposition forms an important part of discursive identity formation, since narrators locally position themselves, both within the storytelling world (present) and storyworld (past), creating a sense of (dis)continuity, and lifespan development (Bamberg, De Fina, & Schriffin, 2011, p. 189). Moreover, narrators’ local identity relates to dominant societal discourses (cf. ‘positioning level 3’ (Bamberg, 1997)), linking both time and space to storytelling, as captured in the ‘chronotope’: “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 84-85). As time-space conditions change, “shifts in roles, discourses, modes of interaction” (Blommaert & De Fina, 2017, p. 4) occur, making chronotopes well-suited to account for “complex identity work … within communities” (p.6).

We connect time and space, using a corpus of repeated WW II testimonies pairs (one oral and one written) by Belgian camp survivors. The stories are repeated at different times, thus situated in different storytelling worlds, while the storyworld – theoretically – remains constant. The testimony pairs’ temporal dispersion enables research into dominant discourse changes and their dialectic relation to local stories and identities. Methodologically, we apply an interactional sociolinguistic, narrative analytical lens (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012), drawing on positioning analysis (Bamberg, 1997), to investigate the testimonies as diachronically evolving social practices.

References

Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bamberg, M. (1997). Positioning Between Structure and Performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1-4), 335-342.

Bamberg, M., De Fina, A., & Schriffin, D. (2011). Discourse and identity construction. In S. Schwartz, K. Luyckx, & V. Vignoles (Eds.), Handbook of Identity Theory and Research (pp. 177-199). Berlin/New York: Springer Verlag.

Blommaert, J., & De Fina, A. (2017). Chronotopic Identities: On the Timespace Organization of Who We Are. In A. De Fina, J. Wegner, & D. Ikizoglu (Eds.), Diversity and Super-diversity. Sociocultural Linguistic Perspectives. (pp. 1-15). Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.

De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2012). Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.