Phase 1: Mapping narrated events

In the first step, a discourse analyst maps the narrated content of the discursive interaction. What narrated events do the participants describe as they speak to each other? In the example of Tyisha and her cat, from Chapter 1, these events included descriptions of Aristotle and his account of social outcasts, descriptions of what teachers and students were themselves doing in the narrating event, and the example of how Tyisha and her cat behave. We saw how narrated events can provide important resources that participants use to position themselves and others in the narrating event—as teachers and students transferred categories like “beast” from narrated to narrating events, using them to exclude and discipline Tyisha.

In the central example from Mr. Bader’s classroom, lines 001—008 describe the classroom participants and the narrating interaction itself. Mr. Bader describes his inclination to enforce disciplinary rules, and Hyo appropriates Mr. Bader’s voice, imagining him saying, “bring the hammer down.” Then from lines 009— 019, the teacher and students describe hammers and swords in a fantasy world, exploring their characteristics. At line 020, Pete seems to be calling the teacher a racist, although it will take further analysis to interpret this remark. In any case, at line 020, the narrated event shifts back to the classroom conversation itself. Then Mr. Bader returns to the substantive content of the lesson at lines 021—022.

In order to map narrated events, a discourse analyst must use knowledge about grammar, lexicon, and sociocultural context. The goal is to identify the various narrated events—the characters, objects, and actions that were described. In the example, the first narrated event about classroom behavior is marked in part by the use ofdeictics “I” and “you,” which describe participants themselves, and in part through talk about classroom behavior management—which those with cultural knowledge recognize as a common topic for teachers and students. The second narrated event about fantasy objects is marked by talk about “Thor” and a “sword of darkness,” which presuppose a realm of fantasy books, movies, and games also familiar in the cultural context. The return to talk about the curricular subject matter is marked by a change in aspect of the verb “we are recognizing” and by the reference to “page eleven” in their textbook. There exists no comprehensive list of cues or rules that a discourse analyst uses to identify the narrated contents of a discursive interaction—what Silverstein (1976) calls the “denotational text.” The process of interpreting narrated events requires the same sort of context-dependent inference described in the last chapter, relying on what we know about grammar, lexicon, and relevant background information to interpret indexes and symbols that communicate denoted content and build an account of what is being described.

Figure 2.1 represents the narrated and narrating events at this point in the interaction. The two central narrated events are represented in embedded boxes, showing relevant characters and objects. We leave out the third narrated event, the curricular topic introduced at lines 021—022, in order to save space. The teacher and students are represented in the narrating event, with Pete’s puzzling accusation about “racist” off to one side because we do not yet know to whom or what this refers. It might refer to Mr. Bader, but that is not clear. As introduced in Chapter 1, such a diagram is a tool for spatially representing important

FIGURE 2.1 Narrated events in the central example.

information about narrated and narrating events, their elements and interrelations—not a precise representation of all possibly relevant elements. Wortham (2001) introduces such diagrams with a few general conventions: the exterior rectangle represents the narrating event, and the embedded rectangles represent narrated events; relevant characters and objects are represented as ovals in the appropriate space; relations among characters are either described in text or represented iconically—like the representation of hierarchical social relations represented with one character on top of another, or the representation of social relations or processes with a solid line connecting ovals; potential conceptual connections, like the possibility that Mr. Bader is racist, are also marked by solid lines; the mapping of parallel relations across narrated and narrating events is represented with dashed lines, as in Figures 1.2 and 1.6.