Background

In Communicating Beyond Language, Betsy Rymes (2014) uses the concept of “communicative repertoire” to analyze how people draw on a range of semiotic resources as they position themselves both interactionally and across time. Instead of identifying people as members of bounded, homogeneous groups who share a stable set of capacities and beliefs, she describes the heterogeneous repertoires that characterize both individuals and groups. Demographically similar individuals often have very different repertoires, and groups’ repertoires overlap in complicated ways. Furthermore, both culture itself and communicative capacities expand and shift as individuals and groups create and master new signs, models, and genres. Rymes shows why we must do discourse analysis beyond the speech event in order to trace the emerging intersections and divergences of identities and capacities as individuals expand their repertoires and as group repertoires shift.

In this section, we briefly sketch two analyses from one of Rymes’ chapters— entitled “Storytelling Repertoires”—in order to illustrate how our model of discourse analysis beyond the speech event can be applied to the multimodal new media genre of “video storytelling.” Like Chun, Rymes uses YouTube videos as data. Instead of following pathways of YouTube comments, however, Rymes follows storytelling elements as they move across several music videos posted to YouTube. She examines how these videos incorporate stock storyline elements with varying degrees of self-reflexivity, and how the same elements can produce divergent results as they are recontextualized differently.

Rymes argues that storytelling involves a central tension in which most narrators want to tell a unique story but nonetheless rely on routine storylines to do so. In order to explore this tension, she samples viral YouTube music videos and analyzes a subset. In her focal YouTube video storytelling genre, Rymes identifies six stock storyline elements that appear across the selected music videos.

• 1. Wake up in a youthy bedroom
• 2. Get together with friend(s)
• 3. Visit a convenience store and/or get food
• 4. Drive in a car
• 5. Walk down a street
• 6. Dissolve into fun/reverie/vague destination

These six elements function as a pre-formed scaffold for some video storytellers in the genre Rymes examines, and, together, they form a recognizable story trajectory. But Rymes finds that these elements are deployed in different ways, sometimes as unimaginative replications but at other times as creative recontextualizations. According to Rymes, replication merely reproduces these stock elements without reflexive awareness and without telling a unique story. Recontextualization, in contrast, often juxtaposes the stock elements with other forms to produce ironic awareness and to say something clever.

In the following sections, we sketch Rymes’ analyses of how these storyline elements are combined differently in replication and recontextualization. Within each video story, Rymes shows how the six elements form a narrative with movement from beginning to end. The video storytelling events also participate in cross-event pathways as they juxtapose elements that are drawn from prior events. Rymes traces the elements across videos, analyzing how storytellers embellish and recombine each element with others as it is recontextualized. Her analyses show how each storytelling event participates in a narrower pathway with similar video stories as well as broader pathways across which widely circulating social stereotypes emerge.